"What the Health"

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Freedom_2018
Posts: 479
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Freedom_2018 »

Also A1C - 5.4

Low carb has so far saved me from becoming a type 2. Runs on maternal side. Hoping to avoid it.

BRUTE
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by BRUTE »

did the doc say anything about close to 300 total? brute once had a doc freak out, turned out he knew nothing about cholesterol. brute had mistakenly assumed him to be a real doctor. it must have been the lab coat.

Freedom_2018
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Joined: Sat Dec 18, 2010 12:10 am

Re: "What the Health"

Post by Freedom_2018 »

Docs always give me grief about that. It doesn't bother me.

However, I do wonder if there is a way to bring down my LDL and triglycerides while keeping a high HDL. Maybe I will experiment later this year when my travels overseas will automatically force some change in diet and activity.

But then, I do cook everything in butter.

Dragline
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Dragline »

Freedom_2018 wrote:
Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:23 pm
Anyone care to post their entire set of numbers?

Got my results today:

Total Cholesterol - 289
Triglyc - 67
HDL - 102
LDL - 174
Total chol/hdl - 2.8
Trig/hdl - 0.67

Mostly low carb but since I've been a nomad Las couple of years, some junk food/wine and carby goodies have been consumed more than I would like. No specific exercise regimen except long walks.
As of end of July, mine were:

Triglyc: 92
HDL: 77
LDL: 118
Total: 213
Chol/HDL: 2.77
Trig/HDL: 1.19

I was pleased that my serum glucose had dropped from the 90s to 84 and that there were ketones in the urine. Less pleased that I need to lose 10 lbs. I also blame the wine. ;-)

BRUTE
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by BRUTE »

Freedom_2018 wrote:
Tue Aug 08, 2017 8:34 am
However, I do wonder if there is a way to bring down my LDL and triglycerides while keeping a high HDL.
LDL is typically calculated using a formula. it should say on the results sheet if the value was calculated or measured directly. the formulas are often completely off for low-carb/keto diets, meaning that a calculated LDL will be far too high and meaningless.

trigs of 67 look great. in which case there wouldn't be anything to fix.

Freedom_2018
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Freedom_2018 »

Yes...LDL was a calculated number.

LDL calc = total chol - hdl- (triglycerides /5)

BadHorse
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by BadHorse »

Just came across this, don't know if it's been posted here before. Might be of interest to the "optimizers" among us.
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/arti ... holesterol

Excerpt from abstract:
The association between HDL cholesterol concentrations and all-cause mortality was U-shaped for both men and women, with both extreme high and low concentrations being associated with high all-cause mortality risk. The concentration of HDL cholesterol associated with the lowest all-cause mortality was 1.9\u2009mmol/L (95% CI: 1.4\u20132.0) (73\u2009mg/dL (54\u201377)) in men and 2.4\u2009mmol/L (1.8\u20132.5) (93\u2009mg/dL (69\u201397)) in women.
There is also an editorial that goes with it:
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/arti ... L-function
A few excerpts:
...there is compelling evidence that people with extreme high levels of HDL cholesterol have an increased rather than a decreased risk of death from cardiovascular disease, cancer and, other causes... ... The observation also indicates that ratios, such as the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol, should no longer be included in algorithms designed to calculate ASCVD risk.

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Ego
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Ego »

At a dinner party on Saturday I met the sixth person I know personally who said that "What the Health" was the film that convinced them that a plant based diet was the right diet for them. All but one of these are the type of people who I would have said would never in a million years become vegan. One grew up and a dairy farm which she still partly owns. Another, a gruff retired navy nuclear engineer, is so evangelical about it that even I want to get away from him. :lol:

We've been trying to figure out why this film in particular has succeeded in convincing people where other films that were in my opinion far better, had failed. I believe it comes down to the framing. He sets up the film as if he is discovering some great coverup. A conspiracy. He shows people that they are being duped by the system. I guess people really don't like to feel as if they are being duped. Maybe ERE needs a conspiracy film to make it take off like wildfire.

For those who have not yet seen it, the producers have posted it on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIl7aTwxIE0

RealPerson
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by RealPerson »

I saw the movie and liked it as well. I was on a full on strict vegan diet, but GI problems and weight gain (!) caused me to abandon the diet after about a year. As a relentless experimenter with my diet, I returned to a high fat low carb diet and it feels great. And I lose weight effortlessly. I am at my ideal weight without even trying. It is actually easy for me to lose weight on bacon, eggs , steak and butter.

I really wanted the vegan diet to work for me, but alas it didn't. My wife does very well on a mostly vegan diet, and she has no issues with carbs. Different bodies really do need different nutrition. The experience of people like Dr. Peter Attia in his private practice shows that as well. Even though he is a strong advocate of high fat/low carb, it does not work for all of his patients.

Individual experimentation, i.e. an empirical approach, is the only way to go, at least until the biochemical variability between individuals can be assessed and even predicted based on test results or other objective methods. Popular movies simplify these complex issues and make an objective discussion more difficult. In many ways, nutrition is like a religion for many people.

TopHatFox
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Location: FL; 25

Re: "What the Health"

Post by TopHatFox »

@real person, were you eating a whole-food, plant-based diet, or simply a vegan diet? Technically, white rice and Oreos are vegan...

BRUTE
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by BRUTE »

Ego wrote:
Tue Sep 26, 2017 4:27 pm
We've been trying to figure out why this film in particular has succeeded in convincing people where other films that were in my opinion far better, had failed. I believe it comes down to the framing. He sets up the film as if he is discovering some great coverup. A conspiracy. He shows people that they are being duped by the system. I guess people really don't like to feel as if they are being duped.
it's interesting that the opposing side, the Paleo/Low-Carb crowd, uses the exact same framework. "low fat was a conspiracy", (which has been proven), framing themselves as rebels against a corrupt system (orthodox nutrition) and vested interests (big agriculture).

finity
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by finity »

I just took the time and watched the first 20 minutes and acutally looked at the original research this film bases its conclusions on. I have to say this is terrible propaganda. The EPIC study totally does not say what the doc says it does. In fact, it says that unprocessed red meat does not have any kind of significant effect and that processed meat does have an effect, but that effect can be explained 2/3 just by the additional salt intake (I don't buy that either, because of a lot of different conclusions in different EPIC papers). The study even links vegetable oils, fried & sugary foods and some foods that have a high GI to bad health outcomes. Sugar should be completly safe according to the movie :shock: :?

The quoted egg study (https://youtu.be/MfUfTU61cak?t=17m30s) is displayed as if they are comparing egg intake with egg McMuffin intake, which is totally not true! They establish a baseline with eggs, an egg McMuffin like sandwich and oats. The real comparision is between oats and egg intake! This is unbelievable.

I also bought the book "How not to die" from Amazon (99 cents) and decided to look at the data. It's a mess. Gazillions of studies that are named multiple times and often don't contain what is stipulated. The first heavily marked quote of the book (Amazon provides that data to the readers) is the following:
People who once ate vegetarian diets but then started to eat meat at least once a week experienced a 146 percent increase in odds of heart disease, a 152 percent increase in stroke, a 166 percent increase in diabetes, and a 231 percent increase in odds for weight gain. During the twelve years after the transition from vegetarian to omnivore, meat-eating was associated with a 3.6 year decrease in life expectancy. 39
Greger, Michael; Stone, Gene. How Not To Die: Discover the foods scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease (Air Side Edt) (S.5). Pan Macmillan. Kindle-Version.

Source 39 is (as is source 40):
39. Singh PN, Arthur KN, Orlich MJ, et al. Global epidemiology of obesity, vegetarian dietary patterns, and noncommunicable disease in Asian Indians. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1: 359S– 64S.
40. Singh PN, Arthur KN, Orlich MJ, et al. Global epidemiology of obesity, vegetarian dietary patterns, and noncommunicable disease in Asian Indians. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1: 359S– 64S.
And the study does not contain that data at all. Only the last sentence can be found in terms of a diagram without data (defers to AHS). In fact, the study blames the shift to changes in India's food consumption (headlines):

Substitution of white rice for brown rice

Overconsumption of other refined carbohydrates

Change in the amount and type of cooking oils

Increased consumption of fast foods/processed foods

INSIGHTS FROM STUDYING ASIAN INDIANS IN THE
AHS-2

Nutrition transition away from faith-based vegetarianism


I also looked in the AHS data as good as I could find it and vegetarians have less total mortality. But: They do also smoke way less, drink way less alcohol and exercise more!

I'm not going to dig deeper. It's crazy.

Edit: Btw: I eat very little meat because of ethical and enviromental reasons.
Last edited by finity on Wed Nov 01, 2017 5:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

Smashter
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Smashter »

@finity, thanks for doing that research. I am not at all surprised. Misusing sources and creating heinously biased content is unfortunately the name of the game in the nutrition world right now.

It happens on all sides, none worse than the person on the opposite end of the spectrum who would probably come down quite hard against "What the Health" himself -- Gary Taubes. https://nutritionsciencefactcheck.com/2 ... nst-sugar/

As always, it comes back to trying different diets, seeing what works for you, and taking it from there.

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Bankai
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Bankai »

finity wrote:
Tue Oct 31, 2017 5:40 am
I also bought the book "How not to die" from Amazon (99 cents) and decided to look at the data. It's a mess. Gazillions of studies that are named multiple times and often don't contain what is stipulated. The first heavily marked quote of the book (Amazon provides that data to the readers) is the following:
People who once ate vegetarian diets but then started to eat meat at least once a week experienced a 146 percent increase in odds of heart disease, a 152 percent increase in stroke, a 166 percent increase in diabetes, and a 231 percent increase in odds for weight gain. During the twelve years after the transition from vegetarian to omnivore, meat-eating was associated with a 3.6 year decrease in life expectancy. 39
Greger, Michael; Stone, Gene. How Not To Die: Discover the foods scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease (Air Side Edt) (S.5). Pan Macmillan. Kindle-Version.

Source 39 is (as is source 40):
39. Singh PN, Arthur KN, Orlich MJ, et al. Global epidemiology of obesity, vegetarian dietary patterns, and noncommunicable disease in Asian Indians. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1: 359S– 64S.
40. Singh PN, Arthur KN, Orlich MJ, et al. Global epidemiology of obesity, vegetarian dietary patterns, and noncommunicable disease in Asian Indians. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1: 359S– 64S.
And the study does not contain that data at all. Only the last sentence can be found in terms of a diagram without data (defers to AHS).
Hi!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... gure/fig1/

finity
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by finity »

Yeah, that's a graph that defers to AHS data (btw. ovo-lacto vegetarians are way less obese [BMI > 23 = Obese?!] than vegans). So all animal product may not be bad?! :?: When people get away from a strict religious lifestyle they also seem to smoke more, drink more and exercise less (implied by paper). They may also lose social connections (implied by me), which is always bad for health. The healthiest seemed to be semi-vegetarians with < 1x meat/week, but not none.

edit: Considering the weight gain (+231% chance), you could also say that those who changed diets got lazy and showed little self-discipline which lead to the other bad outcomes. I'd bet they also increased fast-food and sugar consumption - It's impossible to tell without the data though. I'm just saying that the film and book are cherry-picking not only studies but even the contents of the picked studies.(I'm also not saying the other side doesn't use the same principles to get to their desired results)

I can't find

a) The graphs dramatic results in quite a few AHS studys I scrolled through
b) There are three Singh papers as reference, none of which I can find... hints? edit: Could find one of the three, but that one didn't include the data

I could, however, find AHS data which showed that the vegetarians had a significantly better lifestyle and one AHS paper noted, that the influence of those may be big. Also, India is THE vegetarian country and yet they have very high rates of obesity and diabetes (said in the paper!).

--------------------------
The paper concludes
Underlying this epidemic is a complex nutrition transition
in vegetarians in which whole plant foods (fruit, vegetables, nuts,
seeds, unrefined whole grains) are being replaced by refined
carbohydrates, fast foods/snack foods/processed foods, and fried
foods. A transition to cooking oils with more atherogenic effects
is also evident. We have presented evidence that such a nutrition
transition is increasing the rate of NCDs despite the continued
high prevalence of vegetarianism.
Global epidemiology of obesity, vegetarian dietary patterns,
and noncommunicable disease in Asian Indians
1–4
------------------------

I guess it's a messy djungle. The only thing most people seem to agree on, is that processed and highly refined or fried stuff is bad. I keep a mostly plant-based diet with little meat (probably once every two weeks). I do drink milk and eat eggs though. The more I read, the more I think that unprocessed meat is safe to eat and may even be healthy in some respects. I have other reasons not to eat it, but health does not seem to be a good one to me.

Just aside: The AHS-1 study was funded by the EPA.

saraohyland
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by saraohyland »

eah, that's a graph that defers to AHS data (btw. ovo-lacto vegetarians are way less obese [BMI > 23 = Obese?!] than vegans). So all animal product may not be bad?! :?: When people get away from a strict religious lifestyle they also seem to smoke more, drink more and exercise less (implied by paper). They may also lose social connections (implied by me), which is always bad for health. The healthiest seemed to be semi-vegetarians with < 1x meat/week, but not none.

edit: Considering the weight gain (+231% chance), you could also say that those who changed diets got lazy and showed little self-discipline which lead to the other bad outcomes. I'd bet they also increased fast-food and sugar consumption - It's impossible to tell without the data though. I'm just saying that the film and book are cherry-picking not only studies but even the contents of the picked studies.(I'm also not saying the other side doesn't use the same principles to get to their desi

Michael_00005
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Michael_00005 »

And the study does not contain that data at all. Only the last sentence can be found in terms of a diagram without data (defers to AHS). In fact, the study blames the shift to changes in India's food consumption (headlines):
Anyone can post directly to NutritionFacts.org and they will point you directly to the source, they have full-time research workers who know the material, and how to find it. It's sad to see people try and discredit Dr. Greger, when he is not around to clarify. If anyone cares to post to NutritionFacts, please share the link so we can all see the data. He also allows direct question every week on a live FB web cast. I've witnessed people trying to pick his work apart and he clarifies the issue on the spot, a deep breath and as if to say "here we go again". He's probably the most transparent nutrition / doctor / research writer I've come in contact with.

Keep in mind there are "143 pages of references to peer-reviewed scientific evidence" in the book "How Not to Die" (Google search), and someone thinks they found one that is misleading.

For some reason not many want to talk about the environmental disaster of the meat industry, or that that the dead animal on our plate endured a life-time of suffering for 10 minutes of eating pleasure, karma and the law of "reap what you sow", or even the fact that heart disease was proven to be reversible in the 90's via a plant based diet, see "Prevent and reverse heart disease". It's only the #1 killer in the world, but how many knew this 5 years ago? And why point to a single study, when meat eating has been proven to increase the risk for all major chronic ailments: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... SNXF5EkLvP
Last edited by Michael_00005 on Thu Nov 16, 2017 3:42 pm, edited 4 times in total.

BRUTE
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by BRUTE »

just because it says "facts" in the URL doesn't mean they're facts.

finity
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by finity »

Michael_00005 wrote:
Thu Nov 16, 2017 1:47 pm
Anyone can post directly to NutritionFacts.org and they will point you directly to the source, they have full-time research workers who know the material, and how to find it. It's sad to see people try and discredit Dr. Greger, when he is not around to clarify.
I have the source, because I actually looked up the paper he cites. Yes, it contains a graph with that data, but it's actually a reference and not the conclusion of the paper.
Michael_00005 wrote:
Thu Nov 16, 2017 1:47 pm
If anyone cares to post to NutritionFacts, please share the link so we can all see the data. He also allows direct question every week on a live FB web cast. I've witnessed people trying to pick his work apart and he clarifies the issue on the spot, a deep breath and as if to say "here we go again". He's probably the most transparent nutrition / doctor / research writer I've come in contact with.
I actually don't really care. I have read studies cited in the film and they were totally misrepresented. The film is extreme in cherry-picking it's studies, if you ask me. I found a (vegan cherry-picked) review of a discussion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdgdfSybBqA&t=785s) where Kip is basically like "It took a long time to find this" - this means nothing else, but that most studies did not show the desired results, so they searched long and hard to find their "evidence". Kip does not seem to understand cherry-picking at all.
Michael_00005 wrote:
Thu Nov 16, 2017 1:47 pm
Keep in mind there are "143 pages of references to peer-reviewed scientific evidence" in the book "How Not to Die" (Google search), and someone thinks they found one that is misleading.
Have you looked at one of those studies? Have you looked at all the evidence he does explicitly not name? Have you distinguished between RCT and associational and other studies?
Michael_00005 wrote:
Thu Nov 16, 2017 1:47 pm
For some reason not many want to talk about the environmental disaster of the meat industry, or that that the dead animal on our plate endured a life-time of suffering for 10 minutes of eating pleasure
Again, I don't eat much meat. You're preaching to the choir. That has absolutely nothing to do with health, however.
Michael_00005 wrote:
Thu Nov 16, 2017 1:47 pm
karma and the law of "reap what you sow", or even the fact that heart disease was proven to be reversible in the 90's via a plant based diet, see "Prevent and reverse heart disease". It's only the #1 killer in the world, but how many knew this 5 years ago?
It's known for decades that heart disease is one of the big killers. Nothing has changed from 5 years ago.
Michael_00005 wrote:
Thu Nov 16, 2017 1:47 pm
And why point to a single study, when meat eating has been proven to increase the risk for all major chronic ailments:
From what I have read (including thousands of pages of books and quite a few studies), this is simply not true.

I'm not here to debate what you eat, as I eat a diet similar to yours ;) A mostly plant-based diet certainly is not a completely bad one. I doubt it's the healthiest, however. My bet is on a high fat, low carb, low-to-mid level protein intake (including animal products). Fat seems to be the best macronutrient health-wise.

Michael_00005
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Re: "What the Health"

Post by Michael_00005 »

Many people will wreck their health though diet, and then a large percent will find another way. Maybe the question should be, "has anyone found a quicker path to hell than the critic?", where hell is simply a state of mind in this life and then continues into the next. --- this post was edited.
Last edited by Michael_00005 on Sat Dec 02, 2017 9:22 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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