Thanks flappinit! Always appreciate your well thought out replies!
One way of trying to explain the vego/vegan diet as a cause of “mental illness” is risk of B12 and/or iron deficiencies - which can result in psychiatric symtoms. No surprise but worth mentioning.
That’s a good point. Certainly, anyone following a restrictive diet of any kind should make sure they are getting everything they can from whole foods, and supplementing with anything else if necessary.
By the way, I dunno if I’m coming across as super pro-veggie or pro-vegan, but I LOVE meat, especially rare, bloody steak, and I’d give carnivore a go before I gave vegan a go, haha. I just believe both can be adequate, and that there’s ample evidence in terms of our anatomy and history that we are, in fact, omnivores. I don’t agree with the people who talk about meat like it’ll make you sprout a tumor overnight, nor do I agree with the notion that vegetables are toxic and a rejection of our evolutionary makeup.
Just the idea of no ribeye depresses me lol
Is this digestive issue a recent thing or something that always happened? Could be related to some gut stuff that should be fixed.
I meal prep pretty often. And when I do I have vegetables each day. Usually in the form zucchini, onions, asparagus, bell peppers, sweet potatoes. What I notice is that after 2-3 days of this, I have to poop more so than normal. I’ve never been one with constipation issues, so it’s really not too much of an issue for me. Those things do cause more gas. It is to be expected. Most vegetables cause gas. You do need to limit the amount, too much can cause some oops 
.
So I feel like I need them? No. I eat them because I can eat more food and take in less calories.
I believe the main issue with ‘evidence’ in this area is that conclusions are drawn predominantly from epidemiological studies (which work both ways when it comes to plant versus animal debates). For example, there is quite a lot of data showing animal protein consumption increases life expectancy. If that is correct, it seems incongruous that vegetarians would still have lower rates of cancer.
What I think we do have is better clinical evidence which drives a wedge between common misconceptions, e.g. the notion red meat causes cancer. This was shown in a review of interventional studies looking at the connection between red meat and cancer, which found there was no increased risk. (Kruger & Zhou, 2018).
Further, I also believe there is very strong clinical evidence showing, (a) the deleterious effects of plants on human health; and (b) positive health outcomes of animal diets. For example, there have been several major ramdomised controlled trials showing the link between all cause mortality, and increased risk of cardio vascular events when saturated fats are replaced with polyunsaturated fats (aka vegetable oils). Then there is a wealth of evidence which clearly demonstrates the link between substances like lectins and auto-immune disorders. And this is all without going down the insulin resistance rabbit hole.
I am the first to respect people’s choices but I think even some of the more mild arguments such as ‘plants are as good as meats’ are fallacious.
Do you have a source for this? I did look, but I can’t find any studies showing this data.
Search on ‘Meat intake and cause-specific mortality: a pooled analysis of Asian prospective cohort studies’. One of the key findings here was ‘Red meat intake was inversely associated with CVD mortality in men and with cancer mortality in women in Asian countries.’
These type of findings shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider a place such as Hong Kong, which has one of the highest levels of longevity in the world and is also the world’s third largest consumer of beef per capita.
There was also the NHANES III Project, which saw a link between consumption of white meat and decreased mortality.
As mentioned, these are observational studies so there is some correlation at least.
What about the second and first largest consumers of beef?
Nobody chants “We’re number 3! We’re number 3!”.
How are the next two highest positioned for age of mortality and other relevant metrics, like obesity, cvd, cancer, etc?
Or more directly, it looks like cherry picking when you point to the one that supports your position without also pointing at the others within that metric (beef consumption).
Are there other things that need to be considered though? The ones who can eat copious amounts of beef/meat are the ones who can afford it, which means they’re probably better off financially, and a more financially stable lifestyle often means one with less stress and greater access to life-prolonging measures.
Stating “X-people eat a lot of meat and have long life expectancies, therefore eating meat causes longer life expectancy” is similar to the previous statement “vegans generally have some type of mental illness, therefore a vegan diet causes mental illness”; there is perhaps a relation there, but what about all the other factors surrounding those subjects?
I’m genuinely curious.
There’s significant evidence that veggies are good. There’s also significant evidence that meat is good.
Por que no los dos?
I’m reposting this quote again as I purposely highlighted this is epidemiology. So I’m not cherry picking.
What I did rthen refer to was clinical trial evidence showing the efficacy of meat over plants when it comes to all cause mortality. I also highlighted clinical evidence linking substances like lectins to auto immune disease. This is much more persuasive.
Just a comment. As far as I’m concerned it is extremely difficult to put together a study on how dangerous a specific diet is over time. There should be an obvious bias considering a lot of studies is based on self-reports on how people have eaten. Secondly there should be genetic variation, as well as different variability in diet - meaning that if you eat something that predisponate cancer, you may have eaten something protective at the same time/time frame. Then again, life expectancy and other illnesses may hint what is working dietwise in a specific area (but again there are lots of confounders). Not implying here that I disagree with the current diet recommendations, it seems to be a scientifical concensus re the red meat causing colon cancer.
Was this the intention of this clinical trial to show this efficacy or did this somehow emerge as an unforseen result of a different line of inquiry?
Is this an inference of the data, or an independently drawn conclusion?
I’d like to see you connect the dots for us on this.
Well if you take a large randomised controlled trial like the Minesotta Coronary Experiment, the hypothesis was that the group put on polyunsaturated fats would have lower instances of CVD compared with the saturated fat group. The result was the opposite. No dots to be joined really.
No, I mean take the study you have referred to and walk us through, from “here is this study called x”
To
“And here [point 1, point 2, point 3] is where it is inferred that meat is more efficacious than plants in all cause mortality”
which you have stated here.
I would like to see you produce that study and show us how that evidence proves this statement.
Can you do that?
Not if I can help it.
I only eat vegetables in a large calorie deficit to feel full. Otherwise, I don’t eat them at all.
I use a greens powder. I also take Indole-3-carbinol.
Results: Red meat consumption was substantially lower in the Asian countries than in the United States. Fish and seafood consumption was higher in Japan and Korea than in the United States. Our pooled analysis found no association between intake of total meat (red meat, poultry, and fish/seafood) and risks of all-cause, CVD, or cancer mortality among men and women; HRs (95% CIs) for all-cause mortality from a comparison of the highest with the lowest quartile were 1.02 (0.91, 1.15) in men and 0.93 (0.86, 1.01) in women.
Conclusions: Ecological data indicate an increase in meat intake in Asian countries; however, our pooled analysis did not provide evidence of a higher risk of mortality for total meat intake and provided evidence of an inverse association with red meat, poultry, and fish/seafood. Red meat intake was inversely associated with CVD mortality in men and with cancer mortality in women in Asian countries.
From that study. I don’t exactly see “quite a lot of data” here, and picking Hong Kong out of “Asian countries” DOES kind of seem like cherry picking. I spent a month in Hong Kong - I can assure you that, despite them indeed being the 3rd largest consumer of beef (we’re 4th, by the way), the locals there eat a balanced diet, with a LOT of greens and a LOT of fish - much more balanced than us - and they are extremely active compared to Americans. So, not to brush this aside because the inverse correlation in the study between beef consumption and some health conditions is encouraging, but there’s got to be more than this to support your claim of tons of data, especially when I’m sifting through mounds of studies about plant-based diets and longevity.
The study I referred to was the Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE), a double blind randomised controlled trial that ran from 1968-1973. To quote the medical investigator (Chris Ramsden) that resurrected the data and published in the BMJ only a few years ago, it was the “largest and perhaps the most rigorously executed trial of cholesterol lowering by replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid.” In short, it was designed to test whether replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid reduces coronary heart disease and death by lowering serum cholesterol.
The main outcomes measured: death from all causes; association between changes in serum cholesterol and death; and coronary atherosclerosis and myocardial infarcts detected at autopsy.
The results showed that the intervention group (vegetable oils) indeed lowered cholesterol compared with the control group. However, there was a 22% higher risk of death for each 30mg/dl reduction in serum cholesterol.
Regarding the exact mechanism here which may be responsible for these findings, I will quote Chris Ramsden again: “Critically, however, consumption of vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid produces a wide range of biochemical consequences, including qualitative changes in lipoprotein particle oxidation that could plausibly increase risk of coronary heart disease. Hence the clinical effects of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils could reflect the net impact of decreasing low density lipoprotein while increasing its susceptibility to oxidation.”
I would refer you to similar studies showing similar outcomes: Women’s Health Initiative; Sydney Diet Heart Study.
Honestly, I feel like a broken record here. This is epidemiology. It gives you correlation not causation. I could cite another observational study, e.g. ‘Vegetarian diet and all cause mortality: Evidence from a large population-based Australian cohort’ (2017). This looked at 243,096 participants and concluded: ‘We found no evidence that following a vegetarian diet, semi-vegetarian diet or a pesco-vegetarian diet has an independent protective effect on all cause mortality.’
Or, a survey looking at the the Japanese population, specifically the Okinawans, where it was observed consumption of pork and goat was historically high. A comment from the authors here includes: ‘Unexpectedly, we did not find any vegetarians among the centenarians.’ (Nutrition for the Japanese elderly, 1992).
If you are more interested in clinical outcomes then check out someone like Dr Steven Gundry, who claims to have treated patients with autoimmune disease by removing lectins from their diets. While he is often portrayed as something of a zealot in his anti-lectins crusade, the biochemistry involved is not widely disputed, as far as I am aware. In fact, I was only reading an article recently, which I book marked, titled ‘Reaction of Lectin-Specific Antibody with Human Tissue: Possible Contributions to Autoimmunity’, which challenged Gundry’s blanket claims. The authors nonetheless concluded: ‘our study shows that lectin-specific antibodies react with a variety of human tissue antigens. The fact that lectin IgG, IgM, and IgE antibodies were detected in 8-15% of our blood samples supports the assertion that undigested lectins and agglutinins can cross the gut barriers… Our results thus indicate that lectins or the antibodies produced against them may contribute directly or indirectly to autoimmunity.’