"Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions

You are starting to rant. Calm down.Mainstream clinicians advise their patients to eat less saturated fat, and take on fewer calories. Cross did exactly that and his health improved. This is no surprise. This is simply false. There are thousands of professional dietitians around the world who practise dietary interventions on a daily basis. Numerous maladies are treated through diet. There is nothing remarkable or "alternative" about this. The diets you recommend are low in saturated fats, high in fruit and veg, low in refined carb's, and high in fibre. That is exactly what your mainstream doctor would recommend.That these fad diets go way beyond what doctors recommend is a flaw, not a badge of merit. I certainly hope that I might dissuade people from thinking that they can treat their cancerous tumours with carrot juice.I would not wish to dissuade anyone from improving their diet. I would simply urge them to stick to scientifically plausible, evidence-based regimes which they can actually manage long-term, rather than wasting their efforts pursuing pointlessly punishing quack regimes. Your apparent reluctance to engage with any form of evidence is very persuasive either.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

Re Esselstyn's study; Not quite true, even as per Esselstyn's own accounts, although it has to be said that Esselstyn seems to have trouble keeping his accounts consistent in the first place.In "Forks Over Knives" he says he had twenty-four patients. In the write-up of the study that Esselstyn presents on his website, it is twenty-two patients, five of whom dropped out completely, with a further six failing to keep up with reporting their results, leaving him with just eleven patients. This drop-out rate is troubling; the patients who drop out of studies tend to be those for whom the regime isn't working. By leaving only those patients who improved, the drop-out rate greatly distorts the results.When you say "no heart trouble" it's true that none of the patients who followed Esselstyn's diet had no further coronary events, but Esselstyn himself notes that some of their lesions got worse;

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Analysis by minimal lumen diameter of 25 lesions fotind that 6 regressed, 14 remained stable, and 5 progressed.

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A Strategy to Arrest and Reverse Coronary Artery Disease: A 5-Year Longitudinal Study of a Single Physician's Practice
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr, MD; Stephen G. Ellis, MD; Sharon V. Medendorp, MPH; and Timothy D. CroweWelcome heartattackproof.com - BlueHost.comSo whilst they weren't having heart attacks, they were not completely untroubled.It's also worth noting that when he first started his study Esselstyn was content to include small amounts of dairy. Now he says to eliminate all dairy. He seems to have changed numerous parameters of his diet over the years. This is incredibly bad form. You can't change the test parameters half-way through a test. That would invalidate the test, as ought to be obvious.So all told, we have a study with a pathetically small sample size, no control group, inadequate and inconsistent reporting and multiple changes in procedure during the test period. This is junk science. Esselstyn may well be sincere and well-meaning, but he is a terrible researcher. Somebody competent perhaps. He didn't bother to include a control group, so how can we know?Besides, the important comparison is between Esselstyn's diet and a less stringent healthy diet. Comparing Esselstyn's diet only against the random awful diets his patients had before is meaningless. For example, Evelyn Oswick, who apparently appears in "Forks Over Knives", clearly had an appalling diet;

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I ate all the chocolate I could eat, I ate every doughnut I could get my hands on oh, I just loved things like that. A lot of gravy.

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All that this woman's experience demonstrates is that Esselstyn's diet is an improvement over a primarily doughnut and gravy based diet. Forgive me, but that is not an astonishing revelation. It wasn't mentioned because it's not true. It's just some silliness you made up for yourself.All Esseystyn's patients were on statins.

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Methods. The study included 22 patients with angiographically documented, severe coronary artery disease that was not immediately life threatening. These patients took cholesterol-lowering drugs and followed a diet that derived no more than 10% of its calories from fat.

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Conclusions. A physician can influence patients in the decision to adopt a very low-fat diet that, combined with lipid-lowering drugs, can reduce cholesterol levels to below150 mg/dL and uniformly result in the arrest or reversal of coronary artery disease.

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So not diet alone. Drugs too. No mention of discontinuation.So basically, this is a terrible study and your faith in it is misplaced. It might be interesting to see it replicated, but it would have to be done with a much larger sample group, a proper control group, follow-up on drop-outs and, most of all, a consistent regime to test, rather than constant modification. Until then, I really don't see that there's any meat on these bones.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

I don't really know how to respond to that, other than resorting to an outbreak of Rrhain-esque blinking. Do you seriously doubt that a low-fat calorie controlled diet can improve health?To keep score;Leprechauns - Plausible, probably demons.Improved health through diet - Suddenly implausible, despite the fact that that is exactly what you've been promoting throughout this thread.It seems that when internet videos tell you something, you believe it wholeheartedly, but when actual doctors are involved, you refuse to believe even the most obvious facts.Scepticism; you're doing it wrong. Or he simply improved through swapping his diet of deep-fried lard for a healthier diet with more fruit and veg, with his specific dietary strictures adding little or nothing to what amounts to a low fat calorie controlled diet. Without a control group or a sample size greater than just one dude, there is no way to know. Not a single one of Esselstyn's patients was cured. They all still had coronary artery disease. So no cure there. They make that claim, but I'm still waiting to see some actual evidence of that. Anyone can make claims... They claim...Athletes actually tend towards extreme gullibility with regards to anything that claims to aid their performance. The craze for the mediaeval practise of cupping that swept through the Rio Olympics attests to that.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

Hi Phat, Okay. His science is not on point.You did ask.Seriously though, this talk is packed with nonsense. I read as far as this before I lost the will to live;

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So where do carbohydrates come in?

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They don‘t. There is no essential need for carbohydrates. Why are we all eating carbohydrates? To keep the rate of aging up, we don‘t want to pay social security to everyone.

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That is absolutely moronic. We eat carbohydrates because most foods contain them. Attempt to cut out all carbohydrates for any length of time and you will die. And as for the conspiracy theory angle, that is moronic and disgusting. Rosedale is fear-mongering.And seriously, some of the inane drivel in this thing...

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Whenever oxygen combines with something, it oxidizes. Oxygen is a very poisonous substance. Throughout most of the history of life on Earth there was no oxygen. Organisms had to develop very specific mechanisms of dealing with high levels of oxygen before there could ever be life with oxygen.

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So we evolved very quickly, as plants arose and developed a very easy means of acquiring energy, they could just lay back and catch rays, they dealt with that oxygen with the carbon dioxide by spitting it out, so the oxygen in the atmosphere increased. All the other organisms then had to cope with that toxic oxygen. If they didn‘t have ways of
dealing with it, they perished.

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One of the earliest ways of dealing with all that oxygen was for the cells to huddle together so that at least the interior cells wouldn‘t be exposed as much. So, multi-celled organisms arose after oxygen did. Of course, with that came the need for cellular communication.

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What utter bullshit! Does Rosedale think that plants are not multi-celled organisms? He seems to imply that here. Cyanobacteria are not plants. Rosedale is out by about three billion years.

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Multi-celled organisms arose after oxygen did

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Yeah, about 8.5 billion years later! Even if we assume that what he's trying to say is that multicellularity emerged after the oxygenation of the atmosphere, he is still talking about a gap of around 1 billion years. But that doesn't quite fit the narrative he's trying to sell.

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Throughout most of the history of life on Earth there was no oxygen.

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Rubbish. Earth's atmosphere contained no free oxygen, but there was oxygen, albeit in compound. Apparently Rosedale's research on this subject didn't run as deep as Wikipedia;

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Before photosynthesis evolved, Earth's atmosphere had no free oxygen (O2).[2] Photosynthetic prokaryotic organisms that produced O2 as a waste product lived long before the first build-up of free oxygen in the atmosphere,[3] perhaps as early as 3.5 billion years ago. The oxygen they produced would have been rapidly removed from the atmosphere by weathering of reducing minerals, most notably iron.

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Geological history of oxygen - WikipediaAnd what has this garbled retelling of the history of oxygen got to do with anything anyway? His only point in raising it appears to be that... oxygen is highly reactive... which we knew.His talk is full of stuff like this; irrelevant, inaccurate asides that serve to do little beyond bamboozling the audience. And this was originally not presented in written form remember, this was a talk, so his audience would not have been able to fact-check this rubbish on the fly. This is the Gish gallop in full swing.Some of Rosedale's claims are out-and-out lies. Take this for example;

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The common therapy for osteoporosis is drugs, and the common therapy for claudication is surgery. For cancer reduction there is nothing.

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For cancer reduction there is nothing? That is simply a lie. And let me be clear, it is not an error or a difference of opinion. Rosedale did not misspeak. He is lying. There are numerous drugs that reduce the risk of cancer recurrence. Rosedale cannot possibly be so ignorant as to be unaware of this. He is lying. Worse, he is deliberately telling a lie that endangers peoples' lives.To those participants who value the supposed good character of their alt-med gurus, I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what this behaviour says about Rosedale's character.Beyond Rosedale's general bad science, I see only a string of meaningless case studies, some of which are astoundingly vague. What exactly are we meant to conclude from this little parable?

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High Cancer Risk

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This patient had a mother and sister who had both died of breast cancer. I put her on the exact same treatment as the other cases I just mentioned, because they all had the same thing wrong with them.

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That's it! As far as I can tell, that's all there is on that "case". That isn't a "case history". It doesn't even amount to a vague synopsis. He doesn't even say whether this woman actually got breast cancer or not! This is truly pathetic stuff.

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Dr.Ron Rosedale is an expert and is at the cutting edge of this science

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What science? There is no science here. Rosedale has precisely zero clinical research to back up his claims. His recommendations are entirely unsupported. He projects an aura of confidence but the truth is that he's running with a hunch. It may be a well-informed and even plausible hunch, but there's no evidence here. No reputable clinician would partner with a fraud like Mercola. Apart from his book. And his e-book. But worry not!

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Dr Rosedale's Elite supplement line will be relaunched soon. We appreciate the desires of our past customers, patients, and friends. Thank you for your continued loyalty over the years.

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Life Supplement, is a new exciting line, including a Breakfast Replacement and other foods soon to be launched in India.

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Read more: Welcome to Dr.Rosedale's Website
Follow us: @DrRosedale on Twitter | RosedaleHealthPlan on Facebook

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That sounds like a dangerous gamble to me and I am concerned to hear you say that. Despite the fear-mongering efforts of Dr Rosedale, statins have well-proven beneficial effects. I would hate to see you place your health in jeopardy on the basis of questionable advice. If it's a second opinion you're after, I recommend seeking a reputable physician who's willing to talk nutrition with you.Mutate and Survive

It is pretty standard knowledge that poor diet exacerbates artery disease. The point is that a study like this really requires at two control groups; one with no intervention and one with an improved diet, just not Esselstyn's uber-strict diet. That would be the only way to test if all of Esselstyn's extreme protocols are really necessary or if just any sensible diet could have done as well. None of Esselstyn's patients seem to have dropped their med's. That was not the point of the study. *AHEM*

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A Strategy to Arrest and Reverse Coronary Artery Disease: A 5-Year Longitudinal Study of a Single Physician's Practice

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They weren't following any doctor-prescribed diet. That one woman was following a doughnut and gravy based diet. Diets only work if you follow them. I quite agree that doctors typically don'y know enough about nutrition and that more could and should be done to integrate nutrition into everyday practise. When I say that nutrition is already part of medical science, I mean that nutrition is a standard part of our scientific understanding. How well that understanding is applied in clinical practise is a slightly different issue.Mutate and Survive

Oh no. There are reputable people working on diet-based approaches to treating diabetes. I don't dispute that and never have. Did you even read the study you cite? None of those patients were even on insulin.Mutate and Survive

There's nothing to argue. Idon't dispute that diabetes can be treated by diet. You haven't presented anything to refute. I don't argue bare links or Youtube videos. I didn't say it did. You claimed, quite wrongly, that Rosedale wasn't selling anything. I pointed out that he was and that he is planning on re-entering the supplement industry. You haven't presented anything to refute.What do you want me to say? Fung seems more sensible than Rosdale, sure. I have no idea whether he practises or not, but Mercola is a qualified osteopathic doctor for whatever that's worth. He is still a quack. I have no opinion on Fung. This is a man who will lie to your face and tell you that there are no drugs to reduce cancer risk when in fact there are many such drugs. Lies are not sound science.Mutate and Survive