This article should be read by all vegans and vegetarians, it looks like we should improve our eating habbits:
Maximizing Vegetarian Nutrition
by Michael Greger, M.D.
www.veganMD.org
August of this year, the BBC reported that the British
Advertising Standards Authority attacked a vegetarian organization
for making "alarmist" and "unsubstantiated" claims about the risks of
eating meat. Headlines like "Vegetarian group slammed over
advertising" splashed across the evening news. What "exaggerated"
claims were targeted by the Agency? The vegetarian group claimed that
meat-eaters were at increased risk of dying from heart disease and
stroke, and that vegetarians lived longer than meateaters. How could
the agency possibly find fault with such incontrovertible facts?
Because, simply put, our "facts" aren't true.
The latest science and the best science that we have that we
have suggests that we vegetarians do not live longer than our
meat-eating counterparts. The latest published results came out
January, 2002 in a journal called Public Health Nutrition. Eight
thousand vegetarians were followed for 18 years, and no survival
advantage was found. Then April, 2002 the results of a study twice
that size were released at the International Congress on Vegetarian
Nutrition held at Loma Linda University. A study involving seventeen
thousand vegetarians followed for about 9 years confirms the bad
news-no survival advantage for vegetarians. Even more worrisome, both
this huge studies found that vegetarians had an increased risk of
dying from degenerative brain diseases.
Frankly, I was shocked when I saw these new data. My first
thought was, it's got to be the dairy and eggs. After all, isn't milk
just liquid meat-with the same cholesterol and saturated fat? And
indeed dairy is one of the main sources of saturated fat in the
American diet. And aren't eggs like little cholesterol bombs? No
wonder ovo-lactovegetarians weren't doing so well. Separate out the
vegans, I thought, and then you'll see some longevity. Neither of
these two studies separated out the vegans, so where can we turn?
Well, this was the latest research; what about the best?
Probably the best science we have was summarized in the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1999, in an article entitled
Mortality in Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians. In an enormous
undertaking, twelve researchers took all of the biggest and best
studies to date on vegetarian mortality rates and pooled all the data
together. They took a decade of mortality data from 28,000
vegetarians from Germany, California, and Britain. And found... no
survival advantage for vegetarians.
What about vegans though? Despite even having lower
cholesterol levels than vegetarians, the vegans in the study didn't
live any longer either. Vegans had the same mortality rate as
meateaters. Now although this is the best science we have, it is far
from definitive; there are flaws in the study, and they were just
looking at a few hundred vegans. There is a currently study underway
in Europe which will soon become the biggest study of vegans in human
history. We should have those data in a few years, but unfortunately
there's not much reason to suspect that the results would turn out
significantly different.
Before we explore these findings, it's important to realize
that even as we vegetarians are now with no changes, just because we
don't seem to live longer, doesn't mean we're not healthier. These
studies were of mortality rates only. Everybody's got to die some
time and so it's not only how long one lives, but also how well one
lives. Vegetarians still have less heart disease, less obesity, less
hypertension, less diabetes, less colon cancer-even less emergency
appendectomies. The list goes on and on. So it still makes sense to
go vegetarian, just for health reasons alone, but with all that one
would think we'd have a survival advantage. We have a tremendous
potential for reducing heart disease risk, but there's something
getting in our way. What is it about vegetarian and especially vegan
diets that's increasing our risk of heart disease so much that it's
canceling out our potential?
The first reason why vegetarian nutrition experts think we're
not doing as well as we should is that we're not getting enough omega
3 fatty acids in our diet and we're getting too many omega 6 fatty
acids. For more information about these essential fatty acids, I
recommend the book Becoming Vegan by Melina and Davis and an article
by Jack Norris, R.D. entitled "Staying a Healthy Vegan" at
http://www.veganoutreach.org/health/stayinghealthy.html. Suffice to
say that every vegetarian and vegan should:
Step 1. Every day eat 1-2 tablespoons of ground up flax seeds
Step 2. If you have any of the following oils in your house,
throw them away: corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, or
cottonseed oil. If you feel the need to use oil, use olive or canola
instead.
Reason number two why we're not living up to our potential-or
more accurately, living out to our potential is probably even more
important. Reasons number two is homocysteine. Homocysteine is a
toxic metabolite-it attacks our blood vessels, it' attacks our brain
cells; it's a risk factor for heart disease, for stroke, for
Alzheimer's and a growing number of other diseases. And, up to 25% of
lacto-vegetarians and 80% of vegans have seriously elevated levels in
their blood. This is probably why the latest research suggests
vegetarians have over twice the risk of dying from degenerative brain
diseases.
Why do we build up more of this toxic stuff than meat-eaters?
Because, simply, we don't get enough vitamin B12. We now have quite
convincing data that there seems to be an epidemic of this functional
B12 deficiency among vegans. Every person on this planet needs a
regular and reliable source of B12. For vegans this means vitamin B12
supplements or vitamin B12 fortified foods.
If one chooses the supplement route, one can take 100mcg of
B12 once a day, or 2000mcg once a week. Ideally the supplements
should be chewed or let to dissolve under the tongue. Alternately, if
one relies solely on B12 fortified foods, one needs to eat servings
of B12-fortified foods at least twice a day, There does not seem to
be a harm of taking too much. And if you haven't been getting enough,
once you start supplementing your diet, odds are your homocysteine
levels will drop, you may physically and mentally feel better, and
you'll lower your risk of becoming paralyzed, demented and dead-all
for just pennies a day!
When I first learned about all this, my first thought was
that it just didn't seem natural. When human beings were evolving, I
kept thinking, they didn't have to take flax. I learned that that's
because there were no such things as cottonseed oil, no such thing as
trans fats. Prehistoric peoples got much of their omega 3's from wild
plants that tend to have much higher levels than the ones currently
cultivated. Purslane, for example, the most common plant in the
world, is one of the highest plant sources of omega 3's. But, as a
culture we just don't eat weeds anymore.
And those cavepersons didn't have to take vitamin B12
supplements I thought. Well, one of the reasons is because they
didn't chlorinate it out of their water supply. People used to be
able to get B12 from well water, drinking from mountain streams, etc.
It's true that we don't get a lot of B12 in our water anymore, but we
don't get a lot of cholera either-that's a good thing. The problem is
that we live in an unnatural world which is compromising our health,
compromising our vegetarian potential. But we can reclaim that
potential with a but few simple changes, and maximize our chances for
optimal health and longevity.
