Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

[Spiral]

You have received another Facebook nod by PlantPositive.

https://www.facebook.com/plant.positive?fref=ts

I want to say thank you to two bloggers who are trying to raise the profile of my last video project, the user "Spiral" at the McDougall forums and Keith Akers at CompassionateSpirit.com. Thank you both!
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=37551
http://www.compassionatespirit.com/wpbl ... tpositive/

Of course, we all thank you too.

And thank you, Debbie, for letting me know. That was a real highlight for me to see that on Plant Positive's Facebook page.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 9th video in the video series Nutrition: Past and Future by Plant Positive, titled 9 The Journalist Gary Taubes 9: Anomaly Hunter 3. This video is the 3rd of 4 videos discussing the anomoly hunting Gary Taubes.

In this video, the so-called anomolies mentioned on page 25 of Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" are analyzed. This is the sentence that gets scrutiny.

Studies of Navajo Indians, Irish immigrants to Boston, African nomads, Swiss alpine farmers, and Benedictine and Trappist monks all suggested that dietary fat seemed unrelated to heart disease. These were explained away or rejected by [Dr. Ancel] Keys.

It turns out that Keys' explainations are more helpful than Taubes' sloppy mention of those studies. The comparison of the Boston Irish and their brothers in Ireland was the most interesting in my opinion.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 10th video in Plant Positive's Nutrition: Past and Future video series titled, 10 The Journalist Gary Taubes 10: Anomaly Hunter 4.

This video covers a few supposed anomolies mentioned by Gary Taubes in his book "Good Calories, Bad Calories," anomolies that Taubes thinks should have caused scientists to doubt the idea that dietary fat has an adverse impact on cardiovascular health.

Plant Positive discusses the study that included a small town in Pennsylvania, Roseto and, at the end of the video, discusses a study done in Antartica. That Antartica study was well controlled. It had to be. Even though technically the people studied were "free living humans," it was in many ways similar to a metabolic ward study that lasted a full year.

This video is the last of the 4 videos that Plant Positive made in this video series devoted to analyzing Gary Taubes' appetite for anomoly hunting. You can watch the video here.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 11th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive. This video is titled, 11 The Journalist Gary Taubes 11: Oil-Based Nutrition 1. This is the 1st of 2 videos on "Oil Based Nutrition."

This video discusses diet trials in which the control diet competed against an intervention diet. In the Minnesota diet trail, the intervention diet had almost as much total fat as a percent of total calories consumed as the control diet. The main difference was that the intervention diet had less saturated fat and more polyunsaturated fat. However, some of this unsaturated fat came in the form of unhealthy foods such as whipped topping. This partially explains why these diet trials didn't show overwhelmingly favorable results for the intervention.

Still, some interesting observations could be learned from some of these trials. For example, dietary sugar consumption did not correlate with heart disease risk.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 12th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive.

This video is the 2nd of 2 videos discussing "Oil-Based Nutrition," diet trials in which the intervention group received, not a low-fat diet, but a diet lower in saturated fat, but higher in polyunsaturated fat. The exception was the Oslo study in Norway. And it just so happened that the Oslo study showed the clearest benefit for the intervention group compared to similar studies.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 13th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive. This video is titled 13 The Journalist Gary Taubes 13: The Taubes Filter.

This video discusses how Gary Taubes, in his book "Good Calories, Bad Calories," misleads his readers by quoting others out of context, making it appear that the people quoted hold views that they do not hold. The first example Gary Taubes gave was the Nobel Prize winners Brown and Goldstein, who won their Nobel Prizes for their discovery of the LDL receptor and its role in cholesterol metabolism.

Taubes mentioned Michael Brown once and Joseph Goldstein twice in his book. That's amazing, considering that those two played such an important and decisive role in convincing most of the scientific community of the validity of the lipid hypothesis, a hypothesis Taubes believes is false.

This video shows how Goldstein's views were misrepresented. But most of the video shows how Taubes misrepresented the views of Edward "Pete" Ahrens. Taubes makes you think that Ahrens was carbophobic. Yet, in reality, Ahrens believed that avoiding meat, dairy and eggs was an effective way to reduce serum cholesterol and reduce heart disease risk.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 14th video in the video series Nutrition: Past and Future created by Plant Positive

This video discusses how Gary Taubes was able to seduce libertarian economist Russ Roberts on the nutritional superiority of a low-carb, high-fat diet over a plant-based diet using anti-establishment, anti-groupthink rhetoric.

Russ Roberts seemed to have conducted these interviews with Gary Taubes without being familiar with alternative points of view (for example, the points of view of Doctors McDougall, Esselstyn, Ornish and Campbell).

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 15th video of the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive.

This video covers a lot of ground in about 15 minutes.

It starts out explaining how the "Eskimo Diet" consisting almost entirely of animal fat turned the blood milky and raised the cholesterol level to 800 mg/dL.

Then comes a brief discussion of the Seven Countries Study and the China Study (Oxford-Cornell-China Project). Plant Positive mentions that the China Study wasn't the first time that very low cardiovascular disease rates were noticed in China. Reference was made to Dr. Snapper's 1941 research, research in 1947 by another physician and a 1974 paper by Dr. TO Cheng. Cheng mentioned that the northern Chinese ate more animal fat and have many times higher the cardiovascular disease than the north.

At the end there is this excerpt from a speech made by Dr. Michael Brown, one of the two researchers who discovered the LDL receptor.

BROWN: The real news is that we shouldn’t really need these drugs, that for those of us who have normal genes, the reason why our blood is being filled up with cholesterol is because we are basically eating too much cholesterol and too much animal fat. And if you look at populations where the diet is lower in cholesterol and fat, they don’t need these statin drugs, they have low cholesterols in their blood, and they have (a) twenty times lower rate of heart attacks than we do in the United States.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 16th video in the video series Nutrition: Past and Future created by Plant Positive.

This video focuses on fiber, Dr. Denis Burkitt, the famous British doctor who discovered that lack of fiber in western diets causes many western diseases and Gary Taubes' discussion of fiber in his book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories."

Each of the references used by Taubes attempting to debunk the healthfullness of fiber is reviewed by Plant Positive. It turns out that the most of the studies cited by Taubes focused on fiber supplements, not foods containing naturally occuring fiber and/or subjects who had already had symptoms of diverticulosis or colon cancer.

But even within the studies cited by Taubes, there is evidence that a diet high in meat and fat but low in fruits and vegetables raises ones risk of many western diseases. Dr. Denis Burkitt had it right.

[Spiral]

I just finished the 17th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive.

This video discusses the lipidologist Dr. Thomas Dayspring, who has accepted the faulty arguments made by Gary Taubes' book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories." This video discusses, in detail, different lipid bio-markers and how they relate to cardiovascular disease risk. Also discussed is how consumed foods impact bio-markers and how sometimes bio-markers can be misleading.

There are several excellent scientific references that appear on the screen during this video, including one that discusses high-fat and low-fat diets in terms of how they impact fatty liver and another that discusses how a low-fat, high-fiber diet reduces serum cholesterol better than an American Heart Association low-fat diet.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 18th video in the video series Nutrition: Past and Future created by Plant Positive. This video is titled 18 Cholesterol Confusion 1 Primordial Prevention and discusses the various ways in which Gary Taubes and others create confusion with respect to LDL and total cholesterol as they relate to cardiovascular disease.

In my opinion, the highlight of this video is the mention of the LDL-lowering polymorphism PCSK9. Some people have a genetic trait that causes them to have very low LDL for their entire life. The statin trials could only study people who were very sick and often very old and who had their LDL levels lowered with statins. Some researchers believe that statin therapy should begin at much younger ages, before cardiovascular disease begins to become so significant. The people with PCSK9 give us the opportunity to study people who could be viewed as having "taken a statin since birth" in the sense that their LDL has stayed extremely low.

They have, in some cases, 88 percent less cardiovascular disease compared to controls.

This demonstrates a few things. Very low cholesterol and very low LDL might be associated with bad health outcomes in some cases. But this is due to reverse causation, a disease causing the low cholesterol.

If one achieves low cholesterol via a healthy diet or having great genes, it is a health advantage, not a disadvantage.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 19th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive titled 19 Cholesterol Confusion 2 The Cause of Heart Disease.

This video mentions that high cholesterol is believed to be the cause of cardiovascular disease in the sense that without high cholesterol the other "risk factors" seem unable to develop cardiovascular disease. However, there are other risk factors for cardiovascular disease such as high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking and air pollution.

This explains why someone with moderately high cholesterol levels (believed to be "low" in affluent countries) can have a heart attack while someone else who has high cholesterol can live to be 90 years old and not have a heart attack.

[Spiral]

I just finished watching the 20th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series created by Plant Positive titled 20 Cholesterol Confusion 3 A Poverty of Animal Fat.

This video talks about how those who advocate a high-meat, high-fat, low-carb diet show that the more animal fat a population consumes, the higher the healthy life expectancy is. The problem with this is obvious. Many deaths and illnesses are unrelated to nutrition. Some are due to civil war. Many are due to lack of health care and sanitation.

Also, even in a country, like Switzerland, that would seem to show that a diet with a significant amount of animal fat has a high life expectancy, the data shows the connection between high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. However, one must look within that country to see the relationship, so that the massive environmental confounder of poverty is excluded.

[TerriT]

Thanks for starting this journal, Spiral. It's a great way of discussing these videos on the forum. I've just started working my way through PlantPositive's website (not in any particular order) and I'm finding it really fascinating. There's lots of extremely useful info on there.

[Cupcake]

Thanks, Spiral, for discussing these wonderful videos here. A few months ago, I watched them up to the 9th video that you talk about at the top of this page. You summarize them very well. I need to go back and start watching with the 10th in the series and continue.

The main thing I learned from PP was that there is so much misinformation out there in the popular diet press. PP was ruthless in tracking down references and checking facts. Which is what we should all be.

This week, I got out a new book by John Ratey called Go Wild. As I had loved Dr. Ratey's previous book Spark, I had high hopes for this one. I started getting a sinking feeling when I saw that the Forward was written by Dr. Perlmutter. Then I scanned the chapter on food and it would appear it's a retread of Good Calories Bad Calories, quoting Gary Taubes by name. Very, very disappointed in Dr. Ratey. He really should fact-check at least as well as Plant Positive, a blogger on the internet.