Not enough protein: Vegan dieting

 

 

 

Then there's:

 

Also, as our diet gets less healthy:

 

Nearly four times more drugs than 2000!

 

...or...

 

 

 

There are gigantic animals who are herbivores, from brontosaurus to elephants. Vegetables have plenty of protein.

 

For those interested in exploring the downside of a high-protein diet, try Garth Davis' Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat Is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It. Davis is a bariatric surgeon who wrote the book so he wouldn't have to perform so many stomach staplings.

 

On the anecdotal side, my very athletic friend, Keith, ate almost exclusively protein...and died of kidney cancer. After all, protein is just a carb with a Nitrogen atom or two attached, and unless we're growing children, we don't use the protein to build cells, and we excrete the Nitrogen. That's why urine is an excellent Nitrogen fertilizer.

 

Then there are my friends adopting a low-carb keto-, Adkins, paleo- diet that is heavy on meat...roughly the equivalent of practicing Russian roulette as a way of avoiding suicide.

 

As for artery disease (heart attack, stroke), vegan is the clear winner there too. See Caldwell Esselstyne's Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease lecture. It's a little long, but well worth the trouble.

Or see Dr. Barnard's lectures (like this one):

 

 

Or you could read The China Study by Colin Campbell.  Campbell helped supervise the largest study of the connection between diet and health ever conducted...and the book mentions additional studies. Campbell is a former Columbia University biochemist who grew up on a dairy farm, consuming lots of milk and meat. Since he did his researche, he currently travels the country promoting a vegan diet.

...I don't usually say anything about diet. It's personal and more controversial than politics. And there are differences in digestion and the intestinal microbiome that may make a difference. So...your mileage may vary. After all, testing for glycemic index--the speed with which food turns into glucose in our blood stream--indicates there are wide variations in digestion. Some people eat ice cream and it spikes their glucose right away. Others eat it and have no glucose spike. My money is on the ice cream as a cause of glucose spikes, but that's not true for every single person.

Meanwhile, on Netflix, try The Game Changers (athletes, including Arnold Schwarzenneger!) or Forks Over Knives, or What the Health!