http://famishedfox.blogspot.com/2012/01/here-is-what-i-think-about-veganism-and.html
Although I agree with this lass on many things (the barbaric treatment of animals for instance), I found many of her claims ridiculous and even downright misinformed. Although I am not vegan (merely vegetarian), a well-balanced vegan diet has been proven again and again in medical research to provide adequate nutrition, as well as having a high statistical correlation with the reduced incidence of many of our 'diseases of affluence'.
The Fat-Soluble Vitamins A,D,E,K.
The author implied that these essential micronutrients were absent in a vegan diet.Vitamin A (as retinyl esters) are only found in animal products but vitamin A precursors are the carotenoids found in brightly coloured vegetables. Vegan bodies can indeed produce enough vitamin A through the conversion of carotenoids, but must eat far higher amounts (12:1 ratio).
Vitamin D is not really a vitamin as such, more a hormone that is synthesized by the body in reaction to sunlight exposure. 10 minutes 3x a week outdoors is more than sufficient for most people. In fact, Vitamin D toxicity is far more prevalent than Vitamin D deficiency.
Vitamin E comes primarily from vegetable oils.
Vitamin K is made in the GI tract by bacteria then stored in the liver. This process provides about half of what we need, the rest can easily be supplied by leafy green vegetables, and vegetables of the brassica family (cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts etc) easily.
'Saturated fat and cholesterol are extremely healthy to eat and essential for human life".
Saturated fat, or low density lipoproteins have had such a vast body of research dedicated to them, that surely I don't need to repeat their horrors here? WHO nutrition recommendations include " reducing saturated fats and increasing Omega-3 fatty acids"....but what would they know?....Maybe she meant mono and polyunsaturated fats? These are indeed extremely important to health (not least, the transport and utilisation of fat-soluble vitamins).
Omega-6: vegetable oils (corn, safflower, sunflower, cottonseed), nuts, seeds (pumpkin, sunflower)
Omega-3: Oils (flaxseed, canola, walnut, wheatgerm), Walnuts, flaxseeds, soybeans
Saturated and trans fats raise blood cholesterol.*1
Cholesterol
The liver manufactures cholesterol from fragments of carbohydrate, protein and fat. Endogenous cholesterol (that manufactured by the liver) = 800-1500mg per day. Our need for exogenous cholesterol sources is therefore less than 300mg/day.
The famous Framingham Heart Study*(2) found that;
* excess fat & cholesterol in food caused a rise in blood cholesterol
* excess fat and cholesterol consumption caused atherosclerosis
* high blood cholesterol might predict and/or cause heart disease
* most of the world's population didn't have heart disease, and those heart disease-free cultures had radically different dietary patterns, consuming far less fat and cholesterol.
"Americans dutifully reduced saturated fat and cholesterol in their diets....Heart disease and cancer now abound".
I think there's a confusion here between correlation and cause. Virtually all of the diet related conditions encountered in developed countries like Australia and America have a multi-faceted aetiology of which diet is only one possible contributory factor and not a necessary cause. (*3)
While it is true that meat consumption, for example has fallen, the consumption of Energy dense, rather than Nutrient dense foods has skyrocketed, exercise levels have decreased and the consumption of chemical additives has grown enormously thanks to processing and packaging. To imply that Heart Disease and Cancer are a direct result of a reduction in saturated fat/dietary cholesterol alone is poor reasoning at best, lazy science, and downright dangerous at worst.I am in total agreement about the disgusting monopoly of companies like monsanto, but it should be remembered that the vast majority of soybeans are grown to feed animals in factory lots, NOT (as is implied) to satisfy the vast quaffings of soy products in vegans/vegetarians.
In conclusion, I suggest that the author take her own advice and "think" a little harder. Some of this thinking would be well-directed toward research.
1. Rutishauer, I.H.E (2002) Nutrition assessment and monitoring. In M.L. Wahlqvist (ed) Australia and New Zealand food and nutrition (p499). Sydney; Allen and Unwin
2. Morrison, L.M. Ateriosclerosis. JAMA 145 (1951) 1232-1236
3. Fieldhouse, P. (1996) Food and Nutrition. Customs and Culture (2nd Ed, p 122). London; Chapman and Hall.
A character limit means I have to post this in several comments, so here goes:
ReplyDeleteThank you for your response to my post on veganism. It is necessary for me to clear up a few things for your readers, as you have misrepresented several of the key points in my blog.
First of all, you reduced this:
"The myth that saturated fat and cholesterol contribute to heart disease was started by the Edible Oil Industry in the 1920s, when heart disease was almost unheard of. Americans dutifully reduced saturated fat and cholesterol in their diets, much to the detriment of their health. Heart disease and cancer now abound, in large part due to the normalisation of processed, rubbish foods, and the shunning of life-giving foods such as organ meats, fat and vitamin-rich foods such as raw butter from pasture-raised cows, and home-made bone broths."
To this:
"Americans dutifully reduced saturated fat and cholesterol in their diets....Heart disease and cancer now abound".
It is easy to make it look like I am making a direct correlation between the incidence of heart disease and cancer and ONLY fat and cholesterol reduction, and thus claim this to be false, when you remove the point about processed foods also. That is called the straw-man fallacy, and won't fly with anyone who actually read my entire piece.
I most definitely did NOT mean polyunsaturated fats, such as those found in vegetable oil, which are highly processed and rancid by their very nature and cause extreme oxidative damage to our cells. Studies of the cholesterol found to be clogging arteries found that 70% of this cholesterol was the type found in overly processed frankenfoods such as vegetable oils, with only 30% coming from natural, saturated fats. (Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions).
ReplyDeleteSaturated fats are extremely stable and difficult to denature, because their bonds are each "saturated" with a hydrogen molecule. There are no available bonds to be denatured or "broken", meaning they hold up better to heat and digestion. Unstable factory-fats are extremely reactionary molecules which (aside from being unrecognisable to our own digestive enzymes), quickly denature and become rancid and toxic.
Fat soluble vitamins A, D, and K were the ones I mentioned as coming from animal sources. I am aware that E is available from vegetable sources, and it was added to the list I supposedly mentioned by you for some reason. True vitamin A does not occur in non-animal sources, only beta-carotene, which is a precurser for vitamin A. Studies have shown that if our gut environment is compromised (as most people living in a world saturated with antibiotics, dangerous pharmaceuticals, and a poor diet are), our beta-carotene conversion rate is very poor.
Good point about the soy being used primarily as animal feed in factory farms, the many evils of factory farming is large part of what the original article was about, and one of the main issues for trying to convince people to consume meat ethically. Meat from accountable farmers raising their animals on good quality pastures does not have this issue of Gm corn, soy, or canola being fed to their animals.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I would love to see these 'countless studies' which show that a vegan diet is the healthiest way to eat. When Weston Price researched traditional peoples to find the most healthy among them, he found that (to his great disappointment), there were NO traditional societies that followed a vegan diet, and when we consider insect life, there were also none that followed a truly vegetarian diet. He discovered that health abounded in those that consumed plenty of natural cholesterol, fat, fat-soluble vitamins, lacto-fermented vegetables, bone broths, and cultured or fermented dairy.
Continued research is necessary for all of us in the natural health field, and will never stop for me. In spite of what you have implied, I have already conducted extensive research in this area. I would suggest you refer to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, "Eat Fat, Lose Fat", by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, "Gut and Psychology Syndrome" by Dr Natasha McBride, and "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston A Price as a foundation before you make ridiculous claims about factory fats somehow being better suited to human digestion than those found in nature.
OK. Firstly, I did not set out to deliberately misrepresent your article. My post was a direct reaction to what I read. Of course, with further explanation (such as you have given here), a lot of your previous article's seemingly broad strokes have been clarified.
ReplyDeleteAs I have said before, I will read your suggested research and add it to my own body of research. I am still somewhat mystified at your insistence that vegetarian choices are so terribly unhealthy though. I suggest that for the moment we agree to disagree..(or we could continue to throw vast bodies of conflicting but scientifically sound research at each other interminably...). All studies are somewhat one-sided and depend largely on who funded them, as I'm sure you're more than aware. For every study that 'proves' one thing, another can usually be found to just as vehemently disprove it.