"Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions

Here I think I'll register another Bible-based objection of my own to this dietary system. I believe the system is true, I believe it works but I'm also aware that it rejects foods that the Bible describes as the standard diet of the Israelites.For instance the promoters of this diet keep saying how milk is good for calves and not humans and they get all philosophical about that, although milk and milk products are treated as staples in the Bible and have been staples of diets in many cultures around the world, as cheese and yogurt and butter and "curds and whey" among other things. The Promised Land is described as a "land of milk and honey."I figure it's either the hormones and antibiotics and other drugs that they now feed to cows that's the real problem, or maybe it's that we've just reached a point in the effects of the Fall where we can no longer tolerate some perfectly good foods our ancestors could tolerate. Such a standard dietary ingredient shouldn't be causing liver cancer in children so there has to be a cause that isn't the milk itself.Same with meats. God told Noah after the Flood to eat meats so something must have changed between then and now to make meat an undesirable food. Also there have always been cultures that depend almost entirely on meat, nomadic cultures for instance. Meat and milk.This is of course a separate issue from the obvious problems of over-processed foods and fast foods that are of our own making.In any case I take this diet as the answer to new problems we face whatever they might be, and as a gift from God insofar as it really does seem to have quite a range of important health benefits.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Special mention added to your medal for accusing me of failing as a Christian. High achievement there.

It doesn't matter if you all hate me, and I fail as a Christian in many ways, but this topic is important and could be helpful to a lot of people and I think I've given enough information to show that much, and I hope someone might benefit from it.

A story that is filmed is more than an anecdote recounted by the subject himself. There are witnesses who are interviewed among other things. You can see for yourself at least samples of what he ate but you also have the testimony of his doctors to its effects.. There is room for error, but there is always room for error. At some point you have to trust people.Not perfectly, nothing is perfect, nobody is perfect, but everybody here seems to want some kind of absolute perfection. I only ask people to trust my assessment of what I've been learning the same way I'd ask them to trust Dr. Lim or Dr. Esselstyn or Dr. McDougall or any of these guys who have devoted themselves to learning and teaching nutrition -- or for that matter anybody who tells an anecdote about something that improved their health. Why the blanket sour refusal to accept what people say? What makes your skepticism automatically superior to their conviction?Following a particular system wouldn't prove anything and I couldn't pick one to defend because I haven't settled on any particular version myself, I'm still checking it out and trying different things, and I still have some meat and dairy and that may continue. The differences between the plantbased systems are on the order of advocating nuts versus banning nuts, advocating some oils versus banning oils. I don't think the studies have yet discriminated among these things and so far the testimonies are all similar, great improvements in health on all of them. I'm sure it will get refined over time and some practices will show up as better than others. Meanwhile it's all a work in progress and I think any change in this direction is for the better especially for people who do have some kind of disease.The married couple doctor team in the film "Forks Over Knives" deal with a single patient in the film who has a long list of ailments from minor annoyances to being on a long list of meds for high cholesterol and I forget what all else. They put him on a plant-based diet and follow him through the film and show how much all his problems improve.It may be that if he'd retained some meat and dairy he'd also have improved. I'm certainly hoping for that to be true because I'm not able to go completely plant-based yet and would like to improve a bunch of ailments. Adding lots of plants and minimizing though not eliminating meat and dairy, -- and of course processed foods, but I've been pretty good at that for a long time -- is the best I can do right now, and I need a way to get the butter and cream down to a stark minimum or I don't think I can expect much in the way of good results.I read most of the article at your link and it overall shows benefits from a vegetarian diet, with the usual messy uncertainties and deviations. Overall it seems they are doing something in the right direction at least.There are enough people Chris Wark has interviewed who claim to have cured their cancers with diet and other lifestyle changes that in my opinion it is reasonable for the information to lead other people to try it themselves. Again, there's always room for error and perfection is too much to ask, and there are also different versions people follow, but the right direction to go in is pretty clear: up the plants, down the animal sources and out the processed foods, except the plant emphasis should be pretty drastic. Most of the people interviewed started out getting informed of what their prospects were on standard treatment and how much time they had to experiment with other methods before trying a drastically changed diet. Then they get tested at intervals to see if it's working. If it doesn't work they've left room to go on the standard treatment.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

A study of a huge population like the Adventists has to gloss over all kinds of individual factors and unknowns, even though overall it shows benefits to their lifestyle nevertheless. Too many variables. It would probably be more informative if selected smaller groups with a shared diet and lifestyle were chosen for study.I think what Esselstyn did with the 18 patients with severe heart disease is more telling in the end: actual reversal of the disease process on the prescribed diet.Chris Wark's interviewees I also find as convincing.

Yes I know it's complicated and that was the main point in the post I just wrote. Huge studies also are dealing with too many complications to give a reliable result though. As I said I think we get better information from small controlled studies like Esselstyn's. But I'm still going to defend the single person anecdote.The most important point about all this is not what's "good for you" but the ability of some versions of this diet to actually cure disease and radically improve health, which was dramatically demonstrated in Esselstyn's heart disease study. Smaller studies are more likely to pin down the relevant factors than a huge study with a zillion variables, most of them unknown.Some Adventists are living into their hundreds. The difference between their practices and those of other Advantists might be worth knowing. IN any case there will always be individual factors that can't be known or controlled.But also getting people do DO what's "good for us" is a big reason for getting more specific about it, watching the films about it, reading the anecdotes, listening to the experts.But again it's the possibility of reversing diabetes and heart disease and cancer and many other diseases that is the biggest point about it all.

Skepticism is one thing, the kind of sour accusatory stuff this topic is getting is something else. At least you maintain civility and I appreciate that.I'll have to come back to this.

It's a big whoop because most people just keep going through life with whatever problems they have, such as his overweight and his immune deficiency skin disease, knowing vaguely they aren't eating or living right but just going on doing it because they don't really know what is causing what for sure, and accepting the medicine approach to everything because it's pushed by doctors, so it's eyeopining to see a specific approach actually work for somebody. Nothing but juiced fruits and vegetables cured this guy. That IS a big whoop. It CURED him.Most of us have have tried a bunch of diets and it's common knowledge that relapse is the rule rather than the exception. It gets pretty discouraging. It's like nobody knows anything for sure, there's nothing really trustworthy out there. But this one looks sustainable. This is good food, it can be made very appealing. The growing information about nutrition gives us a handle on our health the usual medical approaches don't offer, and some of the medical approaches are so hard on us we'd rather die anyway.The only claim I made for the Adventist study was that it showed greater longevity for Adventists over nonAdventists and for vegetarian Advantists over nonvegetarian Adventists, that's all.

Esselstyn took a group of people with severe heart disease, which worked itself down to 18 individuals who among them had had I think it was 48 heart attacks in eight years, or heart "events" or something like that, and on the diet he gave them, all but one of them went another twelve years without a single heart problem of any kind, and in at least one case it was shown on xray that a major heart vessel that had been just about closed was now opened up with no other intervention than the diet. Lim discussed this and the same study was part of the film "Forks over Knives" as well.

All I meant by the medicine approach was taking drugs for the skin disease. Apparently nobody told him that his urticarial was due to his weight so I'm not sure you are right about that.Well, remind me, did the blatantly nonvegetarian vegetarian group live longer than the defined nonvegetarians or not? Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Actually we can. Looking up urticaria pigmentosa finds no association with weight gain or loss.I conclude it was the juicing that cured it, and it IS totally cured. It's a big deal for the plant-based point of view, and it's a big deal for those of us trying to get off the diet loop and find something that really works and that's unquestionably good for us. He didn't choose to do a conventional diet, he was looking for a radically healthy way of life. I think it's pretty good evidence for the health value of eating nothing but fruits and vegetables.ABE: However, no one anecdote, or study, or dietary system, is convincing by itself, at least not for me. I've needed to see lots of films and talks and interviews to get as convinced as I am of all this. And the many statistics that show health problems correlated with meat and dairy are a big part of the convincing too. The information about the conditions in which animals are raised, covered in many of the films, was a jolting additional influence I wasn't expecting. It's the whole package that has pushed me to this viewpoint, and that's why I think you can't stop with a few studies or any limited information. I was interested to see that Anthony Lim ended his talk by telling anyone who wants to get started in this direction to simply learn a lot more and keep learning about it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I should have said urticarial pigmentosa which is not the same thing as simple urticaria. I'm sorry but I don't remember things well, don't know where to look for them, and I did manage to remember urticaria but not the pigmentosa part until I read up on it. I'm sorry, you are right that I'm not careful about all this but I don't mean to mislead you, I'm just not up to a whole lot these days.For instance I'd like to remember the ailments of the man who was treated in the film Forks and Knives but I can't and haven't been able to locate it either. He was on medications for the usual stuff, cholesterol, blood pressure etc. and had a list of 27 symptoms that were bothering him, such as not sleeping well, sinus problems, acid reflux etc etc., and after being put on the plant diet for twelve weeks was off all the meds, had better than normal numbers even, and no longer had 26 of the 27 problems on his list.But the most dramatic study still is Esselstyn's eighteen patients with severe heart disease who were actually cured on a plantbased diet.There's another story in Forks over Knives of a woman athlete who got breast cancer and stopped her activfities, but then did McDougall's diet which gave her back her health and in her seventies is running marathons.Other athletes in the film, an other films too, talk about imp;rovements in their performance when they went on this kind of diet. Since they are athletes they were already following what they believed to be the optimum diet for their activity, but when they gave up the meat they found that their ability improved.You don't like anecdotes though.Sorry.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes Esselstyn is extreme and I know I couldn't follow his program. I hope this kind of study will be repeated with a less extreme regimen. He asked for the most difficult cases and was given these so I doubt the ones you mention who had had surgery were somehow less complicated as you seem to think. AND I'm sure those who were on drugs came off them when the diet improved their conditions.I do get frustrated trying to defend things that are much better defended in the films I keep talking about. Esselstyn is no quack.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, standard clinicians are NOT prescribing plantbased diets, no they are not. They know NOTHING about this. They prescribe meds and treat diet as an adjunct and it's not anything like the diets I'm talking about.You are wrong.Maybe you are turning a lot of people away from this idea and that's too bad. Your stickler mentality doesn't convince me of much though. It's the overall picture that I'm convinced of and the flaws in particular cases are irrelevant because the main principles still work, and they are not what standard doctors propose..Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Watch Lim's presentation.
Watch Forks over Knives.
Watch What the Health