Cool Site on Vegan Supplements

The go to site and brain for me is Jack Norris, but this person who put together http://www.vegan-supplement-checklist.com obviously did a lot of research.

Convinced of my vegan lifestyle, out of respect of animal life, I want to promote veganism on the web.

By looking around on the internet how other people write about their vegan lives I mainly found vegan blogs about vegan cooking. Though it is always useful to expand your daily vegan meals and to try out new ingredients, I find it necessary to cover more on nutritional needs.

There still appear cases in the news of people, mainly vegan children, that do suffer shortage of certain vitamins with all the consequences of this.

A taurine-supplemented vegan diet may blunt the contribution of neutrophil activation to acute coronary events

After feeling so amazing with the addition of taurine and a teeny bit of raw coconut oil, I decided to do a little looking around for studies on Taurine. Here's one that's interesting: http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/S0306-9877(04)00280-4/abstract

Neutrophils are activated in the coronary circulation during acute coronary events (unstable angina and myocardial infarction), often prior to the onset of ischemic damage. Moreover, neutrophils infiltrate coronary plaque in these circumstances, and may contribute to the rupture or erosion of this plaque, triggering thrombosis. Activated neutrophils secrete proteolytic enzymes in latent forms which are activated by the hypochlorous acid (HOCl) generated by myeloperoxidase. These phenomena may help to explain why an elevated white cell count has been found to be an independent coronary risk factor. Low-fat vegan diets can decrease circulating leukocytes – neutrophils and monocytes – possibly owing to down-regulation of systemic IGF-I activity. Thus, a relative neutropenia may contribute to the coronary protection afforded by such diets. However, vegetarian diets are devoid of taurine – the physiological antagonist of HOCl – and tissue levels of this nutrient are relatively low in vegetarians. Taurine has anti-atherosclerotic activity in animal models, possibly reflecting a role for macrophage-derived myeloperoxidase in the atherogenic process. Taurine also has platelet-stabilizing and anti-hypertensive effects that presumably could reduce coronary risk. Thus, it is proposed that a taurine-supplemented low-fat vegan diet represents a rational strategy for diminishing the contribution of activated neutrophils to acute coronary events; moreover, such a regimen would work in a number of other complementary ways to promote cardiovascular health. Moderate alcohol consumption, the well-tolerated drug pentoxifylline, and 5-lipoxygenase inhibitors – zileuton, boswellic acids, fish oil -may also have potential in this regard.

I lied. Here's a great interview on the China Study and its Credibility

So I'll try to get up here once a week to post anything I run across.

Here's an excerpt from an interview (see urls below) between Chris Masterjohn and Dr. Mercola regarding the China Study and its "conclusion" that a plant based diet is best for everyone. Yes, I am aware that Chris Masterjohn is affiliated with the so-called "darkside", Weston A. Price Foundation, but he's extremely credible and pragmatic because he can see another perspective. When anyone makes sweeping statements, even in the vegan world, I immediately put up a flag. My husband does this, and he's on my shit list. When a doctor here in Santa Rosa says a low fat, starch based diet is the perfect diet for everyone, when there's even ONE PERSON or child with tooth decay (requiring most of her adult teeth to be capped!), that's just simply wrong on all levels. Do right by the fork wielders with honest information and let each one go to the level of plant based diet that is healthy for them.

Chris Masterjohn: ... some people may do better with a more plant-based diet and other people may do better with a more animal-based diet. I do happen to believe that everyone would be better off if they include some animal products in some form in their diet but certainly, there are many people who do well by having the majority of their diet or a vast majority as plant products.


What you find is an enormous selection bias when you look at only one practitioner who’s only treating people with vegetarianism. If you take a practitioner like Dr. Joel Fuhrman, for example, he may be a great practitioner and may have great success with his clients, but if you take someone like that and say that every single person or at least 90 percent of them do fine with less than 10 percent of animal products, do you really think many people who intuitively feel that they do better with animal products are gonna go to a doctor who’s telling them that they should cut out all the animal products and eat at least two pounds per day of leafy green vegetables in their diet? Probably not, so what you see is this enormous bias that’s introduced by focusing on three or more clinicians who are using that type of diet, and completely leaving out all of the other evidence.

http://mercola.fileburst.com/PDF/ExpertInterviewTranscripts/InterviewChrisMasterjohnChinaStudy.pdf
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/12/11/chris-masterjohn-criticism-of-the-china-study.aspx

I didn't have a chance to read Denise Minger's break down of the raw data of the China Study, but this information is highly interesting, she's got charts and photos too!:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/06/23/tuoli-chinas-mysterious-milk-drinkers/