The World is flat. Water is not wet. Vegans get more heart disease.
by Garth Davis, MD on June 16, 2016Breaking news! I have come across damning evidence that debunks the notion that the world is round. The world is in fact flat. Want proof? Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XclStdqkA4, http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/…/200-proofs-earth-is-no….
Next post I will prove to you that water, in fact, is not wet!
Of course this is utter nonsense. I bring it up because my mailbox is flooded with requests for me to counter an article on a website called “Testosterone Nation” where they say vegans are bad at science. This coming from someone with zero formal scientific training. I read through the site and the nonsense posted is ridiculous, though I did learn how to do a better dead lift.
Listen, is it really necessary to argue with a meathead about science? I hate to brag, but I think I have a little more training and understanding than a personal trainer who has never treated a patient, never been trained in statistics, never attended scientific meetings, and whose sole source of info comes from other blogs and random pubmed searches (with zero ability to decipher whether an article has valid methodology).
If you get your health information from a website called “Testosterone Nation” then you can expect to have the health of a bodybuilder, who has a life expectancy of 48.
Likewise my mailbox is full of questions about an article on Dr Mercola’s website saying that Vegans and Vegetarians have higher risk of heart disease. At least this website has a resemblance to something really scientific. And I share much of Mercola’s distrust of traditional medical advice.
Mercola, however, has let mistrust lead into outright quackery, selling tanning beds and snake oil to an unsuspecting, desperate clientele. http://www.chicagomag.com/…/Dr-Joseph-Mercola-Visionary-or-Quack/.
Saying vegans have higher rates of heart disease is so preposterous, I am more likely to actually believe the world is flat. What Mercola is hinting at is that on a vegan diet, if you are not eating organic vegetables straight from composted soil, you can get a B12 deficiency, and that can lead to increased homocysteine, which is a known risk factor for heart disease.
In this regard he is correct. There are many “ethical vegans” who follow a diet without animal products due to the ethics of slaughtering animals and the environmental effects. As such, they often do not put much thought into the health value of the food they eat.
For instance, a large study was done in Oxford looking at a large group of vegans and comparing them to the rest of the population. While they did very well with most things, they were low on B12 intake. Interestingly they had a fairly low fiber intake too, signifying that they were not eating lots of fruits and veggies. Turns out Oreos are vegan.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12740075.
Now lets put aside the fact that a small B12 pill taken once a week can completely put to rest this whole debate. What did the heart disease rate look like in this group of vegans who were not getting Omega 3 and who had low B12 and were eating a relatively low plant vegan diet? Well, scientists compared them to a group of meat eaters who really didn’t eat much meat and ate lots of fish and had equal fiber intake.
By Mercola’s standards, this group should kick butt with heart disease. They had higher B12 and omega 3, they had to do better, right? WRONG!!!!! Vegetarians had a significant 32% reduction in risk of heart disease.
The seventh Day Adventists are a far better population to study because as a whole they are healthy eaters who get moderate exercise and do not smoke or drink. Some eat a bit of meat, some fish, some are vegetarian, and some are vegan. We have been studying 90,000 of them for over 30 years. So can you guess who has the lowest heart disease and cardiac mortality? THE VEGANS!!!!! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23364007
In fact there have been 2 large meta-analysis that have demonstrated that vegans have far less heart disease than meat eaters.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479225, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22677895.
A very complex statistical analysis was done on 29,000 postmenopausal females where they found that substituting vegetable protein for animal protein reduced the risk of heart disease by 30% BUT replacing carbs with meat increased the risk by 33%!http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15671256
For the love of God, Ornish showed that in a randomized control trial you can actually REVERSE heart disease with a vegan diet.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9863851.
And this research is the tip of the friggin iceberg!!!!!! Read my book for far more.
So I don’t know what the hell Mercola is talking about but all I can tell you is that the internet is absolutely filled with bullshit and bullshit artists. I cannot imagine why someone would go to a charlatan for advice but people have been buying snake oil for years. After all, if we are dumb enough to nominate and possibly elect Trump as president, I guess we are dumb enough to believe the earth is flat.
(Starting with 0 days not complaining – again!)