New Study Says If You Eat Red Meat You Will Die

[Benko]

New from Kresser (Only Because Gumby Must Be Busy):

" The researchers claimed that this means eating red meat must alter the gut flora in a way that predisposes toward TMAO production. However, there’s another explanation that I believe is much more plausible: the red meat eaters are engaging in unhealthy behaviors that have led to dysbiosis and/or SIBO. "

http://chriskresser.com/red-meat-and-tm ... t-the-meat

Yup, makes much more sense.

[Benko]

Similarly regarding the study MG posted (awhile back), it is not lecithin that increases risk of heart disease, it is having your gut screwed up, which results in abnormal gut bacterial flora which can convert things in meat, lecithin and probably other substances into things which increase risk of heart disease.

[rocketdog]

Red meat has been a significant part of most human diets for hundreds of thousands of years. Forgive me if I don't rush to cut it from my diet.

Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't make it a good idea.  Most of our early ancestors didn't live past their 20s, so they didn't have to face the long-term consequences of a diet heavy in animal products.  We shouldn't be asking ourselves "How did our ancient ancestors eat?" Instead we should be asking ourselves "What should I eat in order to live the longest, healthiest life possible?"  And all of the evidence points to a largely vegetarian diet, with animal products used in limited amounts, if at all. 

Michael Pollan summed it up well in his book In Defense of Food:  "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

[l82start]

Red meat has been a significant part of most human diets for hundreds of thousands of years. Forgive me if I don't rush to cut it from my diet.

Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't make it a good idea.  Most of our early ancestors didn't live past their 20s, so they didn't have to face the long-term consequences of a diet heavy in animal products.  We shouldn't be asking ourselves "How did our ancient ancestors eat?" Instead we should be asking ourselves "What should I eat in order to live the longest, healthiest life possible?"  And all of the evidence points to a largely vegetarian diet, with animal products used in limited amounts, if at all. 

Michael Pollan summed it up well in his book In Defense of Food:  "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

  average life expectancy needs to be adjusted for infant mortality and death by accident/large animal to be meaningful, i suspect if those adjustments get made an "early ancestor diet" wont look like a cause of short life...

[moda0306]

Red meat has been a significant part of most human diets for hundreds of thousands of years. Forgive me if I don't rush to cut it from my diet.

Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't make it a good idea.  Most of our early ancestors didn't live past their 20s, so they didn't have to face the long-term consequences of a diet heavy in animal products.  We shouldn't be asking ourselves "How did our ancient ancestors eat?" Instead we should be asking ourselves "What should I eat in order to live the longest, healthiest life possible?"  And all of the evidence points to a largely vegetarian diet, with animal products used in limited amounts, if at all. 

Michael Pollan summed it up well in his book In Defense of Food:  "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

All of the evidence?  Hardly.  There is a lot of evidence that omega 3 fats are great for us and that animal fats are the best way for us to absorb micronutrients. 

[doodle]

Is the fact that most apes are primarily vegetarian at all important in determining what an appropriate human diet should look like? It seems to me that meat was probably adopted into the early human diet because during the days of hunter gathering it allowed us to get a huge amount of calories and nutrients relatively quickly as compared to searching out plants. Unlike our ape ancestors we also were able to make tools that made hunting large game possible. The negative effects of this meat under conditions of survival took a back seat to the priority of just getting the calories to live another day. Modern agriculture has made these calorie dense forms of nutrition less necessary perhaps???

This is all conjecture....

Here is another take on the Paleo diet http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/2 ... 95228.html

When we talk about “paleo”? diets, we arbitrarily tend to start with one set of ancestors, our most recent ones. I want to eat like Homo erectus or a Neanderthal or a stone age human, my neighbors testify. But why do we choose these particular ancestors as starting points? They do seem tough and admirable in a really strong five o’ clock shadow sort of way. But if we want to return to the diet our guts and bodies evolved to deal with, we should not be looking at our most recent ancestors. Instead, we need to understand the diet of our ancestors during the time when the main features of our guts, and their magical abilities to turn food into life, evolved. We need, in other words, to look at apes, monkeys and other non-human primates.

[moda0306]

doodle,

Somewhere on here Gumby picked me apart on the whole ape topic.  He needs to join this discussion, because I don't have the energy or knowledge for this debate.

[rocketdog]

average life expectancy needs to be adjusted for infant mortality and death by accident/large animal to be meaningful, i suspect if those adjustments get made an "early ancestor diet" wont look like a cause of short life...

I agree with you that diet wasn't a cause of our early ancestors' short lives.  Which was my whole point:  it's precisely because they died an early death that they never experienced the long-term affects of an animal-heavy diet, and so it was not detrimental to them.  Smoking isn't terribly detrimental to you either... assuming you die in a car accident in your 30s.  But now that humans are regularly living into their 80s and 90s, we've only recently begun to understand the long-term impact of such a diet on the human body. 

A lot of it is genetics, too, but diet can be a pretty powerful insurance policy. 

[rocketdog]

Is the fact that most apes are primarily vegetarian at all important in determining what an appropriate human diet should look like? It seems to me that meat was probably adopted into the early human diet because during the days of hunter gathering it allowed us to get a huge amount of calories and nutrients relatively quickly as compared to searching out plants. Unlike our ape ancestors we also were able to make tools that made hunting large game possible. The negative effects of this meat under conditions of survival took a back seat to the priority of just getting the calories to live another day. Modern agriculture has made these calorie dense forms of nutrition less necessary perhaps???

We're not apes, so I'm not sure how much you can glean from their diet.  We're related to apes of course, but only through a common ancestor (sort of like a distant cousin).  We're more closely related to chimpanzees, which also eat 95% vegetarian diets with 5% devoted to animal sources (mostly insects and grubs, but on occasion they will also hunt and eat small mammals, other primates, and even cannibalize other chimps.) 

[l82start]

i am far from being the resident expert on the topic but there have been some great threads on paleo diets that give a lot of convincing evidence for the health benefits of dropping carbs from sugars wheat and grains out of the human diet and the benefits of fats as a nutrition source. i think the ultimate conclusion was find your own perfect balance based on close observation and monitoring of the effect foods have on you... i personally do well on a lower carb red meat heavy diet, i would love to upgrade that to a grass-fed meat only version of my diet, and i do so when i can afford it.  i tend to doubt claims that red meat kills or that vegetarian is superior for everyone, like you said a lot of it is genetics and those genetics determine what diet or balance of vegetables to meat is going to be your optimum..

[RuralEngineer]

Red meat has been a significant part of most human diets for hundreds of thousands of years. Forgive me if I don't rush to cut it from my diet.

Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't make it a good idea.  Most of our early ancestors didn't live past their 20s, so they didn't have to face the long-term consequences of a diet heavy in animal products.  We shouldn't be asking ourselves "How did our ancient ancestors eat?" Instead we should be asking ourselves "What should I eat in order to live the longest, healthiest life possible?"  And all of the evidence points to a largely vegetarian diet, with animal products used in limited amounts, if at all. 

Michael Pollan summed it up well in his book In Defense of Food:  "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

There are plenty of animals that have an exclusively animal protein diet, Orca for instance. Too bad they don't have the benefit of your wisdom so they can stop shortening their lives and go Vegan. Then again a quick google search puts their max life spam at 80 - 90 years. Maybe if I eat enough fish I can avoid your Vegan hell?

[doodle]

I'd say humans fall a lot closer to apes than orcas on the evolutionary spectrum. Then again, that might not be ones impression if you spend a lot of time shopping at Walmart. 

[Benko]

Rocketdog,

Theory is all well and good (and who is correect, paleo/perfect diet, or the vegetarian mafia), but real world experience is that a significant percent of people, do better i.e. feel better, are able to keep weight off, don't have food cravings, etc when eating red meat.  There is a link in this thread I posted above with 40 studies showing benefits of carnitine (found in red meat).

I would agree that eating plants is very good for you, and I've increased my intake of plants significantly over the last coupla years, while still consuming 12+ ounces of animal protein per day.  The animal protein is mostly hormone free, antibiotic free. 

Which is responsible for the health benefits, eating lots of plants, or stopping the meat?  Would that be the same if the meats we of high quality?

[rocketdog]

There are plenty of animals that have an exclusively animal protein diet, Orca for instance. Too bad they don't have the benefit of your wisdom so they can stop shortening their lives and go Vegan. Then again a quick google search puts their max life spam at 80 - 90 years. Maybe if I eat enough fish I can avoid your Vegan hell?

1. I am not a vegan.
2. Orca have evolved to eat animal protein exclusively; it is their optimum diet.  Humans evolved to eat a plant-based omnivorous diet, augmented by small amounts of animal protein when available.
3. You are correct that fish are preferable to land mammals, dietarily speaking.

Not sure what "vegan hell" is?  Is that where you live a long, healthful, active life because you're not suffering from the ill effects of a lifetime spent eating a sub-optimal animal-based diet? 

A smoker might consider not smoking to be "non-smoking hell", but that is not an argument in favor of smoking.

[l82start]

• Orca have evolved to eat animal protein exclusively; it is their optimum diet.  Humans evolved to eat a plant-based omnivorous diet, augmented by small amounts of animal protein when available.

i think some of the facts about human digestion/evolution might contradict this claim, we actually absorb nutrition very poorly from plants compared to what we get from fat/meat. i wish i could drop the detailed and documented support for this into my post, but i don't have it memorized or easily at hand,  most of it has been posted on this forum before.
  lacto fermentation,  paleo diet, and low carb diet might be good search terms to find the threads with the detailed arguments..

[moda0306]

Where the f'k is Gumby when you need him ?

[l82start]

Where the f'k is Gumby when you need him ?

seconded

[rocketdog]

Hey, everybody is free to eat whatever they want.  As for me, I'm sticking with the real-world studies of societies that eat very little animal protein and have enjoyed significantly lower incidents of dietary-related diseases and longer life spans.  The China Study and Seventh Day Adventists come to mind. 

Studies looking at it from the other direction also exist, such as those that have followed people who immigrated from Asia to America and adopted a typical American diet, then quickly suffered the same health problems that have become endemic in the U.S.  Hell, many heart attack patients have been put on low-fat vegetarian diets and their health improved so much they avoided the need for bypass surgery!

Bottom line is that there has never been a confirmed study that indicates moving from a balanced vegetarian diet to an animal-heavy diet results in overall health benefits, nor has there been a study showing that moving from an animal-heavy diet to a balanced vegetarian diet results in overall health detriments. 

It's your life, so the choice is yours to make.  (Notice that we haven't even talked about the environmental damage that the animal farming industry creates, which is a whole additional argument against eating large amounts of factory-produced animal protein. But I digress.)

[rocketdog]

Where the f'k is Gumby when you need him ?

Have you ever considered the possibility that I'm Gumby, using a different alias so I can debate both sides of a topic?  BWA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!!!! 

[MachineGhost]

Similarly regarding the study MG posted (awhile back), it is not lecithin that increases risk of heart disease, it is having your gut screwed up, which results in abnormal gut bacterial flora which can convert things in meat, lecithin and probably other substances into things which increase risk of heart disease.

I know we're in the dark ages of medicine here, but are there any tests that can irrefutably point to your gut microbiome being screwed up?  I don't mean a SIBO or a leaky gut test or physical symptoms test, but something more directly concrete.

[MachineGhost]

Just because something has been done for a long time doesn't make it a good idea.  Most of our early ancestors didn't live past their 20s, so they didn't have to face the long-term consequences of a diet heavy in animal products.  We shouldn't be asking ourselves "How did our ancient ancestors eat?" Instead we should be asking ourselves "What should I eat in order to live the longest, healthiest life possible?"  And all of the evidence points to a largely vegetarian diet, with animal products used in limited amounts, if at all. 

Oh, wow!  So much falsehoods in that statement, but my adrenals can't spare the stress to correct the falsehoods.  We're all sorely missing Gumby...

EDIT: Gumby is taking a break from the forum to destress his adrenals.

[Benko]

In an attempt to give credit, pasted from another forum:
http://monkeyisland.lylemcdonald.com/sh ... ost1037447

[QUOTE=CoQ10;1037447]"The China Study" is a joke. Among the many errors:

- The author fails to note that plant and wheat proteins are correlated to CVD far more strongly than animal protein is.

- The author cites dozens of poorly-designed animal studies that are not remotely applicable to humans.

- Several of the studies cited don't compare two diets. Rather, they compare a typical diet to a low-fat/low-protein diet combined with statins.

Much more here: http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/

-C10[/QUOTE]

[MachineGhost]

Ramen-style noodles, a staple in the pantry of broke college students, has been the mainstay of one teenager's diet for the past 13 years, according to an article in the New York Daily News.

Georgi Readman, 18, of the Isle of Wight, U.K., refuses to eat fruit and vegetables and exists solely on packaged noodle soup, a snack that often contains high amounts of fat, saturated fat, and sodium. One package typically boasts 400 calories and 20 grams of fat.

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/t ... 13286.html

Not mentioned was the transfats and the MSG unless that is banned in the UK?

I'm too chicken to watch the TED video at the end.

[notsheigetz]

Reminds me of the Chinese saying my wife keeps telling me about. Her translation is "If you eat, you die. If you don't eat, you die. So why not eat"?

Probably sounds better in Chinese.

[Benko]

I know we're in the dark ages of medicine here, but are there any tests that can irrefutably point to your gut microbiome being screwed up?  I don't mean a SIBO or a leaky gut test or physical symptoms test, but something more directly concrete.

I don't know. 

I know that not only are there numerous different types of bacteria found in different parts of our GI tracts, but apparently different people have different (?normal) populations in their gut.  Perhaps this means that the optimal flora (supplement) differs from person to person.

Even if such a test exits, the question remains, what do you with with the answer to the test i.e. what are you going to do differently?  Doing the perfect diet thing complete with...what was it bone soup?  marrow soup? Whatever soup Gumby talked about regularly sounds like a good idea, along with the other things you were doing.  The gap meditation and and other stress relieving things are probably a super idea as well.