Dallas Cowboys fullback Tony Fiametta has reportedly switched to a purely plant-based (vegan) diet. He says that it makes him feel better on and off the field.
Photo by .sanden. 
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Starchy, Low-Fat Diets Reduce Deaths From Type 2 Diabetes
Here is an interesting article that was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1949. It points out that type 2 diabetes is common in places where people eat a fatty, low-carb diet and rare in places where people eat a starchy, low-fat diet. When a population that had been eating a fatty diet switches to a starchy diet, such as under rationing in wartime, the number of people who die of complications of diabetes falls off dramatically. See the graph on page 324 to see the effects of rationing, economic slump, and the introduction of insulin therapy on the number of people who died of diabetes in England and Wales in the early 20th century.
The author pointed out that you can see the same relationship between high fat consumption and deaths from diabetes all over the world:
There thus seems to be a universal relation between diet and diabetic mortality. The dietetic factor most closely related is fat consumption.
It may seem odd that the introduction of insulin therapy didn’t make a dent in the graph. That’s because most people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, which used to be called non–insulin-dependent diabetes. You’d see a different picture if you looked at a graph of deaths from type 1 diabetes, which used to be called insulin-dependent diabetes.
Note: For a clear explanation of why high-carbohydrate diets are good for people with any type of diabetes, see my book Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes: Prevent Type 2, Cure Type 2.
Where Do Elephants Get Their Protein?
I chose the gorilla motif for this blog because gorillas are the biggest and most powerful primates, along with being about as close as possible to vegan as you can get while eating many pounds per day of vegetation in a rain forest. I wanted to point out that people simply don’t have to worry about getting enough protein or calcium from a plant-based diet. In reality, the animal-based foods that we have been urged to eat don’t provide any nutrients that we can’t easily get from plants or bacteria. If you are still worried about protein, think about where elephants get their protein. Elephants are even bigger and even stronger than gorillas. A big elephant can eat up to 600 pounds of food a day.
Photo by mcoughlin
Is the Child Resisting Toilet Training? Or Merely Constipated?
Yesterday, a friend of mine told me about a four-year-old boy who was “resisting” being toilet trained. She said that the child would urinate in the toilet but that he’d “hold it” for three days rather than defecate in his potty. I told her that I couldn’t imagine that anybody who eats a high-fiber vegan diet could “hold it” for three days, even if he tried, unless he was taking morphine or some other drug that shuts down gut motility. I said that the child’s problem didn’t sound to me like resistance to potty training. It sounded like constipation. His refusal to go on the potty probably reflects the fact that his bowel movements are uncomfortable or even agonizingly painful, and it’s probably because he’s being fed dairy products and a lot of processed food. She admitted that the poor child was being fed cow’s milk and wasn’t eating much fruit and vegetables or even whole grains.
Think about it. If you are a toddler or preschooler and have had some painful experiences on the potty, wouldn’t you avoid the potty the way you’d avoid any torture device? Painful experiences have trained the child to avoid the potty. I can only hope that the poor child’s caregivers aren’t adding to the child’s misery by punishing him for failing to use the potty.
Bowel movements aren’t supposed to hurt. If a child’s bowel movements are infrequent or difficult, there is something wrong. The usual cause of the problem is the diet.
Cow’s milk and other dairy products are a common cause of severe constipation in children. The digestion of casein, which is the major protein in cow’s milk, produces protein fragments that are called casomorphins because they have drug effects that are similar to those of morphine. Besides being slightly addictive, casomorphins can cause severe constipation. Fortunately, human beings do not need to consume any cow’s milk products at all, ever.
A low-fiber diet is also a common contributing cause of constipation in children. Animal-based foods all contain zero fiber, and refined plant foods contain very little fiber. As a result, the standard American diet, which is based on animal-source foods (including dairy products) and refined foods, is a recipe for constipation. It is also a major cause of appendicitis, which can be deadly. If all of the foods that a child is offered contain fiber, the child will eat fiber.
Often, a child’s refusal to use the potty is viewed as a problem with the child’s behavior. However, I think that when a child doesn’t poop for three or more days, it’s probably the caregiver, not the child, who is misbehaving. The caregiver is probably failing to feed the child the kind of diet that would enable the child to have normal bowel movements. Any healthcare professional who suggests drug treatments–even over-the-counter laxatives–or behavioral interventions without teaching the caregivers how to correct the child’s diet is also misbehaving, in my humble opinion.
Online course in nutrition from Cornell University
Cornell University is offering an online course in nutrition, under the supervision of T. Colin Campbell, PhD, a nutritional biochemist who is also one of the world’s foremost authorities on nutritional epidemiology. The course provides essential information for healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, chiropractors, dietitians, nutritionists), patients, teachers, parents and anyone in the general public with an interest in reaching optimal health and dietary excellence. Medical doctors who take the course can get 19 Continuing Medical Education credits for taking the course.
Type 1 Diabetes: It’s the Milk, Not the Shots!
I was listening to a self-educated, self-styled health expert who was talking on the radio yesterday. He said something about some vitamin therapy for type 1 diabetes, and then he said something that shocked and upset me. He mentioned what he believes is the cause of type 1 diabetes. I expected him to say “cow’s milk.” There’s plenty of evidence to support the role of cow’s milk in causing type 1 diabetes. If more parents knew about the link between cow’s milk and type 1 diabetes, it’s likely that fewer children would come down with type 1 diabetes. Instead, he said, “vaccinations.” I’d never before heard of any link between vaccinations and type 1 diabetes, so I quickly did a MEDLINE search. I looked for articles on vaccinations and the cause of type 1 diabetes in humans. If you click on this link, you’ll see the same articles I did:
For me, this search yielded 60 articles, many of which I could read for free. By the time that you repeat this search, there may be more. Some of them were about the ability of vaccines to provide protective immunity in children who already had type 1 diabetes. Several articles were about the attempts to develop a vaccine to prevent type 1 diabetes.
One article pointed out that rubella infection was the only infectious disease that has been clearly implicated as a contributing cause of any form of type 1 diabetes. Of course, rubella could be completely eradicated, along with measles, if all of the world’s countries participated in a comprehensive vaccination campaign. Unfortunately, many people are refusing to get their children vaccinated against rubella because they are convinced that the MMR vaccine causes autism. I remember one woman in particular telling me that her child’s autism resulted from mercury in the MMR shot. I told her that I was sorry that her child has autism, but I can guarantee that mercury in the MMR shot had absolutely nothing to do with it. That’s because the mercury-containing preservative thiomersal has never been used in the MMR vaccine. I also explained to her that since congenital rubella infection is a possible cause of autism-spectrum disorder, then her efforts to scare people away from the MMR vaccine might make the problem worse, not better. If the world’s population worked together to eradicate measles, mumps, and rubella, then the MMR vaccine would no longer be needed.
The studies that looked for evidence of a statistical relationship between various vaccinations or vaccination schedules and type 1 diabetes kept coming up empty-handed. As the biggest and best-designed study concluded:
These results do not support a causal relation between childhood vaccination and type 1 diabetes.
If there really were some sort of cause-and-effect relationship, it would leave some evidence of its existence. In other words, we don’t have an absence of evidence, we have evidence of absence! There’s no rational reason to blame vaccinations for causing type 1 diabetes!
So far, vaccination campaigns have led to the complete eradication of two infectious diseases: smallpox and rinderpest. Smallpox is a human disease that was once a major cause of death and disfigurement. Rinderpest killed hundreds of millions of cattle. The next human disease that is about to be eradicated by vaccination is polio. Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis) is about to be eradicated by a campaign of education about sanitation. It is technically possible to eradicate measles, mumps, rubella by vaccination and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) and cysticercosis (pork tapeworm) by other methods. There is even talk of eradicating malaria.
Nowadays, it’s no longer necessary to vaccinate people against smallpox. Soon, it will no longer be necessary to vaccinate people against polio. I look forward to the day when measles, mumps, and rubella are eradicated and the MMR vaccine will no longer be needed. In the meantime, there’s no need to worry that the currently used vaccinations pose any risk of type 1 diabetes.
Note: Most of the people who build antivaccine Web sites and produce antivaccine documentaries have a profit motive. Some of them are faith healers who want you to put money in their collection plate. Others are selling overpriced vitamins and unproven herbal remedies over the Internet. Still others are providing some sort of service that has never been proven to be safe and effective. A few of them run nonprofit organizations that give them a salary. To get you to support them financially, they need to undermine your trust in your family doctor. For that reason, they attack the single most important service that conventional medicine can provide: immunization against serious diseases that do not respond well to any available treatment. I explain the history and motivations of the antivaccination movement in detail in my book No More Measles! The Truth About Vaccines and Your Health.
Predators Aren’t the Top of the Food Chain, Their Parasites Are!
Lots of people tell me that human beings are supposed to be predators and carnivores—that we’re supposed to be the top of the food chain! This makes human beings sound really important and special, doesn’t it? There’s only one small problem with this idea. The apex predator of an ecosystem (i.e., a predator that has no predators of its own) is not really at the top of its food chain. The creatures at the very tippy top of the food chain are the parasites that feed on the apex predator. Here’s a link to an article that describes the protozoa, worms, and mites that were found in the droppings of wild lions in Tanzania. These parasites are the sort of creatures I think of when someone mentions the top of the food chain! Not so glamorous, is it?
The idea that human beings should be at the top of the food chain and therefore should or must kill and eat other animals to maintain some sort of special status sounds to me like a weird and dangerous form of narcissism. It asserts that we are special and entitled to special privileges, but it bases that exalted status on primitive animalistic behaviors, not on the abilities and accomplishments that are unique to our species. We’re the only known species in the universe with whom it is even theoretically possible to hold an intelligent conversation. We’re the only ones who can contemplate and deliberately shape our own destiny. Those uniquely human gifts make us special, even if we eat the low-fat plant-based foods that are good for our health instead of the fatty, meaty foods that are the major cause of death and disability in the United States.
The Cause of the Breast Cancer Epidemic
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and we’re inundated with pink ribbons, urging us to be “aware” of breast cancer and encouraging women to get mammograms. Personally, I didn’t need to be made aware of breast cancer. It devastated my family about 40 years ago, when my father’s eldest sister, who was more like a mother to him, died of it after a long and horrible illness. About 10 years later, another of his sisters began her long and painful struggle against the disease that eventually claimed her life. Recently, some of my friends have undergone mastectomies. It would hard for me to be more aware that breast cancer exists.
What infuriates me is that the attempts to raise “awareness” of breast cancer systematically fail to tell women the single most important thing they can do to reduce their risk of dying of breast cancer: correct their diet. Instead, it urges them to do something that might have little or no effect on their survival: get an annual mammogram. It would be as if the efforts to educate the public about lung cancer all failed to mention cigarettes but instead just urged everyone in the population to get an annual chest x-ray.
By the mid 20th century, European and U.S.-trained doctors who were practicing in Africa and Asia realized that breast cancer is rare to practically nonexistent in populations that eat a low-fat, plant-based diet. By the end of the 20th century, epidemiologists knew that breast cancer mortality is strongly linked to the amount of animal protein that a population consumes. The more animal protein a population eats, the more likely its women are to die of breast cancer. Vegetables had the opposite effect. The more vegetables a population eats, the less likely their women are to die of breast cancer.
The data on breast cancer mortality boil down to a simple lesson: if women ate low-fat plant foods instead of a fatty, animal-based diet (including meat, milk, fish and eggs), they could dramatically reduce their risk of dying of breast cancer–and colon cancer, and heart disease, and diabetes, and autoimmune disease, etc. etc. etc. They’d even reduce their risk of getting varicose veins! Even if a woman already has cancer, a switch to a low-fat, plant-based diet might improve her chances of survival.
Instead of being given advice that will actually prevent breast cancer, women in the United States are urged to get a routine annual mammogram. Unfortunately, mammograms do absolutely nothing to prevent breast cancer, and they may do little or nothing to keep most women from dying of breast cancer. Worse yet, routine mammography may lead to unnecessary surgical procedures in women who don’t have cancer.
The decision of who should undergo mammography and when they should undergo it is complicated. The next time you hear someone urging all women of a certain age to have annual screening mammograms, consider the following:
- Mammography involves exposing the breast to x-rays and thus might actually cause some cancers. The x-rays could pose a particular problem for young women and women with a genetic predisposition to breast cancer.
- The breast is typically squashed flat while the mammogram is being taken. Not only does this compression hurt, it could break up a precancerous lesion, turning it into a deadly invasive cancer.
- Mammography is less useful for finding cancers in the breasts of premenopausal women because their breast tissue is denser.
- By the time a cancer is large enough to be seen by mammography, it may already have spread.
- Mammograms often cause false alarms by bringing attention to harmless benign lesions, as well as to cancerous tumors that would have gone away by themselves if left untreated. Unfortunately, the woman has to undergo the pain and expense and risk of a surgical biopsy to find out whether the lesion is benign or not, and she’ll never know whether her body’s immune system would have destroyed a tumor before it caused any problems.
Many studies have failed to show that routine screening mammography provides any benefit in terms of saving lives. As a result, some experts argue that it is a pointless and cruel waste of medical resources to urge all women to have annual screening mammography. Even the value of routine breast self-examination has been questioned. Nevertheless, mammography could still be valuable for many individual patients, depending on the situation. The real question is when and how often and for whom it should be used.
Photo by maf04
Host a Screening of Forks Over Knives
If you haven’t seen it already, watch the documentary Forks Over Knives. You can watch it instantly on Netflix if you are a Netflix subscriber. You can also order the DVD at www.forksoverknives.com and host your own screening.
The documentary includes this juicy quote from T. Colin Campbell, PhD, who is one of the world’s most prominent nutrition scientists:
I know of nothing else in medicine that can come close to what a plant-based diet can do. I can say this with a great deal of confidence, that our national authorities are simply excluding this concept of nutrition from the debate, in the discussion, in order to protect the status quo. In theory, if everyone were to adopt this, I really believe that we could cut healthcare costs by 70% to 80%.
How to Cook Dried Beans, Lentils, and Peas
It’s easy to get enough protein from a plant-based diet, even if you don’t eat legumes (beans, lentils, and peas). In fact, the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece thrived on a purely plant-based diet, even though they refused for philosophical reasons to eat beans. Nevertheless, beans are cheap, tasty, and nutritious and play an important part in many traditional cuisines. The only problem is that dried beans can be hard to cook. I’ve tried several different methods and have had good luck with all of them.
If you want to use dried beans instead of canned beans, you’re going to have to think ahead and allow time for the beans to soak and cook. I usually soak them overnight and then cook them the following day. I often cook a huge pot of beans and then use the cooked beans in various recipes over the next few days. For example, I mash some of the beans with a little bit of chili powder and salt and use them as sandwich filling. Or I can add chick peas or other beans to a salad.
If you want to cook chick peas, use soft water, such as rainwater. If you use hard water, the chick peas will never soften! We have really hard water, so I use water from a reverse osmosis filter when I cook chick peas. I can use regular tap water for other kinds of beans.
The first step in cooking dried beans is to sort through them to make sure that no pebbles are hiding among the beans. I simply pour them into my hand a few at a time and then toss them into a bowl. For small beans like lentils, I scatter them a handful at a time onto a white plate and pick through them before tossing them into the bowl. You can cook lentils and peas right away. I soak larger beans overnight before cooking them.
I use any of several methods to cook beans. The traditional method used by the Native Americans of New England was to put the beans and water and maybe some maple syrup in a crockery pot and leave it by the fire. The Puritans of New England adopted a similar practice because they strictly observed the Sabbath, which meant that they couldn’t work on Sundays. They realized that they could have a hot, cooked meal on Sundays if they left a pot of beans and a crockery of coarse bread dough in a hot brick oven on Saturday night. The fact that nearly everyone ate beans on Sundays is why Boston is called Bean Town.
With the rise of the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and the resulting Triangle Trade involving Boston, Bostonians started using molasses and brown sugar to sweeten their Boston baked beans and their Boston brown bread. This struck me as deeply hypocritical. It meant that people turned a blind eye to human trafficking and slavery but frowned on free people doing household chores on Sundays. As Haitian-American author Solar Cookers International.
In winter and during cloudy weather, I use a pressure cooker to cook beans. My Presto® pressure cooker is about 20 years old. Two years ago, I bought it some new gaskets and a new handle for the lid. Pressure cookers are great! They save time and energy. Here’s a chart that gives the pressure cooker cooking times for various kinds of beans. Pressure cookers are particularly useful for people who live at high elevations, such as in the Rocky Mountains. That’s because water boils at a lower temperature if the air pressure is low.
Photo by WhyKenFotos