Dr. Doug Graham (80-10-10 raw vegan)

[Aractus]

You should avoid cholesterol, saturated fat, trans fats and animal protein by that definition. All of these things are only found in animals naturally (except for saturated fat) and can make your body produce excessive amounts of things you can get from diet; CVD, Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, and the list goes on.

No, you shouldn't. You didn't even know what cholesterol is.

Now you know that it's the parent hormone from which all other hormones are made. I've also made you aware that under normal dietary conditions, humans source about 15% of their cholesterol from the diet and sythesise the remaining 85%.

Vegan diets often lead to cholesterol deficiency, but even if it doesn't, you're still causing your liver to produce about 18% more cholesterol than normal. Like I said, the human body does cope as best as it can with abnormal conditions, but that's not a valid reason to put your body through these stresses to see how it copes.

Sure, or improve the diet so it is no longer unhealthy. The case however, is that for most people a B12 fortified plant-based diet rich in legumes and vegetables is an extremely healthy diet. I would also argue that a diet that causes the greatest killer in the world, the standard meat-eater diet, is unhealthy.

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Hey, how about the 17.3 million people that die of CVD each year? 30% of global deaths worldwide? How is your "balanced" diet treating them? How can you possibly stack up your anecdotal examples of people having problems with a possibly faulty vegan diet to the greatest causes of death in the world?

Everyone has to die eventually. I have a feeling you're intentionally misusing the data to fit your agenda. Just because somebody dies from CVD doesn't necessarily mean that death was premature. Even if you had a society in which 100% of people died from CVD, it wouldn't necessarily mean that you had any premature deaths.

Here's the statistics for CVD prevalence in Australia by age group:





As you can clearly see, the condition is much more prevalent among older people. And this is just people with the condition, not necessarily people that go on to die from that particular condition. Of people aged 45-54, 23% had CVD. Of people with CVD, only 33% reported their health as bad/poor - which is three times higher than the non-CVD population. So only 7.7% of people aged 45-54 both had CVD and reported their health as being bad. That's a lot less than the 30% figure you came up with.

High blood pressure was a bigger risk factor than blood cholesterol, in fact: "In 2004-05, 7% of the population reported having been told by a doctor or nurse that they have high blood cholesterol. The rate for those aged over 65 years was higher at 22%; Of Australians reporting a cardiovascular condition, 40% also reported having high blood cholesterol."

Here is the complete list of risk factors:

"Major preventable risk factors for cardiovascular disease include tobacco smoking, hypertensive disease (high blood pressure), high blood cholesterol, inadequate physical activity, overweight and obesity, poor nutrition and diabetes (AIHW 2004)."

So, now we know that only 22% of people aged 65 or over had high blood cholesterol. There's scientific debate on this even though in the peer-review literature because research is now suggesting that it's a normal part of the aging process to have higher cholesterol in old age. Again way lower than the 30% figure you claimed.

I have a second source also saying that high blood pressure is the main risk factor for CVD:

"Around 6% of the burden of disease and injury in Australia in 2003 was attributed to high blood cholesterol, placing it fifth out of the 14 risk factors examined (Begg et al. 2007). High blood cholesterol, at 35%, was the second highest contributor to the burden of CVD after high blood pressure (Begg et al. 2007)."


And once again, that 6% figure is way way lower than your 30% figure, and as to how much of that 6% results in premature death hasn't even been assessed.

From that same report:

"Based on self-reports from the 2007–08 National Health Survey (NHS), an estimated 3.4 million Australians (17% of the population) had one or more long-term cardiovascular diseases (AIHW 2010a). Similarly, estimates from the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHWB) show that 3.5 million Australians aged 16-85 years had a chronic CVD condition. The NHS ranked CVD fourth in prevalence after diseases of the eye and adnexa, the musculoskeletal system, connective tissue and the respiratory system."

So 17% of Australians have CVD - that's only half of the 30% figure which you came up with.

Ah, finally I think I've found your figure: "In 2008, CVD was the cause of 48,456 (34%) of all deaths—responsible for more deaths than any other disease group. CVD was followed as a cause of death by cancer (29%), diseases of the respiratory system (8%) and external causes (6%), with mental and behavioural problems and diseases of the nervous and endocrine systems each accounting for a further 4% (Figure 3.9)."



34%, but hardly any of them were premature.

And here's the downward trend:

We know it's healthy for the great mass of people, therefore for most individuals.

No, you don't. When I pressed you to answer whether someone should continue veganism if they find that it's bad for their health, you gave me some nonsense about CVD, and then claimed once again that cholesterol is bad showing once again that you're stigmatising one of the body's most important chemicals with your bronze-aged understanding of it.

Of people who promote and advocate for "ethical veganism", the vast majority have never studied human nutrition, human biology, human anatomy, or even medicine. They then make the kinds of claims that you've been making "we know veganism is good", etc.

Let's go back to when you asked me "how do I know we're designed by nature to eat meat"?

Firstly there are an estimated 8.7 million species of flowering plants, of those only 195,000 produce edible parts for humans. Of that number, just 17 species provide an estimated 90% of mankind's food supply, with domesticated grass seed being the most consumed plant-based foods. "Eight cereal grains: wheat, maize, rice, barley, sorghum, oats, rye, and millet provide 56% of the food energy and 50% of the protein consumed on earth [1]. Three cereals: wheat, maize and rice together comprise at least 75% of the world’s grain production (table 1)." (Cordian, 1999).

The simple fact is that that a much greater proportion of animals are edible by humans - in fact even animals which we generally have other uses for and generally do not eat: cats, dogs, horses, donkeys, alpacas, etc. are still edible, and available to provide nourishment if we find ourselves in a situation where we needed to eat such animals. Unlike domesticated grains, the original wild forms of these domestic animals (wolf, wildcat, wild boars, etc) are edible as well. Of course when thinking about land animals it is the herbivorous which are healthiest, but we can eat just about any of them. We can, and do, also eat a range of marine life.

A study done found that humans also consume 87 species of marine mammals (dolphins, whales, seals, etc. see here). I certainly disagree, ethically, with eating dolphins - because they are very intelligent. I have no problem with minke whales, seals or most other mammals that are not endangered.

In addition, of course, then there's fish, insects and grubs. They all too can provide a range of nutrition and again there are a lot of species to be found that are edible, and a few that are not.

And finally, human teeth are designed for meat. I see vegans often wrongly claiming that they aren't, but they are - we have teeth designed to shear the meat from the bone, and teeth designed to chew. Furthermore, the archaeological record has shown that people who ate large amounts of meat had little to no cavities in their teeth, but those who ate large amounts of grain had more cavities.