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Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina  Red meat is very healthy -- if you're a cancer cell.  |
Honestly, I'm not convinced. I've seen so many studies, both for and against, that I'm fairly convinced that most people doing studies know squat.
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Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina Many veg*ans are hugely disappointed in the current state of the healthcare field (which in the USA is really sickcare) and therefore rarely visit a doctor except in case of emergency. So it makes sense that you wouldn't see many healthy veg*ans walking through your office door. Most tend to avoid a service that profits from disease except as a last resort. |
Sigh. I'm right there with you. As I just posted above, I'm not in the traditional health care field and I'm frankly terrified of being at their mercy. I've learned a lot of things from a lot of perspectives, and almost none of them agree with your GOOD results from the raw diet. But theory is theory and fact is fact.
If your diet works for you, it's clearly good -- for you, for right now. The average American's diet is such Pure Crap that most people could probably benefit from a change like you took, at least for a few months. I'm still unconvinced of it's viability in the long term, but I'm keeping an open mind about it. I think the biggest reason it works so well for you is that you're eating no processed foods. Honestly, a lot of veggie food I see in the local co-op worries me because it's nearly as processed, plastic-ed and packaged as anything Kraft sells. To borrow a phrase from an endocrinologist I've read, if you can't pick it, fish it, hunt it, or milk it, I'm kind of suspicious of it.
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Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina The vegan diet is a financial threat to the medical field (less risk of big moneymakers like cancer, heart disease, etc), while consumption of animal products is a significant long-term profit center. It's unfortunate that profits are increased when people adopt habits that encourage long-term disease. |
The sheer bloody weakness of preventive and/or curative care in this country make me furious. But I genuinely have my doubts about how much animal products themselves rather than what manufacturers *do* to them is to blame.
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Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina Many doctors and nurses also serve as poor examples of health for their patients.
(...snip...)
In a contest between doctors and patients to test basic nutritional knowledge, the patients won. |
True enough -- it's an overworked, overstressed field that comes from a perspective of looking at disease rather than health. (To quote a snarky friend of mine - doctors learned by studying DEAD bodies. Something is wrong with that.) It's why I went left of "normal" (to acupuncture and chinese medicine), and I actually consider it a requirement of my job to be a good example. I have no doubt that my health and diet are improvable, but given that for the last 2 years I've improved it enough to have weaned myself off of all the asthma and allergy medicine I was on, I think I'm heading in the right direction. I went from 2 daily preventative medicines + one "emergency" inhaler being used 2-3x/week, to no daily medicines and using the emergency inhaler 2x in the last 20 months. I can't begin to tell you how happy I am with that. (My primary changes though were self-treating and exercise, not quite so much diet change.)
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Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina I remember when our daughter was having a minor health problem when she was a baby, the doctor said it was definitely the result of a dairy allergy. He was very certain that his diagnosis was correct. Erin and I both looked at each other, thinking, "This guy is a dufus!" Our daughter had never consumed dairy products in her life. |
Oi. I have WAY TOO MANY "dufus" stories. Something in the way doctors are trained has them SO CONVINCED that they are Always Right. I'm convinced that the willingness to be wrong (and ask a couple of extra questions) is a lot more important to healthcare than they're being trained to believe. The problem is, doctors really are screwed by the HMO system almost as much as the patients are. They don't have the luxury of actually talking to a patient for 20+ minutes the way I do. I have a lot of sympathy for them, and I would not want their job.
As I said in the last post, I genuinely did not mean to come across as trolling -- I gave my background for (what I thought was) the humor aspect -- that even this mild carnivore loves reading the veggie posts. Again, I apologize that it clearly came across poorly.