[docgnome]

I know this is slightly off topic and I apologize but I'm rather obsessed with the topic at the moment.

First, vegan isn't a necessarily a moral choice. I'm vegan and my primary reason for being so is for one animal: me.

Second, the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods are terrible for you. I'm no expert in the field of nutrition but it seems to me the paleo diet falls straight into the animal food based diet category and therefore into the greatly increases your risk of multiple kinds of diseases category.

(If anyone knows of any real criticism of the China Study, I'd like to read it. All I can find boils down to "I like me therefore it's good for me")

[lmm]

In my personal, anecdotal experience, every vegan I know has serious health problems. Literally every single one. Never anything that can be traced directly to their diet (e.g. one of those I'm thinking of mostly has severe eczema), but it's such a sharp correlation that I can't help thinking there's something to it.

While I haven't looked at that particular study, the result you're claiming seems implausible; one would expect humans to be optimized by evolution for living on the ancestral diet. While there are specific reasons why certain parts of our traditional diet are unhealthy (e.g. the ancestral lifestyle burned far more calories than current), in the absence of a specific mechanism like that, "I like me therefore it's good for me" is a perfectly reasonable inference.

And if you're really only interested in health, it seems implausible that that would be 100% correlated with animal vs. non-animal. There are so many different possible food molecules and no reliable common factor that differentiates where they came from - even more so when it comes to the animal byproducts that make vegans different from vegetarians, such as honey.

[afterburner]

Regarding the vegans you know, maybe they already had health problems in general, and thought going vegan would alleviate them or make them healthier.

(I'm not a vegan/vegetarian.)

[brendoncrawford]

> every vegan I know has serious health problems

That does not necessarily mean that veganism caused their health problems.

[ctdonath]

That many vegans with health problems watched those problems evaporate upon return to omnivorous habits does.

Such anecdotes (data more so) are hard to come by due to the verbal abuse ex-vegans tend to suffer.

[docgnome]

Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I've felt much better since going vegan. I'm willing to grant that may be a placebo effect, but my acne seems to also have improved a bit as well.

[ctdonath]

Hence room for the correct answer: we are built to consume both plants and animals, but different people respond differently to particular combinations thereof and thus have individual reasons to tailor their diets differently.

[Tichy]

Apart from what afterburner said (vegetarians going vegan because of health problems), was there really a single ancestral diet? I have read that foraging was actually more efficient than hunting, so maybe it wasn't all meat after all?

[lmm]

When we look at human prehistory we're talking about a small number of individuals living in a small area, so a single ancestral diet is a reasonable approximation. Foraging was indeed more efficient than hunting in terms of calories, and yes the majority of food consumed would not be meat - I certainly wouldn't advocate an all-meat diet. But obviously meat was a valuable or even vital source of some nutrients (the very fact that humans continued to hunt when foraging is more calorie-efficient suggests that meat was necessary in some way), and I find it hard to believe that a diet that eliminates meat entirely could be healthy.

[malandrew]

Having lived in China and know a lot about its history for the past 60 years, I can't help but shudder at anyone trying to compare health between Chinese and Americans on a longitudinal basis. A Chinese person that is 40-65 years old (the ages when cancers tend to crop up) has experienced a life that is wholly incomparable to the life of an American of the same age in so many different ways besides a meat vs plant based diet.

For example, a large portion of adult Chinese people likely experienced a calorie restricted diet for from 58-61 during the Great Leap Forward that was so severe that it led to millions upon millions of excess deaths. This was just one of the many things impacting diet that happened during the life of a 40-65 year old that would have participated in the China Study.

The China Study took place from 1983-2003, so it is likely that all the numerous food issues China experienced under Mao most likely impacted the study's results in ways that can't even be imagined.

IMHO at best it's a correlational study comparing apples and orangoutangs.

[jongleur]

A moment on Wikipedia gave me this:

Professors Frank B Hu and Walter Willett of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in a letter to the editor in 2000, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that the China-Cornell-Oxford Project did not find a clear association between animal-product consumption and heart disease or major cancers, although in 2010, in an article, "Healthy eating guide," Willet encouraged people to choose plant-based proteins over animal sources.[30] Willett is the principal investigator of the "Nurses' Health Study II" (established 1989). Campbell is highly critical of the first Nurses' Health Study (established 1976), calling it one of the chief sources of public misinformation about nutrition.[8]

In a written debate with Campbell in 2008, Dr. Loren Cordain, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, argued that "the fundamental logic underlying Colin's hypothesis (that low protein diets improve human health) is untenable and inconsistent with the evolution of our own species," and that "a large body of experimental evidence now demonstrates a higher intake of lean animal protein reduces the risk for gout, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, insulin resistance, and osteoporosis while not impairing kidney function." Campbell responded by questioning the implications of the evidence Cordain noted, and argued that "diet-disease associations observed in contemporary times are far more meaningful than what might have occurred during evolutionary times—at least since the last 2.5 million years or so."[31] Cordain's rebuttal countered that contemporary hypothesis regarding "what modern day humans should and shouldn’t eat must be consistent with the system and the ancient environmental selective pressures that engineered our current genes," and that "there is no credible fossil, archeological, anthropological, anatomical, ethnographic or biochemical evidence to show that members of our genus (Homo) routinely consumed low protein diets. In fact, without the inclusion of energetically dense animal food into the hominin diet, starting at least 2.5 million years ago, our large energetically active brains would not have evolved."

[johndavi]

Read Denise Minger's extremely thorough review of The China Study (note, the book and its conclusions by T. Colin Campbell as opposed to the actual China-Cornell-Oxford Project). His cherry-picked evidence is extremely fallible and unsupportable.

Denise is now a fairly central figure in the neo-paleo movement, so she may appear biased, but she started as a vegan whose particular inspection of the book played a big role in her conversion.

(On edit: yes, that link by Graeme.)

[graeme]

This one's circulated a fair bit on the internet:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...

The central idea is that the china study showed correlations (sometimes), but not causation, and that it isn't supported by causal evidence.

I haven't read the China Study, or the critique in full, so I don't think I'm qualified to say more.

[docgnome]

He explicitly takes the time to discuss correlation vs causation. But thanks! I'll take a look.

[pav3l]

> the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods are terrible for you

I analyze data for several research departments of a large hospital and I would quite literally not trust 99% of the studies you read about. Even if we ignore all of the issues of statistics misuse, most studies in nutrition and similar areas have flawed designs to begin with. You can't just ignore what incredibly complex systems humans are and just study effects of a substance/action/whatever on the human body as an isolated thing, and that's precisely what most studies do. Frankly it's hard for me to think of a feasible alternative, would probably make a great HN thread ;)

[docgnome]

The China Study is supposed to have taken a more comprehensive view. I've not read any criticism of it (which is why I asked for some). But he cites more than one study that demonstrated the ability to "turn on and off" cancer growth in rats exposed to a particular carcinogen by raising and lowering their animal protein intake. That seems like pretty damning evidence against that particular protein.

(Edit: Assuming of course, said studies are accurately being described to me. I haven't read the actual data.)

[Shorel]

I'm a Paleo/Ketoer and my primary reason for being so is for one animal: me.

It has been proven to be the best diet for me. By a huge margin. I eat less, I have more energy, I can work and exercise for longer without feeling tired, I can write code (be in the zone) for longer and I help the local economy.

You make me remember Steve Jobs. Yes, the same one who died from pancreatic cancer and only believed in extreme vegan diets. The same diets that probably caused said cancer.

For a start, follow the money. Monsanto wants you to believe grains and legumes are the best food anyone can eat. And the Monsanto executives hold very important government positions.

Second, gluten is bad for you. It has been proven, that even if you are not celiac, gluten will cause inflammatory responses in your guts and the rest of your body. The more gluten you eat, the more stress your immune system gets, until it snaps at some point, and you become celiac, or worse.

Third, quinoa and potato peels have saponines, which basically means you are eating soap. And soybean has lots of estrogens.

Fourth, cooked eggs are very good for you. No other food will be absorbed as much by your guts (highest biocompatibility of all foods), which means we should be evolutionarily adapted to eat eggs (I think this applies to all mammals, not just humans).

Right now we are just tiny little specs of dust in the current ongoing grand internet debate about diets. Both sides have their blogs, studies, etc. The list is long.

Some links:

http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2011/3/30/paleo-20-a-di... http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Challenging-Conventi...

[eikaterine]

I have my reservations about the paleo diet that mostly have to do with the amounts of meat that its adherents consume, but out of curiosity, how can a food group that we are undoubtedly evolved to eat, even if it's probably as part of a diet rich in other food groups, be "terrible" for us?

[zargon]

I wouldn't place too much weight on a single study, even if it is the china study. It's very difficult to apply the scientific method to nutrition. However, if you look at the subject from many many angles and learn to evaluate the quality of the methods and procedures of different studies then may find some trends.

You may be interested in the work of doctors Caldwell Esselstyn, Joel Fuhrman, John McDougall, Dean Ornish, and their colleagues. Fuhrman's Eat to Live book is a good place to start; it cites thousands of studies for you to spend your hours in a university library reviewing. ;) It is a "diet" book but mainly because that is the format one must use to get a nutrition book published.

[docgnome]

I've read McDougall, it's what started me on veganism after 20 years of vegetarianism. And I have a copy of the book you mentioned.

[specialist]

I was working towards vegetarian. Long story short, I'm now working towards the Dr. Terry Wahls diet: 9 cups of vegetables per day, please meats, legumes, supplements. Think troglodiet, cave man diet, super Atkins (which I prev thought was bullshit).

My health's improved. My psoriasis is going away.

Ditto my gf, a full vegetarian for years. Muscle pain and inflammation going away. Other benefits.

I'd probably be a vegetarian if I had more time. 9 cups of veggies per day is a lot of work. To completely give up meat, I'd have to work even harder to get the proper nutrition.

[fingerprinter]

Here, let me GTFY ;) - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=...

In all seriousness, the China Study has been lampooned widely for lack of rigor, selective sampling and overall poor study habits.

[brockhaywood]

I would take a read of Robb Wolf's posts on the topic. Here's one that addresses the spat between Loren Cordain and Colin Campbell http://robbwolf.com/2008/12/03/heard-of-t-colin-campbell/