What Causes Heart Disease? (Video)

thoughts? Is he spewing bullshit?

that is the guy from vegan gains all most everything he says is picked for promoting vegan life style
he is a douche bag

Yes, he is a total douchebag, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong about heart disease.

did not say he was wrong
i did not watch the video
i have seen enough of his videos to see that he picks only the research that promotes veganism
if he finds research on anything that is counter to his point he normaly will not tell you
cardiovascular disease some years number one killer of leo’s
heart disease is a leading cause of death in this country but people like him ‘muddy the waters’ in research
and education

Yeah bullshit, waaay more educated people like Gary Taubes and John Meadows here on this website have debunked all his crap

I didn’t watch the video (because I know he’s full of shit). He hand picks studies and then largely misrepresents them. I did start paging through his citations though. I glanced at the first 6 or 7 and none of them showed any real evidence that meat caused heart disease. Several were vegan/nonvegan studies which mostly compares health conscious people who don’t eat at mcdonalds to the mcdonalds eating sedentary smoking general population. They do not compare a whole food based health conscious vegan to an omnivore.

But every single study I clicked on did NOT monitor heart disease as and end result (because that is expensive and takes decades). They are comparing heart disease risk by monitor cholesterol levels, which is NOT the same thing. Several even used LDL as there indicator of disease which is the LEAST important thing you can measure that relates to the actual disease. Any study that substitutes disease rates for cholesterol profile is DEEPLY flawed because cholesterol (if it even can be determinative) isn’t understood well enough to predict disease.

All decent studies that have monitored actual disease have at best not shown improvement by reducing meat consumption. And many have shown poorer overall outcomes (earlier death, the thing we really care about) because of things like increased stroke and cancer rates.

Or to be more concise, none of those studies investigates the cause of heart disease. They start with the assumption (incorrectly) that cholesterol is the cause and then investigate what causes certain cholesterol numbers. They are investigating cholesterol reactions to dietary changes, not heart disease.

I think by now it should be fairly well known that C-Reactive Protein is a major player in heart disease. CRP as it is referred to is a marker of inflammation in your arteries. This can be measured with a simple blood test. The range is from 1 to 3. If you are at 3 or above you are at a higher risk of dying from heart disease. Many people who have virtually no inflammation in their arteries are far below even 1.

As for cholesterol it has been found in multiple studies that 50% of those who die of heart disease have high cholesterol. The other 50% have either low or normal cholesterol. This should tell people a whole lot. The reason that modern medicine has not abandoned the cholesterol paradigm yet is because drug companies stand to lose billions of dollars. Also, there is no magic pill which can be taken that can bring down CRP (inflammation in your arteries). This can only come from eating a really clean diet, adding some fish oil, eliminating fired foods and of course training 4 to 6 times per week. It’s not as easy as popping a pill so you know that it works!

As for being a vegetarian, aside from the obvious lack of protein you will most assuredly lower your iron levels which is a really bad thing to do and can lead to anemia. Vegetarians who say they get all the iron they need from vegetables like spinach etc. do not understand that there are two types of iron, heme which is the easiest to absorb and found only in meat and liver, and non-heme which is quite difficult to absorb and it is found in vegetables.

There are also other important nutrients that are mostly found in meat such as B-12, carnosine etc… But that’s another topic…

Suffice it to say that meat is good food and should be consumed in any healthy diet.