The China Study
September 7th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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A terrific health book I’m reading now is The China Study by T. Colin Campbell. This book is currently one of the top 500 selling books at Amazon, with a 4.5 star rating.
According to the New York Times, this book is based on “… findings from the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” In my opinion it’s one of the most important books on diet ever written.
The China Study is incredibly readable and presents solid and convincing evidence that the best possible diet for overall health, energy, weight control, and disease prevention is a whole foods plant-based diet. Even reducing the percentage of animal foods in one’s diet from 10% to 0% was found to be significantly beneficial.
One thing I really like about this book is how simple the principles are. It boils down to eating unrefined plant foods, and it explains why that’s all you really need to do. No calorie counting, worrying about carbs vs. proteins or other such nonsense. This is the same type of diet that Morgan Spurlock’s girlfriend put him on after he ruined his health on an all fast food diet in the movie Supersize Me. In fact, she also wrote a book about that called The Great American Detox Diet, which also promotes the benefits of a whole-foods vegan diet. Her diet quickly restored Spurlock to a state of health after he made the movie.
My personal experience with this diet
One thing I’ve found is that when I eat a whole foods vegan diet (as opposed to a more junky vegan diet that includes refined or processed foods), I can eat as many calories I want and not gain weight. In fact, I can eat 3000 or 4000 calories a day and actually lose weight, even if I don’t exercise at all and do nothing but sedentary desk work. I can eat pounds and pounds of high-calorie, even high-fat foods like nuts and banana-nut shakes, and it simply doesn’t put on excess body fat. Plus (after the initial detox period of about a week), I feel incredible when I eat this way.
The calorie theory is just plain wrong. The reason that calorie restriction seems to help with weight loss is that if you keep your overall diet the same and then restrict calories, you’re also restricting your intake of junk foods (and by “junk” I mean anything that isn’t a whole natural food like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes). So when you cut down on calories, you’re also cutting down on toxins. But if you cut out the toxic foods completely, I’ve found (as have many others) that you can eat like a pig — as many calories as you want — and you’ll even lose weight if you have extra pounds to shed. It’s not the quantity of food that matters, but the quality.
So where does that weight loss come from? The calorie theory suggests that fat is your body’s way of storing excess energy, but another theory is that fat is your body’s way of storing excess toxins. I can’t say the second theory is perfectly accurate, but in my experience it’s far more accurate than the first theory. If I cut back on refined foods in my diet, it seems to allow my body to catch up on toxin elimination, which burns fat off like crazy. Losing 5 pounds in a week isn’t uncommon. I have a body fat measuring device which seems to be fairly accurate, and I can see my body fat dropping when I lose weight from eating this way.
When my wife and I first went vegan in 1997 (after being lacto-ovo vegetarian for several years), we each lost 7 pounds in the first 7 days. But we didn’t restrict calories at all. The weight loss came from our bodies dumping a lot of stored junk that it finally had the chance to eliminate. I’ve read other stories of people losing 25-30 pounds in the first 30 days after switching to this kind of diet. Even Tony Robbins tells a story of losing 30 pounds in 30 days after switching to a similar diet. That’s basically impossible with the calorie theory, but it makes sense if you buy the toxin theory.
And as the China Study points out, this diet isn’t only the best one (and the easiest) for long-term weight loss, but it’s also the best diet for the prevention and reversal of every major diet-related disease. Plus it’s the diet that will leave you feeling your best.
A side effect I’ve found is that this is also the best diet for me emotionally. When I eat this way, I find that my emotional “immune system” is at peak performance. I experience far fewer negative emotions and far more positive ones. I feel much more emotionally resilient. Often I’ll have a background feeling of euphoria that lasts for days at a time. This is what good health is supposed to feel like. If you have trouble with negative emotions, it’s very likely your diet is the culprit. No amount of discipline is going to matter if the foods you eat are throwing your endocrine system out of balance. Of course, the first week or so after I switch to this diet, I go through the male equivalent of PMS — as my body rebalances itself, I experience major mood swings, and there’s no living with me. I walked around feeling generally pissed off at everything. But after the initial adjustment period, I soon settle into a prolonged feeling of general happiness, and external events are rarely able to knock me into states like stress or anger.
It’s truly sad that most people never experience this state of being in their entire lives. What most people think of as their default state of feeling “normal” is probably around a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, where a 10 is how energetic and positive they’d feel on a whole foods, plant-based diet. But since they’ve never even experienced a 4 (except perhaps under the influence of illegal substances), they have no way of knowing what it’s like. The best comparison I can give is that if you’ve ever meditated and experienced that deep feeling of relaxation in your mind with a mild feeling of euphoria, imagine what it would be like to experience that state around the clock as your default. That’s not perfectly accurate, but it’s close enough. At least that’s how it feels to me. YMMV.
Yet another side effect is that I seem to think much better when I eat this way. I can concentrate very deeply for long periods of time without being distracted. I can hold more thoughts in my head, tackle more difficult problems, and overall I just have a much greater sense of mental clarity. When I devolve into eating refined foods, I feel as if I have a fog of brain.
Although switching to this type of diet can be very difficult, maintaining it is actually very easy. It’s the same as with changing any other kind of habit. Establishing the habit is tough, but once it’s established, you’re on autopilot.
I eat far more interesting and varied foods on this diet than I ever did as a meat-eater. Some of my favorite foods are nori maki (nori-rice rolls with veggies and avocado), guacamole, banana-nut shakes, and oatmeal-apple cookies. Plus I love spicy foods, so my diet is anything but bland. Being able to eat unlimited quantities of these foods is very nice. I’d say right now I’m probably averaging about 3500 calories a day and not gaining weight. Eating a high toxin diet and having to drop to about 2000 calories doesn’t sound very appealing. I would miss second-breakfast. 
I want to stress that “vegan” isn’t really a diet per se. Vegan just means the absence of all animal products, but you could eat a vegan diet of nothing but junk food like french fries, candy, and soda, or you could eat an all raw, whole foods diet. Both are vegan, but there’s a huge difference between them. Eating vegan by itself isn’t enough to guarantee good health. Some vegans eat a lot of junk, and their health suffers for it. The same goes for vegetarian. Eliminating animal products is a good step, but it’s not the whole she-bang. Incidentally, many people now recommend giving up dairy before giving up meat. Dairy products are among the most unhealthy garbage you could possibly want to put in your body.
If you’d like to bypass those unhealthy fad diets found in books with photos of fat doctors on the cover and read some genuine long-term research into what really works across the board (weight control, disease prevention, high energy), read The China Study. It will open your eyes to a much healthier way of eating.
September 7th, 2005 at 1:50 am
My personal experience with diet Paragraph 2:
“It’s not the quantity of food that matters, but also the quantity”
Did you mean “quality” here?
September 7th, 2005 at 2:04 am
Well, this article really has a strong point. Thanks, Steve, it will make me think again about switching my diet. Last time I failed to resist my surge for a nice, fat, juicy piece of fried pork, with some onions and vinegar… yum..
That would be surely hard to resist, though I suppose I can let it go for a ‘trial’ period.
The other thing concerning me though is the price of a healthy vegan diet.
We have many sorts of fruits and vegetables here, like, say, potatoes, onions, carrots, tomatoes, plums, apples etc, and the prices are generally acceptable. For the tropical and/or exotic fruits that’s something quite different.
How do you think, would the standart northern-hemisphere-temperate-zone veggies do? With no bananas, coconuts etc?
September 7th, 2005 at 2:39 am
Steve, I have to contradict you. Please excuse my less than perfect English – I am not a native speaker.
I was on a vegetarian diet for almost 2 years. I used to eat varied vegetarian meals. I kept eggs and milk at a minimum, so I was close to vegan.
At first the vegetarian diet improved my well-being and health. In the first months I felt great.
After 2 years, however, I started to feel worse, my immunity was bad (I was getting lots of colds), my memory and ability to think logically were obviously weakened.
I went to a doctor and he said that the symptoms I was experiencing were due to lack of protein input, and that I should start eating meat.
I started eating meat, and in about 2 weeks I was feeling great again, my immunity, memory and logical thinking were already starting to recover.
This is my genuine experience with vegetarianism. I know that you have a very different experience.
Which experience is true – yours, or mine? I think BOTH experiences are true.
Maybe we have different metabolism types.
So – my conclusion is – for some people a vegan diet may be the best thing ever.
For some other people (me included) the vegetarian or vegan diet may be a bad think, and lead to general weakness and health problems.
In the mean time I have spoked with other doctors, and one of the doctors told me he had several pacients with problems caused by vegetarianism.
Their symptoms were similar to mine, but more severe, and also included edemas (I am not sure if this is the proper term in English – it means water retention in the body) caused by a lack of protein. However, most of them believed so strongly in vegetarianism that they didn’t want to change their diets.
September 7th, 2005 at 3:40 am
“It’s not the quantity of food that matters, but also the quantity.” – I’m guessing that second quantity is supposed to be quality.
September 7th, 2005 at 4:32 am
Fixed the quantity-quality typo.
@Dan: Whether or not a vegan diet is one that everyone can thrive on is an area of active study (and controversy). It works for me and millions of others, but I’ve certainly heard other stories similar to yours. It’s good that you experimented. However, there are many variations of ways to eat vegan — as I mentioned in the post above, “vegan” is simply the absence of animal products, so that doesn’t really tell me anything about what you DID eat, only what you didn’t.
I can easily eat vegan and feel lousy — if I eat too many processed foods or sweets.
I can also eat vegan and feel great, if I fill my diet with a variety of raw fruit and vegetable foods.
Most doctors know extremely little about vegan/vegetarian nutrition, so to play it safe, if they see you made a dietary change that seemed not to work, they’ll commonly recommend going back to how you used to eat. You don’t need to go to a doctor to get that kind of thoughtless recommendation though — any friend will do. It generally doesn’t take a doctor more than 5 minutes to make such a recommendation. Did your doctor even go through the process of classifying what subset of the vegetarian diet you ate, and did you both consider other variations of eating vegetarian? Like vegan, vegetarian isn’t really a diet — it’s only the absence of certain foods.
Some people who don’t feel good as vegans feel even better when they eat an all raw diet, much better than they did as meat eaters, even though it’s still a subset of the vegan diet. Others swear by macrobiotics (another subset). My wife and I must have about two dozen vegan cookbooks, and no two are really the same “diet.”
There are huge health differences within variations of vegan diets, just as there are within meat eating. I could easily say I don’t feel good as a meat-eater if I ate only beef around the clock. But like like veganism, being a meat-eater isn’t really a diet — it only defines the superset of what one considers edible.
September 7th, 2005 at 5:35 am
Steve,
I’m assuming it would work fine from an exercise perspective. Have you had any issues with that? It certainly doesn’t seem like you have.
I’m looking forward to listening to the podcast today!
Josh
September 7th, 2005 at 6:03 am
If fat is storing toxic crud then I suppose it’s a bad thing to lose a lot of fat very quickly. As the fat melts away doesn’t it dump the stored toxins into your bloodstream?
If you lose fat slowly, your body only has to handle a little bit each week of that waste at a time. If you drop a large amount of fat all at once your body is suddenly faced with a huge surge of nasty goo all at once. That can’t be good for you.
September 7th, 2005 at 6:34 am
Dan,
I believe you are correct in assuming that your metabolism type is different than someone who thrives on a vegan diet. It’s a strange concept that each of us has our own unique metabolic type, but it was a necessary evolutionary adaptation that humans made over thousands of years to optimally process the food available around them. Traditional Alaskan Eskimos eat large quantities of fat and several pounds of meat a day. They are extremely healthy. The Bantu tribes in Africa eat a very low-fat, almost-vegetarian diet. They are extremely healthy.
The key is to figure out your metabolic type. Dr. Mercola offers a free metabolic type test and there is a much more thorough and comprehensive test contained in the book The Metabolic Typing Diet.
I believe carb types are very well suited to a vegan or vegetarian diet while protein types and mixed types may not fare as well.
September 7th, 2005 at 6:39 am
A good deal of the work seems credible, however, the author fails to review other researchers who have shown, for example, that diets that include fish without meat, also reduce cardiovascular disease. Further, the study fails to account for possible genetic variables underlying the Oriental population and its health risks; moreover, the China diet although a healthy one, is not one that has been specifically studied in the United States. Although the results are provocative, they are not fully convincing. We don’t really know what the Chinese died of during the study, probably infectious diseases among others, and if these diseases of several decades ago were excluded, based on modern medicine, I suspect that the results would be far less dramatic. In summary, the author, a respected scientist, and his son, a writer, have tried to convert some research into the latest diet book, and regrettably, they fail to disclose the fundamental weaknesses of the approach.
September 7th, 2005 at 6:52 am
@Sukotto: Yes, when you’re detoxing, your blood actually becomes dirtier as your cells release stored toxins into the bloodstream. However, the body seems to do a great job of regulating this process to keep it manageable. When you stop consuming so many toxins, the body is able to drop fat quickly and catch up on eliminating the toxins. In the first week this can lead to aches, pains, and mood swings. It’s similar to the effects of giving up caffeine.
@Josh: I found this type of diet greatly beneficial for exercise. I ran a marathon eating this way and did lots of long runs along the beach when I lived in Marina del Rey. I also had great endurance when sparring at Tae Kwon Do, so the longer the match went, the better I would do.
September 7th, 2005 at 6:52 am
I’d like to point out that by definition, a healthy diet is one that makes a person healthy. There are a definite set of things that a body needs in proper amounts in order to maintain its health. There are other things that are generally harmful to the body. Thus, health problems (as they related to diet), are caused by:
1. Not eating enough of what the body needs
2. Eating excess of what the body needs
3. Eating things that the body doesn’t need and cannot deal with
The terms vegetarian, vegan, etc. refer to sources of food, rather than what the food contains. As a result, those labels has no bearing on the healthfulness of the diet.
Given that the world has many healthy carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores, it is safe to say that there are a wide variety of diets that are healthy.
September 7th, 2005 at 7:54 am
Why are dairy products unhealthy? I never heard of that.
September 7th, 2005 at 8:10 am
> Traditional Alaskan Eskimos
> eat large quantities of fat
> and several pounds of meat
> a day. They are extremely
> healthy.
… because their meat diet includes a lot of fish which includes Omega-3 fats, which protect the cardio-vascular system.
> Why are dairy products
> unhealthy? I never heard
> of that.
Some people can’t digest milk because they lack a certain enzyme (which they had during childhood).
September 7th, 2005 at 8:16 am
@Peter: Answering that question could easily fill a book. It’s sort of like asking, “Why is raw sewage unhealthy?” A better question to ask might be, “Why would anyone think it’s healthy to begin with?” And the answer there is… hundreds of millions of marketing dollars. People believe milk is healthy simply because that’s what we’ve been told over and over, year after year by the people who sell it.
Perhaps I’ll address this topic in more detail in future blog posts, but here’s a decent starter article by Dr. McDougall:
http://www.notmilk.com/tudrmac.html
Here’s some more info you may find of interest:
http://www.all-creatures.org/health/milk.html
And here:
http://www.all-creatures.org/health/shouldnti.html
September 7th, 2005 at 9:33 am
Steve –
As part of my transitional spiritual journey, I re-commenced regular “fasting” (modified) two years ago in June.
As a modified – not a “true” – fast, I go for various durations (the shortest being 6 days, so far, and the longest being 40). Generally I start off with liquids for two days and then switch to vegan (after two days of no solid foods, you can imagine how good raw fruits and veggies taste – even though they are without dressing!). The change in energy state by the 4th day is, as you say, euphoric and my body detoxes intensely.
On the longer “fasts,” after the first week I would add meats (measured and weighed – usually cottage cheese, poultry or fish) and other dairy and two tablespoons of fat to the program, but primarily stayed with the veggies. During this phase though, it now occurs to me after reading your post, the euphoric feeling y would drop, although with weighing and measuring portions not anything close to the pre-fast low-energy levels. At that point, I still have a tremendous increase in mental and physical energy compared to pre-fasting.
I assumed the euphoria would level off because my body had adjusted to the change in intake. I’ll have to take another look at that.
And of course, consistent with your position on the matter, when I break fast, and go back to my regular dairy, meat, sugar and processed food diet (according to the USDA “Food Pyramid”), my energy gradually begins to drop and after about a month, or maybe two, I’m back to normal pre-fast energy levels – even if I continue weighing and measuring to get some discipline back into my meals.
For me, my current program is primarily about increasing my spiritual connection during the fast, and it works wonderfully for that.
But to think I could carry that kind of energy with me even when I’m not fasting is intriguing – So, I think the vegan thing is definitely something I want to take a look at, in conjunction with my spiritual fasting program.
Yours, Anton
September 7th, 2005 at 9:46 am
I have been a vegetarian for over 15 years. I tried a vegan diet a couple of years ago, and found it did not work for me. I now started a vegan diet again a couple of weeks ago. I think Steve is right that a lot of people that find a vegan diet does not work for them eat too many processed foods (cookies, potato chips etc.)
I do not agree with the notion that as long as you eat whole foods everything is okay, though. A peanutbutter sandwhich is whole food, but not that healthy at all.
I think a vegan diet could work for nearly everyone if they:
- ate less grains (and only in whole form – no wholewheat bread)
- ate much more greens
- ate more beans (lentils, chickpeas etc.)
A good MD on this topic is Dr Fuhrman (www.drfuhrman.com). He wrote a book: Eat to Live, and recently a new book about children’s health: Disease Proof Your Child. He claims almost all adult cancers are caused by what the patient ate as a child.
By the way: Eskimo’s are not that healty at all. They have the highest rate of osteoporosis in the world, for example (caused by excess protein, probably).
September 7th, 2005 at 9:50 am
I don’t know if I just didn’t see it when you posted the notmilk.com website last time, but I see that they now have at least some information on what to drink as an alternative:
http://www.notmilk.com/alternatives.html
The site still might turn off people because it doesn’t look professional, but at least it has a lot more information than just “Milk is bad for you”. Of course, I wish I had a better alternative for a bowl of cereal than to make my own soy milk. Is buying soy milk at the store really that bad?
September 7th, 2005 at 9:50 am
What makes a food ‘processed’? Boiling it? Broiling it? What about the oatmeal-apple cookies? Those sound processed, but I got no idea, eating pure raw seems hard, at least for the vegetables, fruits are eaten raw most of the time, so, piece of cake, anways, I’ll give it a shot for a couple of weeks to see how it goes, nice article!
September 7th, 2005 at 10:24 am
lena,
It’s unfortunate that there are some Eskimos today that live short lifespans and suffer from osteoporosis. However, all research I have found shows that this did not occur until the Eskimos began to eat “white man’s” food, mainly grains. The metabolic system of an Eskimo seems to be designed to use protein and fat much more efficiently than starches and therefore grains cause them all sorts of problems.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:27 am
@Guillermo: I wouldn’t consider “cooking” processing. Processed foods would include white bread, crackers, potato chips, cheese, ice cream, and other items that have been significantly altered from their original natural ingredients. Processing of this nature destroys many nutrients, and attempting to restore them via enrichment or fortification doesn’t come close to correcting the damage.
As for the oatmeal-apple cookies, they’re actually raw and uncooked. I make them from a blend of oats, shredded apples, almonds, cashews, raisins, and dates. Everything gets chopped up in a food processor and then formed into cookie shapes. Then I dehydrate them for about 12 hours in a dehydrator at 90 degrees F, which gives them the consistency and taste of oatmeal cookies. My five-year old daughter loves them. The sweetness comes from the dates and raisins, and the fat comes from the nuts. It takes about 10 minutes of prep to make them. It’s the kind of cookie you can eat all day if you wanted to. I don’t consider this a processed food because none of this preparation significantly alters the nutritional value of the food. Cooking destroys many nutrients, but dehydration at low temperatures doesn’t.
It’s creative foods like this that makes the raw food diet very manageable and interesting. They’re filling, taste great, and don’t take much effort to make. The first time I tried the raw diet, I only made it three days because I ate nothing but raw fruits and veggies and salads, and it quickly became mind-numbingly boring. Later I took the time to educate myself on how raw foodists really eat and some of the more interesting creations that are possible.
A few times I’ve made an all-raw carrot cake with whipped cream topping. The “cake” is a mixture of shredded carrots, fresh cocunuts, ground nuts, spices, and many other ingredients. The “whipped cream” is a blend of cashews, walnuts, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and dates. It’s absolutely delicious, and nothing is cooked or processed. Before I learned these types of recipes, I thought all raw foodists just ate plain fruits and veggies and salads. I’m sure some do, but that doesn’t seem to be too common because most people (including me) would find it downright dull.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:42 am
A peanut butter sandwich is not healthy if you’re using Skippy and Wonder Bread.
But make an almond butter sandwich on sprouted grain bread, and it’s wonderfully healthy and rich in nutrients.
Peanuts contain high amounts of mold, which produce one of the most deadly carcinogens known to man: Aflatoxin. Peanuts are not really a nut, they are a legume. They are grown in moist, shady soil. The best peanuts are put into cans. The worst, the ones with mold, get ground up into peanut butter. Plech.
If you must eat peanut butter make sure it’s organic, but it’s better to switch to almond or cashew butter for health reasons.
September 7th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
If moldy peanuts are used to make peanut butter, what prevents people from getting sick when consuming the peanut butter?
September 7th, 2005 at 12:50 pm
@Chi Shen: Actually they do get “sick” in a way. The mold floats through your blood stream (I’ve seen photos of mold in the blood after the consumption of certain foods — it can be seen with a certain type of blood test). Your immune system then has to take care of the mold. While the problem isn’t normally big enough to make you feel common disease symptoms as you would with a cold or flu, it can reduce your overall feeling of energy. Plus it can make you more susceptible to colds and flus by diverting your immune system resources.
In a healthy individual the immune system is strong and can handle problems like mold, yeast, and fungus in the blood. But if the problem becomes chronic and the immune system can no longer handle the load, then noticeable disease systems begin to appear.
What most people don’t realize though is that not feeling highly energetic and alert as your default state means that on some level, you’re already sick. It’s just that the problem hasn’t gotten so bad yet that your immune system has to resort to drastic measures. When the problems becomes too great, your body will force you to help it eliminate the overload of toxins via sneezing, coughing, sweating, vomiting, and all the other symptoms of disease. Disease is your body’s way of speeding up toxin elimination — the symtoms of disease are in fact the body’s way of curing a pre-existing imbalance that has gotten way out of control. So in a way it has to shut you down, catch up on the overload, and then reboot you.
September 7th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
I don’t know about the calorie thing, Steve. It’s way too easy to under- or overestimate calories. I would love to see somebody who’s successfully been on a whole foods vegan diet take a week to weigh all their food by gram weight, break out the heart rate monitor, and compare everything using software like NutriBase to get a more accurate estimate of calories-in/calories-out. I bet you’re eating less calories than you think — it would be really hard to eat 3,000+ calories of whole foods. That’s a LOT of veggies.
For example, In-N-Out french fries (mmm) are 400 calories for 125 grams. For fast food, In-N-Out has pretty reasonable serving sizes — I’d guess that’s about 1.5 cups of french fries. For 120g of celery, it’s only 17 calories. You’d have to eat about 23 cups of diced celery for the same calorie intake as one serving of In-N-Out fries.
So, it’s easy to be full on less calories with a whole foods vegan diet. That doesn’t mean that you can’t gain weight by eating more whole foods. It’s just harder.
September 7th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
Ah I see — that makes sense.
After reading these posts, I’m quite wary of eating processed foods! I don’t eat a lot of processed foods by upbringing, but I often eat dry cereal with milk in the morning for breakfast. Is there anything in particular regarding cereals that I should watch out for?
September 7th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
What Steve said.
And I’ll also add that allergies to peanuts are becoming more prevalent. Some people can’t even smell peanuts or they will go into anaphylactic shock. Nut allergies in schools are so bad nowadays that school cafeterias are urged to stop serving any foods that contain peanuts. Parents are cautioned not to give their children peanuts until they are at least 2 years of age, when the immune system becomes more developed and children have a chance of warding off an acute allergy.
If peanut allergies run in your family, doctors caution you to wait until your child is at least 3 years of age.
Basically, peanut butter should come with a warning label.
September 7th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
Steve, I think that a good idea would be to publish on your blog what you eat during 1 day, with recipes. In fact, it would be better to write what youeat during one week.
I still don’t belive in vegetarianism but I am willing to give it another try.
I have huge doubts about the China Study book. Was this study done in China? If so, there are several problems with it:
China is a poor, communist, dictatorial country with lots of people to feed, and not enough food resources. Such coutries usually manipulate the results of scientific studies (and many other things) for propaganda purposes.
It is in the interest of China’s government to make the study come to this conclusion, so people start eating more vegetables, which are easier to produce. So, they may have manipulated the study. In fact, I think this is highly probable.
You will say that I’m a crazy crackpot conspiracy theorist. But… exactly the same thing happened in my country.
I live in Romania, a country that was communist, dictatorial and poor. When the economic crisis (which in the end led to the revolution and overthrow of communism) intensified, the dictator Ceausescu has came up with the idea of a “scientific feeding plan” for the people (in romanian: programul de alimentatie rationala a populatiei).
So.. fake scientific studies were done, articles appeared in magazines, doctors recommended it (because they were forced to), etc.
In this “scientific feeding plan” they claimed that it’s healthy to reduce your food intake (for a population that was SEMI-STARVED at that time), to eat less meat, etc.
They also introduced new “normal weight charts” featuring lower weights which were considered normal and healthy.
It was a whole complex propaganda campaign, which lasted many years, with the sole purpose to make the people consume less food… at a time when at least 70% of the Romanian people were underfed or starving.
You have no idea what a communist regime is capable of, unless you lived under one.
September 7th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
@Elaine: I’m very familiar with the calorie contents of foods, since I used to do calorie-counting in the early 90s.
Eating 3000+ calories of whole foods is very simple actually. You wouldn’t do it by eating celery all day though.
Consider what I’ve eaten so far today…
For breakfast I had a banana-nut shake (2 large frozen bananas, pecans, vanilla, dates, water), which I know from prior calculation is about 700 calories. Around 10am I had some carrots with dressing (150 calories, mostly for the dressing). For lunch I had 2c steamed brown rice tossed with sesame seeds and a tablespoon of sesame oil (570 calories), plus a veggie salad with dressing (150 calories), plus some raw “garlic mashed potatoes” made from cauliflower, cashews, garlic, lemon juice, and seasoning (about 150 calories, mostly from the cashews). For snacks I ate about 6oz of tamari-almonds, which is another 1020 calories. And I also ate two bananas worth of dehydrated banana chips (210 calories).
So that’s 2950 calories already, and it’s only 3:20 pm here. I’ll probably end the day at around 3500-4000 calories. It’s easy to pack on the calories with dense foods like nuts, avocado, dried fruits, coconut, oils, etc. Plus the denser foods add satiety.
So forget about the diced celery.
September 7th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
A note about peanut butter:
Not all of it is bad. Peanuts grown in Valencia do not contain aflatoxin mold. Some brands that make their peanut butter from Valencia peanuts include Arrowhead Mills and Marantha. Just check the label to make sure.
And always get organic
.
September 7th, 2005 at 2:59 pm
Yes, what Jesse said. We buy Maranatha organic peanut butter. They even sell it at Costco. It’s organic, delicious, and safer than Skippy.
September 7th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
I’ve been vegan for a few years, vegetarian a few before that. When I finally dropped dairy my cholesterol went from 300 to 145 in six months, and stayed there. My acid reflux has disappeared, my allergies are less severe, and asthmatic episodes are now a rare occurance. I don’t understand how people can claim that veganism made them sick, unless they were a potato chip and soda pop vegan with pasta on the side. I have felt physically better than I ever had before, and according to the eat for your blood type book, I should have dropped dead by now. Go figure.
September 7th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
I am vegetarian and my wife is vegan. I read the China Study after reading a review of it and in my opinion there is no good reason to be anything other than vegan (for health, environment, ethics, whatever). I am currently transitioning with the help of my wife’s knowledge and cooking.
I am also currently in remission from prostate cancer, and if we had known then what we know now, I might have spared myself the pain and emotional downfall of this disease. Right now my oncologist is baffled by my quick recovery time and a few other things. When he asks what I’m doing differently, I tell him about the diet change. He’s not willing to come right out and medically endorse it (of course), but he said to “not change a thing, then”.
September 7th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
I don’t have any doubts about the health benefits of a vegan diet, however how does one come to terms with the fact that the longest lived people (average life span) live in Japan and Andorra, two countries known to be inhabited by voracious meat eaters. I’ve personally followed many longevity studies and what is most interesting is how relatively unimportant diet is in the determination of longevity. The consensus of the majority of the longevity studies is that main factors affecting longevity are (in order of importance):
1. Mental well being
2. Genetics
3. Diet
If you are a stress case with a mutated LDLR receptor gene that you inherited you will die from heart disease at a young age no matter what you eat. Sometimes people get so uptight about diet, and so distrustful of doctors (thanks to crackpot diet gurus) that they fail to address the top-two factors influencing longevity. My personal feeling is that as long as you are getting clean, nutrient-dense, foods loaded with anti-oxidants you’ll be better off regardless of the source.
September 7th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
“The calorie theory suggests that fat is your body’s way of storing excess energy, but another theory is that fat is your body’s way of storing excess toxins.”
By this logic, our early ancestors, who were by definition eating a wholefood diet, would have been unable to accumulate the fat stores required to get them through periods of food scarcity. Although toxins may be stored in fat, it seems ridiculous to suggest that the primary purpose of fat is to store toxins. The synthesis and metabolism of fat are mechanisms of energy management.
The toxins we now have to cope with in our diet and our environment are a rather recent phenomenon however the ability to store energy as fat evolved long before homo sapiens started screwing up the planet or for that matter even existed.
Perhaps if a high calorie vegan diet is not resulting in fat accumulation, it is not because of the absence of toxins but because the body is unable to fully access all available calories. This may have something to do with the high fibre content of foods.
The dietary advice is well taken but the reasons it works seem to need further study.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:10 pm
While I don’t doubt there are some nuggets of wisdom here, it’d be nice to see a large scale study of the benefits of a Vegan diet vs a Vegetarian diet vs a “regular” diet. Much of what we hear about different things is heresay and I’m sure some things, good or bad, may be more psychosomatic than “real”. Also the human body is so complicated that health benefits *rarely* are the result of one change; they are often due to many interacting things including genetics, other life habits, environment, etc.
As our understanding of the body grows, one day eggs are horrible for you and the next day we find out that maybe eggs aren’t killing us after all.
The tried and true “moderation” is key probably holds here too. Stick to mostly real unprocessed foods with a dab of the other stuff, all in moderation, and you’ll probably be OK assuming everything else in your body is working properly.
September 8th, 2005 at 2:30 am
> When he asks what I’m
> doing differently, I tell
> him about the diet change.
> He’s not willing to come
> right out and medically
> endorse it (of course)
In medicine, ONE case (including yours or mine) means almost nothing.
It’s studies done on tens or hundreads of patients and confirmed by other studies, that are taken into account.
So – this is why your doctor doesn’t endorse your diet yet.
However, if 10 patients recover quickly and all use the same diet, then he will probably endorse it.
Doctors learn very hard and train very hard.. I for one respect their opinion and profession a lot.
September 8th, 2005 at 4:21 am
In medicine, ONE case (including yours or mine) means almost nothing.
It means a heck of a lot to the person whose case it is!
This is not a medical site — this is a personal development site. And given that context, one particular case (yours) probably means quite a lot to you, just as my case means quite a lot to me.
September 8th, 2005 at 5:40 am
The fact that my doctor didn’t endorse it only tells me that he is legally bound to cover his a$$. And #that’s# what I understand! But I will tell you this much, it has been proven in study after study/ test after test that animal protein triggers tumor growth. When I consumed dairy product after dairy product my tumors were reflecting that. When I dropped dairy, my treatments worked. I’ll be damned if I wait for a group of men 15 years down the road to tell me that I was right.
September 8th, 2005 at 6:45 am
@JL: Yeah, it’s unfortunate that doctors have so much legal pressure to play follow the follower and not make waves. Plus they frequently get kick-backs from drug companies for prescribing drugs in abundance. I remember Deepak Chopra saying that when he worked as a traditional medical doctor, he thought of himself as a legal drug pusher. He said part of the problem was that if he told patients the real solution to their problems was to eat healthier and reduce stress in their lives instead of popping pills that will only make the problem worse, they’d complain that they didn’t need a doctor for that advice.
So I don’t think the fault lies entirely with doctors. Patients contribute to the problem by placing doctors on a pedestal and seeking “fast and easy” cures that don’t require discipline or lifestyle changes.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:24 am
@Steve: What you’re saying about doctors being pill-pushers is true. A couple of years ago, my physician found that my blood pressure was high (something like 140/70, and normal is 120/70) and my heart rate was pretty high (like 80). For my age this was really horrible — I was only like 20 back then, and for the record I wasn’t fat or anything; I’ve always been pretty skinny. So what did she do? She prescribed blood pressure medication for me that would reduce my heart rate. I just threw the slip in the trash can. I refuse to take any medication unless it’s an extreme case (like if I need to take antibiotics or antivenom, but I haven’t gotten sick in a very, very long time). The real solution to my problem was of course to eat more healthy and to exercise. At that time I was a huge meat eater (plus dairy, eggs, junk food, the works) and also consumed a lot of sodium laden foods, which causes water retention and hence high blood pressure.
For a while I didn’t do anything about this other than reducing the amount of sodium I ate, but I finally became vegan two years ago, and haven’t looked back since. To address my fast heart rate I started doing cardio exercise (running) which will strengthen the heart and reduce the heart rate. My goal is 60 beats per minute. Unfortunately, most people seem to prefer the easy solutions of taking drugs to control their heart rate, cholesterol, blood pressure, water retention, etc. while still doing the things that cause them like drinking coffee (blood pressure), eating cheese (cholesterol), potato chips (sodium = water retention = blood pressure). I think the worst thing you can do to your body is dump chemical cocktails into it. Drugs should be the last resort, not something you take casually.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:54 am
> It means a heck of a lot
> to the person whose case
> it is!
Yes, Steve, but I have to ask you: if you were a doctor, and ONE patient came in and said “I changed my diet to X, and I felt better” and TEN patients came in and said “I changed my diet to X, and I felt worse”, would you endorse and promote diet X?
Now, do you see what I mean when I say that one case doesn’t count?
Only studies (studies in which proper scientific protocols were followed and which were REPEATED at other universities and got the same results) count, and this is very logical and ok.
The part about covering their a$$ is true. Doctors are afraid of lawsuites, so they mostly follow the official guidelines for treating diseases. If they follow the guidelines, you can’t successfully sue them. If they don’t, it’s very easy to successfully sue them.
So – if you want a non-standard treatment, you must have a closer relationship with your doctor – so he knows you personally and he knows that you are not a crazy guy who will sue him or her! (this is in my country – I don’t know how it is in the US)
September 8th, 2005 at 8:16 am
“Fast and Easy” never works. Vader took the quick and easy path and look what happened to him.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:20 am
>>>they’d complain that they
didn’t need a doctor for that advice.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Doctors aren’t qualified to give dietary or nutrition advice, as they are not required to study those fields to complete their degree.
September 8th, 2005 at 9:03 am
Just when I was feeling really great about switching to Silk’s Soy Milk about 6 months ago, I read this: http://www.notmilk.com/alternatives.html
Carrageenan!? Why do they put carcinogens in this stuff?
I’m starting to wonder if I can’t win. No matter what I buy is there always going to be some stupid cancer-causing ingredient put in there by the manufacturers to save money?
September 8th, 2005 at 9:17 am
@Dru: Many vegans have mixed feelings about Silk because White Wave, the company behind Silk, is owned by Dean Foods, a major dairy company. Dean also owns Alta Dena. So a lot of vegans choose not to support them for ethical reasons. It’s a tough issue for some vegans because many of the natural product companies have corporate investors/owners with questionnable ethical standards.
I’ve never been a fan of soy milk myself and much prefer the taste and texture of rice milk instead. I find soy milk too chalky. My favorite variety of rice milk is Rice Dream (carrageenan-free).
September 8th, 2005 at 10:19 am
My wife manufactures raw organic energy bars and nori-wraps, which I love. As of yet, I have not crossed over to eating raw /veggie for day-to-day meals. However, I am very interested. Does the China Study include a guide of how to switch to this type of diet? Or are there any resources (web, books, etc.) that would be good for a beginner?
Keep up the great work! This is far and away the best blog I’ve found!
September 8th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Steve,
Thanks for sharing the calorie info. That is simply fascinating! How many calories of energy do you burn working out every day? You’re a runner, right? So, maybe 600-800?
September 8th, 2005 at 10:41 am
Nobody ever seems to notice that a major food category gets ignored in all these studies: raw meat and animal products. I eat raw meat (including beef, fish, and chicken) and raw eggs, and drink raw milk and cream, and have done so for years. I could never go back to eating only foods that had been spoiled by cooking them – cooked meat is nasty, nasty stuff compared to raw. I can eat a rare steak, but only if the cookedness hasn’t penetrated more than a 16th of an inch or so, or it tastes so bad I have to spit it out.
But these studies pretend that “meat” means “cooked meat”, when cooked meat is absolutely nothing like real meat. Pasteurized milk is also chemically quite different from unpasteurized milk, and the pasteurization process actually destroys the milk’s natural antibiotics.
Human beings evolved as hunters – and we ate the meat raw. Fire was initially used to warm cold meats back to a palatable temperature, and to improve the taste of meat that would otherwise be spoiled. However, as with any method of food preservation, the quality of the food declines. The idea that humans are naturally fruitarians or vegetarians is a myth; our entire anatomy is designed so that we can be distance runners who chase our prey as a pack until it drops from exhaustion. We’re not as fast as other animals, but we can run marathons, and they can’t.
Cooking *is* processing, and pretending that it’s not is just a convenient rationalization so you can continue to eat things that don’t fit into your theory. Don’t get me wrong, I *love* oatmeal cookies, especially one of the “all natural” brands, and I hated giving them up, but I prefer how I feel without them.
September 8th, 2005 at 10:52 am
@James G: You can check out my wife’s site if you’d like — there’s a message board there where you can ask advice from other vegans:
http://www.VegFamily.com
@Elaine: For the past few weeks I’ve averaged about 30 miles per week, which would be the equivalent of roughly 3000 kcal/week. When I was doing marathon training and Tae Kwon Do at the same time, it was more than double that. If I were to increase my exercise though, I’d also eat more food. After marathon training runs with the L.A. Roadrunners they’d have a table full of bananas set out for us. After a long run I’d eat as many as nine of them (about 1000 calories). I used to be very much into the calorie theory in the early 90s, and it actually seems to work if you eat like most Americans, but if you stray from the norm and eat very differently, the theory just isn’t accurate. It’s like how Newton’s laws of physics lose accuracy as you approach the speed of light.
September 8th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Raw eater,
I’ve never seen a human that could (as a pack or otherwise) take down a cow and eat it with only bare hands and teeth. I’m not sure where you got your info from, but I’d love to see documentation (other than someone else’s *theory*) that people ran in packs and dropped game with no tools.
September 9th, 2005 at 12:51 am
Preferring unrefined food sounds to me like a bit like a diet based on glycemic index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic) where a lower GI is better and unrefined food has a lower GI that refined food (in general).
A long-term study by the german cancer research center found out that a vegetarian diet “dramatically reduced the mortality risk”. Within the studied group of vegetarians (vegans, Ovo-Lakto-Vegetarians, moderate Vegetarians) the mortality risk of “moderate vegetarians” (eating occassionally meat) is lowest (in numbers: if the risk for vegans is 1, ovo-lakto have 0.66 and moderates have 0.60) This might be because the lack of B12 vitamine. (from the german wikipedia entry of veganism http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan )
September 9th, 2005 at 9:04 am
Who said bare hands? Even monkeys use rocks as tools. And who said cows? I used to chase goats and sheep and chickens out of our yard when I was a teenager, and all of those animals would be fairly easy to kill once run down, especially if you had helpers. Getting the skin open sounds tougher – but if it was a small enough animal I’d just swing it around and bash it against rocks, the ground, or a tree, until something opened up enough to get my teeth into it. For a bigger animal, I’d probably have to use rocks or a sharpened stick.
I personally have little trouble tearing raw meat with my teeth and swallowing fairly large chunks of it, so an opening is all that’s really needed, and of course convenient forelimbs (aka hands) to hold the meat steady while tearing.
As for the taking-down of large animals, I understand that there are modern humans who, to prove the point, have run down large herbivores until the animal literally drops from exhaustion and is unable to move or fight back in any way. So it’s not really a question of a struggle – breaking its neck, bashing its head in, or cutting or tearing the throat open would all suffice for the coup de grace.
So, it’s not so much a matter of theory as of experience. If you’ve chased wild animals before, if you’ve eaten raw meat with your hands and teeth for a few years, if you’ve tasted the difference between warm and cold raw meat, and felt the difference it makes to your body between eating even dried raw meat vs. fresh raw meat, you’ll just know. And among the things you’ll know are that we’re born to run, to kill, and to eat meat – warm and raw.
For that matter, it only takes open eyes to see that the most visible differences between us and other kinds of monkeys are differences that make us more suitable for hunting. We walk upright, have less fur, and sweat more. These three changes make us fast and let us run without overheating, even in the noonday tropical sun.
September 9th, 2005 at 9:36 am
Thanks Steve for a facinating blog and discussion about The China Study. I discovered this book last month and found it so compelling I immediately started on a vegan diet. I’m getting some blood work done in a couple of weeks and I will be very interested in seeing if just four weeks on the diet will show up. I need some evidence so when I start passing this book out to my grown kids I have something to back me up.
I have to say just when I thought your blog couldn’t get any better, it does.
September 12th, 2005 at 2:52 am
Please forgive my less than perfect English. It is not my native language.
I have asked one of my friends who is a doctor about the chinese diet. He has experience with this because he studied in China for 6 months on a grant (to study accupuncture).
He told me that the diet of the AVERAGE man in China is very bad:
- They eat a lot of smoked fish. They use food smoking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_%28food%29 a lot to conserve fish and other kinds of meat.
- They eat their food with A LOT of condiments.
- They eat their food very very hot.
Because of these factors the incidence of cancer in the Chinese is higher than normal.
It is no wonder that when they stop eating heavily smoked meat (which causes cancer in the long run) they are healthier and live longer lives.
Other things my friend (who is a doctor) told me yesterday:
The toxins contained in the fat in your body are a myth. Fat cells don’t contain toxins. These “toxins” are a myth that circulates in the alternative health circles because they are an easy to understand concept (and also a FALSE concept unfortunately).
If you are a meat eater and you stop eating meat, your metabolism has to adapt to your new eating style – that is, it has to lower the production of some enzymes, it has to start making some enzymes in higher quantities, etc.
This is why when you go from being a meat eater to a vegetarian you feel bad in the first 2-3 weeks, and not because of the (non-existant) “toxins”. Exactly the same thing will happen if you are a vegetarian and start eating meat – your metabolism will have to adapt and you will feel bad in the first weeks.
Here is more information about enzymes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzymes
The proteins are made of amino-acids. The problem is that proteins from plants don’t contain some amino-acids which are necessary for humans.
This is why doctors say that protein from plants is low-quality protein.
If you don’t eat meat at all, the body will extract the missing aminoacids (which you don’t get from a vegan diet) from your muscles and then from organs such as the heart, weakening your body.
This is well-understood and well researched information. Many scientific studies and biochemestry experiments were done about this.
The body needs 0.9 grams of high-quality proteins per body kilogram, every day.
So if you weight 70 Kg (about 154 lbs), you will need 0.9*70 = 63 grams of high quality protein per day.
Lean meat is about 60% protein – the rest is made of fat and carbs.
If we make a simple calculation, we came to the conclusion that according to these numbers, an average human who weights 70 Kg needs about 105 grams of lean meat per day in order to be healthy.
My friend the doctor also told me that eating too much meat is dangerous – people eating 500-800 grams of meat per day get cholesterol and many other problems.
So, in order to be safe, the optimal intake of meat should be of around 150-200 grams of lean meat per day.
He also told me that your needs may vary according to your metabolism.
September 12th, 2005 at 4:13 am
@Dan: Sounds like your doctor friend would have a hard time explaining the health of vegans then. Much of what he says is contradicted by what others in the field are writing. For instance, why does your doctor believe that animal protein is higher quality than plant protein? That is the opposite of what many others are now writing. Animal protein cannot even be used by humans as-is — it must first be broken down into amino acids and then rebuilt into human protein. Plant protein, however, is available in amino acid form to begin with. So your body must work unnecessarily hard to utilize (inferior) animal protein by first deconstructing it. This extra step isn’t necessary when you consume plant foods.
September 12th, 2005 at 8:14 am
@Steve: I will ask my doctor friend about this. Please keep the comments open on this post so we can discuss and get to the bottom of this issue.
September 14th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
@Raw Eater: I’m curious about the idea that humans can run down large animals just by wearing them out. I’ve heard of this theory before, and the only attempt I’ve ever heard of to actually test this theory was a total failure. Do you have any references that you can provide?
From what I’ve heard, quadrapedal locomotion is roughly 8 times more efficient than bipedal locomotion. So it sounds to me like the reduction in body hair and the development of sweat glands might not be an advantage over other animals, but rather some compensation for inherent inferiority. Most animals are faster than humans as well. Even if an animal couldn’t run as far as a human, they could run away very quickly, and sit and rest and recover while the human catches up.
You say you can easily catch chickens, goats and sheep. However, those animals all have a very important common characteristic: domestication. These animals have been specifically bred for millenia so that people might catch and eat them.
I think it would be far more telling for a human with no tools or vitually no tools, to catch a wild animal. It would then be somewhat compelling to see a group of humans live entirely off of animals they caught and killed and whatever else they scrounged up along the way, without any level of technology.
Chasing wild animals around also sounds really dangerous.
The other obvious issue here is food poisoning. Meat has a very high likelyhood of containing lots of things very dangerous to humans, like salmonella, E. coli and trichinae. Things that are also destroyed by heat. Granted, much of this may result from contemporary animal raising and meat packing techniques, but it seems like it would be a huge issue for a modern American raw meat eater. While some of this risk may have been reduced for the hypothetical pre-industrial raw meat eater, but I imagine some level of elevated risk would remain.
While I don’t reject your claims out of hand, they are very counter-intuitive and are not inline with my personal body of knowledge. I thus request much more evidence here. Especially when there’s all these tasty fruits, veggies and wild grains just sitting around stuck to the ground, just waiting to be eaten. No running about for hours, wasting energy, required.
September 14th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
Nish says: “It would then be somewhat compelling to see a group of humans live entirely off of animals they caught and killed and whatever else they scrounged up along the way, without any level of technology.”
@Nish… LOL, you’d probably find a group of vegetarians at the end of the study!!
September 19th, 2005 at 7:11 pm
“Do you have any references that you can provide?” No, sorry, I just read once about a video of a guy demonstrating it.
“You say you can easily catch chickens, goats and sheep.” No, I didn’t. I said I had chased them out of our yard when I was younger. I never actually tried to catch any of them.
“Even if an animal couldn’t run as far as a human, they could run away very quickly, and sit and rest and recover while the human catches up.” I think you’re making a number of mistakes here. First, you’re assuming that we have to hunt animals bigger than us, which isn’t true. I’m sure that as soon as we did find ways to hunt such animals, it was really helpful, but it certainly wasn’t necessary. Small animals would certainly be easier. Second, you’re assuming the equation is one human per animal, when humans are naturally pack animals. If you’re hunting something bigger than you, you can always gang up on it. Third, you’re making an assumption that the animal and the human(s) start at the same place, ignoring such options as relay running, driving animals over cliffs or into traps and ambushes. All of these options are used by other hunting animals, and are tricks commonly reinvented by human children at play.
“Meat has a very high likelyhood of containing lots of things very dangerous to humans, like salmonella, E. coli and trichinae.” I don’t worry about bacteria; bad raw meat is usually obvious to the smell and taste. And although I don’t have a study to cite, I’ve read that bacteria counts can be 20 to 40 times higher in cooked meat than in raw meat, before there is a noticeable difference in taste or smell. So, it’s actually a lot easier to get sick eating cooked meat, because you don’t notice and spit it out.
What’s more, I’ve found that if I eat raw meat, eggs, or fruit that I’m not entirely sure of, and there’s a problem with it, it will come back up out of my throat or stomach within minutes – usually in an entirely painless way, not unlike belching. It’s a funny thing, but it seems as though millions of years of evolution have provided us with a body that knows what is and isn’t good, as long as you are actually eating things it has evolved to eat. And it’s not specific to meat, either; I’ve had it happen with avocados or grapes, too, that in each case were just a little too old or tasted a wee bit off on the way down.
What’s interesting is that I get the impression that the mechanism is regulated by some “safe quantity” of bacteria or bacterial toxins, above which the response is triggered. That’s just a hypothesis, because sometimes I’ll get a warning feeling that if I eat any more of something, it’s going to come back up, but if I don’t, nothing happens, and if I do, then sure enough it comes up.
That probably sounds pretty disgusting, but I’m sure it was a lifesaving trait for our ancestors. However, judging by how many people become seriously ill due to ingesting *cooked* food containing salmonella or E. coli, I’d have to guess that the detection mechanism doesn’t work as well with cooked food. Perhaps it depends on some byproduct of the bacteria that’s different when the bacteria are eating cooked food.
As for parasites, I know someone who conducted experiments, first with dogs and then on himself, eating parasite-infested raw meat and trying to see if they could be transmitted that way. He was unable to get either the dogs or himself to end up with any parasites. I’m personally not that committed to science, though.
“Especially when there’s all these tasty fruits, veggies and wild grains just sitting around stuck to the ground, just waiting to be eaten.” Um, have you ever actually tried *eating* wild grains without cooking them? For that matter, how many of those fruits you’re thinking of are domesticated varieties? Grains are seeds; they aren’t made to be digested, and in fact plants do their best to make seeds indigestible on purpose. (As much as evolution can be said to have a purpose.) It takes a lot of prep work to make grains edible, and I believe it’s generally established that humans have only been eating them for about 10,000 years, vs 2.5 million years of meat eating.
Fruit is nice, of course, and I eat rather a lot of it. But I can only go a day or two of just that before I start hankering for a few pounds of nice raw meat, maybe with some tomatoes or avocado on the side. Yum. I don’t eat vegetation (roots, stalks, and leaves), though, although I suppose onions might be considered a root (but I don’t eat them very often at all). It’s kind of funny, because I used to like salads before I became a raw eater, but then at some point I saw lettuce on something and went, “ew, who put those leaves in my food?” I was rather surprised and amused by that reaction, because it was visceral rather than intellectual, and I hadn’t originally intended to quit salads. In fact, in my early days as a raw eater I tended to make steak or sashimi salads. Now I make ‘em with tomato and avocado, but leave out the (ugh) plant leaves and roots.
September 27th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Steve-
great blog.. but I have a question about dairy. do you think your prohibition would also apply to real home-made kefir made from raw goats milk and real kefir grains? I have been eating this for a few months and think its spectacular, not like milk at all.
john