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diabetes, as well as many other conditions) and arteries stiffen (raising blood pressure). Recovery to normal fluidity takes several hours. None of this occurs following a low-fat meal consisting of cereal and fruit.
When someone is wheeled into the ER after suffering a heart attack or stroke, it’s a better idea to administer a thrombolytic drug to dissolve the blood clot than to give them an intravenous kale smoothie. But aside from true emergencies, the rapidity of response of WFPB is superior to any drug—without the negative side effects.
The WFPB diet deals with so many diseases and conditions that you begin to wonder if there isn’t just one basic disease cause—poor nutrition—that manifests through thousands of different symptoms.
Rather than focus on the underlying cause, Western medicine has decided to focus on the individual symptoms and call each of them a disease.
And admittedly, it’s good business to identify thousands of different diseases, then make and sell treatments for each of them, rather than to look at the big picture and prescribe one simple interve...
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Treatment #2 would typically resolve the root cause of the disease fairly quickly, thus ending all symptoms and increasing their life expectancy and the quality of that life. Side effects would include achieving their ideal weight, having more energy, looking and feeling better, and even helping to preserve the environment and slow global warming.
The vast majority of medical research looks only at the very specific effects of one element (whether a drug, vitamin, mineral, or procedure such as an operation) on a single symptom or system. Anything else—such as looking at macro differences like lifestyle and diet—is just considered too messy to be reliable.
There’s one last crucial factor in evaluating the power of a health intervention: the size, or significance, of the effect. Another word for this is profundity. All things being equal, would you rather undergo a therapy that made a slight improvement to your well-being, or an enormous one?
Plant-based nutrition tends to elicit enormous effect sizes.
One hundred percent to zero percent. That kind of result is rarely seen in biological studies that have so many confounding variables.
Lester Morrison and John Gofman, undertook studies in the 1940s and 1950s (almost 70 years ago!) to determine the effect of diet on heart disease in people who had already had a heart attack.4 The doctors put these patients on a diet with less fat, cholesterol, and animal-based foods—a regimen that dramatically reduced subsequent recurrence of heart disease. Nathan Pritikin did the same thing in the 1960s and 1970s.5 Then Drs. Esselstyn6 and Dean Ornish7 set out to learn more in the 1980s and 1990s. Working separately, they both showed that a plant-based, high-carbohydrate diet controlled and
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In 1985, Esselstyn recruited patients with advanced but not immediately life-threatening heart disease for a clinical trial to explore whether heart disease might be reversed using diet.
9 In the eight years prior to the study, his eighteen subjects had had forty-nine coronary episodes (e.g., heart attacks, angioplasty, bypass surgery), but during the twelve years after adopting a WFPB diet, there was only one event, involving a patient who strayed from his diet.
He has casually followed his subjects since then, and all but five are still alive today, twenty-six years later.
The five who passed away did not die of cardiac failure, but...
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“No difference in total mortality was observed with ranolazine compared with placebo.
The depth of effect you expect to see in an experimental study determines the number of subjects you need for that study in order to assess with any degree of confidence whether the results are real or just a meaningless blip.
In other words, the smaller the difference between two conditions (say, experiment and control group, or Treatment A and Treatment B), the more experimental subjects you need in order to show that the difference is real, and not simply due to chance.
Hundreds of data points are no longer required when the effect is so large. The likelihood that such profound, consistent results are the result of chance is nearly zero.
The problem is, many researchers worship statistical significance at the expense of something equally important: actual significance, as in, “Who cares? Why does this result matter?”
Not to minimize the suffering of patients with heart disease, but shouldn’t we spend our time and money seeking and evaluating treatments that significantly improve lives, as opposed to just maintaining and managing a disease state?
medical establishment. But that establishment doesn’t really take diet seriously as the first and primary means of treating and preventing disease.
while within the medical establishment, the idea that nutrition might impact diseases as serious as cancer is considered just plain “wacko”—despite the fact that almost none of those professionals who systematically reject nutrition’s potential have any training in this field.
Better than anything the current medical establishment has in its arsenal in the various “wars” on cancer, stroke, heart disease, MS, and so forth. Perhaps it’s time to stop declaring war on ourselves through toxic drugs and dangerous surgeries, and instead treat ourselves with kindness by feeding ourselves the sorts of foods shown to grow and sustain healthy, vibrant people and cultures.
Health is more than a few superficial expressions like “eat a good diet” or “use alcohol in moderation” or “use the stairs, not the elevator.” Of course, there is merit in these statements, but for the most part they dismiss the possibility of real change.
Instead of feel-good pabulum that accomplishes nothing, we need to make nutrition the central element of our health-care system.
Instead of “dieting,” we must change our lifestyle to include a diet that promotes health.
One of the most eye-opening phenomena has been the ferocity with which I’ve been attacked for sharing my research findings and their implications—sometimes even by fellow medical practice and research professionals.
the dark side of “science” as it is currently done: the greed, the small-mindedness, and the outright dishonesty and cynicism of some of its practitioners.
Not to mention the shocking examples of how public officials closed their eyes to important findings that got in the way of their reelection.
How a well-conceived experiment was like setting the table beautifully and inviting Truth to dinner. How honest questioning could banish ignorance and create a better world.
A well-conceived experiment is like setting a table beautifully and inviting Truth to dinner.
What I discovered is that science was, is, and can be just like that—as long as the researcher is careful not to pursue politically incorrect ideas outside the boundaries of “normal” science.
Normal science means anything that doesn’t challenge the prevailing paradigm—the agreed-upon story of how the world is. “Normal” doesn’t mean “good” or “better” in any way; it just means that the researcher has refrained from asking questions whose answers are considered already known and no longer subject to debate.
One of the most devilish things about paradigms is that they’re almost impossible to perceive from the inside.
As philosopher-songwriter Paul Simon put it, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
limitations. But people who have built their careers upon these paradigms can act like threatened dictators; they cling to power at all costs, and the more they are challenged, the nastier and more dangerous they become.
My journey “out of the water” has led me to be branded a heretic by many of my colleagues.
My heretical path through the research world has been a result of my curiosity about and dogged pursuit of “outlier observations.” An outlier is a piece of data that doesn’t fit with the rest of the observed results.
The scientific method, at its best, looks at outliers and says, “Prove it! Show us that wasn’t a fluke, a mistake, or a lie.
Describe the experiment in enough detail that others can repeat it and see if they get the same outlier result. If an outlier can withstand that kind of scrutiny, it’s supposed to get folded into our knowledge
base and change our ...
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When a finding threatens the validity of their life’s work, they can become irrationally defensive.
And when new evidence threatens their funding, they can get downright nasty. You can tell when this happens because they stop arguing about the evidence and start slinging epithets.
I believed that my job was to discover the truth, wherever it led. And my research into protein led me, step by step, to a realization that the entire modern scientific paradigm was badly flawed.
the children in the Philippines who ate the most protein were the ones most likely to get liver cancer.
like. Except our group of mad scientists was slowly proving, beyond any doubt, that not just excess dietary protein, but a particular type of excess dietary protein, promoted cancer formation and growth.
impressive associations between animal-based protein
consumption and cancer rates.
proteios, means “of prime importance.”
The most significant carcinogen, the substance that almost invariably led to cancer at 20 percent of the rats’ diet, was casein, or milk protein.
