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Why not try an all meat diet? Smarter people than you do: http://www.jbc.org/content/87/...

That's an old study, and the evidence from the China study directly contradicts it....

The conclusions drawn from the China Study data were in fact contradicted by the data. E.G. The highest univariate association was between wheat and cancer. But the author ignored that. The author chained together confounded univariate associations in a statistically incorrect way. Try looking here for an analysis by someone who actually understands statistics.

FWIW, there are many contradictory studies made in this area that correlate read-meat consumption with higher mortality.

I haven't seen any that indicate this except for two, one of which was The China Study, which has been debunked pretty well. In fact it's widely suspected that the The China Study was released in book form so that it wouldn't be subject to peer review, but we don't know for sure. What we do known is that somebody actually gathered the author's raw data and found that he cherry picked it to make it favor his ideology:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/...

In fact if you look over the data, you might notice that there's a county that he pulled data from that consumes meat twice as much as the typical American, and you know what? It happened to be one among those counties with the lowest mortality rates. The author of the book responded to the criticism I linked there, and his refutation effectively amounted to "I'm a scientist, so that means I'm right here."

You might also want to look at this as well:

http://www.cholesterol-and-hea...

There was also a Princeton study that just asked people what they ate, (a really terrible way to understand nutrition, by the way) and they found the meat eaters had a higher incidents of all kinds of issues like heart disease and other whatnots. The problem is they made a huge mistake in gathering their data: They made about zero attempt to create a control. The meat eating group also had much more smokers, much more drinkers, much more drug users, people with poor exercise habits, etc. The vegetarian group had less of these problems simply because they were following some kind of diet, which is beneficial regardless of whether or not it includes meat.

In addition to all of the above, google the Inuit Paradox. Essentially the Inuit consumed mostly meat (somewhere north of 90% of their diet was meat) and, aside from deaths from war, accidents, virulent/bacterial disease, and other non-nutrition related natural causes, they actually lived longer than Europeans of that era. Some people suggested it was due to them as a people being adapted to that, until a few scientists tried that diet upon themselves, and they had no health problems associated with it. In fact, they didn't even get scurvy.

Now, all of this isn't to say that eating meat is healthier, rather it does say that eating meat isn't unhealthy, even if your diet is mostly meat (in the case of the inuit, over 90%.)

Hardly what I'd call diligent.

A far cry from "proven to make up data and conceals data that doesn't fit his ideology".

Maybe you find this kind of diligence more to your liking? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

And this is known as lying.

Like using a trick to hide a decline? :) Or maybe identity theft and forgery? http://fakegate.org/

I'll gladly pillory John Lott for sock puppetry if we'll put Peter Gleick and Phil Jones in jail for their sins :)

Ted Goertzel considered multiple regression to be not of much use in proving causal arguments

And there we agree - data diving is notorious for being unable to differentiate correlation and causality (The China Study being a prime example - http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/... - the AGW scam is another).

That being said, John Lott has undoubtedly done a more thorough job than any other researcher in the field on trying to include control variables - for all the critiques that can be laid against him, there's simply nobody else out there doing a better job...and he's even *invited* his naysayers to critique his work, reaching out to them to try and add to the body of knowledge, looking for control variables they might think of that he might not.

Here's an excerpt, regarding Susan Glick:

"However, when the publicity broke on the story with an article in USA Today on August 2, she was among the many people who left telephone messages immediately asking for a copy of the paper. In her case, the media were calling, and she “need[ed] [my] paper to be able to criticize it.” Because of all the commotion that day, I was unable to get back to her right away. ABC National Television News was doing a story on my study for that day, and when at around 3:00 p.m. the ABC reporter doing the story, Barry Serafin, called saying that certain objections had been raised about my paper, he mentioned that one of those who had criticized it was Ms. Glick. After talking to Mr. Serafin, I gave Glick a call to ask her if she still wanted a copy of my paper. She said that she wanted it sent to her right away and wondered if I could fax it to her. I then noted that her request seemed strange because I had just gotten off the telephone with Mr. Serafin at ABC News, who had told me that she had been very critical of the study, saying that it was “flawed.” I asked how she could have said that there were flaws in the paper without even having looked at it yet. At that point Ms. Glick hung up the telephone."

Hardly what I'd call diligent :)

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/...

Go down a ways to where rapeseed oil is mentioned.

Gluten-free is kind of a fad lately, but wheat sensitivity that falls short of full-blown celiac disease is present in far more of the population than are aware of it. The inflammation this causes is an important contributing factor to heart disease and stroke (the same way that failing to brush your teeth regularly contributes to both). The data from the China study suggests a strong correlation between wheat consumption and heart disease (as well as between rate of wheat consumption and greater weight per calories consumed).

Again, you're holding a double standard. Taubes speaks of vegans and vegetarians broadly, when he probably could be more specific.

There's no double standard, if he has some special group of fat vegetarians he's talking about he should specify, but from the context he's clearly talking about all vegetarians, or at least those not eating tons of oil. Don't imagine some imaginary context to let them off the hook.

Status quo nutritionists speak broadly of red meat and saturated fat eaters, when in fact the studies they tout have shown *correlation* not *causation* - so if they were to be more accurate, they'd have to really point out the controlling factor of carbohydrates on insulin, which they quite nearly actively disparage.

Translation: I think nutritionists are wrong, therefore when they disagree with me they're lying.

Think about all the b.s. that came out of the China Study, that denise minger so thoroughly dissected - http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/07/31/one-year-later-the-china-study-revisited-and-re-bashed/

I didn't care about the health outcomes, I figured those would be messy. I cared about the obesity correlation which seems to have held up.

Taubes statement on the other hand makes a specific claim about a specific group of people at it IS provably false.

Again, you're holding a double standard. Taubes speaks of vegans and vegetarians broadly, when he probably could be more specific. Status quo nutritionists speak broadly of red meat and saturated fat eaters, when in fact the studies they tout have shown *correlation* not *causation* - so if they were to be more accurate, they'd have to really point out the controlling factor of carbohydrates on insulin, which they quite nearly actively disparage.

Think about all the b.s. that came out of the China Study, that denise minger so thoroughly dissected - http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/07/31/one-year-later-the-china-study-revisited-and-re-bashed/

The Masai and Inuit are famous for showing you can be healthy on a low carb high fat/protein diet, a fact I never argued with.

Excellent, then perhaps I misunderstood your position.

I'd take it a step farther and state that they also give us prominent evidence that ancestral cultures in wildly differing environments tended towards a low carb, high fat/protein diet.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/are-we-meat-eaters-or-vegetarians-part-iii/

Is a guy selling protein supplements really a reliable source for analysis on whether we're naturally meat eaters?

Even then at best he shows that the European paleolithic population ate a lot of meat. But there's a big before and after period and we don't know how relevant the paleolithic diet is to modern nutrition. Certainly most populations will eat fatty meat when available because it's a great energy source, that doesn't mean doing the same when you have unlimited quantities will keep you thin!

Advanced culture who's high carb and low obesity? Japan.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sugar%20consumption%20per%20capita%20in%20USA%20and%20Japan

I never said Japan ate a lot of sugar, I said they ate a lot of carbs.

Primitive cultures who are high carb and low obesity? A bunch of other places in Asia and Africa.

Cite?

I don't know a lot about the site, but here's a bunch of carb heavy communities in China compared with a fat heavy community and there's not much difference. How do you explain that with the paleo evidence? If we're all adapted to high fat then why are all those other Chinese communities healthy? If the Chinese are adapted then how is the high fat community thin?

Injecting insulin not causing obesity? Done with mice.

Human evidence contraindicates.

It does? I assume you're not referring to the evidence that insulin is the mechanism for fat storage in humans, because it plays the exact same role in mice.

Replacing x% of calories from fat with pure sugar not causing obesity? Done with people.

Missing the insulin resistance factor.

People losing weight on high carb diets? Tons of vegetarians do this.

Again, insulin resistance factor.

So as long as you don't become insulin resistant then carbs won't make you fat? How do non-insulin resistant people lose weight on low carb diets then? Do you have to become insulin resistant before you become obese? (Assuming we ignore the non-insulin resistant obese)

If none of this data convinces you then what data possibly could?

Those aren't data, those are assertions.

Every "assertion" (except the vegetarian thing) I backed up in previous posts, often multiple times, with links to studies, journal articles, or blog posts with extensive citations to journal articles. How is that not data?

The main protein in milk and meat is casein. However casein has been linked to adverse health effects.

Casein is not found in meat, much less its main protein. I don't know where you read that crazy idea. Casein is radically different in structure from myofribullar proteins that give muscle its strength and from myoglobins which store oxygen which are two of the more common proteins in meat.

And other than allergic reactions, pretty much the only people purporting adverse health effects from casein are the authors of "The China Study," who mix some common sense, pro-vegetarian suggestions with some questionable and some really, really bad science. For your perusal, he is a extremely detailed takedown of the science in the book, including the casein/aflatoxin study.

I've seen forks over knives. It smelled wrong and indeed it is.

There's a book "The China Study" that is a vegetarian promotion that claims to be based on the China Study data. Then there is the actual China study. The strongest (by far) univariate association in the China study is between wheat consumption and cancer.

The statistics used in the book are simply wrong. This has been exhaustively examined here.

The WWII accounts in FOK are particularly egregiously nonsensical. Derive your information from the available data and you get this

There's a point in FOK that the guy goes back to the doctor after his 'healthy' veggie diet. He gets his readout, they highlight the headline lipid profile on the bits of paper, but darken the rest of it. Pause the film and read the triglyceride number. That man's already got atherosclerosis and is heading for more.

Anyone can make film promoting a viewpoint. Watch 'Fat Head' as an example of a film that establishes the opposite.

I've seen forks over knives. It smelled wrong and indeed it is.

There's a book "The China Study" that is a vegetarian promotion that claims to be based on the China Study data. Then there is the actual China study. The strongest (by far) univariate association in the China study is between wheat consumption and cancer.

The statistics used in the book are simply wrong. This has been exhaustively examined here.

The WWII accounts in FOK are particularly egregiously nonsensical. Derive your information from the available data and you get this

There's a point in FOK that the guy goes back to the doctor after his 'healthy' veggie diet. He gets his readout, they highlight the headline lipid profile on the bits of paper, but darken the rest of it. Pause the film and read the triglyceride number. That man's already got atherosclerosis and is heading for more.

Anyone can make film promoting a viewpoint. Watch 'Fat Head' as an example of a film that establishes the opposite.

If you think she's right, then show me validated data that demonstrates that the prevalence of heart attacks is greater in poorer countries than in richer countries.

You're missing the point I think - from Minger's critique:

"Oversight of a third, potentially significant disease cluster. Myocardial infarction, hypertensive heart disease, stroke, brain and neurological diseases, and diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs share strongly statistically significant correlations with each other and with shared nutritional variables, such as non-rice grain consumption, while correlating inversely with the variables associated with diseases of affluence. Despite this, Campbell forces myocardial infarction into a disease cluster it does not naturally align with, and ignores the remaining diseases rather than attempt to explain their anomalous nonassociation with other Western conditions."

In other words, myocardial infarctions have less to do with diseases of affluence as it does to other nutritional variables, such as non-rice grain consumption. Yes, you can point out a correlation from myocardial infarction to affluence, but the *stronger* correlation is with shared nutritional variables.

You can see her graphs of the actual data here:
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/08/06/final-china-study-response-html/

Again, from her critique:

"On pages 78-79 of “The China Study,” Campbell writes:

As blood cholesterol decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach and esophagus (throat) decreased.

However, citing the same univariate correlations, he could have also written:

As plasma glucose decreased, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach, bladder, and cervix, as well as childhood and adult lymphoma, decreased."

So the alternate hypothesis of disease (that it is related to plasma glucose rather than blood cholesterol), is *just as supported* by the China Study as the hypothesis they chose to highlight (if not more, as you look at the data itself).

Minger's point isn't that poor nations have more heart attacks - it's that heart attacks correlate more with nutritional variables that Campbell dismissed than with the economic variables he chose to highlight.

This blog does a great job a ripping Campbell's "The China Study" apart. http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/. The short story is he warped his representation of the numbers to make meat look worse then it is to reach conclusions that not even his academic papers support. I agree that the problem is the western diet, but not because the western diet contains large amounts of meat. I've tried my best to read about this topic with an open mind and I've come to the conclusion that we have two major problems in our western diets that is killing us. 1) Too much sugar. See "Sugar: the bitter truth" and 2) Too much Omega-6 compared to Omega-3. This can be partly tied to meat consumption as corn feed beef is much lower in Omega-3 then grass feed beef is. Cut out the soda and eat good quality meat and you will avoid most of the modern health issues

To avoid the "appeal to unnamed authorities" fallacy, here's a specific person (Denise Minger) who specifically tore the China Study to pieces, and has graciously put up her formal critique, including references, here:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/08/03/the-china-study-a-formal-analysis-and-response/

tl;dr - the China Study ignored data that didn't support their basic conceit, and exaggerated data that did.

That hypothesis, using data directly from the china study, has been thoroughly falsified by a wonderful woman named Denise Minger:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/08/03/the-china-study-a-formal-analysis-and-response/

The problem is carbohydrate, not animal protein or fat.

It's amazing how people just take such propaganda at face value. Did vegetable consumption increase? Definitely. Was it all, or even the most significant thing that changed? Not by a long shot.
http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/09/22/forks-over-knives-is-the-science-legit-a-review-and-critique/
200% increase in fish, 50% decrease in sugar, 40% decrease in margarine, 20% decrease in energy intake.

Oh, but it was without doubt the meat. /rolleyes

The extreme diet that doesn't work is the one that cuts out fat and replaces it with carbohydrates or reduces calories, typically by cutting fat since fat is calorically dense. This doesn't work for good reason, and bears really no resemblance to the notion that the extremes are bad or wrong. Low fat (high carb) diets do not work because carbohydrates shut off the satiation pathway in your brain, induce excessive insulin, and drive nutrients into your fat cells while telling your brain and organ tissue that you are not nourished, so your brain keeps telling you that you need to eat (more).

I see the argument for moderation as a half-assed attempt at a rebuttal and a sign that you either A. don't want to try something new and unknown to you, B. didn't do a lick of research beyond wikipedia, or C. both.

By the way, the low carb studies that are in print are mostly studies done on not so low carb diets. They've compared diets of say 60% carb with diets of 30% carb. Thirty percent carbs is NOT a low carb diet. Low carb dieters (or lifestylists) seek to achieve anywhere from 5-15% carbohydrate, and usually no more than 20. The studies that say they show no difference between "low carb" and "high carb" really aren't making valid comparisons and serve only to further validate the original basis of this entire thread. If you would like to learn about this and other similar studies yourself- here is a breakdown of one such "low carb" vs "high carb" study: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/09/08/brand-spankin-new-study-are-low-carb-meat-eaters-in-trouble/

I'll see your out-of-our-league smart pretty physicist, and raise you an out-of-our-league smart pretty biologist/statistician. On the one hand, le sigh, but on the other hand, it's wonderful that such people exist.