You have a great site, and a wonderful attitude. Kudos to you for being fair to everyone. Can you dispense any advice to a vegetarian/vegan wishing to go Paleo - in other words, how does one start eating meat again? I looked at broths today at the store but they were loaded with sodium, gluten, and so called 'natural flavors'. I've not had a morsel of anything meaty (fish too) since 1987. Plus, I always hated chicken, fish and turkey as a kid. What's a gal to do? Bottom line is, I am sick, and this ain't working. I no longer do grains (severely allergic) and dairy doesn't work either (unless grass fed and in small amounts) and have always thought soy foods were freakish and scary, so yes, it doesn't leave me many options. I tried the raw vegan thing and only binged on breads and obsessed about food. Do you have any suggestions to ease the body into this? I'm all over the fresh fruits and veggies - yay!  half way there! Are supplements (enzymes) warranted? Have you heard that veg people lose some enzymes to digest meat and can get very ill? Self hypnosis? Yes, admittedly, it will be emotionally challenging, so anything not weird textured, scary to prepare would be optimal. I am seriously meat illiterate. I understand the whole grass fed thing and would see myself living along those lines.

I've looked everywhere and haven't found any answers on this. Normally I wouldn't pester a blog writer I have written some in Weston Price meet ups (couldn't find Paleo ones near me) but I never heard back. Must be the 'veg' label. Sigh.

Thanks so much for your fascinating blog and your awesome attitude.

OK, since this certainly isn't my area of expertise I put it out there for my generous readers to help with specific ideas and/or put up some resource references.

I'll start with just some references I know of. To start, it would certainly be worthwhile to get and read Lierre Keith's book The Vegetarian Myth , which I have written about a number of times. Of course, that's not so much to convince you of anything but to learn of Keith's experience in becoming very sick after 20 years as a vegan. I believe the first animal protein she had was a can of tuna, so you might try that as a start. Here's a really wonderful product, High Seas Tuna Co., that I recently ordered and loved. It's all wild, line caught. I eat it right out of the can with a half of lemon or lime squeezed into it. And the smoked tuna is divine.

OK, as far as other resources I can think of...

Beyond Vegetarianism is a great resource for all things vegetarian and vegan, written by people previously involved in these diets.

The material presented on this site comes from individuals with years of hard-won experience either practicing alternative diets or observing those who do. As you'll find, no two writers will necessarily agree on all topics. A unifying theme, however, is the intent to squarely acknowledge and discuss the sometimes serious problems that can occur on alternative diets but often go unreported, and to go beyond the simplistic dogmas readily available elsewhere--in fact almost everywhere--to "explain them away."

Ex-Vegan Melissa McEwan writes about Transitioning to Eating Meat on her blog.

I was an ultra-health conscious raw vegan, so I had a different experience than someone coming from grilled cheese. It was very hard to add meat to my diet though because I didn't know much about it. As a sad survey of my early paleo fridge shows, I ate mostly fruits, vegetables, and fish. I hated fish to death and pretty much had to bury it in sauce, but I really did believe it would make me feel better...and it did. It took me over a year to get into grease, braising, and offal. I was a faileo, but it was a start.

Speaking of sauces, you might check out my Food Porn category to see about making sauces to really get your meat or fish to a taste level you like. Melissa was also recently interviewed at a blog by another ex-vegan, Rhys Southan -- now paleo -- Let Them Eat Meat. Here's the link to Melissa's interview, but there are interviews of plenty of others too. She says near the end:

After about six months of the diet, my GERD, asthma and IBS went away. My own quality of life is so much higher than it was in the past. Things that I didn’t even know were linked to diet have been ameliorated, such as my occasional acne and depression. I got my father into it and he has lost 50 lbs. And through my involvement with the NYC paleo meetup I’ve met dozens of people who have had success with the diet.

For a final bit of info, Melissa has returned the favor and interviewed Rhys on her blog. Here's a great quote to finish off this post.

I instantly felt better after going paleo (ie, adding meat and eggs to my paleo-ish vegan diet). I wonder if selective memory is making me exaggerate how quickly my mood improved and the brain fog dissipated, but other ex-vegans seem to have similar experiences. As a vegan, a lot of people had told me I was eerily pale; once I started eating meat again, a vegetarian who was shocked by my new meaty diet had to admit that my face had taken on a healthier hue. With my energy back, I got into weightlifting and quickly regained the muscle mass I'd lost by the end of my veganism. My nearly lifelong eczema, which had its worst breakouts during my veganism, hasn't been a problem since I've been paleo.

A less predictable change is that I became more assertive. I tend to be introverted, so maybe I lean toward meekness and passivity naturally, but veganism exasperated the problem. Veganism is a suicidal mentality in the sense that it's about doing your best not to exist (while still existing). Vegans don't believe they deserve to put their own interests before the interests of animals. Most humans, however, do think they deserve to put their own interests ahead of the interests of animals. So either vegans respect animals a lot more than everyone else does, or vegans respect themselves a lot less. In my case, veganism was more about lowering myself than raising up the animals.

The opposite of the self-sabotaging vegan mentality -- intentionally destroying as much as possible to make your mark -- isn't particularly great either. Going paleo helped me find a balance. As you have pointed out, there isn't really a moral component to paleo, though being against factory farms and supporting local food can be a part of it. Since paleo is about doing what's best for yourself, it was great for my self-confidence after sacrificing myself in the name of "the animals" for so long.

Another advantage of paleo's lack of a moral component is that there's no reason for me to judge anyone who isn't paleo. I get along with people better now. (Except maybe for the vegans that I piss off with my blog.)

Alright all, time for you to chime in and help with this reader's transition to Paleo.

Related posts:

1. Trouble in Raw Vegan Paradise?
2. “You have saved my life.”
3. Vegetarian Paleo
4. Meat & Morality
5. The Vegetarian Myth

Bound Together Books and PM Press continue to try to prop up and foist veg*n antagonist Lierre Keith onto the radical community in the Bay Area. Today, at the 15th Annual San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, where she was scheduled to be a featured speaker, Keith was served her just deserts for her obnoxious attacks on veg*ns in The Vegetarian Myth. She was pied in the middle of her speech in the main auditorium at the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park.

According to the various reports by eyewitnesses -- many who have now commented at that link and condemned the actions of the three young "men" who assaulted Ms. Keith -- she was just beginning the part of her speech critical of factory farming.

While I'm tempted to rage a bit about this and call names, I think the assault & battery speaks for itself and is an excellent representation of vegetarianism and veganism in general. They deserve those three "gentleman" as their standard bearers.

Here are my past posts about Lierre Keith and her excellent book, The Vegetarian Myth. It would be great to see a good spike in orders for her book, so if you're inclined to help out, please do so. You can also listen to Lierre's recent podcast interview with Jimmy Moore.

Update: Jimmy Moore has now published an extensive entry on this incident. And when I exchanged an email with Lierre last night, she echoed the same thing she wrote to Jimmy: that the worst part was hearing the cheers of onlookers in the audience as the assault took place. Shameful.

Update 2: Now Tom Naughton has weighed in.

Update 3: Lierre Keith responds. This is a 15-minute interview with Keith in the beginning of Jimmy Moor's normally scheduled podcast for today.

Update 4: Comedian Tom Naughton has a new post on True Believerism using the attack on Keith as inspiration.

Update 5: A Local News report on the incident.

Related posts:

1. “You have saved my life.”
2. Out & About On The Interwebs: Science Based? Weston Price; Smart Patients; Fasting vs. Cancer; Alcoholics for Agriculture; and ex-Vegan Lierre Keith
3. My Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Interview with Jimmy Moore
4. The Vegetarian Myth
5. What a Month, Week, Day

1) Seeing as I was taken to task by a couple of people for my "disrespectful" words toward Dr. Campbell here, is this going to be more of the same?

Answer: It'll start off much milder than the title to that last, but no guarantees. We'll just have to see how worked up I get. In any case, whatever it is, it'll be what it is and I'll make sure I enjoy it.

2) Why bother with Dr. Campbell?

Answer: I'm not. I'm using him. Look, it's clear to me that he's operating under his own agenda, in the making for decades. There's no chance I'm going to convince him of anything. But with more than 100,000 visits to this blog each month and more than double that in pages viewed -- combined with the fact that search logs consistently show vegetarian subject matter near the top, when not actually the top -- I want to continually build material that meets that demand. The Amazon discussion is well over a thousand posts now. I'm taking a few important ones, bringing together other relevant material, and creating something more accessible for everyone, particularly those new or confused.

So let's get on with it, now that my own agenda is unabashedly right out there in front. I had put this out on Twitter for laughs when Dr. Campbell showed up in the forum again the other day to whine at length about how badly he's been treated by myself & others. I'll excerpt a bit.

So what do I get? Mostly, it is hostility, anger and worse. It has been virtually impossible to find reasoned explanations in the midst of so many attacks and lies. Because there are so many kooks on this site, I have lost faith in almost anything that is said. [...]

I am guided by the famous suggestion of President Kennedy, "Ask no what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country (i.e., others)." People on this site seem not to give a whit about the societal effects of eating animals and other high resource-requiring foods on our society and our environment. It's all about you and only you. Have you heard the recent analysis of two World Bank people (of all things!) who recently published findings showing that livestock production causes more than 50% of global warming?

Yes folks: step right up; you too can put the spurious claims of unnamed "others" above your own health, well-being and enjoyment of your food in the name of general, various, unspecified environmental causes. ...Oh, yea, the crumbling AGW movement.

You'd need to read a lot of the discussion yourself, but in actuality it has been Dr. Campbell who almost never answers questions directly (ignores most of them), never gives much in the way of reasoned explanations but spends pretty much all of his time telling us how well his book sells, how long he's been doing this, dropping names, and letting us know how much he's adored by so many. As poster Greg observed in a half-dozen or so posts -- that are pure gold -- in describing precisely the way Dr. Campbell operates (his posts start here)...

And THAT'S been shown in many studies, too, which you apparently won't look at because you already know they're wrong. How many more times should we link them? And how many more times should I call you to task for ad hominem attack? It's just ridiculous. You just did it again in this post. Do you even realize this? I guess you obviously think it's a valid form of argument, because it's literally the only one you use: we're wrong because we're angry, disrespectful, have no experience in science, are pretentious, are primarily concerned with excess body weight, and "claim" we can lose weight and improve our health with low carb. That's all in one paragraph! [...]

Your arguments are all based on setting yourself up as the ultimate authority who can't be questioned and then discounting everyone else - if they're not credentialed, then they're just making stuff up or relying on editors; if they have science backgrounds, then they're not doing primary research; if they're medical doctors, then they're cynically writing harmful books and possibly faked their medical degrees. You are really Mr. Ad Hominem Ad Nauseum. Based on your biography it seems to me that you MUST have a lot more you could be contributing to the conversation, but I guess you just have no interest.

And here's how he operates in debates with other scientists who actually do their own research. This one, The Protein Debate (PDF) between Cordain & Campbell. Dr. Eades was going to review that but one of his readers did an excellent job of it. An essential excerpt:

Cordain’s paper contains no less than 134 references, and his rebuttal to Campbell contains another 30. Campbell, in support of a low protein, low fat, diet provides, uh, let me count, ZERO citations. He manages a few in his rebuttal to Cordain, but a couple of those are to himself, and only one that I saw appeared to be a peer-reviewed article. He makes some fairly bold statements, like “overwhelming findings on the adverse health effects of dietary protein” and “remarkable healing effects now being routinely accomplished by my clinician colleagues”, again with no citations to supporting peer-reviewed literature.

Campbell’s stance appears to be largely one of “because I said so”. The first sentence in his rebuttal is “My critique of Professor Loren Cordain’s proposition almost entirely depends on my philosophy of nutrition”; as opposed, say, to evidence gathered via the scientific method? In fact, he goes so far as to argue in favor of what is essentially sloppy research in nutrition science.

Alright, so now you know what we're up against. So then...this morning, a bit of a different tone from Dr. Campbell.

Greg and Richard et al,

Why don't you comment on my reporting of evidence that animal protein-based foods, when exceeding the amount of protein (as in dairy) that the body needs, causes cancers to grow robustly, increases blood cholesterol, increases atherogenesis, increases calcium loss and bone fracture incidence, increases formation of kidney stones? Are you interested in the idea that cow's milk protein is the most relevant carcinogen that humans consume? Are you interested in the idea that this protein-specific effect is only the tip of a much larger story? Are you interested in why it is so easy to cure heart disease in its advanced stages? Or that the dietary effect, when done right, acts so fast that for those on diabetic meds, they could go into glycemic shock if they failed to decrease meds in the first day or so?

Do you want to know how I got those conclusions?

Well, though I've read all of these before, poster Markus from Germany helps us out on the protein issue. As to most of the rest of it, note the supplementation section in my reply which I cover below.

From: The Protein Debate (PDF)

Aflatoxins are naturally occurring toxins ....The toxin is also found in the milk of animals fed contaminated feed. Aflatoxins are metabolized in the liver to become potent liver carcinogens for all mammals including humans (157). ....

Colin's research group developed a rodent model of liver cancer in which they dosed the animals with high concentrations ... of aflatoxin and then fed them diets containing varying amounts ...) of casein (158-161). Regardless of the casein dose, all animals developed cancerous or pre-cancerous liver lesions (161), however the animals fed the higher amounts of casein developed more cancerous lesions, particularly when a level of approximately 12 % casein was reached (160)....

Although Colin has inferred from his experiments with rodents that high protein diets promote cancer and low protein diets repress it following cancer initiation by a carcinogen, this interpretation is incorrect. The only logical conclusion that can be reached from his series of experiments is that only the milk protein, casein, when consumed at more than 10% of energy, promotes liver cancer in rodents exposed to high concentrations of aflatoxin. His experiments cannot be generalized to other animal proteins, such as those found in lean meats. .... Accordingly, current consumption of casein in the U.S. diet would have little or no bearing on cancer incidence rates if we assume Colin's rodent model of cancer is correct and applicable to humans.

From: The China Study: More Vegan Nonsense, Anthony Colpo

Extrapolating from the deleterious effects demonstrated by casein in rodents, Campbell goes on to warn that all animal proteins are a deadly threat to humans.

Campbell's position constitutes little more than a totally unscientific leap of faith. Casein is one of the major protein-containing fractions of milk; the other is whey. Campbell does not mention that while casein is often observed to promote cancer in rats, whey protein does the exact opposite. Numerous experiments have shown that rats lucky enough to be fed whey experience greatly reduced tumor incidence when compared to rats fed casein, beef, soy or standard rat chow[Badger TM][Hakkak R][Hakkak R][McIntosh GH][Papenburg R][Bounous G].

From: The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, Chris Masterjohn

Campbell is aware that casein has been uniquely implicated in health problems, and dedicates an entire chapter to casein's capacity to generate autoimmune diseases.17 Whey protein appears to have a protective effect against colon cancer that casein does not have.18 Any effect of casein, then, cannot be generalized to other milk proteins, let alone all animal proteins. Other questions, such as what effect different types of processing have on casein's capacity to promote tumor growth, remain unanswered. Pasteurization, low-temperature dehydration, high-temperature spray-drying (which creates carcinogens), and fermentation all affect the structure of casein differently and thereby could affect its physiological behavior. What powdered, isolated casein does to rats tells us little about what traditionally consumed forms of milk will do to humans and tells us nothing that we can generalize to all "animal nutrients."

So I ask you dear reader: how far do you want to go down that rabbit hole of finding out that, because casein by itself (without the whey as occurs naturally) in high doses gives rats cancer, we ought to be overwrought with fear of eating what our ancestors have been eating for millions of years? And while we're at it, let's refresh our memories as to the overall association with dietary protein in The China Study. From Masterjohn's review, linked above.

What is most shocking about the China Study is not what it found, but the contrast between Campbell’s representation of its findings in The China Study, and the data contained within the original monograph. Campbell summarizes the 8,000 statistically significant correlations found in the China Study in the following statement: "people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease."26 He also claims that, although it is "somewhat difficult" to "show that animal-based food intake relates to overall cancer rates," that nevertheless, "animal protein intake was convincingly associated in the China Study with the prevalence of cancer in families."27

Let's take a look at Table 1 from Masterjohn's review.

Table 1

So for those not used to postitive vs. negative correlatioins, the plus sign means the more they ate it on average, the more average death from cancer. The minus signs mean that the more they ate it, the less death from cancer. Finally, only one of the above reached statistical significance, which is sort of an arbitray line of 5%; meaning, an association (more or less of A is assocated with more or less of B) must be less than 5% due to simple chance. What do you notice? Of all these associations (among a total of 8,000 identified associations in The China Study) all Dr. Campbell seems to wish to place focus is on...

...animal protein intake was convincingly associated in the China Study with the prevalence of cancer in families.

Amazing. Oh, and one other thing. There was another negative association orders of magnitude higher than animal protein and unlike animal protein which wasn't significant at all, was highly significant (2 **): home-made cigarettes. That's right, those smoking their hand-rolled tobacco had a highly significant negative correlation in death from cancer.

I won't be holding my breath for Campbell to be coming out with that. Which -- and given the shocking nature of the above picture and what he's out rabidly promoting -- scaring people off the high-density nutrition of animal products -- means really only one thing. He's merely -- as mentioned earlier in his own words -- promoting "[his] philosophy of nutrition." Now, if he were out there dissing processed foods, flour and sugar in favor of his veganesque philosophy, I wouldn't have a complaint in the world. Instead, and it's critical to understand, he's promoting his philosophy of nutrition by tearing down your animal food, relentlessly and, as you can see above, quite dishonestly. And then when you combine it with the tripe about environmental concerns you begin to get into areas of public policy and how do you think that's going to go?

And he's good at it, which is why I make the effort. No doubt about it, in terms of sales, The China Study is a phenomenal success. As of this moment, Amazon lists it as #84 in sales rank. And of course, that's only because people are swallowing the message and telling their friends. So, I think that a compilation like this is worthwhile, given the power of Google.

I did have my own reply on the forum this morning that I'll recompose to follow, perhaps with a few edits.

~~~

Markus:

Excellent digging, sir. I had read all those in the past but this was a good review. Since Dr. Campbell adressed me in his last and this discussion forum is explicitly about low carbing, I ought to perhaps lay out where I differ.

I'm a paleo lifestyler, and that applies to things beyond diet as well; such as the way I exercise, the way I intermittently fast, the way I spend time in the sunshine, the way I sleep and the way I interact socially -- eschewing modern collectivist politics completely, i.e., I don't vote as I'm not interested in a 1/270 millionth say in my own affairs. Rather, I cultivate close bonds and relationships with family and a manageable number of close friends.

At to diet specifically, I practice avoidance behavior rather than seeking behavior.

I avoid grains, flour, sugar, processed foods in general, and industrial vegetable & seed oils. All else is fair game; however, due to concerns about the overload of fructose and omega-6 poly-unsaturates that ancient man would not have gotten chronically, I limit fruit to berries now & then and I keep nuts to a minimum, sticking mostly to macadamias with a fatty-acid profile similar to olive oil.

As to carbohydrate, here's a study that demonstrates a profound difference between 100% fructose carbs and 100% glucose carbs (starch).

Dr. Stephan Guyenet:

The investigators divided 32 overweight men and women into two groups, and instructed each group to drink a sweetened beverage three times per day. They were told not to eat any other sugar. The drinks were designed to provide 25% of the participants' caloric intake. That might sound like a lot, but the average American actually gets about 25% of her calories from sugar! That's the average, so there are people who get a third or more of their calories from sugar. In one group, the drinks were sweetened with glucose, while in the other group they were sweetened with fructose.

After ten weeks, both groups had gained about three pounds. But they didn't gain it in the same place. The fructose group gained a disproportionate amount of visceral fat, which increased by 14%! Visceral fat is the most dangerous type; it's associated with and contributes to chronic disease, particularly metabolic syndrome, the quintessential modern metabolic disorder (see the end of the post for more information and references). You can bet their livers were fattening up too.

The good news doesn't end there. The fructose group saw a worsening of blood glucose control and insulin sensitivity. They also saw an increase in small, dense LDL particles and oxidized LDL, both factors that associate strongly with the risk of heart attack and may in fact contribute to it. Liver synthesis of fat after meals increased by 75%. If you look at table 4, it's clear that the fructose group experienced a major metabolic shift, and the glucose group didn't. Practically every parameter they measured in the fructose group changed significantly over the course of the 9 weeks. It's incredible.

Here's the link to the table he references.

And it makes perfect evolutionary sense. Paleoman, at least in most times & places would have had far more access to starchy tubers than fruit, and keep in mind that the fructose concentrations in wild fruits were significantly lower than our selectively bread fruit of today.

Moreover, if you look at what happens to bears when they consume massive amounts of wild berries, they pretty much become obese & near diabetic in advance of hibernation. It's reasonable to speculate that for humans, seeking out fructose when available in the summer and fall was a specific mechanism we evolved to fatten up a bit so as to help us through the leaner months. Speculative, but I'm practicing a precautionary principle, here. It's easy enough to just toss another piece of meat, fish, or fowl on the barbie.

So, essentially, unless you are trying to loose weight or are diabetic, I don't think "low carb" is that essential for most people; but, those carbs should come primarily from starch and not fructose and in particular, not refined sugar and all the foods loaded with sugar.

My supplementation regime is pretty simple (there's a couple more, but this is the foundation):

Vitamin D3, as I'm not in the sun nearly as much as our ancestors would have been and as well, the epidemiology of cancer when plotted against latitude is pretty interesting.

Omega 3s, to balance out the n-6s I get from trips to restaurants and so on.

Vitamin K2 (MK-4, menatetrenone). This is the form made from K1 by ruminants (found in marrow, organ meats & milkfat) and is also found in eggs, particularly fish eggs. This is Weston Price's "Activator X."

The combo of D and K2 in particular has had profound health effects for me. My personal anecdote is that I have always had huge plaque / calculus buildup on my teeth, particularly around the molars & the inside lower front. In time, this created places for bacteria to grow, invade the gum tissue, finally resulting in deep pockets, inflammation, bleeding gums and eventually two surgeries in 2001. But the surgery was only successful in setting back the clock. I still had to have four deep cleanings per year just to hold things at bay.

But when I went paleo and dropped the grains, flour & sugar, something interesting happened. My gum disease began to reverse, as documented by the dentist's measurements. I still got the plaque and calculous buildup but it wasn't having an adverse effect on my gum tissue.

Then I began taking the D and K2 and now, I have zero plaque or calculous. My teeth are like smooth pearls every morning and in fact, I only brush now & then -- and I use wooden toothpicks instead of floss. The last cleaning I had, well over six months ago demonstrated my gums to be in better shape than when the dentist began warning me back in 1993, 17 years ago.

What do I take away from this? Well, if you read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price and take stock in the huge disparity in tooth decay and malocclusion (crowded teeth) between people existing on their traditional diets and those who left for contact with civilization it becomes quite clear that replacing high nutrient-density foods like raw milk, eggs, organ meats, meat, fish and organically grown vegetables with flour and sugar has profound costs.

And, I think that dental health is a great surrogate for asking: how healthy are your bones? How about your arteries? The combo of D and K2 helps to ensure that calcium and other mineral salts go everyplace they should (bones, teeth) and no place they shouldn't (artery walls, kidney stones, etc.).

Here's my links on K2.

And you might want to read Dr. Stephan Guyenet's nine part series, Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization. Go to the bottom and read the posts in reverse. This is amazing work on Dr. Guyenet's part.

In the end, everyone needs to decide for themselves. I took charge of my own health going on three years ago, now. Rather than paralyze and scare myself to death with contradictory, agenda driven, profit driven "science," I sought to find out what healthy people were doing, then copy and experiment. Now I've lost 60 pounds, am stronger at 49 than ever in my life by far, sleep an average of 7 1/2 hours every night, have far better relationships, never watch the news or fret about quotidian politics, have dispensed with prescription medications for allergies & GURD and above all, feel great and happy.

You have to figure this out for yourself. Gather information, think about it, use what makes sense in your own life, but let no one -- including me -- tell you what's right for you.

~~~

Well, as you can see by now, I didn't end up blowing a gasket in this one. That's fine. As I got going into it I was caught up in the idea of creating a fairly decent narrative of the whole shebang, and I'm pretty happy with it. In particular, if you read some of the links and look especially into Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and search posts using that title at my blog & Dr. Stephan's, what begins to emerge is a picture of a time when health was a cinch. They simply ate the unadulterated, natural foods available in their environments without silly discrimination, like not eating animal products.

Propose to any currently living true hunter-gatherer group that they forego animals as a source of food. You will leave them befuddled.

Related posts:

1. T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study: Finally, Exhaustively Discredited
2. The China Study Smackdown Roundup
3. Would Someone Shut This Asshole Up? T. Colin Campbell
4. “Fraudulent Science”
5. Downtown Campbell Farmers’ Market

Let me take an aside, because as a libertarian who's very supportive of free markets, there's one thing I've always noted. You know how with politics and religion, ideology matters so much -- to the extent that loathing, hatred, fantasies of murder, dismemberment and general blood lust are all part of the game? Well, when was the last time you did business with a Muslim? How about an atheist? How about an anarchist? How about a democrat, republican, or a commie who goes by different euphemistic names in the U.S.? How many have you traded with that you'd loath and hate in the context of politics or religion?

You don't know, and why? Because you don't really care. It's within a defined context of the value-for-value business transaction. So I've always thought that the more free trade and less force and religious moralizing (that leads to force), the more general peacefulness.

Alright, let's move on to Half Foods, formerly Whole Foods...

I first got wind of this a while back, but my buddy Jimmy did super homework. ...You, who dis him constantly, can you not see the value in this?

An obvious uproar has ensued within the high-fat, low-carb diet community this week as a result of the seemingly sudden decision by the most well-known health food retailer in the world to actively market and promote a low-fat, vegetarian diet in their 289 stores. Whole Foods Market has strongly branded itself as the go-to place for people desiring to make healthier food choices for themselves and their family and they have long offered customers with a variety of dietary choices that ability to select what best meets their specific needs. But all of that has changed now that they are pushing what they are calling their “Health Starts Here” campaign.

Go read the whole damn disgrace, and pay particular attention to the huge effort Jimmy put into getting quotes from more than a dozen respected sources. Thank you, Jimmy.

So now I'm riled up. As a fist step, I popped off a vicious email, and per the promise, I'll edit out the f-bombs.

Whole Foods:

Here's my latest tweet:

I will quit spending $100 or so per week @wholefoods and suggest my 60,000 blog readers do likewise #F***wholefoods

I'll add: #F***johnmackey, and I'm a libertarian and have been a fan for years, for Christ's sake. I publicly defended him on his stance on health care.

http://freetheanimal.com/2009/08/whole-foods.html

So why turn on you now? I don't spend money to be f**ing preached to about eating meat while being encouraged to embrace The F***ing Vegetarian Menace.

My blog:

http://freetheanimal.com

See here for the sort of traffic & influence I have:

htttp://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s20sense&r=33

Unique readers are at about 60,000. I was just interviewed by Der Spiegel, Maclean's, and the Columbia News Service serving 400 newspapers. I have other interviews scheduled. And in case you think I'm fooling, here's the Der Spiegel run; look for my name:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,677121,00.html

So, from here out, Whole Foods is my enemy. I'm blogging about it, agitating my readers, and I'll be sure and mention it in future interviews. I go to Whole Foods to do good food business and not to support an ideology, either way. I've always been willing to co-exist with the vegan morons in your stores, because one always felt Whole Foods welcomed and embraced both. Now you're taking sides, getting preachy...so you can have the f***ing Vegans all to yourself.

You're dismissed.

So maybe there's some merit in just getting attention. I'd have not used the language unless I could back it up with credentials, and I think I did. Many retailers are getting wise to the potential thunderstorm of social medial and that was my aim. I'm pissed off. Your mileage may vary and I get it. I'm just always who I am.

Here's why I'm pissed, out to you. First, perhaps you might question why I'd support Mackey in his public health care proclamations, but not now. Why? Because, just like any other business that lobbies politically or regulatory wise from the board room or from individual board members, it's not part of the deal when you do business with them. How would you like to go into your nearest auto dealership and be assaulted with literature in support of the UAW? And maybe you like the UAW just fine, but isn't it a bit out of context with regard to the purpose of your visit, like, maybe, buying a car?

Now, if I'm in a pinch and have to go down to Safeway (insert whatever popular big market exists in your area), would I be surprised at them having some healthfood campaign, however orchestrated or focussed? No, not really, because they're everyone's market and kinda any effort towards eating real food -- even vegetarian focussed -- is tolerable to me, even if it's not representative of my choices.

But this is way different, because I'm principled. You see, nobody goes to Whole Foods Market unless they are already health and quality conscious and willing to pay extra for extra care. And so, this is not a campaign over general quotidian-median health awareness, it's an ideological campaign. The getting skinnier, less-vital, more pitifully looking Mackey is pushing a personal, guilt-driven agenda upon you -- and is using your own money to do it.

So, John: what the eff are you doing, man? Tryptophan deficiency, or what? Is this payback to the very commies outraged at your public health-care ideas and who'd see your capitalist ass strung up in the village square if they had their way?

I will not stand for it, and neither should you, readers. Have your own values, John, but shoving them in our faces when we just want to trade good values is not what the hell we're paying you for. Hell, the veg-heads have been putting up with your meat department forever -- smart enough to see the big picture.

Then again, they didn't have pamphlets and books extolling the virtues of meat eating shoved in their faces and shopping bags -- nor should they have, and nor should we.

Have you considered politics? Seems like you're getting adept at pitting one agains the other...

Update: On my twitter this morning, from @WholeFoods:

@rnikoley The goal is not to promote vegetarianism, but the consumption of more vegetables - something we believe everyone can benefit from.

Update 2: An email response from Whole Foods:

Hello Richard,

Thank you for contacting Whole Foods Market with your concerns. Our Health Starts Here program is not intended to promote a completely plant based diet. Although the program does offer an option for those who wish to follow a vegan diet, there are also options for those who wish to consume animal products. The Health Starts Here program encourages a higher consumption of vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes for people of all dietary preferences.

We understand that our customers follow a variety of dietary paths. The Health Starts Here program is voluntary and is simply being made available to customers who are interested. Our stores will continue to offer a variety of high quality products such as meat, dairy and seafood. We appreciate your feedback.

Best regards,
Carijane Grigsby-Etter

Global Customer Information Specialist | Whole Foods Market | 550 Bowie Street | Austin, Texas 78703

But, as I made clear in my three tweets back to them (Twitter is limited to 140 characters per tweet:

@WholeFoods You are demonstrating an ideological preference for your veg/vegan customers over your meat & animal fat loving customers.

@WholeFoods Imagine the shitstorm if you put out books & pamphlets promoting the superiority of meat & animal fat eating.

@WholeFoods If you wouldn't do that to your veg/vegan customers why would you do it to your meat-loving customers?

Why should you reward them to treat you like an unhealthy second-class customer, especially if you can source other options?

Related posts:

1. Whole Foods
2. Downtown Campbell Farmers’ Market
3. Trouble in Raw Vegan Paradise?
4. John Mackey: “We sell a bunch of junk.”
5. The San Pedro Square Farmer’s Market

Why the shift away from veganism in the raw world?

As you may already have noticed, a big change has taken place in the raw food world, and this change is ongoing. More and more raw food authors, coaches and speakers are coming forward either to say they're not vegan anymore, to publicly promote the health benefits of certain animal products, or to warn that the vegan diet does not provide all necessary nutrients so vegans must supplement...

Some interesting quotes from various luminaries in the raw vegan movement.

“What has come out is only the tip of the iceberg. Regardless of whether raw promoters are really doing what they're saying or comprehending what they're doing, people shouldn’t just follow blindly...."

"It is difficult to take on board that our ideal of veganism, while ethically admirable, may in fact be injurious to health in the long term..."

"It comes as no surprise to me that many leaders of the raw food movement are now openly admitting that they have been eating non-vegan foods. The writing has been on the wall for years..."

"In my view, the simple explanation is that an increasing number of people are finding out that raw veganism does not work long term. Contrary to what people hear when they first get involved, the raw movement is littered with nutritional casualties. It was only a few years ago that substantial numbers of people started to go raw vegan and it can take years for the symptoms of deficiency to show up..."

"Ironically many of the people who have spoken out have done so after experience of many years being or trying to be raw vegan. They were in favour of the ideal as much as anyone – they just found it didn't work in practice..."

“Of course we want to be compassionate to all beings, yet we can’t ignore the fact that our species hasn’t evolved to be 100% vegan. This means that if we choose to be vegan without supplementing (and especially raw, eschewing all fortified cooked products), we miss out on vital nutrients such as B12, choline, vitamin K2 and vitamin D (in some countries) and we may be low in all B vitamins, DHA, minerals and other nutrients..."

And more from the post's author.

A surprising phenomenon we’ve uncovered is that many raw food enthusiasts who identify themselves as vegans are in fact not totally vegan. Whether it’s a free range organic egg or a little raw goat’s cheese once a week or some fish once a month, these people think of themselves as vegan and will tell you they’re vegan – no doubt because, unlike the average eater, most of what they eat is completely free of anything animal-based and they wish to keep it that way. This makes us wonder how many more who identify themselves as vegans are doing the same but not admitting to it.

The comments are an interesting read, too, as by far most of them extoll how wonderful raw veganism is and that they have no problems at all and have been at it for decades and yada yada. There were a couple of admissions, however.

"we were animals long before we had ethics and its frustrating that our bodies don't care much about the latter!"

"Somewhat disconcerted that 'gurus' could be returning to animal products..."

Well, lest we get too cocky, problems crop up in the "paleo" arena too. But, while I congratulate them on their honesty and willingness to air dirty laundry in public, I just think the enormity of the multi-faceted, long-term, getting-worse-and-worse problem leads to one thing: they are eating a highly un-nature-al diet. Ironic then, that the pursuit of veganism for so many is out of a respect for nature, misguided as it is -- as exhaustively outlined by Lierre Keith in The Vegetarian Myth. The takeaway for me if you read that whole linked post above is that the only way to do the diet healthfully is with some pretty intense and complex supplementation. And that's not for optimal health, that's for just-getting-by health. Explicitly, it is for the purpose of fixing a nutrient deficient diet! Why would anyone want to eat a nutrient deficient diet?

As for the paleo problems, most people fix those easy by adding back a bit of carbs via starch, and -- in my case -- upping my intake of fish and supplementing with iodine. Huge improvements for me in the space of a week. I think what happened is that in my zeal for the beef & lamb bone stocks I do, the red meat I cook, and my recent foray into grassfed meats resulted in my fish consumption going way down. In addition, I've somewhat gotten a bit tired of eggs and for a while was hardly eating them at all. So, it looks like what I did was create my own problems by not paying attention to what I was eating.

At any rate, that post is pretty damning when you consider that it's the gurus themselves returning to animal products, combined with their admissions that a raw vegan approach requires great care and complex supplementation.

Related posts:

1. Let’s Help Out a Soon-To-Be Ex-Veg*n Go Paleo
2. “You have saved my life.”
3. Links, Quick Hits & Meatballs Again
4. Any Ideas For a Fellow Traveller?
5. Vegetarian Paleo

Good for you, Lierre: best of all, cut off or cull the supply of new victims; double-edge-sword, create advocates for sensible eating as added leverage against The Myth! Many of the old-timers will sacrifice their own health for the sake of misery-loves-company. They confuse misery and bliss -- like a damaged soul confuses love & hate.

Alright, let's just admit there's selection bias here. Certainly there are vegetarians and vegans who are fortunate -- and I wish them well -- to have no such problems, and they aren't emailing Lierre. Prolly not fans of her book, either.

But the fact is there are those who suffer. And there're those commenting on this blog and elsewhere, proclaiming how meat eating is so satisfying for them. That means something simple: the argument that anyone and everyone ought to Go Vegan! is falsified. It should end. No, they do not have and so certainly should not proclaim to have the diet to end all diets. And Paleos should not claim that either. Everyone is individual. People fare differently; Paleo is merely an excellent place to start. Our job is to convince them it's the best place to start. That's how we got here, evolved, so give that a college try, first.

Oh, I almost forgot. That bit is at around 56 minutes into her interview with Sean Croxton, right here. Go listen.

Related posts:

1. The Vegetarian Myth Revisited
2. Let’s Help Out a Soon-To-Be Ex-Veg*n Go Paleo
3. Trouble in Raw Vegan Paradise?
4. The Moral Vegetarians
5. Lierre Keith Gets a Cayenne Laced Pie in the Face During San Francisco Book Fair Speech

Meat may be the reason humans outlive apes

Even hunter-forager humans have twice the life expectancy as wild chimps

Genetic changes that apparently allow humans to live longer than any other primate may be rooted in a more carnivorous diet.

These changes may also promote brain development and make us less vulnerable to diseases of aging, such as cancer, heart disease and dementia.

Chimpanzees and great apes are genetically similar to humans, yet they rarely live for more than 50 years. Although the average human lifespan has doubled in the last 200 years — due largely to decreased infant mortality related to advances in diet, environment and medicine — even without these improvements, people living in high mortality hunter-forager lifestyles still have twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees do.

Now, we understand that chips cooperatively hunt, capture, and rip their prey apart limb-from-limb to great tribal fanfare and meat loving...

Here's one that shows their hunting tactics from above, via infrared.

So what gives, then? Well, perhaps it's because bi-pedal hominids began using stone tools upwards of 2.5 million years ago and probably longer. In so doing, they were able to scavenge the high density nutrients (fats, mostly) in bone marrow and brains, inaccessible to carnivores.

Then, as Max Kleiber showed in 1947, humans, chimps and virtually all animals follow a linear function of mass to metabolic rate.

So, essentially, all animals that weight the same have the same metabolic rate. And in comparing us to chimps, we find that all the major organs have the same metabolic cost. What's different is our brain size vs. gut size. From the article:

The oldest known stone tools manufactured by the ancestors of modern humans, which date back some 2.6 million years, apparently helped butcher animal bones. As our forerunners evolved, they became better at capturing and digesting meat, a valuable, high-energy food, by increasing brain and body size and reducing gut size.

Now for my first complaint: how come on the one hand it talks about butchering animal bones, leading to capturing and eating meat, yet no mention of fats? What's inside bones is extremely high in fats. Why not acknowledge that?

At any rate, I've posted on Kleiber's Law and the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis recently, for those desiring more in-depth:

• Do The Math, Dr. T. Colin Campbell
• Saturated Fat and Coronary Heart Disease, Part II: The Paleo Principle

And if you want to really dig deep into it, see Dr. Mike Eades post, Are We Meat Eaters or Vegetarians?

Then we advance to unlock another piece of the puzzle from the original article cited.

Over time, eating red meat, particularly raw flesh infected with parasites in the era before cooking, stimulates chronic inflammation, Finch explained. In response, humans apparently evolved unique variants in a cholesterol-transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which regulates chronic inflammation as well as many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries.

One variant found in all modern human populations, known as ApoE3, emerged roughly 250,000 years ago, "just before the final stage of evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa," Finch explained.

Well that's all well and interesting, but I'm not sure how well that hypothesis (that ApoE3 arose primarily in response to parasites from uncooked meat) would stand if it turns out we began cooking much, much earlier (Is It The Meat, or Cooking The Meat?), maybe even at the advent of homo Erectus 1.8 million years ago. We do know from even modern hunter-gatherers that cooking vessels aren't needed, that the meat is often just tossed in the fire and retrieved to eat. Speculating, could we have gotten a taste for cooked meat very early, say, from scavenging meat burned during a quick forrest or brush fire ignited by lightening?

But I'm getting a little suspicious. Is there a "meat is inherently unhealthy" bias, and we had to evolve ways to not die from the very thing that they just claimed made us human in the first place...? Does this not strike you as somewhat circular? I mean, it couldn't possibly be that we evolved to live longer than apes naturally (all else remaining equal) because of numerous factors, evolutionary pressures, surviving great odds against us, and/or that there's one hell of a lot more bioavailable nutrition in a diet of cooked meat, fat, vegetables, fruits & nuts than, say, cellulose?

Is this yet another example of unbridled reductionism -- that it's necessary to find a single magic switch in a gene that protects us from awful meat & animal fat? Well, I suppose that's where you have to look if you accept the premise.

So now for the obligatory anti-meat & animal fat part, signaling the bias I was beginning to detect.

"I suggest that it arose to lower the risk of degenerative disease from the high-fat meat diet they consumed," Finch told LiveScience. "Another benefit is that it promoted brain development."

Curiously, another more ancient variant of apolipoprotein E found in a lesser degree in all human populations is ApoE4, which is linked with high cholesterol, shortened lifespan and degeneration of the arteries and brain.

Yep, that's what it looks like to me. The very thing that drove our evolution profoundly forward is a-priori unhealthy and instead of wiping us out, we eventually developed a coupla genes that keep us alive (and for longer than our ancestors!). But, if I get the implication right, do lower your meat, animal fat consumption, and of course, watch your cholesterol!

That's my take, anyway. Anyone see it differently?

Related posts:

1. Dog Pile: Join the Fun
2. Is It The Meat, or Cooking The Meat?
3. Saturated Fat and Coronary Heart Disease, Part II: The Paleo Principle
4. Do The Math, Dr. T. Colin Campbell
5. Rapid Evolution

Ah yes, the low-carb, meat-addicted Weston Price clones. Saturated fat is good for you, huh? Hey, I know a bridge you can buy! Interested? lol

It’s amazing how you people proliferate (and predictably, diss and despise) Campbell while worshipping your dead hero Atkins, the pseudo-scientist diet faddist who suffered from (remember?): HEART DISEASE. Hello? Anybody paying attention, or are you too busy scarfing fried bacon with cheese chasers?

Go high-carb vegan! Be thin AND healthy.

Well, after thanking him/her for bringing "fresh meat" to the table, I set out to do a more substantive response. Given the huge increase in readers over the last few months I thought I'd reproduce that here as it covers a lot of stuff I haven't blogged about in quite a while.

So, here's my response, along with some touch-ups and additions.

~~~

Weston Price, eh? So, are you just a troll? ...Because if you knew anything about this blog you’d know that we’re not shills for WAPF. I don’t think grains & legumes have a proper place in the human diet, soaked, sprouted and/or fermented or not (though, if you must, that's the way to prepare them).

But I suspect all you know about Weston Price is what you’ve read and heard in your vegan echo-chamber. You’re probably not aware that he travelled the world in the 1920s to seek out indigenous populations that had had little contact with civilization and were still eating their traditional foods, and he also compared them to members of these populations who had moved away into contact with modern foods. The research was meticulously documented in journals and photographs and published in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Who did he study? From Wikipedia:

Some of the cultures studied include the inhabitants of the Lötschental in Switzerland, the inhabitants of the Isles of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the Eskimos of Alaska and Canada, the Native Americans, among the inhabitants of New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Rarotonga, Nukuʻalofa, Hawaii, the Masai, Kikuyu, Wakamba and Jalou tribes of Kenya, the Muhima of Uganda, the Baitu and Watusi of Rwanda, the Pygmies, and Wanande in the Congo, the Terrakeka, Dinka and Neurs of Sudan, the Aborigines of Australia, the inhabitants of the Torres Strait, the Māori of New Zealand, the Tauhuanocans, Quechua, “Andes Indians”, “Sierra Indians” and “Jungle Indians” of Peru.

What did they eat? From a review of the book:

Politically Incorrect: The Neglected Nutritional Research of Dr. Weston Price, DDS

Curiously, all native peoples studied made great efforts to obtain seafood, especially fish roe which was consumed so that we will have healthy children. Even mountain dwelling peoples would make semiannual trips to the sea to bring back seaweeds, fish eggs, and dried fish. Shrimp, rich in both cholesterol and vitamin D, was a standard food in many places, from Africa to the Orient.

The last major feature of native diets that Price found was that they were rich in fat, especially animal fat. Whether from insects, eggs, fish, game animals, or domesticated herds, primitive peoples knew that they would get sick if they did not consume enough fat. Explorers besides Dr. Price have also found this to be true. For example, anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who lived for years among the Innu and Northern Canadian Indians, specifically noted how the Indians would go out of their way to hunt down older male caribou for they carried a 50 pound slab of back fat. When such animals were unavailable and Indians were forced to subsist on rabbits, a very lean animal, diarrhea and hunger would set in after about a week. The human body needs saturated fat to assimilate and utilize proteins and saturated animal fats contain high amounts of the fat soluble vitamins, as well as beneficial fatty acids with antimicrobial properties.

Of course, the foods that Price’s subjects ate were natural and unprocessed. Their foods did not contain preservatives, additives, or colorings. They did not contain added sugar (though, when available, natural sweets like honey and maple syrup were eaten in moderation). They did not contain white flour or canned foods. Their milk products were not pasteurized, homogenized, or low fat. The animal and plant foods consumed were raised and grown on pesticide-free soil and were not given growth hormones or antibiotics. In short, these people always ate organic.

Conclusions of the research from the Price-Pottenger website:

- Dental decay is caused primarily by nutritional deficiencies.

- Although radically different, 14 tribal diets provided almost complete immunity to tooth decay and resistance to disease.

- The diets contained no refined or devitalized foods.

- Laboratory analyses revealed that all of these diets were unusually high in protein, vitamins, minerals and especially in fat soluble factors found in animal fats.

- Contact with civilization, followed by adoption of the “displacing foods of modern commerce,” was disastrous for all groups studied.

- Rampant dental caries were followed by progressive facial deformities in children born to parents consuming refined and devitalized foods.

- These changes consisted of narrowed facial structure and dental arches, along with crowded teeth, birth defects and increased susceptibility to infectious and chronic disease.

- Significantly, when some natives returned to their traditional diets, open cavities ceased progressing and children subsequently conceived and born, once again had perfect dental arches and no tooth decay.

- If civilized man is to survive, he must incorporate the fundamentals of primitive nutritional wisdom into his modern life-style.

Based upon his findings, he came back and began curing cavities in his patients nutritionally. See, he found almost no tooth decay in his travels (often less than one cavity per 1,000 teeth or more examined) at a time when tooth decay was 30% in the modern world and even teens were having teeth extracted for dentures.

Prove it? Yep, you guessed it. Re-calcifying tooth cavities was published in major medical journals as early as 1924.

• Cure Dental Cavities
• Reversing Tooth Decay

I would also recommend reading Dr. Stephan's recent series on Malocclusion.

• Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization
• Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part II
• Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part III
• Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part IV

And check out what Activator X -- now Vitamin K2 (MK-4; Menatetrenone) -- is all about.

Finally, not all vegetarians are ignorant parrots when it comes to Price.

Atkins? While I think a low-carb focus has merit, especially for radical weight loss, a whole food focus is more important.

• Atkins: Lost Souls

I do not follow an Atkins diet. As to the controversy surrounding his death, I’ve never been interested. If someone else want’s to argue that, be my guest.

Saturated fat. I’ll bet you know nothing first hand, that you just parrot conventional “wisdom.”

I’ll bet you have no idea how healthful were the heftiest saturated fat consuming people on the planet. Bet you don’t even know who they are, or that saturated fat makes up a full 50% of their total energy intake.

• Saturated Fat

More good, devastating stuff.

• Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
• Low Cholesterol to Die For
• Saturated Fat Epidemiology for Math Geeks
• Saturated Fat Intake vs. Heart-Disease & Stroke
• Drilling Down: Saturated Fat Epidemiology

Last but not least, I wonder if you’ve been vegan long enough to experience the physical degeneration that eventually comes for most, as written by 20-yr vegan Lierre Keith in the recently published “The Vegetarian Myth.” I own a signed copy.

I’ve blogged about it here:

• The Vegetarian Myth
• ...and we soaked up animal protein and fat like parched ground in the rain.
• The Moral Vegetarians
• The Vegetarian Myth Revisited

Here's Lierre on YouTube.

Related posts:

1. Cure Dental Cavities
2. Agitating The Experts
3. Modern Day Weston Price?
4. Don’t You Wish You Were As Smart as Lyle McDonald?
5. Keeping it Real: Food

Thanks for the laugh, Tom.

Related posts:

1. Not Quite Rock
2. Diet Fad Insanity
3. The Paleo Diet
4. The “Groan” Diet
5. Diet Obsession

You are on the cutting edge.

Indeed, I am. She forwards a great review of The Vegetarian Myth (reviewed here, here, here, and here) in an email newsletter from Fourfold Healing.

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Very occasionally powerful, life-changing books are written that give one the palpable sense that "if people would only listen" the world might be a different place. The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith is one such book. In this book Lierre essentially tells two intertwined stories. One is the story of the deterioration of her own health as a direct result of adopting a vegan diet. The second is the related tale of the destruction of our planet essentially as a result of the widespread adoption of agriculture, specifically agriculture based on the growing of grains. Her central premise is that, unlike what we are all led to believe, the absolute worst thing that could ever befall humans or the earth is if we all adopted a vegetarian or, worse yet, a vegan diet. To many, this is such an unbelievable head spinner that they simply will not even be able to entertain the ideas that are presented by Lierre. The ideas, the argument she presents to make her case are powerful, coherent and irrefutable - grains and in fact a grain-based (i.e. vegetarian) diet are literally killing us all.

First, the ecological argument. We are told that the biggest users of fresh water and the most wasteful, ecologically speaking, food we can eat is meat. We are told that if instead of feeding grains to cows to get meat, which is anyway poison for us to eat, we should feed that grain to people thereby feeding at least 30 people with a grain-based diet for every one person we can feed on a meat-based diet. We are told to eat low on the food chain to conserve resources and be ecologically friendly. And, finally and crucially we hear people proudly announce they don't eat anything with faces as a sign that they are living out their deeply held convictions about social justice. The facts actually tell a completely different story.

Imagine the Middle East 10,000 years ago when the only people living in what we now call Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, etc., were nomadic hunter-gatherer types. This area was referred to as a paradise; it was lush, fecund; Lebanon was the land of the cedar forests. The area between the Tigris and Euphrates was literally paradise on earth. Then came agriculture, specifically the growing of grains. As happens where grains are grown and irrigation is used, the soil began to lose its vitality, the humous layer was lost. The irrigation and the converting of perennial grasses and the animals that live on these grasses to annual crops is akin to mining the nutrients and the fertility out of the soil. Without sufficient animal manure and animal bodies to put nutrients back into the soil, without the annual flooding of the plains that is stopped when irrigation systems are used, the land loses its nutrients, the soil becomes more salty and, as evidenced in the Middle East, eventually, inevitably the land becomes a desert. Lierre describes this process in intimate detail so the reader is left with no doubt that in human history, whenever the transition from perennial grass- based land - alongside naturally flowing lakes and rivers, co-existing with verdant forests - is converted into grain based agriculture, the inevitable result is everything dies. Everything - the plants, the insects, the wild animals and eventually the people.

If this wasn't reason enough for conscientious people to shun a grain-based diet, Lierre spends the second half of the book detailing the negative health repercussions from adopting a grain-based, vegetarian or vegan diet. For those familiar with the work of the Weston A. Price foundation or The Fourfold Path to Healing, this will come as no surprise. What will be eye-opening for many is a detailed chart that compares the physiology of meat eaters with that of herbivores. If you still have any doubts that humans are literally physiologically required to live on mostly an animal food diet, I recommend checking out this enlightening chart. Lierre has done her homework. She references many studies that have been done in the last 100 years documenting the superior health outcomes, the absence of chronic disease, and the total absence of cancer and heart disease in people who eat the food that comes naturally out of a perennially based grass and forest system. What do these people eat? What is the "human" diet, the diet that works back to heal the land? Conveniently it is one diet, called the GAPS diet. As probably more than a hundred of my patients can attest, those who have literally regained their health as a result of the GAPS diet, it is no surprise that the very diet that can heal so many sick people is the very diet that,when applied to agriculture, can heal a "sick" earth.

Get this book, read it, pass it to your friends, especially your vegetarian friends, for as Lierre often says in our current situation, it is not enough any more to just have good intentions. You also have to be informed about what it is you are fighting for.

By the way, some people have emailed me that they have not been able to get it from Amazon. Me too. I have an order pending; I initially read it on Kindle, but wanted a copy to mark up. Still waiting. At any rate, Lierre informed me via email today that she has had the 2nd edition for weeks and anyone can order directly from her.

She might even sign it for you, if you ask. Click here to order.

Related posts:

1. “You have saved my life.”
2. The Vegetarian Myth
3. Vegetarian Paleo
4. More Stupid Nonsense
5. The Vegetarian Menace