by Zoë Harcombe
I also looked, as Keith did, at the possibly of getting sufficient vegetarian food for the 3.5 million years since ‘man’ first walked upright. Notwithstanding the 30,000 years of ice age endured 40,000-10,000 years ago, when no vegetation would have been available, there is simply no evidence that our planet could have yielded sufficient vegetables and fruit for man to have consumed sufficient calories to survive. Grains were not available until the emergence of agriculture. Half the vegetables possibly available to our ancestors would not have been edible without cooking and fire was not discovered until somewhere between 1.5 and 0.5 million years ago. Let alone the seasonality of vegetation and the likelihood that nothing would have been available in certain parts of the world and for many months anywhere else.
That’s as far as I went. Keith also goes into the enzymes in plants and the toxins that they emit – in an effort not to be consumed and to survive – as any living thing tries to survive. She then picks up the argument – OK – should we have become vegetarian when grains did appear – notwithstanding the fact that we never had them before? She presents a compelling argument that we have simply not evolved to eat grains (this is the mainstream Paleo view) and that they are seriously harmful to human health. Lines such as these are punched out on successive pages:
– “Grains are essentially sugar with enough opioids to make them addictive.”
– “The diseases that insulin affects directly are the cause of the vast majority of death and disability in the US today. Heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes are all caused by the insulin surges that grain and sugar demand.”
– “You can call it complex carbohydrates if you want, but it’s sugar.”
– “According to the USDA, we should be eating a diet that is 60% carbohydrate. Your body will turn that carbohydrate into almost two cups of glucose and each and every molecule has to be reckoned with.”
– Quoting the Eades again: “The actual amount of carbohydrates required by humans for health is zero.”
– And my favourite: “you’ve (vegetarians) damaged your digestion, from too many blood sugar highs and lows, and too much adrenaline. It can be fixed, but you’re going to have to eat real protein and fat and not sugars. You need to leave adrenaline for emergencies only; can we agree that breakfast shouldn’t be one?”!
b) The cholesterol argument has been covered more extensively by Kendrick and Ravnskov (and me in The Obesity Epidemic). Keith mentions a couple of the key points, and nails it beautifully with the following one liner: “One of the main functions of the liver is to make cholesterol, not because your liver wants you dead, but because life isn’t possible without cholesterol.”
c) The book provides another really nice summary on the position on fat. I go into this in more detail than I’ve seen it elsewhere with my original analysis of the Seven Countries Study and an assassination of the Truswell article, which is a summary of all the evidence relied upon by government authorities telling us that fat is a killer. (I also point out that when our governments talk about fat, they are in fact talking about refined carbohydrates, but that’s another story).
Keith’s summary is very clever. She explains that fat consumption declined almost 25% in the past 15 years (the book was published in 2009) and, at the same time, type 2 diabetes has increased by a factor of more than ten; cardiovascular disease recorded at time of hospital discharge has increased 25%, the incidence of stroke is rising and cancer “continues its relentless and increasing toll.”
Keith also covers the fat soluble vitamins, essential fats and other nutrients in real fat vs. the unnatural levels of omega-6 to 3 ratio, as a result of our obsession with cheap vegetable oils. “You tell me what to blame: the saturated fats we’ve always eaten – for four million years – or the industrially manufactured oils that until recently were used in paint.” Quite so!
d) Sugary cereals, soy (as it is called in the USA – it’s called soya in the UK) and vegetable oil spreads/margarines are promoted as healthy by the food industry. Of course they are – they are phenomenally lucrative. Kellogg’s alone is a $13billion company. They are new products, only introduced to the food chain in little more than the past 100 years in the case of cereals and in nearer 20 years in the case of modern soy and vegetable oil products. Keith states: “The food industry has developed over 100,000 new processed foods since 1990.” That is staggering and surely ‘foods’ should be in inverted commas!
These ‘foods’ rely as much on knocking real food, as they do on promoting themselves as healthy. Vilify eggs and promote sugary cereal as the alternative. Attack butter and hydrogenated margarine can come to the rescue. Lie about hormones in cow’s milk and everyone will turn to soya in their Starbucks. It is horrific to think that big business can get away with it. As Keith says “Try to comprehend the scale of this: food companies spend $33billion a year in advertising.”
Keith dedicates a few pages to a horrifying review of the health concerns surrounding soy(a). Quoting Dr Kaayla Daniel (one of the speakers at the March 2011 Weston Price Conference), author of The whole soy story: the dark side of America’s favourite health food the allegations unfold. Soy(a) is delivering hormone doses not dissimilar to the contraceptive pill (in snack size portions of soy – let alone the levels eaten by vegans). Soy(a) is implicated in serious thyroid disturbance (think thyroid, think weight). “Those who ate tofu at least twice a week had accelerated brain aging, diminished cognitive ability, and were more than twice as likely to be clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.” “In fact, the more tofu eaten, the more cognitive impairment and/or brain atrophy.”
We had a vegan in our online club who said something about ‘you only ever get animal illnesses’ – bird flu and mad cow disease? Keith’s humour appears again when she closes the section on soy(a) with: “According to a vegetarian bumper sticker ‘There’s no such thing as mad tofu disease.’ You might want to rethink that”!
Food manufacturers must love vegans – virtually all vegan calories must come from food manufacturers. There’s very little that the vegan can get from the local farmer. That alone is reason enough for me to not want to be vegan!
e) The final argument was very interesting – especially people interested in weight loss. One of the arguments for avoiding animal foods is that fat contains (approximately) 9 calories per gram and carbs approximately 4. Hence many dieters become vegetarian as a convenient way of avoiding higher calorie foods. (The fact that these foods are zero carb doesn’t matter to calorie counters). Keith notes that “Somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the girls and women seeking treatment for anorexia and bulimia are vegetarian.” Keith says “The overlap in my life is a perfect 100. Everyone I’ve known with an eating disorder has been a vegetarian and that includes two anorexic men who were both vegans.”
There is an interesting ‘chicken & egg’ argument – the dieter likely chooses to avoid animal foods to avoid calories but, also, vegetarian diets are typically low in tryptophan, which is the precursor of serotonin. Hence vegetarian diets can also cause depression, anxiety and eating disorders. “Veganism, I quip, is one part cult, one part eating disorder. I hear those words and I wish they weren’t true because of what they mean about me.” That’s what Keith said. I could have said the same.
Note on all 3 arguments
We need to make it clear that real foodies abhor factory farming every bit as much as vegans and vegetarians. We want it abolished. It is heinous – unhealthy for the animal and the human. It fails all three arguments. There is no moral argument for keeping animals in factory farms – their role is to graze freely on grass and to feed the soil with their manure and digestion. There is no political argument for factory farms – feeding grain to ruminants, who cannot digest it, is a terrible use of the world’s resources and is inevitably less efficient than feeding grain to humans (notwithstanding the harm that this could also do). There is no nutritional benefit in eating an animal that has never seen grass, let alone gr
azed freely on it. Much of the arguments made by vegans and vegetarians use the extreme examples of factory farming to make their case. We hate that too. Where we differ is on the value – morally, politically and nutritionally – of animals living freely and providing food for others in the circle of life, as they always have done.
The summary
The summary chapter in the book is a tour de force. Exquisitely written, it builds on a theme “what do I have for breakfast?” and all the things that we should think about to answer this question. We may not want to face the facts, but Keith sees this as no excuse to stay in denial. If delivered as a speech, you could see that no one in the audience would be sat down at the end. I have never seen such rousing prose.
The questions to be asked of vegetarians become these:
1) Moral – what do you think that you eat for which nothing has died? (I can understand that you may draw your line at not eating animals, but animals died for your food nonetheless. Please stop telling children “meat is murder” when bison, wolves, buffalo and rabbits died for your grains, as did the soil alongside).
2) Political – how can the agriculture that has destroyed, and continues to destroy, the planet be a sustainable way to feed the world? Without ruminants performing biological functions of soil, plants soon die as the soil structure is destroyed. Are you OK that your food is made from oil, not soil? What will feed your food when the fossil fuel runs out? (Let us work together to abolish the factory farming that we both abhor, and let us work together on the only sustainable way to feed the world – dramatically curtailing the world’s population).
3) Nutritional – (particularly for vegans) pick any non-animal food and let me pick any animal food and let’s compare vitamins and minerals. Where do you get retinol? B12? D? K2? Iron? and zinc? – to name just the most obvious nutrients provided by animal foods (some of those, exclusively so). What do you think we have eaten since time began? What did we eat during the 30,000 years of ice age? If there is any nutritional argument for being vegan, why would supplements be life critical? (not least, B12).
I sincerely hope that no one is vegetarian for nutritional reasons alone i.e. that the animal arguments are of no matter to them – they simply think that it is best to avoid real meat and fish and maybe eggs and dairy. If anyone is, they should be the easiest to return to healthy eating. If people choose not to eat animals, because of animals, then the question becomes – are you prepared for your health to suffer, as a result. Because it is less healthy to eat soya and grains than it is to eat meat and fish. Remember – in all of this – factory farmed meat and eggs don’t count. We are not talking about processed meat. That’s as bad as any processed food. We are talking about “Ermentrude”, grazing in the fields.
Keith pulls no punches in this final section: “You can’t have it both ways, vegetarians. If you want to save this world, including its animals, you can’t keep destroying it. And your food destroys it.”
Keith presents three questions to help answer the question – what should we have for breakfast?:
i) Does this food build or destroy topsoil?
ii) Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers?
iii) Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?
She gets stronger: “Despite the deepest longest of your hearts, vegetarians you are wrong. To save this world, we must know it, and then take our place inside it. As long as I believed the annual grains of a plant-based diet would save the world, I couldn’t see that they were destroying it. This exact moment – reading those words – will take courage. I know you’ve got it. Are you willing to use it?”
“What separates me from vegetarians isn’t ethics, or commitment. It’s information.” Lierre Keith.
And with that line, and with this book, we can no longer be in denial.
Red meat & diabetes?
August 12, 2011
There is an article widely reported in the media today (11 August 2011). The original research was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. You can see the abstract for free and the article then costs $12. I bought the article, so that I can comment on the full picture and not the abstract and certainly not on the basis of the usual dreadful reporting that goes on in the UK media – if not elsewhere.
The study
The team looked at three studies for which there was food questionnaire information available:
– 37,083 men in the Health Professionals Follow Up Study (1986-2006);
– 79,570 women in the Nurses Health Study I (1980-2008);
– 87,504 women in the Nurses Health Study II (1991-2005).
In total 13,759 incidents of type 2 diabetes were recorded from 4,033,322 person-years of follow-up. That’s a 0.34% incident rate to start with. Hardly justifying the headline “Diabetes threat from two slices of bacon a day.”
The conclusion
You can see the conclusion in the abstract: “The pooled HRs (95% CIs) for a one serving/d increase of unprocessed, processed, and total red meat consumption were 1.12 (1.08, 1.16), 1.32 (1.25, 1.40), and 1.14 (1.10, 1.18), respectively. The results were confirmed by a meta-analysis (442,101 participants and 28,228 diabetes cases): the RRs (95% CIs) were 1.19 (1.04, 1.37) and 1.51 (1.25, 1.83) for 100 g of unprocessed red meat and for 50 g ofunprocessed red meat, respectively. We estimated that substitutions of one serving of nuts, low-fat dairy, and whole grains per day for one serving of red meat per day were associated with a 16–35% lower risk of T2D. “
There must be an error with the two words that I have highlighted in red. Is the article really saying that eating 100g ofunprocessed red meat has 1.19 risk (presumably relative to not eating any unprocessed red meat) but that eating 50g of unprocessed red meat has a 1.51 risk? i.e. claiming that people who eat 100g of unprocessed red meat have ‘a 20% greater risk of diabetes’ but people who eat half this amount have ‘a 50% greater risk’?! Do they mean unprocessed at the first mention and processed at the second? (I’ve emailed Frank Hu – watch this space. Update – email back by return, fair play! Confirmation that this IS an error and AJCN will be asked to correct).
The overall conclusion is: “Our results suggest that red meat consumption, particularly processed red meat, is associated with an increased risk of T2D.”
Issues
1) On p. 2 of the full study we have the significant error at the outset. Under the heading “Assessment of meat consumption”, we have this telling passage: “Questionnaire items in unprocessed red meat consumption included ‘beef or lamb as main dish’, ‘pork as main dish’, ‘hamburger’ and ‘beef, pork or lamb as a sandwich or mixed dish’, and items on processed red meat included ‘bacon’, ‘hot dogs’, and ‘sausage, salami, bologna, and other processed red meats.’”
We reach the fundamental issue, which renders the study futile, in this one passage. Real food supporters define unprocessed meat as that which has been naturally reared and processed meat as any and every other meat. Take the Weston Price Foundation definition of real meat for any study. Real unprocessed meat comes from animals that have been living their entire life freely outdoors grazing on (ideally fast growing) grass in rain and sunshine. These animals must have been eating grass, which they are designed to eat and not grain which they cannot digest. Unless they have been chewing the cud, which, as ruminants they are designed to do and pre-digesting vitamin D blessed grass for those who cannot digest cellulose – humans – there is no point in consuming them.
Hamburgers are not real meat. Presumably a lamb curry takeaway qualifies as “beef or lamb as main dish” – this is not real meat, as real food supporters would define it. The fundamental point of the study is about red meat – processed and unprocessed. To make any relevant claims, the study should have looked at those who eat no meat (every single other factor unchanged), those who eat real meat (every single other factor unchanged)
and those who eat processed meat (every single other factor unchanged). The fact that other factors cannot be held constant is one of the major reasons why the UK Food Standards Agency had to admit (in the context of fat and heart disease studies):
“However, the ideal controlled dietary trial for prevention of heart disease (a long-term intervention trial with differing levels of saturated fatty acids and measuring coronary disease endpoints) has not yet been done and it is unlikely ever to be done”.
Plus – the second critical point related to the so-called unprocessed meat – what is “beef or lamb as main dish” eaten with? rice? potatoes? carbs? What are hamburgers eaten with? burger buns? chips? ketchup? carbs? What are “beef, pork or lamb as a sandwich” eaten with – bit of a clue there – bread, likely hydrogenated fat margarine, emulsified mayonnaise, and, no doubt, more ingredients in the bread alone than in the varieties of real meat available to humans.
It doesn’t matter what the survey did or concluded next – they did not measure real meat vs processed meat or isolate this consumption from any other macro nutrient.
2) Diabetes is a condition related to blood glucose levels and insulin – either the body’s failure to release insulin to respond to a rise in blood glucose levels (type 1) or because cells are unresponsive (resistant) to insulin released (type 2). The macro nutrient most relevant to diabetes therefore is carbohydrate. Fat has no relevance and the relevance of protein is debatable, but negligible compared to that of carbohydrate. So, what is most likely to have any impact on diabetes – the processed (don’t call it unprocessed) hamburger, or the bun, fries and ketchup? To claim an association between one part of food intake and not the whole is meaningless.
The report even notes that they conducted a sensitivity analysis with “adjustment for other major dietary variables (whole grain, fish, nuts, sugar-sweetened beverages, coffee, egg, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, all in quintiles).” Why not take the dietary questionnaires (however unreliable these notoriously are) and run an association with all dietary carbohydrate and incidence of diabetes over time. Biscuits, cakes, confectionery, bread, sugary cereals, pizza – the 400 calories of sugar and 700+ calories of flour that the average American eats daily. Are those eating more than their share getting more than their ‘share’ of diabetes?