Saturday, December 11, 2010

The difference between a healthy vegan and an unhealthy vegan: the coconut?

One thing I noticed between healthy vegans on the VeganHealth site and in my own life and the ones who are now ex-vegans: saturated fat.

Here's some information on how much coconut oil rocks! Yes the last link is to a WAPF site and Dr. Mary Enig's work (she's not a dumb ass and her research on a coconut oil should be considered):

http://www.coconutresearchcenter.org/coconut-research.htm
(this page has lots of NIH studies on medium-chain triglycerides — huge eye opener)

http://www.coconutdiet.com/cholesterol.htm
http://thyroid.about.com/cs/dietweightloss/a/coconutoilfife_3.htm
http://trit.us/knowyourfats/coconut-oil-studies.html

Please send me any links you find.

I am probably only a handful of vegans (I'm coming up with a different word instead of a vegan) who do not believe there is a connection between saturated fat and cholesterol and the rise in heart disease. I think that the rise in heart disease stems from eating too many refined carbohydrates and stress (nutritional and other forms). Anyway, call me a nut job. Here's some information, if you have any links to share, please send them to me.

Could sugar, not saturated fat and cholesterol, be the cause in heart disease?

http://www.cardiologytoday.com/view.aspx?rid=63483
http://www.usc.edu/hsc/info/pr/hmm/99spring/sugar.html
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/106/4/523
http://www.dietitian.com/triglyce.html
http://www.telegram.com/article/20100421/NEWS/100429942/1052

So what if this turns out to be the case? That's we've bought a big lie? That saturated fat and, even dietary cholesterol, is not unhealthy, as long as you stop drinking the sodas and eating the buns? So what! No one was becoming vegan in record numbers anyway, so relax. There's way too much money in the statin business to disprove this. Did you know that research that started this idea was on vegetarian bunnies?

Nothing will change at all, except you might get healthier by adding coconut oil to your diet. Read the http://www.coconutdiet.com/cholesterol.htm page.

The Vegetarian Myth’s many inaccuracies and misleading claims

The Claim (by Lierre Keith): "...there are no good plant sources of tryptophan. On top of that, all the tryptophan in the world won’t do you any good without saturated fat." And later Keith blames the lack of tryptophan in vegetarian diets for depression, insomnia, panic, anger, bulimia and chemical dependency. (P. 10) In Reality: A cup of roasted soybeans contains nearly three times the adult RDA of tryptophan and a cup of pretty much any other bean will get you between 50-60% of the RDA. Two tablespoons of coconut oil more than meet the adult saturated fat RDA. Nuts, dark chocolate and avocado are all rich in saturated fat.

Click the image to download the complete pdf.


Download the pdf by clicking the image.

Except from IndyBay.org: We don’t need pie to humiliate Lierre Keith. As anarcho-primitivists and Weston A. Price followers condemned all vegans as violent psychopaths after Keith’s recent encounter with a spicy pie this weekend, a handful of animal rights activists were peacefully distributing leaflets that strongly disputed some of The Vegetarian Myth’s many inaccuracies and misleading claims (available below). Her book is a dangerous collection of straw man arguments, poorly-sourced pseudo-science, and outright lies. Discrediting the book will be easy, but it will work best with many people working together. To accomplish this, we have purchased the domain www.VegetarianMyth.com and will soon be launching a closely-moderated wiki (or similar site) to crowd-source the vegan critique of the book.

I thought the vegans who threw the pies were brainless zealots. I am no longer calling myself vegan or quasivegan. I think I will call myself an agent for the vegetable lobby. Come to think of it, where are all those kale lobbyists on Capital Hill?

Lierre Keith Pod Cast, Kick a person in the chin

This confirms it! I had guess that she was low fat, based on third party information, but now I heard she also was mostly a low fat, macrobiotic vegan. What a horrible thing. Both of the WORST diets invented. So unhealthy. So many ex-vegans. Here's the link to the pod cast:

Lierre Keith Pod Cast

Chin Kicking
Also, can someone kick this person, Vegan Nutrionista in the chin? I posted that she was really irresponsible with her answer, that some vegan diet variations are VERY DANGEROUS, she and should refer that person, who was weak from the vegan diet, to a nutritionist.

No "Average Man" Biochemist: all men need the same vitamins and minerals, they do not need them in the same amounts or the same proportions.

From Time Magazine:
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,814891,00.html#ixzz17pkDrybZ
Most physicians are convinced that alcoholism is, at bottom, a psychological disorder. Roger John Williams, famed biochemist of the University of Texas, had a different theory. The trouble, he argued might have a physical basis. Now, in Nutrition and Alcoholism (University ol Oklahoma; $2), Williams suggests that vitamins have achieved history's first honest-to-goodness cure in a case of alcoholism, making the patient truly able to take a drink or leave it.
Williams believes that while all men need the same vitamins and minerals, they do not need them in the same amounts or the same proportions. Many human disorders, he thinks, arise because some people (partly because of heredity) need some life-essential substances in far greater quantities than normal diets supply.

No "Average Man." No man was better equipped than Roger Williams to show what vitamins could do. The younger (58) brother of Robert Runnels Williams of B1 and beriberi fame (TIME, April 30), he identified pantothenic acid and helped to discover folic acid, two of the vitamins in the B complex, did pioneering work on several of the others. Along the way, Roger Williams became distressed by the way science tends to deal with the nonexistent "average man," plumped for a science of "humanics" in which differences among men, rather than similarities, would be emphasized.
This Roger Williams is the younger brother of the man who discovered beriberi. That's exciting to me, seriously. All my young life, my mother would teasingly say stuff like "don't eat the white rice, you'll get beriberi." It's no wonder, I've never enjoyed rice and barely eat it. White or brown, not my thing. I learned a lot about nutrition and, strangely, a lot about food poisoning, growing up in my home.

Malabsorption and Theoretical Empathy

Hello, this post is about malabsorption, which is difficulty absorbing nutrients from food, and vegans who become ex-vegans.

Malabsorption
The definition of malabsorption and symptoms. I'm going to be captain obvious here and point out something: there is such a thing as malabsorption. There is also such a thing as absorption. Vegans are people and they are not exempt from having either of these in varying degrees. If one didn't exist the other wouldn't exist. If everyone had a headache, there would be no headache as there is nothing to compare it with. If this whole page was bold, nothing would stand out. I say this silly crap because I still read really bizarre things from very educated and otherwise bright people just not getting how someone could fail to thrive on the vegan diet. After all, it's just a matter of this or that nutrient, nothing is special about meat. Well, the animal has done all the processing for you, so if your intestines sucketh, there you go! You eat that meat and you get the nutrients out of it because it's coming with the fat and already converted vitamins. Plus, far too many people bought the lie about no fat dressings and low fat diets (VegNews gave an award to a low fat vegan blog). If you've been reading this blog, I've cited many studies indicating that if you eat your food with fat, you absorb significantly more nutrients. Much of the reason why there are ex-vegans, provided they did everything else right, is they were not absorbing enough nutrients from their food for some reason or another.

Theoretical Empathy
This is only directed at some ex-vegans, there have been some, I'm sure, who do not want to eat meat or animal products yet they were feeling like crap on the vegan diet they were practicing. My mother keeps her meat, eggs, and dairy consumption to a bare and practical minimum, at 100% she felt bad. This is something sustainable for her.

I'm only referring to some ex-vegans, the ones who completely flip to the otherside, the "darkside", if you will, evangelizing the doctrine of the Weston A. Price Foundation or another "we are the only true diet there is, so screw you" mentality. (The vegan diet is loaded with those ingredients too.) But what current vegans can't understand the complete flip of philosophy. "What about the compassion and the suffering you know about? How can you eat meat with gusto?"

What I want to point out is the difference between theoretical empathy and genuine empathy: seeing oneself in others. A vegan who has rescued a farm animal, has spent any time with them, and/or relates to them just as one would as their own cat or dog, would go to the end of the earth to avoid eating meat. Supplements here I come! My father in law, Jack, born to a dairyman, had a pig he loved, his family slaughtered the pig for Christmas dinner. (Peace on earth, yeah right!) Jack has been a vegetarian for over 40 years because of that pig. There's a huge difference between becoming a vegan by theoretically thinking about animals, reading about them and agreeing with the the logic behind the ethics, and real genuine empathy because you deeply connect with them as your own fellow beings.

Pain is only a theory until you feel it for yourself. And compassion and empathy are the same way.

A final observation: In the Tao or Buddhism (I can't remember), it essentially says that whatever you push up against with force will push back with equal force. Many "absolutists" do complete flips. Even Buddhists or Taoists know this and have to watch their minds. People end up eating their own words. And for vegans, they end up eating more than words, they end up eating meat. It's as if the toxicity of the militant, in your face, exclusivity, veganazi attitude festers in one's own mind, then it poisons the body.