Surreal Wrote:That doesn't mean they don't exist, but there's plenty of meat-eaters who are in excellent health so yeah.

Yeah, there is for example the Paleo Diet practitioners who love to say how superior they feel and how healthier they are now that they're eating more meat and dairy (plus non-starchy vegetables and fruits) and stopped eating things a lot of vegans tend to eat in large quantities (grains, legumes, starchy vegetables, processed foods made of soy, sugar, etc.) And there are those in a raw animal foods diet, affirming that those who eat like them are never going to get sick and are going to live forever (kidding).

bodhisamaya Wrote:What is the evidence I am wrong?

Haha. You're the one making the claim, you're the one who has to provide the evidence. I could throw out a lot of claims about how we could cut down disease or other health issues, and if I did so I would have to provide the evidence.

But, aside from that, your claim is particularly ridiculous. Claims that really go against established knowledge need to be met with a lot more skepticism.

For example, if someone claims they can use their mind to move objects, that would be a claim which would require a huge amount of evidence. We have a lot of reason to be skeptical: 1)We have a very good idea about how matter interacts, and incorporating telepathy into our model would completely turn it on its head; 2) it goes against all our everyday experience; 3) there is a long history of people pretending to be able to do it (for money and so on). And the reasons don't stop there

Now, there are a lot of people who believe in telepathy. And that doesn't matter, because those people are wrong. Some of them who are making money are lying, but the majority have just been mislead (i.e., they're ***** idiots).

The claim you are making is a grand magical one--that with a vegan diet the pharmaceutical industry would literally become obsolete. And that the majority of health problems such as "Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, epilepsy," "heart diseases," and "infections" would go away.

But, much like how we have a pretty good idea of how matter interacts, we have a pretty good idea about how the human immune system works. The human body is a pretty complex system of different things that prevent infection. It ranges from barriers which prevent pathogens from moving around the body or getting into the body, to receptors which already know how to recognize certain harmful pathogens and toxins, to an adaptive process in which your body learns to recognize new dangers as it interacts with the world. Of course, this is all mixed in with various methods of killing threatening things which are in your body. The system is all very big and complex, so it's not all that easy for us to manipulate it. But we have a pretty good understanding of how it works, and what's going on.

Now, in some sense diet is related to the immune system. Not getting enough nutrients will lead to a weakened immune system, and being over-nourished can lead to diabetes and various health problems associated with being overweight. And certain nutrients and fatty acids seem to be directly related to the functioning of your immune system.

But, what you eat is only related to your immune system in an indirect way. Your body is doing the work of fighting off disease largely independently of what you eat, as long as your body is getting enough nutrition for the system to be functioning properly.

With most of the diseases that were mentioned, we have an understanding of how those diseases spread. The flu spreads, for example, because there are many variations of it which change quickly. When you are exposed to the flu virus, your body does not know how to recognize it, so it takes a while for it to react. You get sick. But then you can't get that strain of the flu virus again because your body can recognize it and fight against it very quickly (in other words, it's dealt with by your adaptive immune system). No amount of greens, and no avoidance of meat and milk is gonna change that. It's just not related to diet in a strict sense like that.

The same could be said about HIV, where we know that the virus works by attacking helper T cells and other types of cells that are necessary for the immune system to function properly. It's just not directly related to diet. Or how cancer is largely caused by environmental factors that affect the genetic materials of cells (exposure to radiation or carcinogens, etc), which cause mistakes leading to uncontrolled growth. Again, not eating meat is not going to magically make your genetic material protected against those environmental factors.

So, what you're saying is completely ridiculous and stupid. I've been short in replying to you, because I ***** hate it when people make big sweeping claims about health without properly knowing about it. There's a whole industry of people who make ridiculous claims about health, and it an industry that ruins a lot of people's lives. I know you believe what you're saying, but I hope nobody takes you seriously in the least. And it's too bad that you've been taken in by this type of bullshit.

I do have to say, I love how the OP was referring to BLOG posts and not research articles. I always love when people do that - cuz y'know, everything that people say on the interwebs HAS to be true, right?

Research articles in well-known journals were published for a reason. Anyone can put random crap on the internet that says stuff. (Like this post, for example).

HIV and epilepsy??? Okay, I concede avoiding animal products will not improved health related issues such as plane crashes, suicide and tiger attacks as well.

Do you actually believe the brainwashing the illness industry has been feeding you? I have given anecdotal evidence from what I have personally witnessed, but that is more than what is presented on the flesh consuming advocates' side. Walk into any vegetarian restaurant in America and draw your own conclusions of the health effects compared to the general population. Obesity is surpassing tobacco as far as the leading cause of premature death in that country in large part to the amount of meat consumed. Have you ever met an obese vegan? I am sure they exist, but I would think they would be exceedingly rare.

Maybe the reason there are few obese Vegans is because they all hate the taste of the food and rarely want to eat any of it. 8D

did you read the wiki article though bodhi? it said that the large study found that veganism is on a par with excessive meat consumption in terms of mortality rate. It was those who ate meat occasionally, vegetarians and those who ate fish who had lengthened life spans, albeit very slightly.

It also made the extremely valid point that the other lifestyle factors connected with a vegetarian lifestyle, such as lack of poverty, and less likelihood to smoke, account for a large proportion of the differences found between different diets. So "walk into a health shop and have a look" isn't so much of a valid argument. Get together a group of 100 people who are not poor, and don't smoke or drink heavily or do drugs, etcetc, and you'll see pretty much the same type of healthiness as you see in a health shop.

To base all your beliefs on this idea that the medical industry is involved in some huge conspiracy to lie to us all about every illness just seems pretty silly. There ARE some clear associations between consuming meat & dairy products excessively, and things like risk of heart disease, and certain types of cancer, etc. As science progresses, we'll learn more about this kind of thing, i'm sure, and the exact causes. For now, it seems most sensible, given the evidence, to have a balanced diet rather than consuming any one thing excessively. But if you write all medical science off as a conspiracy, i'm not sure what type of evidence you'll accept...

bodhisamaya Wrote:HIV and epilepsy??? Okay, I concede avoiding animal products will not improved health related issues such as plane crashes, suicide and tiger attacks as well.

Did you read my post? The three examples I gave were influenza, HIV, and cancer. Epilepsy wasn't one of them.

I believe in good empirical studies, not random crap that people make up with no evidence.

Tzadeck Wrote:And that the majority of health problems such as "Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, epilepsy," "heart diseases," and "infections" would go away.

KMDES Wrote:You're kidding right? So a Vegan diet would cure Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, all heart diseases, all infections, etc?

Then the next post was...

bodhisamaya Wrote:It would prevent the vast majority of all those diseases from ever occurring.

I was just restating the claim you had made; I didn't use epilepsy as one of my examples.

Blind faith in pills that do slightly better than placebo is a religion and superstition I find mind-boggling that people follow. Changing to plant-based diet for just a few months will result in improvements in health and overall well-being that are easily observed. There are no negative side effects or unreasonable costs involved by doing the experiment yourself. You don't need to read studies sponsored by a group with a financial interest to verify what you can see with your own eyes and feel with your own senses.

bodhisamaya Wrote:Blind faith in pills that do slightly better than placebo is a religion and superstition I find mind-boggling that people follow. Changing to plant-based diet for just a few months will result in improvements in health and overall well-being that are easily observed. There are no negative side effects or unreasonable costs involved by doing the experiment yourself. You don't need to read studies sponsored by a group with a financial interest to verify what you can see with your own eyes and feel with your own senses.

I posted this for the OP, but I think you would gain a lot from it too.

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." This sums it up pretty well. Our fundamental philosophical disagreement is that you don't seem to get that people mislead themselves very easily. This is why people believed (and still do to some extent) that witch doctors worked--because they were convinced that they had seen or felt witch doctor remedies work. The believed it because the human mind is very easily mislead. (Feynman gives the example of the Millikan experiments, where even trained scientists were fooling themselves without realizing it)

The only real way to know about these kind of health claims is to do very careful studies with no bias. Basically, with the kind of honesty that Feynman talks about in his speech.

You need to be thoroughly skeptical of studies with money on the line, but you need to be just as skeptical of your own senses and your mind (confirmation bias is a big thing with humans, and humans are also inherently bad with statistics). They are both essentially useless.

Now, you can argue that the pharmaceutical industry has dropped the ball, and that there is a lot of bias in the studies. That's a reasonable line of argument when it's done with some subtlety. But if you argue 'we should just believe what we experience firsthand', I think you need to learn a lot about the limitations of firsthand experience. Any basic course in philosophy (specifically epistemology), science, or philosophy of science should cover this.

Firsthand experience should be given a certain weight given lack of strong opposing evidence. Even with seemingly strong evidence that contradicts reason, doubt should be exercised. Especially in this time where growing capitalistic interests do influence, through bribes or other methods, what becomes public knowledge. As in the past when religion (or Nazis) twisted research to fit their own ends, the growing political power of business should be equally in one's mind when doubting one's own senses.

There is a huge amount of conflicting information when it comes to diet, coming from all sorts of people with conflicting interests and also from people who are wrong but genuinely believe they are right. I don't think there will be anything resembling a consensus regarding the best diet for a long long time.

I think its a serious problem that a lot of doctors don't seem to study nutrition, and most seem to be preoccupied with treatment rather than prevention. I don't believe there is a conspiracy to keep us all unhealthy, rather there are just all sorts of people stuck in their sphere of expertise and blind to the bigger picture.

There have been studies linking higher consumption of animal protein with increased incidence of various cancers. Northern Europeans who traditionally consume more animal products (particularly) dairy suffer much higher rates of cancer than East Asians for example. There is graph plotting (I believe) breast cancer against total protein intake, and it's pretty much a linear correlation, with countries like Denmark and Netherlands up the top and places like Japan down the bottom. There is plenty of other evidence that diets high in animal protein (including dairy) are associated with increased incidence of all sorts of diseases.

Now I don't think that occasional meat eating is harmful, and it may indeed be beneficial. If you look back at human evolution, it seems clear to me though that humans are evolved to eat a largely plant based diet. Occasionally becoming omnivorous may have been useful in times of famine but the idea that having a steak everyday is somehow normal seems absurd.

IceCream Wrote:It also made the extremely valid point that the other lifestyle factors connected with a vegetarian lifestyle, such as lack of poverty, and less likelihood to smoke, account for a large proportion of the differences found between different diets. So "walk into a health shop and have a look" isn't so much of a valid argument. Get together a group of 100 people who are not poor, and don't smoke or drink heavily or do drugs, etcetc, and you'll see pretty much the same type of healthiness as you see in a health shop.

I have been to many vegetarian restaurants, but it is rare I eat out. The people I have known for at least a decade without ever seeing sick were friends living on the beach or working low paying part-time jobs. They didn't smoke, but typically used mushrooms and weed.

IceCream Wrote:To base all your beliefs on this idea that the medical industry is involved in some huge conspiracy to lie to us all about every illness just seems pretty silly.

I believe the vast majority of people who study to become doctors do so in a sincere attempt to help people. It is the executives in the pharmaceutical industry that are misleading people. The money at stake is incredible. Universities do not teach nutrition to medical students and doctors are too overworked to do the research themselves.

IceCream Wrote:But if you write all medical science off as a conspiracy, i'm not sure what type of evidence you'll accept...

It is very sad that we just can't trust research when it comes to pharmaceuticals, but with such a large percentage of papers being written by industry ghostwriters, it is impossible to know which ones are authentic and unbiased.

IceCream Wrote:For now, it seems most sensible, given the evidence, to have a balanced diet rather than consuming any one thing excessively.

There are other considerations if you don't believe the health benefits. For every meal you don't include animal products, it has a positive on the environment as a whole. Morality is too vague to argue, but I wish that anyone who wanted to include meat in their diets was required to slaughter one animal with their own hands in their life to appreciate the terror that cold piece of meat in the supermarket endured prior to being wrapped in cellophane. I had a pig slaughtered in my honor in a Philippine village several years back. It was an experience I will never forget.

bodhisamaya Wrote:I have been to many vegetarian restaurants, but it is rare I eat out. The people I have known for at least a decade without ever seeing sick were friends living on the beach or working low paying part-time jobs. They didn't smoke, but typically used mushrooms and weed.

again, there are various other lifestyle factors at play here, which the general population don't have. When i lived in London, i had many friends who were vegan or vegetarian who seemed to be PERMANENTLY ill. They always had some cold, or flu, or other minor illnesses. At least two of them had awful skin. They weren't fat though, admittedly.

At the same time, i lived on a diet of coca-cola, various take out meals or forgetting to eat for days at a time, and never caught any flu or had any minor illnesses, and neither was i fat. Sometimes i'd joke with them saying they should eat like me, they'd feel healthier...

Supposing you're living on a beautiful beach, it's unpolluted, and you have very little stress due to overwork, it's very different to an inner city life where you're overwhelmed by pollutants and people who may have something that you can catch easily. AND, the reason "being poor" is seen as a problem isn't (in western countries) because you literally don't have the money to feed yourself. It's because of the cultural attitudes towards food that go along with it (McDonalds is the best thing evarrrr, etc.). So we're talking about a different type of social group than that...

What you need is a group of people who ate a balanced diet without excessive consumption of anything who lived in that same environment to compare before you can reach your conclusion.

Although, if your friends did mushrooms and weed excessively, typically i would expect some of them to have some of the same effects of paranoia and other mental problems that affect people who do drugs often.

bodhisamaya Wrote:I believe the vast majority of people who study to become doctors do so in a sincere attempt to help people. It is the executives in the pharmaceutical industry that are misleading people. The money at stake is incredible. Universities do not teach nutrition to medical students and doctors are too overworked to do the research themselves.

Yes, GP's aren't the same as dieticians or epidemiologists. These are the people who do the studies in this area, not GPs. To become a dietician, you go to medical school the same as GPs, but then specialise in dietetics while others specialise in surgery, pediatrics, or being a general practicioner. To become an epidemiologist, you need to have a strong background in statistics, and be able to use all the modelling programs to try to tease out correlations between various diseases and environmental and lifestyle factors. Both are trained thouroughly in the theory of their respective roles.

bodhisamaya Wrote:It is very sad that we just can't trust research when it comes to pharmaceuticals, but with such a large percentage of papers being written by industry ghostwriters, it is impossible to know which ones are authentic and unbiased.

Except your opinion on this is based on one fairly crudely made and tenuous documentary that you watched, which was about a different subject altogether. You can have a look at papers for yourself and look at the methodologies used. Any bias does come out in the methodology, if you can think critically about it. Then use that criticism to temper your belief in any one study. There is NO PERFECT SCIENCE PAPER!!! But that doesn't mean that the results are worth nothing but the rubbish bin either. You just have to understand what their limitations are.

bodhisamaya Wrote:There are other considerations if you don't believe the health benefits. For every meal you don't include animal products, it has a positive on the environment as a whole. Morality is too vague to argue, but I wish that anyone who wanted to include meat in their diets was required to slaughter one animal with their own hands in their life to appreciate the terror that cold piece of meat in the supermarket endured prior to being wrapped in cellophane. I had a pig slaughtered in my honor in a Philippine village several years back. It was an experience I will never forget.

well, i totally agree with this. Health certainly isn't the only consideration in choosing your diet, and i fully support cutting down on meat wherever you can.

Again, if you go back to just health issues, there is a fair amount of evidence that raising levels of meat and dairy in your diet also raises the risks of contracting various diseases. Some of this is a direct effect, and some of this is indirect (through obesity, etc). But there doesn't seem to be anything pointing towards a VEGAN diet as ideal. Vegetarian, eating meat and dairy occasionally, and eating fish, all seem to be roughly on a par with each other. The main message certainly seems to be to not do anything excessively!!! Anything done to excess is bad for you, it seems. A little of most things generally shows health benefits. This is even true of the sun... too much sun, you increase your risk of serious skin cancers and other skin disease. Not enough sun, you increase your chances of contracting a wide variety of other diseases.

If you're vegan, you'll have to work that bit harder to make sure you're getting all the right nutrients. Certainly, there may be moral reasons which make that worthwhile to certain people. But on a health only basis, i don't think you can recommend it as the no.1 option, either...

This reminds me of the House episode where he (House) asks the girl drinking orange juice if she has cancer. She says no. He goes "Orange juice prevents cancer!"

Bodhi, you're taking ANECDOTAL evidence and presuming it applies to EVERYONE in the entire world. It doesn't. When you can prove what you're saying with empirical research, then I might believe it.

You mentioned it's because your friends are vegan, and then say they smoke mushrooms or do weed. You can't isolate vegan = healthy = lack of diseases. There are so many other aspects that you haven't even looked at. Your environment. The weed. Maybe there's something in the water.

There is a HUGE saying in science - Correlation DOES NOT (EVER) equal causation. EVER EVER EVER.

That's what you're doing - assuming that vegan = healthy based on your anecdotal evidence. Nil. Nada. Zero.

nadiatims Wrote:There have been studies linking higher consumption of animal protein with increased incidence of various cancers. Northern Europeans who traditionally consume more animal products (particularly) dairy suffer much higher rates of cancer than East Asians for example. There is graph plotting (I believe) breast cancer against total protein intake, and it's pretty much a linear correlation, with countries like Denmark and Netherlands up the top and places like Japan down the bottom. There is plenty of other evidence that diets high in animal protein (including dairy) are associated with increased incidence of all sorts of diseases.

Couldn't we argue it's a genetic thing as people in each country tend to share the same genetic traits in bulk? The only way you could confirm/deny anything of the sort is to have people swap places and diets.

It is interesting people trust the integrity of the pharmaceutical industry and government watchdogs to give honest information over their own eyes and reasoning ability.
Where can I donate to this new blind faith religion?
The recent revelations of Rupert Murdock's media empire should not shake anyone's confidence.

bodhisamaya Wrote:It is interesting people trust the integrity of the pharmaceutical industry and government watchdogs to give honest information over their own eyes and reasoning ability.
Where can I donate to this new blind faith religion?
The recent revelations of Rupert Murdock's media empire should not shake anyone's confidence.

It's not a blind faith religion, it's called having a solid grasp on reality.

It's obvious that pharmaceutical companies want to make money, that's the whole point of having a company. So the choices as a people fall under, take the drugs, or suffer/die early. A diet change does not cure everything as there are plenty of documentation that Vegans get sick and die, just like normal human beings.

If Veganism cured all diseases, all herbivores would never die.

Your view on the situation is also a reason why we have pharmaceutical psychiatric drugs in the first place.

It is not having a solid grasp on reality giving blind faith that a pill will one day save you from poor lifestyle choices. Of course improving your diet will not cure all illness. It will greatly reduce the chances of getting ill prematurely.

James Randi was correct. Educated people are the easiest to fool because they are unreasonably proud and confident they can't be fooled.

are you even reading people's responses? because i've yet to see one that mentions accepting all papers without question, in blind faith...

i'm also unsure what rupert murdoch has to do with much, as most people don't look to media sources for facts...?

Where does this rejection of what is easily observed come from? Obesity leads to a long list of diseases. Those who observe a vegan diet almost without exception are cured of obesity. How much of a mental leap is needed? Is a study needed to show that walking in the street with your eyes closed is harmful to your health?

it's not a rejection of what's easily observed, but an acceptance of the fact that we can't observe everything, in enough detail. You need major widespread studies to find specific correlations between two factors. And even if it's the case that there are no obese vegans, all that shows is that they're not obese. What next, exactly...? Where does your opinion on obesity being bad for you come from?

but everyone's been through this already. All these points have been made above...

You reject the idea obesity is bad for you?

bodhisamaya Wrote:Clinton endorsement of a vegan diet

I can't imagine a Republican would ever take such a stance as pharmaceuticals would become obsolete within a generation if people stopped believing the lie that meat/dairy is beneficial to our health.

bodhisamaya Wrote:It is not having a solid grasp on reality giving blind faith that a pill will one day save you from poor lifestyle choices. Of course improving your diet will not cure all illness. It will greatly reduce the chances of getting ill prematurely.

So you're changing your mind now too? Because if we didn't need pills, then we wouldn't have disease in our world.