Crazy Moms and Crying Babies: Brain Damage By Vegan Diet

In 2004, Koebnick et al reported that a "Long-Term Ovo-Lacto Vegetarian Diet Impairs Vitamin B-12 Status in Pregnant Women."  They found that 22% of ovo-lacto vegetarians had demonstrable B-12 deficiency.


In 2011, Gilsing et al reported on the "Serum concentrations of vitamin B12 and folate in British male omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans: results from a cross-sectional analysis of the EPIC-Oxford cohort study."  They found that 52% of vegans had vitamin B-12 deficiency.

Now a 2011 study published in Early Human Development by Goedhart et al--"Maternal vitamin B-12 and folate status during pregnancy and excessive infant crying" -- finds that women with low B-12 status are more likely to have infants that cry more than 3 hours at a time:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The etiology of excessive infant crying is largely unknown. We hypothesize that excessive infant crying may have an early nutritional origin during fetal development.

AIMS: This study is the first to explore whether (1) maternal vitamin B-12 and folate status during pregnancy are associated with excessive infant crying, and (2) whether and how maternal psychological well-being during pregnancy affects these associations.

STUDY DESIGN: Women were approached around the 12th pregnancy week to complete a questionnaire (n=8266) and to donate a blood sample (n=4389); vitamin B-12 and folate concentrations were determined in serum. Infant crying behavior was measured through a postpartum questionnaire (±3months; n=5218).

SUBJECTS: Pregnant women living in Amsterdam and their newborn child.

OUTCOME MEASURES: Excessive infant crying, defined as crying ≥3h/day on average in the past week.

RESULTS: Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed for 2921 (vitamin B-12) and 2622 (folate) women.Vitamin B-12 concentration (categorized into quintiles) was associated with excessive infant crying after adjustment for maternal age, parity, ethnicity, education, maternal smoking and psychological problems (OR[95%CI]: Q1=3.31[1.48-7.41]; Q2=2.50[1.08-5.77]; Q3=2.59[1.12-6.00]; Q4=2.77[1.20-6.40]; Q5 = reference). Stratified analysis suggested a stronger association among women with high levels of psychological problems during pregnancy. Folate concentration was not associated with excessive infant crying.

CONCLUSIONS: First evidence is provided for an early nutritional origin in excessive infant crying. A low maternal vitamin B-12 status during pregnancy could, in theory, affect infant crying behavior through two potential mechanisms: the methionine-homocysteine metabolism and/or the maturation of the sleep-wake rhythm.

Since meat and fish are the richest sources of B-12, as the Mail Online put it, "a steak for pregnant mothers could stop babies crying."  Forget the stupid final remark by the veg*n nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston.  She proves herself clueless by it.  If anything will destroy your own or your baby's brain, its a vegan diet, not steak, as you will see below.

 I find their report of "a stronger association among women with high levels of psychological problems during pregnancy" intriguing.  Could B-12 deficiency due to meat avoidance increase psychological problems in adults?  Sure enough.

Durand et al reported on a case of "Psychiatric manifestations of vitamin B12 deficiency."

Psychiatric manifestations are frequently associated with pernicious anemia including depression, mania, psychosis, dementia. We report a case of a patient with vitamin B12 deficiency, who has presented severe depression with delusion and Capgras' syndrome, delusion with lability of mood and hypomania successively, during a period of two Months. ...


At admission she was uncooperative, disoriented in time and presented memory and attention impairment and sleep disorders. She seemed sad and older than her real age. Facial expression and spontaneous movements were reduced, her speech and movements were very slow. She had depressed mood, guilt complex, incurability and devaluation impressions. She had a Capgras' syndrome and delusion of persecution....

Further investigations confirmed anemia (hemoglobin=11,4 g/dl) and revealed vitamin B12 deficiency (52 pmol/l) and normal folate level....Vitamin B12 replacement therapy was started with hydroxycobalamin 1 000 ng/day im for 10 days and iron replacement therapy. Her mental state improved dramatically within a few days. After one week of treatment the only remaining symptoms were lability of mood, delusion of persecution, Capgras' syndrome but disappeared totally 9 days after the beginning of the treatment. ...

To illustrate this illness we reviewed the literature regarding psychopathology associated with B12 deficiency. The most common psychiatric symptoms were depression, mania, psychotic symptoms, cognitive impairment and obsessive compulsive disorder. The neuropsychiatric severity by vitamin B12 deficiency and the therapeutic efficacy depends on the duration of signs and symptoms.

Conclusion - We recommend consideration of B12 deficiency and serum B12 determinations in all the patients with organic mental disorders, atypical psychiatric symptoms and fluctuation of symptomatology. B12 levels should be evaluated with treatment resistant depressive disorders, dementia, psychosis or risk factors for malnutrition such as alcoholism or advancing age associated with neurological symptoms, anemia, malabsorption, gastrointestinal surgery, parasite infestation or strict vegetarian diet. 

If you search Pub Med you can find lots of articles on psychiatric complications of B-12 deficiency.  Therefore, the finding that women with psychological problems during pregnancy were more likely to have cry babies probably means that those women were more severely B-12 deficient than others.

What else can happen if you don't get enough B-12 during pregnancy?

Lovblad et al reported a case of "Retardation of myelination due to dietary vitamin B12 deficiency:"

Abstract

Vitamin B12 deficiency is known to be associated with signs of demyelination, usually in the spinal cord. Lack of vitamin B12 in the maternal diet during pregnancy has been shown to cause severe retardation of myelination in the nervous system. We report the case of a 14(1)/2-month-old child of strictly vegetarian parents who presented with severe psychomotor retardation. This severely hypotonic child had anemia due to insufficient maternal intake of vitamin B12 with associated megaloblastic anemia. MRI of the brain revealed severe brain atrophy with signs of retarded myelination, the frontal and temporal lobes being most severely affected. It was concluded that this myelination retardation was due to insufficient intake of vitamin B12 and vitamin B12 therapy was instituted. The patient responded well with improvement of clinical and imaging abnormalities. We stress the importance of MRI in the diagnosis and follow-up of patients with suspected diseases of myelination.

 Casella et al reported on "Vitamin B12 deficiency in infancy as a cause of developmental regression."  

Abstract

Vitamin B12 deficiency can cause serious developmental regression, hypotonia and cerebral atrophy in infants. We report a 6-month-old infant, with insidious developmental regression and brain atrophy showed by CT scan, secondarily to vitamin B12 deficiency. His mother was a strict vegetarian and the patient was exclusively breastfed. The clinical symptoms and the brain CT were normalized after vitamin B12 administration.

So we can conclude:

• B-12 deficiency during pregnancy may produce cry babies.
• B-12 deficiency during pregnancy can give your baby brain damage. 
• B-12 deficiency can make you crazy.

So I guess that proves the superiority of a vegan diet, especially a raw one (sarcasm).   

Starting to understand why some long-term unsupplemented vegans can seem a little, well, light headed?  Perhaps some of that gray matter is missing?


Might this explain why it can be so difficult to reason with vegan luminaries such as T. Colin Campbell?


Stay sane, stay smart.  Eat meat. 

The Week's Links

A London specialty ice cream shop starts serving the ultimate primal ice cream today, made from human breast milk.  From the Reuter's article:

The breast milk concoction, called the "Baby Gaga," will be available from Friday at the Icecreamists restaurant in London's Covent Garden.

Icecreamists founder Matt O'Connor was confident his take on the "miracle of motherhood" and priced at a hefty 14 pounds ($23) a serving will go down a treat with the paying public.
The breast milk was provided by mothers who answered an advertisement on online mothers' forum Mumsnet.

Victoria Hiley, 35, from London was one of 15 women who donated milk to the restaurant after seeing the advert.

Hiley works with women who have problems breast-feeding their babies. She said she believes that if adults realized how tasty breast milk actually is, then new mothers would be more willing to breast-feed their own newborns.

"What could be more natural than fresh, free-range mother's milk in an ice cream? And for me it's a recession beater too -- what's the harm in using my assets for a bit of extra cash," Hiley said in a statement.

Duo Li presents the evidence that vegetarians and vegans can have increased platelet stickiness and higher risk of thrombosis due to dietary deficiencies of vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids in his article "Chemistry Behind Vegetarianism" in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry online.

"Collagen- and adenosine-5′-diphosphate (ADP)-stimulated ex vivo whole blood platelet aggregation were significantly higher in both vegetarian and vegan groups than in both high- and moderate-meat-eater groups. The vegan group had a significantly higher mean platelet volume (MPV) than the high- and moderate-meat-eater and ovo-lactovegetarian groups (35). Increased MPV in vegans suggests the presence of larger, activated platelets. Evidence from case control studies has indicated that an increased MPV is an independent risk factor for acute myocardial infarction (MI) (39) and for acute and/or nonacute cerebral ischemia (40). Large platelets, in such cases, have been shown to have increased reactivity. When platelets become activated, they change from their normal resting disk-like structure to assume a spherical shape and their volume increases substantially, leading to the potential for thrombus formation. In a multiple linear regression analysis, after controlling for potential confounding factors such as dietary group, age, exercise, body mass index, and dietary PUFA and saturated fat, cholesterol, carbohydrate, and fiber intake, the MPV was still strongly negatively correlated with platelet PL 20:3n-6 (p = 0.003) and 22:5n-3 (p =0.001). The data suggest that 22:5n-3 and 20:3n-6 may play a role in the structural function of the platelet membrane (41). This, in conjunction with the increased platelet aggregability, suggests what should be an increased thrombosis tendency in vegans, and in the case of the platelet aggregation is associated with low dietary intake of n-3 PUFA. " (emphasis added)

Ronda Bokram, a nutritionist with Olin Health Center in Lansing, Michigan, proves herself ignorant of the biochemistry of eating disorders in this article in the Lansing State Journal online.  Bokram is quoted as endorsing an MSU program that distributed Twix candy bars to students as part of National Eating Disorders Awareness week:

"Students found miniature Twix bars all over campus and were encouraged to eat them without guilt.

It's one of several campus activities in recognition of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.


The message behind the Twix bars?

"Eating disorders are not about food," said Ronda Bokram, a nutritionist with Olin Health Center. "Students come to my office and they say, 'My problem is I like food.' The problem isn't that you love food.

"The problem is you feel guilty about it ... and that leads to a distorted relationship with food. We label food as good or bad, and then when we eat the food, we put that label on ourselves: 'I'm bad if I eat this.' "

I'm sure this is a bonanza for Mars, Inc, but Bokram clearly has not read the research showing that eating refined carbohydrates like Twix bars will elevate insulin and activate dopamine centers of the brain, leading to transient hypoglycemic reactions, sugar addiction, and chronic insulin resistance, all of which can distort appetite.   Anorexia nervosa occurs only in civilization, i.e. it is a disease of civilization, and includes metabolic dysfunction, namely loss of appetite combined with inability to store fat in fat cells.  Most likely we have something like fat cell insulin resistance.  We don't have the details yet but I know that guilt has nothing to do with it.   I suggest Bokram and her colleagues take some time to read Good Calories Bad Calories, particularly Part 3, especially page 440, and also brush up on her human biology.  Its not about whether food is "good" or "bad," its about whether humans have adapted to an item or not.  If chimps developed anorexia nervosa while on a diet of refined carbohydrates, we wouldn't blame it on "distorted relationships with food" and guilt about eating "bad" foods, we would immediately suspect the food.  Why this escapes human nutritionists I don't understand.


Last but not least, new research shows that children with low vitamin D levels have a higher risk of allergies.

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

Raw fooders like to point to other primates as evidence that humans should eat a raw plant food diet.  

For example, Steve Pavlina :

“There’s very compelling biological evidence that a high fruit diet is optimal for human beings. I can’t share the volumes of info I’ve read about this, but one of the more convincing points is that the nearest animal species to human beings, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos all naturally favor a high fruit diet, meaning that when fresh fruit is readily available, they’ll get the vast majority of their calories from fruit. How they get the rest of their calories varies (nuts, seeds, insects, or even other animals), but a clear preference for a high fruit diet is something they all have in common.”

Like other raw fooders, Pavlina here confused quantity consumed with preference.  The fact that chimps eat more fruit than any other type of food does not indicate that they prefer fruit to all other types of food, any more than the fact that Chinese eat mostly rice means that they prefer rice to all other foods. In fact, chimps prefer to eat termites over fruit, and always start their foraging looking for insects, only moving on to fruits after they have exhausted their insect supplies. The preference for animal matter occurs in other apes; see "Omnivorous Primate Diets and Human Overconsumption of Meat" by William J Hamilton in Food and Evolution edited by Harris and Ross.

Far from vegan, the wild chimpanzee diet is about 5% animal food in the forms of insects (primarily termites) and hunted monkeys and antelope. 

Like other raw vegans, Pavlina appears either to ignore or not know that humans have different gut anatomy and physiology from the great apes. Milton discusses this in detail in "Primate Diets and Gut Morphology: Implications for Hominid Evolution" also found in Food and Evolution.

Briefly, both of the apes closest to humans by genetic constitution (about 98% identical), chimps and gorillas, are hindgut fermenters.  In chimps and gorillas, the hindgut, or colon, comprises about 52 percent of the total gut volume.  It houses microbes that ferment fiber, converting it to fatty acids that supply up to 65% of the animal’s energy requirements.  In contrast, in humans the hindgut comprises only about 17 percent of total gut volume, and has relatively small microbial population.  At most, microbial fermentation in the hindgut can provide about 10% of human energy requirements. 

Because hindgut fermentation provides the majority of the energy used by a chimp or gorilla, the colon is a vital organ for these animals and they will die if you amputate it.  In contrast, the hindgut is of so little importance to human energy acquisition that humans can live without the colon (as shown by victims of colonectomies).

In the human gut, the small intestine dominates, comprising 67 percent of the total gut volume. 

In great apes, most digestion and absorption occurs in the hindgut, aided by microbes, whereas in humans most digestion and absorption occurs in the sterile small intestine.   Human digestion occurs using enzymes released from the pancreas and small intestine, not microbial action.

Non-human primates have more guts than us.

In short, the largely vegetarian apes are, well, adapted to a largely vegetarian diet composed primarily of cellulose.

OK, let’s say you don’t know all of this and want to eat a raw diet based on the chimpanzee model, but don’t want to lose body weight because you already have a desired body composition.  What would that look like?

I expend about 2500 calories daily, so, using the chimpanzee diet as model, to meet my energy requirements for one day, I would have to eat something like this:

·      2 pints blueberries

·      8 apples (106 g ea., 2.5” diameter)

·      8 bananas (101g ea., 6-7” long)

·      4 large oranges (~3” diameter)

·      4 cups raw bok choy

·      16 cups raw collard greens

·      7 ounces raw antelope or termites (vegans substitute nuts)

This comes to 4778 g, or about 10.5 lbs., of food. 

The typical person consumes only 3-5 pounds of food daily.  Can you imagine downing the volume of food in the menu listed above?  Probably not.  Even raw vegan blogger Steve Pavlina had difficulty getting it down:

“The mental adaptation was more difficult than the physical adjustment. Even during the last week of the trial, I still found it difficult to come to terms with how much food I had to eat each day. For example, on the first day of the trial I ate 8-1/2 pounds of food, and I was 2.8 pounds lighter on the scale the next morning. That really takes some getting used to.”

On this note, Pavlina expressed amazement that he increased his total food and crudely calculated caloric consumption yet lost body mass over a 30 day period of eating only raw food:

“During the 30-day trial, I lost 8.0 pounds, about 1.9 pounds per week. I started at 186.0 and ended at 178.0. My body fat also dropped 1.8 percentage points. As of the morning of Feb 3rd, I weighed 174.0.”

“Before this trial I averaged about 2,000 calories a day on a cooked vegan food diet, so I actually lost weight even as I increased my daily calories by 15%.”

Unbeknownst to him, his weight loss despite increased food intake demonstrates how difficult it is for humans, by nature lacking cellulase, to extract nutrients from raw plant food.  

A Losing Proposition

Since Pavlina reports a loss of 8.0 pounds, we can calculate the bioavailability of calories from his raw diet. He reports that his body fat also dropped 1.8 percentage points, but he does not state his beginning and end body fat percentages so I don’t know if he lost only fat or also lost lean mass.   Generally caloric reduction results in weight loss that is at most 75% fat and at least 25% lean, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he lost no lean mass at all. 

Eight pounds of fat lost would represent 28,000 calories if it was all fat, or a deficit of 933 calories per day.  Assuming 2000 calories as his maintenance based on his report, this indicates that his caloric absorption was only 2000 minus 933, or 1067 calories per day.  So, of the 2298 raw plant food calories he reports eating, he absorbed only 1067 calories, or 46%.  

That means his carbohydrate intake (into the blood) was nowhere near what he believed; he reports 532 g per day, but since we now know that he absorbed only 46% of what he ate, we can conclude that he probably only absorbed about 244 g of the 532g he ate. 

Let’s guess that his low-fat cooked vegan diet supplied 60% of its 2000 calories as carbohydrate (with 30% as fat and 10% as protein).  That would amount to 1200 calories from 300 grams of carbohydrate.  Hence, by going all raw, he may have actually reduced his total carbohydrate intake!

Further, since he reports consuming about 10% of those 1067 absorbed dietary calories as fat, and 933 calories each day came from his fat stores, we can calculate that each day he was actually burning at least 107 calories of dietary fat plus  933 calories of body fat, or 1040 calories of fat daily. Of the 1067 calories from food,  90% was not fat, or 960 calories. 

So his fuel mix was 960 non-fat dietary calories, and 1040 calories from total fat (dietary plus adipose), so during that month he obtained 1040÷2000 = 52% of his calories from fat.  In other words, he was running on a high fat fuel mix, most of the fat coming from his own adipose. 

He thinks he was running on a low fat diet, but if he was, he couldn’t have lost fat weight.  In fact, he was burning a fuel mix of which about 47% was the dreaded saturated animal fat, i.e. his own body fat.  So, if you feel good eating your raw vegan diet, its because you're burning animal fat!

Can you say "Crap!"?

By these calculations it appears that caloric absorption from a completely raw food vegan diet may be as low as 46%.  Given the data I showed above, this means that I would have to eat more than 20 pounds of raw vegetation daily to absorb enough calories to maintain my current body mass and activity levels.

Eating would be a full time job.  Given a 16 hour waking period, I would have to eat 1.25 pounds of food every waking hour to meet my energy needs.   I'd probably spend a good chunk of the time I wasn't eating sitting on the toilet excreting all the undigested carbage.  My life would consist largely of eating and crapping, just like other primates.  Not quite what I had in mind, how about you?

The Raw Deal

Pavlina's experience confirms previous research showing how much difficulty humans have getting adequate energy from raw vegetal foods. For example, Koebnick et al found BMI below 18.5 in 14.7% of males and 25.0% of females eating raw food diets.  Among these raw fooders, the more raw food they ate, and the longer they had been eating “raw,” the lower their body mass.

Beyond body mass,  Koebnick et al also found general malnutrition among the raw fooders resulting in young women losing their menstrual cycles:

“About 30% of the women under 45 years of age had partial to complete amenorrhea; subjects eating high amounts of raw food (90%) were affected more frequently than moderate raw food dieters.”

Most likely, these women were suffering severe iron and vitamin B12 deficiency, just like the subjects of another study by Koebnick’s team, which found B12 deficiency in at least 38% of raw food adherents.  These people also had low HDL concentrations and elevated homocysteine levels.  

If you believe that humans are designed to eat a diet that leaves 38% of people vitamin B12 deficient, 15% of males and 25% of females underweight,  and stops the menstruation in at least 30% of women in their reproductive years, good luck to you.

Who's Toxic Now?

Sadly, raw fooders claim that eating only raw food will detoxify your system.  Apparently they don’t know that by avoiding meat containing vitamin B12, they pump up their blood levels of homocysteine, a potent toxic by-product of protein metabolism. 

So, if you really want to detoxify, go eat a steak.

I shared this post at ParadigmShift Blogshare.

I wrote more on this topic:

The Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

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The Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets: A Primal Perspective

Raw vegan diets are all the rage these days.  Advocates claim that a diet composed exclusively of raw plant foods will support optimal health, protect animals, and save the planet. 

The raw truth is that raw vegan diets don't support health for most people, for a very simple reason:  Humans are not adapted to a raw vegan diet.  For that matter, not even our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, is adapted to a raw vegan diet.

Let's take a critical look at the rationales and effects of raw vegan diets.

Raw Rationale

David Wolfe, raw food advocate, wrote a book entitled Nature's First Law (Don't buy it!).  In this book, he suggests that the "first law" of nature is that food is raw; if not raw, its not food.   He derives this "law" from the observation that no animal other than humans cooks anything before eating it.  Thus, humans break the "law."

Let's try more reasoning like Wolfe's:

• No other animal uses language, therefore humans should not use language.
• No other animal wears clothes, therefore humans should not wear clothes.
• No other animal makes violins, therefore humans should not make violins.
• No other animal writes sonnets, therefore humans should not write sonnets.

These people apparently have not noticed that by their reasoning, we humans probably should not be, well, human. 

And, particularly pertinent to the raw food lifestyle, no other animal uses metal knives, blenders, dehydrators, grinders, or juicers, therefore humans should not process foods with any of these items either.  Yet raw foodists seem plenty happy to apply the knife, high speed blending, mechanical grinding, and juice extraction to food.  

Flimsy Analogies

Wolfe and other raw foodists also are fond of using analogies like this:  "If you set fire to your house, it does not improve the house, it destroys it.  Therefore, we can conclude that applying fire to food can only destroy, not improve it."

Raw vegan blogger Steve Pavlina states it this way:

“Incidentally, if you want to see what happens to protein when you cook it, pluck a hair off your head and put a flame under it. Cooked protein becomes a sticky mess that doesn’t digest well at all. Raw plant foods provide all the protein we need, in the right form for easy assimilation.”

Wolfe and Pavlina have constructed straw man arguments against cooking by conflating it with incineration.   

Simply put,  incinerating a house or human hair with a direct flame is, well, not quite the same thing as cooking.   Cooks don't light food on fire, they use finesse to capture and employ radiant heat arising from flames to alter the physical properties of the foods.  Strictly speaking, it is not the fire that they use, it is the heat.

Does cooking make food less valuable?  On the contrary, skillfully applied heat dramatically increases the nutritional value of plant foods.

Hedren et al performed an experiment designed “to develop an in vitro digestion method to assess the impact of heat treatment, particle size and presence of oil on the accessibility (available for absorption) of alpha- and beta-carotene in carrots.”  Their methods:

“Raw and cooked carrots were either homogenized or cut into pieces similar to chewed items in size. The carrot samples, with or without added cooking oil, were exposed to an in vitro digestion procedure. Adding a pepsin-HCl solution at pH 2.0 simulated the gastric phase. In the subsequent intestinal phase, pH was adjusted to 7.5 and a pancreatin-bile extract mixture was added. Carotenoids released from the carrot matrix during the digestion were extracted and quantified on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).”

Their results:  

“Three percent of the total beta-carotene content was released from raw carrots in pieces. When homogenized (pulped) 21% was released. Cooking the pulp increased the accessibility to 27%. Addition of cooking oil to the cooked pulp further increased the released amount to 39%.”

Look, although they treated the finely chopped (chewed-simulation) carrots with an HCl solution at pH 2.0, only 3 percent of ß-carotene was released.  Don't you think this tells us something?  For example, maybe our gut isn't equipped to adequately digest raw plants as they occur in nature?

The human gut can’t extract high amounts of anything from raw carrots or similar vegetables for one simple principal reason:  our bodies do not produce the enzyme cellulase required to digest and break down the plant cells that contain all the nutrients supplied by fibrous plants.  

Source:  Wikipedia

Almost all of the valuable nutrients in plants occur inside the cells of the plants.  These cells have walls composed of cellulose.  Lacking any enzyme to break down this cell wall, humans must use other means to open the cells to extract the nutrients.  Outside modern industrialized nations, most people apply heat to the food, which causes the juice in the cells to expand and this causes the cells to explode open, making their contents more available for absorption.

Thus, carrots cooked to a soft texture deliver 9 times as much ß-carotene as chewed raw carrots.  This experiment explains why raw foodists love and need their blenders and juicers.  Let’s say some raw food person eschews machinery.   Here’s the data:

• One hundred grams of raw carrot contains 16, 706 potential IU of potential vitamin A activity in the form of carotenes. 
• A human requires about 1000 mcg daily of retinol equivalent (RE) activity from food. 
• If only chewing the carrots, a human will extract about 3% of the carotenes, or 501 IU. 
• 10 IU of ß-carotene from plant foods provides one RE.

From this we can conclude that 100 g of raw carrot provides only 50 RE.  Since a human requires about 1000 RE daily, he would have to eat 20 x 100 g, or 2 kg/4.4 pounds of carrots daily to even have a chance of meeting his vitamin A needs. 

Since the typical person eats only 3-5 pounds of food daily, he would have to eat nothing but carrots.  Two kilos of carrots supplies only 820 calories, assuming that we can extract 100% of available calories from raw plants, or only about 24 calories if we extract calories from chewed carrots at the same 3% rate that we extract ß-carotene (the safer assumption, since all the sugars in carrots are also locked up in the indigestible cells). 

So this guy better be up for spending a lot more time eating to meet his 2500 calorie daily requirement.  How about at least 6 kilos of carrots daily, and possibly 200 kilos daily, to meet your energy requirements?

So the raw fooders fall back on their blenders, which will increase the nutrient delivery  by about 7 times.  Now you only need a mere 600 g/1.3 lbs. of carrots to get enough ß-carotene to have a chance at adequate vitamin A production.  The caloric delivery soars to 84 calories per kilo. Now we’re making some progress.

Perhaps you can begin to see why some people rave about weight loss achieved when they gorge on raw foods.  The caloric delivery can be so low, you may as well be fasting. 

Back to the vitamin A, all of that assumes that he was not one of the approximately 45% of people who don’t convert carotenoids to vitamin A at all. It appears that in the course of human evolution, the activity of ß-carotene 15,15'-dioxygenase (needed to convert ß-carotene to retinol) has declined substantially, such that up to 45% of people do not convert ß-carotene to retinol vitamin A. Hickenbottom et al  found that 45% of 11 men tested did not convert ß-carotene to vitamin A (retinol).  Lin et al found the same in women. Leung et al  identified gene polymorphisms contributing to this variability in carotene conversion capacity. 

Now apply this to calcium.  Take a raw vegetable with a fairly high calcium content, such as collards, which may contain up to 250 mg calcium per 100 g.  Like the ß-carotene in carrots, this mineral lies inside the cells of the collards, surrounded by cellulose that we can’t digest.  This means that we might extract only 3% of the calcium from raw collards, i.e. 7.5 mg per 100 g raw.  A human requires about 750 mg calcium daily, so he’d have to eat 10 kilos of raw collards daily to get adequate calcium.  Let's get chewing!

Actually, one might rightly question whether we can rightly call a food that has gone through a juice extractor, blender, or grinder of any sort "raw," "uncooked,"  or even "unheated."

All of these devices treat the food with friction, and friction always generates heat, the key element of the “cooking” that raw foodists so passionately attack.  One might call the products mimimally heated, but they are heated nonetheless.

Moreover, no other animal has to use blenders to get adequate nutrition from its raw food diet.  If you vegan raw fooders discard cooking because “no other animal does it,” shouldn’t you also discard blenders and juicers for the same reason? 

If your raw food diet only works if you use a blender, I have to wonder what you think your raw food ancestors did without those blenders, only invented in the 20^th century.  So far as I know, no archaeological dig has found blenders or juicers in early human tool kits.  Can you imagine stone age women trying to juice carrots by grinding them against rocks?   Not quite optimal foraging.

I've a few more things to say about the claims of vegan raw fooders.  Until next time, have a steak.

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I've written more on this topic:  

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets, 1

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets, 2

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Another Way Eating Meat Makes Us Smarter

Just read Richard Nikoley's Free The Animal post entitled "The Latest Uh-Oh for the Vegetarians and Vegans: Creatine" which refers to a study just published in the British Journal of Nutrition entitled "The influence of creatine supplementation on the cognitive functioning of vegetarians and omnivores."  

Discussions of how a meat-based diet made us smart  by spurring human evolution usually center around meat providing concentrated calories or essential fatty acids.  This new research suggests that the creatine provided by meat also supports better cognitive function among carnivores compared to vegetarians.

According to the abstract of the BJN article:

Young adult females (n 128) were separated into those who were and were not vegetarian. Randomly and under a double-blind procedure, subjects consumed either a placebo or 20 g of creatine supplement for 5 d. Creatine supplementation did not influence measures of verbal fluency and vigilance. However, in vegetarians rather than in those who consume meat, creatine supplementation resulted in better memory. Irrespective of dietary style, the supplementation of creatine decreased the variability in the responses to a choice reaction-time task.

Memory is essential to learning, so we can conclude that a vegetarian supplemented with creatine will learn better than the same vegetarian not supplemented.  But why not just eat meat, an excellent dietary source of creatine?  As Wikipedia points out:

In humans and animals, approximately half of stored creatine originates from food (mainly from meat). Since vegetables do not contain creatine, vegetarians show lower levels of muscle creatine, but show the same levels after using supplements.

So, take a creatine-depleted vegetarian, feed him/her some meat, and voila, now you have a smarter animal.  I have some experience with this.  All my life I have had an exceptionally good memory, so long as I ate meat; but during the time I spent trying to make a vegetarian diet support my health, I had a significant decline in ability to memorize and recall information, obvious not only to me but to people close to me. 

One author reported on this study using the title "Creatine may beef up brain function" in an online journal focusing on supplements.  Apt, but I'd rather see people beef up brain function by eating real food: beef! 


Vegetarians will likely protest that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) does not presently classify creatine as an essential nutrient because human cells can manufacture it from the amino acids arginine, glycine, and methionine.  However, the IOM's  failure to classify a nutrient as essential fact does NOT mean that the nutrient is not essential.  

The history of choline illustrates these points further.  Adolf Strecker discovered choline, a water-soluble nutrient often grouped with B-vitamins, in 1864.  Mammals manufacture some choline using S-adenosylmethionine, derived from the amino acid methionine, as a raw material.  Because of endogenous synthesis, the Institute of Medicine did not classify choline among the essential nutrients until 1998.  


Choline is another nutrient better supplied by meat and especially eggs than by plant foods, and the Wikipedia entry on choline includes this bit:

Strict vegetarians  who avoid all animal products, endurance athletes and people who drink a lot of alcohol may be at risk for choline deficiency  and may benefit from choline supplements.

In general, people who do not eat many whole eggs may have to pay close attention to get enough choline in their diets. Studies on a number of different populations have found that the average intake of choline was below the Adequate Intake (AI).

The body needs choline to manufacture acetylcholine, the primary neurotransmitter, and choline is required for full development of the central nervous system, particularly the memory center of the brain.

Choline deficiency during fetal development affects memory profoundly throughout life.  In  Choline: Critical Role During Fetal Development and Dietary Requirements in Adults Steven Zeisel reports on animal studies of choline deficiency:

Mothers fed choline-deficient diets during late pregnancy have offspring with diminished progenitor cell proliferation and increased apoptosis in fetal hippocampus....and decremented visuospatial and auditory memory.

In contrast, Zeisel reports that although adult rodents decrement in memory as they age, offspring exposed to extra choline in utero do not show this “senility.”

Zeisel also reports on results of studies of choline supplementation in humans.  Among the findings:

In a double-blind study using normal college students, 25 g of phosphatidylcholine caused significant improvement in explicit memory, as measured by a serial learning task; this improvement might have been due to the improved responses of slow learners. A single oral 10 g dose of choline chloride given to normal volunteers significantly decreased the number of trials needed to master a serial-learning word test. The precursor for formation of phosphatidylcholine, cytidine diphosphocholine (CDP-choline), also has been tested for memory-enhancing effects. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, volunteers were treated with 1000 mg/d CDP-choline or placebo for three months. CDP-choline improved immediate and delayed logical memory. In a second study, oral administration of CDP-choline (500−1000 mg/day) for four weeks to elderly subjects with memory deficits but without dementia resulted in improved memory in free recall tasks, but not in recognition tests. In a double-blind study, patients with early Alzheimer-type dementia were treated with 25 g/day phosphatidylcholine for six months. Modest improvements were observed compared with placebo in several memory tests. However, there are studies in which the choline effect on memory was not observed in normal subjects or in patients with dementias.

Given the rather poor track record of supplements, and the fact that humans are evolutionarily adapted to food, not isolated nutrients, I wonder what results these studies would have gotten if instead of using isolated choline chloride or phosphatydylcholine they had simply advised the subjects to eat 3-6 eggs and more than 8 ounces of meat daily.

Stephan blogged about research showing that choline also prevents and reverses non-alcoholic fatty liver disease even in the context of high sugar intake.  Eat egg yolks for a healthy brain and a healthy liver.

These types of findings indicate that humans have long ago adapted to and become dependent upon meat.  If humans did not need meat, they would have the ability to synthesize optimum amounts of creatine and choline in the absence of dietary meat.  Chances are, dietary creatine is as essential to human health as choline or vitamin B-12. 

History suggests we might wait perhaps a century for the Institute of Medicine to decide that creatine is an essential nutrient.   Meanwhile, we have enough evidence:  Humans need meat for optimum health of the nervous system, and the anthropological and experimental evidence already indicates eating meat can literally make you "smarter" than if you don't eat meat.

High dietary animal protein links to lower population growth and greater longevity

Roger Williams, the biochemist who first identified, isolated, and synthesized pantothenic acid, wrote a book titled Nutrition Against Disease (Pitman, 1971), in which he has a chapter titled "How Can We Delay Old Age?" In this chapter he discusses human population growth, because the goal of extending life span conflicts a bit with the growth of population. He points out that if life spans get extended and population growth also continues, in 200 years "Tokyo, New York, and London would each have populations several times that of the entire present world population."

In this context he remarks that in The Geography of Hunger, the author Josue d Castro states that he thinks that "hunger, particularly protein deficiency, is an important factor in creating the problem of overpopulation." To support his hypothesis, de Castro cites several observations that support, such as the fact that cattle become sterile if overfattened. de Castro also produced the following table indicating that human populations display an inverse relationship between birth rates and amount of dietary animal protein.




Williams comments on this data (collected before the introduction of hormonal contraception):

"There seems, however, to be an interesting principle involve which should be further explored. Nature does take measures to prevent the extinction of a species, and when extinction is threatened––by starvation for example––it may be that an exaggerated sex urge is one of he devices used to perpetuate the race. It may be that this contributes to the high birth rate among people who are ill fed. A parallel is found in the area of plant physiology where t has been observed that plants often grow vegetatively as long as well fertilized, and tend to go to seed (reproduce) only when conditions become adverse.

The contrary possibility that a decrease in human birth rates could automatically be brought about by the provision of certain nutritional factors is at least worthy of study.”

Of interest, international data from 2004 also indicate that healthy life expectancy may also correlate inversely with animal protein intake. The following table based on WHO data shows that nations with lower animal protein intake and higher birth rates (e.g. Mexico, China, Thailand, India) generally have lower life expectancy than nations with higher animal protein intake and lower birth rates (e.g. Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy).



These data suggest that vegetarian diets both increase population growth and decrease life expectancy. It does look like these two phenomena (increased birth rate and decreased life expectancy) arise from a common biological condition, and quite possibly de Castro and Williams have named it: animal protein (and perforce, methionine) deficiency.

Addendum 11/18/11:

I made a couple of important errors in my reasoning in this post:

1.  The reduced fertility found in modern nations with higher protein intake could equally be interpreted as an indication that high intake of animal protein might increase the prevalence of infertility in humans. Thus, the data may indicate that low animal protein intake improves fertility. 

In fact, we have data indicating that high animal protein intake poisons the uterus with ammonia, reducing the viability of embryos.

“These data show that consumption of a high protein [25%] diet results in the excess accumulation of ammonium in the fluid of the female reproductive tract of mice. These high levels of ammonium subsequently impair the formation of the fetal progenitor cells and increase cell death at the blastocyst stage. These data from in vivo-developed mouse blastocysts are similar to those for blastocysts developed in culture in the presence of 300 uM ammonium. Therefore, it is not advisable to maintain mice on a high protein diet. These data have significant implications for animal breeding, and for patients attempting IVF treatment.”

Gardner, D. K., Stilley, K. S., Lane, M., 2004. High protein diet inhibits inner cell mass formation and increases apoptosis in mouse blastocysts developed in vivo by increasing the levels of ammonium in the reproductive tract (abstract). Reprod. Fertil. Dev. 16(2):190.

…amino acid inclusion, especially that of glutamine, significantly increases the level of

ammonia within embryo culture media systems. It was shown that the benefits of amino

acid addition could be annulled by the effect of ammonia build-up, partly from degradation of glutamine over the course of embryo culture, and partly as a result of deamination of amino acids during metabolism. Early embryos appear to be sensitive to levels of ammonia as low as 100 mM and levels above 300 mM yield significant detrimental effects.”

Thompson, J. G., Lane, M., Robertson, S., 2006. Adaptive responses of early embryos to their microenvironment and consequences for post-implantation development. In: Wintour, E. M., Owens, J. A. (Eds.), Early Life Origins of Health and Disease. Adv. Exp. Med. Biol. 573. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 58–69.

2.  At the time the data was collected, the populations with low animal protein intake, high fertility, and low life expectancy also had relatively high infant mortality rates, which drives down the average the life expectancy.  Thus, this data does NOT show that high animal protein intake increases longevity.   Further, although most consider high infant mortality a terrible thing, in fact it is a pretty normal biological phenomenon; most organisms produce far more fertile seeds than surviving offspring.  Modern medical care reduces infant mortality, possibly by preserving lives of weaker, more disease-prone individuals. 

3.  The most long-lived nation on the second table is Japan, but Japanese do not have a 'liberal' animal food intake by U.S. standards, although it is higher than in Mexico, China, Thailand, etc..  However, here again Japan has a low infant mortality rate compared to developing nations, making it look as though adults live longer in Japan than in those developing nations, when in reality the main difference is fewer deaths in infants in Japan versus developing nations.

The Vegetarian Myth Review Part 2

Political Vegetarians

Political vegetarians advocate a meat- or animal-free diet for the social good. These people believe that by eating a vegetarian diet they are increasing the amount of food available for humans, and that this is a good thing, i.e., that it will prevent starvation.

These people believe that every time you eat a steak, chicken leg, or any other animal product, you are depriving starving people of food.

These people also believe that raising animals causes global warming and causes the majority of agriculture-related pollution, and that adoption of a vegetarian diet based on grains would thus simultaneously feed the starving millions of people and create an ecological paradise.

Unfortunately, as Lierre Keith points out in The Vegetarian Myth, these people lack crucial information.

First, they don’t understand the animals. They calculate the amount of grain you must feed to, for instance, a steer, to produce a pound of beefsteak—some say 4.8 pounds—then conclude this wastes resources since we could send that grain to starving people somewhere (more on that later). In a startling non-sequitor, they then conclude that eating beef causes people to starve.

What they miss, Keith points out by quoting Rodney Heithschmidt and Jerry Stuth:

“[H]umankind has historically fostered and relied upon livestock grazing for a substantial portion of its livelihood because it is the only process capable of converting the energy in grassland vegetation into an energy source directly consumable by humans.”

In other words, as Ms. Keith notes:

“Nineteen billion metric tons of vegetation are produced by plants in grasslands and savannas, and we can’t eat them. Humans and ruminants are not naturally in competition for the same meal: This is where the political vegetarians have gone wrong.”

Put otherwise, if we stop raising and eating ruminants, we would in that be refusing to produce food for humans from grass.

Of course, cattle don’t have a natural adaptation to a diet of corn or grains in general. Ruminants display exquisite adaptation to a diet of grass, leaves, and other plant matter indigestible to humans. It doesn’t matter how many pounds of grass it takes to grow a pound of beef, because we can’t eat grass directly. The problem with our food system lies not in omnivory, but in forcing animals to eat diets to which they are not adapted.

Now let’s say we implemented the vegetarian plan. We take all the livestock off grain, and continue to raise the grain. Then we send it to the people starving wherever. Shall we pat ourselves on the back for our benevolence?

No. The moment you dump free grain into an environment of hungry people, you have destroyed the local farm economy and created an unsustainable economy.

No farmer can compete with giveaways. If you give food en masse to a population, the increase in supply and unbeatable price will drive prices down to nothing and put local farmers out of business.

As Ms. Keith puts it, “It may seem counterintuitive, but the last place to put cheap food is near chronically hungry people.” She quotes Lyle Vandyke, the former Canadian Minister of Agriculture:

“Consider a farmer in Ghana who used to be able to make a living growing rice. Several years ago, Ghana was able to feed [itself] and export their surplus. Now, it imports rice. From where? Developed countries. Why? Because it’s cheaper. Even if it costs the rice producer in the developed world much more to produce the rice, he doesn’t have to make a profit from his crop. The government pays him [subsidies] to grow it, so he can sell it more cheaply to Ghana than the farmer in Ghana can. And that farmer in Ghana? He can’t feed his family any more.”

And quoting Oxfam: “Exporters can offer US surpluses for sale at prices around half the cost of production; destroying local agriculture and creating a captive market in the process.”

On top of that, as Daniel Quinn has pointed out, if you give a population an amount of food that could not be produced in the local ecology, this will cause the population to grow to numbers unsupportable by local food production. Increasing grain production, and increasing the availability of grain for human food, will simply increase the human population.

As I wrote in The Garden of Eating:

“Vegetarians assert we should stop eating meat to increase the supply of food for humans. In the mid-1990s, U.S. livestock consumed 130 tons of grain annually, enough to feed about 400 million people. Food supply experts Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), and David Pimentel, Ph.D., of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) explain why the vegetarian idea is misguided: ‘Certainly there would be even more human food available if dependence on livestock was decreased. However, because human population is a function of food availability, the resulting increase in available human food would induce a commensurate rise in population. This population increase would ultimately exacerbate the starvation and malnutrition predicament.’[1]”

Political/environmental vegetarians often make claims about the productivity of vegetarian agriculture as oppose to animal husbandry. For example, the British group Vegfam claims that a 10 acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn, and only two producing cattle. Keith responds:

“ Set aside the fact that a diet of soy, wheat, or corn will result in massive malnutrition—along with fun stuff like kwashiorkor, pellagra, retardation, blindness—and ultimately death. The figure of two [for] cattle might be true if you assume grain feeding, though I can’t make the math come out.”

She then points to Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm as a refutation of the assumptions in the Vegfam calculations. On ten acres of land, Salatin’s grass-based husbandry produces:
3000 eggs
1000 broilers
80 stewing hens
2000 pounds of beef
2500 pounds of pork
100 turkeys
50 rabbits

This would support at least 9 people for a year, and as Keith points out, “in full health,” since people can live on a diet composed solely of the foods above, whereas none of the foods proposed by Vegfam form a complete diet.

In addition, Salatin’s farm produces a few inches of topsoil per year whereas monocultures proposed by Vegfam destroy topsoil.

Keith also addresses claims that livestock consume too much water. She goes through the figures, showing that vegetarian claims don’t hold water, and more importantly, that animals don’t either:

“But most importantly, animals aren’t ever-expanding water balloons. For a steer, almost all of that water will be returned in the form of urine and feces laden with nutrients and bacteria, value-added as it were, to the land that needs it. For a dairy animal, there’s also milk.”

In other words, animals aren’t consuming and destroying water, they are part of nature’s water-flow cycle, essential to fertilization of the land. Vegetarians appear ignorant of this. I liked this passage Ms. Keith penned:

“The political vegetarians, however noble their intentions, are planning a planetary diet in compete ignorance of where food comes from. Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all. Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and typography [sic, I think she meant topography] problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians, like everyone else in an urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. They seem shocked when I ask them what will feed their food. Do plants eat? Their expressions say. They don’t just … happen? There was a time when I didn’t know either, so I’m patient. But eventually the question has to be answered: fossil fuel, or manure?”

Ms. Keith addresses all of the other claims made by political vegetarians against animal husbandry, like that it uses more fuel than monoculture or causes global warming. In fact raising animals on grass is more fuel efficient than raising row crops, and monoculture of row crops has a net effect of releasing carbon into the atmosphere whereas raising ruminants on pasture has the net effect of sequestering carbon. Get a copy for your favorite political vegetarian.


Notes:

1. Hopfenberg R. Pimentel D. Human population numbers as a function of food supply. Environment, Development, and Sustainability 2001;3:1-15.

The Vegetarian Myth Book Review

By Don Matesz


Bottom line: If you believe eating a vegetarian diet improves your moral standing, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will solve world hunger, you need to read this book. If you believe that mass adoption of a vegetarian diet will “save the Earth” from environmental catastrophe, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will give you health and longevity, you need to read this book.

Although Ms. Keith directs her prose to those who eat a vegetarian, particularly a vegan diet, I think everyone needs to read this book. If you believe in agriculture as a way of life, i.e. you believe that agriculture will sustain civilization, and feed people indefinitely, you need to read this book.

Ms. Keith writes from the perspective of a 20-year veteran of vegetarian and vegan dieting who has sustained irreparable damage to her body as a result. As she watched her health deteriorate under the influence of vegan dieting, and made efforts to actually grow her own food, she gradually lost faith in the holy trinity of vegetarianism:

1) Moral vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet reduces bloodshed.
2) Political vegetarianism, based on the belief that widespread practice of a vegetarian diet would produce a sustainable agriculture and social justice.
3) Nutritional vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet produces better health than an omnivorous diet.

In my view, these three legs of vegetarianism are merely logical extensions of the near universal belief in moral, political, social, and nutritional superiority of agri-culture in comparison to hunting-and-gathering culture.

Moral Vegetarians

Moral vegetarianism espouses a principle of non-violence. The advocates wish to eat without killing or stealing from any other organism. As Ms. Keith puts it, the vegetarian nearly prays:

“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.”

This chapter recounts Ms. Keith’s inner and outer struggles with life and death on her path to realizing that, of course, life and death are not really two opposites.

“If killing is the problem, the life of one grass-fed cow will feed me for an entire year. But a single vegan meal of plant babies—rice grains, almonds, soybeans—ground up or boiled alive, will involve hundreds of deaths. Why don’t they matter?”

Throughout this chapter, Ms. Keith shows us how her own moral understanding evolved from the juvenile ethical code of veganism to an adult understanding of how nature really works, as a result of her engaging directly in food production herself. Ms. Keith tells us how, as a vegan attempting to garden, she learned that plants need to eat animal products to thrive. Her garden would not grow without the nitrogen and minerals packed up in blood and bone. Even apple trees eat meat:

“I found one small comfort in The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips. He quotes a book called The Apple Culturist from 1871, recounting the story of an apple tree near the graves of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and his wife Mary Sayles. The roots of the tree were found to have grown in to the graves and assumed the shape of human skeletons while ‘the graves [were] emptied of every particle of human dust. Not a trace of anything was left’”

As she developed her own garden, it attracted other animals. As she puts it, she got “locked in mortal combat with the slugs.” Eventually she had to decide whether to save the slugs or save her garden for her own needs. After much internal struggle, she settled on getting chickens and ducks to eat the slugs. She rationalized that the killing would fall on the ducks and chickens, not herself because “it was their nature, their instinct to hunt insects.” Which led her to ponder:

“Wasn’t death natural? Was it? Or wasn’t it? Which way did I want the answer to fall?

“Because if death was natural—a part of life, not an insult to life—then why was I a vegan?”

Why indeed.

Moral vegetarians believe that agriculture does no damage, that grains and legumes have no blood spilled in their fields. Ms. Keith points out that only someone who has never really understood agriculture could believe this:

“So here is an agriculture without animals, the plant-based diet that is supposed to be so life-affirming and ethically righteous. First, take a piece of land from somebody else, because the history of agriculture is the history of imperialism. Next, bulldoze or burn all the life off it: the trees, the grasses, the wetlands. That includes all creatures great and small: the bison, the grey wolves, the black terns. A tiny handful of species—mice, locusts—will manage, but the other aimals have to go. Now plant your annual monocrops. Your grains and beans will do okay at first, living off the organic matter created by the now-dead forest or prairie. But like any starving beast, the soil witll eat its reserves, until there’s nothing—no organic matter, no biological activity—left. As your yields—your food supply—begin to dwindle, you’ve got two options. Take over another piece of land and start again, or apply some fertilizer. Since the books, pleading and polemical, say that animal products are inherently oppressive and unsustainable, you can’t use manure, bone meal, or blood meal. So you supply nitrogen from fossil fuel. Do I need to add that you can’t produce this yourself, that its production is an ecological nightmare, that one day the oil and gas will run out?

“Your phosphorous will have to be made from rocks. There’s a reason for the popular image that equates hard labor in prison with chopping rocks. How will you mine it, grind it, or transport it without fossil fuel, using only human musculature and without using slavery? …Meanwhile the soil is turning to dust, clogging the rivers, blowing across the continent. In 1934, the entire eastern seaboard was covered in a thick haze of brown, the topsoil of Oklahoma plowed to cotton and wheat, drifting like an angry ghost to cover the eastern cities and further, to ships hundreds of miles out to sea, a final, fitting tribute to the extractive economies of the civilized. This is where agriculture ends: in death. The trees, the grasses, the birds and the beasts are gone, and the topsoil with them. More of the same is no solution.”

So what does she settle on as the ethical solution?

“It’s so simple, as simple, really, as my vegan morality: we need to be a part of the world to know it. And when we join, when we participate, we see that life and death can’t be separated any more than night and day. I will face what is dying to feed me and I will do my best to ensure that it is individuals—cared for, respected—not entire species; that soil—the work of our grandparents for half a billion years—is built, not destroyed; that the rivers keep their waters and their wetlands and that the oil stays in the ground. Only then can I claim the title ‘adult.’”

Ms. Keith’s struggle with to reconcile life and death is a classic example of the suffering endured in a culture based on a juvenile philosophy of dualism. Western philosophy has long suffered from dualistic thought, in which life/mind/male/action/hardness/white is good and death/body/female/rest/softness/black is bad. This has led to a culture that tries to pull nature apart at the seams, to isolate the good from the bad, to kill death and everything that resembles it because of its dimness. Think of how hard we strive to eliminate the night by powering up the lights. It is a losing battle.

Image source: Wikipedia

Chinese philosophers and scientists represented the non-dual nature of nature in the Yin-Yang symbol. Yin represents death and yang represents life. The symbol shows how they mold and feed one another; each ultimately transforming into the other. The play of yin and yang is simply the course of change. Reality moves and this movement naturally produces polar phenomena like life and death. Long ago the Chinese realized that dualistic thought is really a mental illness, a state of mind that does not accurately reflect reality. If you try to eliminate death, you will undermine life; and if you try to exaggerate life, you will also exaggerate death. It makes you crazy.

Next time I will reflect on Ms. Keith’s chapter on Political Vegetarians.

Phytochemical Fallacies?

[For those who already read the first version of this post, I made a mistake while editing and erased all the great commments :-(. But I made some improvements to the content anyway. :-)]

I used to believe that people would derive great benefits from a diet containing large amounts of fruits and vegetables because such foods would supply people with an abundance of “beneficial” phytochemicals. I had gotten this belief from my conventional nutrition education – you can find the claim promoted in most textbooks and popular books on nutrition. Consequently I consumed 15 or more servings of vegetables and fruits every day for many years, and advocated a “produce-dominated” diet in my last book.

However, as I integrated the concept of evolutionary nutrition and studied native diets and health in that context, I gradually came to realize that humans can live quite well without plant foods (witness the Eskimos, Nenet, Masai, and numerous other tribes). This of course led me to question the idea that people need daily doses of phytonutrients to maintain a semblance of health. After all, Eskimos had no cancer on their native diet, yet antioxidant rich vegetables and fruits played little or no role in their daily diets.

Epidemiology Not Impressive

If you examine the evidence frequently trotted out to support the frequent ingestion of phytochemicals from vegetables and fruits, you will notice that advocates of plant-dominated diets rely almost exclusively on epidemiological evidence.

For example, to support a recommendation for consumption of at least 400g of vegetables and fruits daily, the World Cancer Research Institute and the American Institute for Cancer Research cite 4500 epidemiological studies reviewed by 150 scientists as evidence for the cancer-preventive effects of vegetables and fruits.

Sounds impressive, but it does not establish that vegetables and fruits protect against cancer. These studies at most establish that people who have a higher intake of vegetables and fruits have less cancer than people who a lower intake of the same. Since people who have the habit of eating lots of produce very likely have higher income, or other habits that may also protect against cancer, like refraining from smoking, taking less alcohol, exercising regularly, getting sun exposure (vitamin D), or eating less sugar, we can’t conclude from these studies that their higher intake of produce is what is actually responsible for their reduced risk of cancer.

In science, clinical trials provide the best way to test a hypothesis. If we hypothesize that increased vegetable and fruit intake will provide health benefits to humans, our best evidence will come from studies where we get people to increase their consumption of vegetables and fruits, then measure outcomes, preferably hard endpoints like incidence of heart disease or cancer, but at least soft endpoints like changes in blood characteristics that we have reason to believe will influence health outcomes.

Clinical Trials

In clinical trials, it appears that increasing human intake of vegetables and fruits either may have little or no benefits, or could even cause injury.

As discussed by Stephan in his two part series The Diet-Heart Hypothesis: Oxidized LDL , we have good evidence to indicate that oxidized LDL causes atherosclerosis. Since vegetables and fruits supply lots of putative “antioxidants,” we could recommend increasing vegetables and fruits for prevention of heart disease if we could show that it would reduce oxidation of LDL.

Van het Hoff et al found increased intake of vegetables and fruits did raise serum levels of vitamin C and carotenoids (ie, {alpha}-carotene, ß-carotene, lutein, zeaxanthin, and ß-cryptoxanthin), but this did not result in reduced oxidation of LDL. They wrote:

“Despite the significant increases in plasma concentrations of vitamin C and carotenoids in the vegetable- and carotenoid-supplemented groups, the total antioxidant activity of plasma, measured as ferric-reducing ability, remained unchanged (Table 3). Furthermore, consumption of the diets supplemented with vegetables or carotenoids did not enhance protection of LDL against copper-induced oxidation ex vivo. Neither the changes in lag time before onset of oxidation nor the maximum rate of oxidation were significantly different from those found in the control group.”


In Changes in Dietary Fat Intake Alter Plasma Levels of Oxidized Low-Density Lipoprotein and Lipoprotein(a), Silaste et al report the results of feeding two diets to thirty-seven healthy women. Both diets contained a reduced amount of total and saturated fat, while one diet was low in vegetables and the other was high in vegetables, berries, and fruit.

As reported by Silaste et al, “During the low-fat, low-vegetable diet, the subjects consumed 2 portions of both fruit and vegetables daily. On the low-fat, high-vegetable diet, they consumed 4 to 5 portions of fruit or berries and 5 to 6 portions of vegetables.”

Regarding fat intake, “The total fat intake was 70 g per day at baseline and decreased to 56 g (low-fat, low-vegetable diet) and to 59 g (low-fat, high-vegetable diet). The saturated fat intake decreased from 28 g to 20 g and to 19 g, and the amount of polyunsaturated fat intake increased from 11 g to 13 g and to 19 g (baseline; low-fat, low-vegetable; low-fat, high-vegetable; respectively).”

What happened? “Surprisingly, we found that in response to the low-fat, low-vegetable and the low-fat, high-vegetable diets, the average plasma levels of OxLDL-EO6 increased compared with the baseline diet.” In fact, the median plasma OxLDL-EO6 –oxidized LDL—increased by 27% in response to the low-fat, low-vegetable diet and 19% in response to the low-fat, high-vegetable diet. Also, the Lp(a) concentration was increased by 7% and 9%, respectively.

The study design used a randomized crossover design for each of the study diets, which increased confidence in the conclusion that both of the interventions – cutting fat and increasing produce – resulted in increased oxidation of LDL.

To summarize the results of this study by Silaste et al:
1. Reducing saturated fat intake by 8 to 9 grams, and replacing it with 2 to 8 grams of polyunsaturates, resulted in an increase of 27% in oxidized LDL.
2. Taking this (#1) as a second base, increasing fruit and vegetable intake from four portions daily (low fat, low vegetable and fruit diet) to nine to eleven portions daily (low fat, high vegetable and fruit diet) countered the effect of increasing polyunsaturates, dropping the increase in oxidation of LDL from a 27% increase to a 19% increase compared to the "high fat" control diet.
3. Doubling fruit and vegetable intake did not completely counter the increased oxidation brought about by decreasing total and saturated fat intake and increasing polyunsaturated fat intake.
4. The group with the highest intake of fruits and vegetables (nine to eleven portions daily) had the greatest (9%) increase in Lp(a).

Research suggests that increased Lp(a) increases risk for coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, atherosclerosis, thrombosis, and stroke. Marcovina et al found that vegetarian Bantus have 40% higher levels of Lp(a) than fish-eating Bantus. Combining these two studies (Marcovina and Silaste), we get the impression that eating more fish will decrease your Lp(a) levels and reduce your risk of coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, atherosclerosis, thrombosis, and stroke, while eating nine to eleven servings of fruits and vegetables may increase your Lp(a) and very slightly increase your risk of those diseases!

In the WHEL trial, Pierce et al randomly assigned about 3000 women previously treated for early stage breast cancer to two groups: one received “a telephone counseling program supplemented with cooking classes and newsletters that promoted daily targets of 5 vegetable servings plus 16 oz of vegetable juice; 3 fruit servings; 30 g of fiber; and 15% to 20% of energy intake from fat” while the other received literature describing the "5-A-Day" dietary guidelines.

Over a four year period, they found that this intensive education resulted in increases in intake of fruits and vegetables and decreases in fat intake: “servings of vegetables, +65%; fruit, +25%; fiber, +30%, and energy intake from fat, −13%.” They measured plasma carotenoid concentrations and these validated changes in fruit and vegetable intake.

After 7.3 years of follow-up care, the two groups had almost identical invasive cancer incidence, 16.7% in the intervention group, and 16.9% in the control group. Increasing intake of produce appeared to have no effect on cancer recurrence despite changes in blood levels of antioxidants. It neither reduced nor increased the incidence of recurrence. Since the incidence of recurrence was the same in both groups, this leaves open the possibility that the intake of fruits and vegetables increased the risk of recurrence. Unfortunately, subjects in both arms of this study, so we can't tell if the intake of produce contributed to recurrence. They needed an arm with no intake of vegetables and fruits to find out whether fruits and vegetables might have had an adverse effect.

For another example, consider “Green tea extract only affects markers of oxidative status postprandially: lasting antioxidant effect of flavonoid-free diet.” This title tells all – a flavonoid-free diet produced a lasting antioxidant effect. The abstract reported: “Since no long-term effects of GTE [green tea extract] were observed, the study essentially served as a fruit and vegetables depletion study. The overall effect of the 10-week period without dietary fruits and vegetables was a decrease in oxidative damage to DNA, blood proteins, and plasma lipids, concomitantly with marked changes in antioxidative defence.”

So giving up fruits and vegetables for 10 weeks reduced oxidative damage to DNA, blood proteins, and plasma lipids; that means that eating fruits and vegetables increases damage to DNA, blood proteins, and plasma lipids.

How can that be?

For anyone convinced that flavonoids are just beneficial “antioxidants,” this evidence produces cognitive dissonance. How could eating vegetables and fruits possibly increase damage to DNA, blood protein, and blood lipids?

Now, taking an evolutionary tact, let us ask, why do plants produce flavonoids? Well, they provide photoprotection, necessary if you sit out in the sun all day.

But that's not all. Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead. From a natural selection standpoint, any plant that produces and stores in its tissues chemicals that will injure, sterilize, or kill predators will have a marked selective reproductive advantage over less-equipped plants. Well, it turns out that flavonoids also function as pesticides!

In “Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural)” Ames et al “estimate that Americans eat about 1.5 g of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than they eat of synthetic pesticide residues.” This natural pesticide intake includes compounds in coffee (caffeine, chlorogenic acid, neochlorogenic acid, caffeic acid), phenols (several hundred mg daily, in tea, berries, etc.), flavonoids and glucosinolates (another several hundred mg), potato and tomato toxins (a hundred mg), and saponins from legumes (peanuts included).

Naturally, they state, “The human intake of these toxins varies markedly with diet and would be higher in vegetarians.” Hmmm….food for thought.

Many people seek out “organic” foods to avoid pesticides. They may not know that plants grown “organically” actually have higher levels of these natural pesticides than plants grown conventionally. You will likely increase your total natural pesticide exposure by eating organic produce.

These natural phytochemicals don't appear benign – as Ames et al note, of the 52 of these natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal tests, 27 have proven carcinogenic, and these occur in many common foods. In isolation, in high enough doses, they have toxicity – and carcinogenicity – comparable to similar doses of synthetic chemicals.

Some will argue that the synergistic effect of multiple ingredients in plants reduces this toxicity. But I doubt that. Remember, the plants that survived evolution were those that either poisoned or created symbiotic relationships with predators. These chemicals may make plants excellent medicines -- many have antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal, and general antimicrobial effects, just what a plant needs to survive.

With this knowledge, you may no longer feel surprised that eating too many servings of vegetables and fruits – especially raw vegetables – might actually cause problems such as increased Lp(a), oxidized LDL, or damaged DNA. These natural pesticides might not kill you outright as they might an insect or worm, but they sure could cause digestive distress, cellular damage, or even neurological effects (like caffeine). You can learn more about that at Plant Poisons and Other Rotten Stuff.

The dose makes the poison. Most likely, we don't consume carcinogenic levels of these poisons when eating typical quantities of fruits and vegetables. Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.

Natural selection also favored the survival of plant predators (animals) that have the ability to detoxify these plant poisons. Our liver does this; but one must wonder, at what intake of produced -- especially high toxin vegetables like leaves -- does one start burdening the liver's detoxification systems?

In many cases, these poisons do have a bad taste (usually bitter) and adverse effects on the GI tract. Traditional cultures with plant based diets got around these toxins with cooking and other processing techniques. I consider unwise the modern raw-food vegetarian who does not follow their example.