Oddbean

Hi Mike, I understand that everybody has their own opinion on what to eat, so this may be of zero interest to you. If you are open to best available dieting research data take a look at Dr Greger's research. He has a lot of easily available data on his non-profit website https://nutritionfacts.org/ I recommend simply reading or listening his book "How not to die". It is full of research analysis on what actually works and what does not. My personal experience. My wife went into his plant based diet and pushed his book on me during family trip. I listened and got convinced. Over multiple years I have kept reducing my eating habits and replacing with recommended foods. It is not fast, but over time my general feeling of healthiness has improved. I generally tried to atkins diet (it killed my work out by the end of 1st week, I had no energy), eatiing a little frequently (I worked out during that time). I even tried salads. None of that worked for me. Plant based approach, beans, leguns, nuts. All of it is easy to follow and there is no problem to maintain for me. So I am happy and generally follow Dr Greger advice for years now. And best of all, it is not a diet in the sense of going on a diet.

I'm very familiar with Dr Greger. I have that book and I have read it. Dr Greger's diet advice is pretty good and his work at nutritionfacts.org is a good reference. But Dr Greger over-states the case for a pure plant-based diet. He seems to have gotten excited by feedback from his followers, driving him to overstate a number of things. Gil Carvalho (who thinks a lot like I do so I respect his view) has a fact-check on him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XjmvBFt63k I think Gil is being overly harsh here, but it is still useful. The diet-health-vegetarianism connection comes out of Seventh-Day Adventism which got it from Ellen G White (a women hit in the head with a rock so hard as a kid that she started having "visions"), who thought she got it from God, but probably got it from Reverend Sylvester Graham. All of this happened before 1900 without the benefit of science. But once people have a belief, it is hard to shake, and since SDAs were some of the first doing medical research into diet, their religious beliefs (including vegetarianism) became (unsuprisingly) the healthiest diet. Not only is it very clear that a pure plant-based diet is deficient in a lot of things (B12, iron) but a lot of research shows that unprocessed low-saturated-fat meats are at least as healthy as grains, and the cohort of SDAs who add fish to a plant-based diet live longer than those who don't.

how can you not understand that Gil sounding scientific, fair and balanced is a con ? how many times can you fall for the same scam ? medicine has been a fraud from day 1 and it has never changed.