plant-based diets
Why Might Vegetarians Have Less HPV?
"Why Might Vegetarians
Have Less HPV?" Cervical cancer is now considered a
sexually transmitted disease, originally suspected as such
as it was supposedly found less in nuns and
more in prostitutes, but now we have DNA fingerprinting
proof that virtually all cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus,
human papilloma virus, which also causes cancers of the penis,
vagina, vulva, and throat.
HPV is considered a necessary,
but not sufficient cause of cancer. Most young women contract HPV,
but most don't get cervical cancer, because their immune systems
are able to clear out the virus. 70% of women clear the infection within
1 year and more than 90% within 2 years before the virus can
cause cancer, unless you're immuno-
compromised or something. Well, if that's the case, may
maybe those with particularly strong immune systems
might clear the virus even faster. That's what may be behind this new
study that found that vegetarian women appear to have significantly
lower infection rates with HPV.
It's one of many studies reporting
that vegetarians have lower risk of HPV infection thought to be because of the presence of more fruits
and vegetables in their diet, which are rich sources of
all sorts of good phytonutrients. So for example, if you take a bunch
of women with cancer-causing strains of HPV infecting
their cervix and follow them out,
and retest at 3 months, and then 9 months, while analyzing
their diets, what do you find? Higher levels of vegetable
consumption may cut the risk of HPV
persistence in half, double one's likelihood of clearing this
potentially cancer-causing infection. And "higher" levels just meant
like 2 or more servings a day! What do antioxidants in plants
have to do with viral diseases? Different antioxidants affect
different viruses in different ways, but against HPV…don't you know that electrophoretic
mobility super shift assays showed "irrespective of enhanced c-fos
expression, c-jun was phosphorylated and became primarily
heterodimerized with fra-1", "which was also induced
after PDTC incubation"…I mean duh! I had to read this
paper like 5 times! Long story short: antioxidants
appear to suppress the activation of critical segments
of the virus' DNA.
Maybe that's why smearing green tea
on genital warts – also caused by HPV – has been found so effective
in clearing them. In terms of preventing cervical cancer:
through their role as antioxidants, pytonutrients like lutein, found
in dark green leafy vegetables; and lycopene, the red pigment in
tomatoes, may decrease viral load, thereby decreasing persistence
and progression to disease. Whereas the protective associations
may be due to their antioxidant properties. They have all sorts of other wonderful
effects, so who knows… who cares! Bottom line: "higher
consumption of vegetables may decrease risk
of HPV persistence," which may help explain
why this 2013 study found vegan women
have significantly lower rates of all female cancers combined,
including cancer of the cervix.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Plant-Based Bodybuilding
"Plant-Based Bodybuilding" We know excess cellular growth isn’t
so good when we’re fully grown adults, since budding tumors may end up being
the main beneficiaries of higher levels of circulating growth hormones. But in some circumstances, a little
extra growth is sought after, particularly for men in this
culture — though not exclusively. The growth hormone IGF-1 is the
reason some dogs look like this, and others like this. What about those who strive
to be the big dog? Yes, lower circulating levels of IGF-1
in vegans lowers cancer risk, but might that interfere with their
accumulation of muscle mass? There certainly are lots of
plant-based body builders, but maybe they’re the exception. To look like this, does one
have to risk looking like this? True or false: Lower IGF-1 levels
in vegans likely interferes with muscle accumulation. Is this fact, or is this fiction? Well, there’s a couple ways
you attack that question. For example, what’s the skeletal
muscle mass like in acromegaly? People afflicted with giantism — where
they have an IGF overload in the body. If IGF bulks up muscle, you’d think
they’d be musclebound; but no, they don’t have any more muscle,
on average, than anyone else.
What if you inject people with IGF-1? They injected women for a year, and
found no increase in lean body mass or grip, bench or leg press strength. What about men? Basically, same thing. They had about a dozen 22-year-olds
flex for 15 weeks under different hormonal milieus, and concluded that
elevations in ostensibly anabolic hormones, like IGF-1,
with resistance exercise, enhances neither training-induced
muscle bulk, nor strength. "Thus it seems that outside of
[genetically engineered mice or a cell culture dish or other
animal models] that the search for the true role of the growth
potential for IGF-1 in adult muscle hypertrophy is a vain one." So, although it’s never been
directly tested, probably fiction..
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
IQ of Vegetarian Children
"IQ of Vegetarian Children" Okay, so the bronze goes to
hormonal genital meat malformation. The silver goes to a study
on IQ and vegetarianism. First, let me share
a little background. We’ve known for
nearly 30 years that vegetarian children
test smarter than omnivorous kids. First shown in a
1980 study by Tufts University, the IQ of vegetarian children was found
to be about 16 points above average. And their “mental age” was a year
ahead of the rest of their classmates. Of all the veg kids,
the vegan kids appeared the smartest. The pediatricians and psychologists
knew the veg kids were bright, but the researchers noted
that they were puzzled that they were
so much superior. Which came first, though?
The chicken or the egg? Well, for the vegan kids,
neither, perhaps.
But were they smart
because they were vegetarians, and therefore getting
all that good nutrition— or did they become vegetarian
because they were so smart? Well, the mystery has
finally been solved—I guess. Those fantastic Brits followed
8,000 kids for 30 years. Measured their IQ at age 10,
then came back 20 years later and asked which of them had
become vegetarian during that time. Their findings? Higher scores for IQ
in childhood are associated with an increased likelihood
of being a vegetarian as an adult. Smart people
evidently eat vegetarian. They even quote Benjamin Franklin
saying vegetarian diets result in “greater clearness of head
and quicker comprehension.”.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
How Plant-Based to Lower IGF-1?
“How Plant-Based to Lower IGF-1?” Just a few days of walking
and eating whole healthy plant foods, and our IGF-1 levels drop low enough
to reverse cancer cell growth. What if we stick with it? Going to some Pritikin spa and getting
healthy for two weeks is one thing, but what about long-term? Does your IGF-1 start to creep back up
to standard American diet levels again? No. Here’s after 11 days,
and it just gets better. People eating plant-based diets for 14
years have half the IGF-1 in their bodies, and more than twice the amount of
IGF-binding protein than those on the Standard American Diet. We know decreasing animal product
consumption decreases our IGF-1 levels, but how low do you got to go? How plant-based does our diet need to get? Well, let’s look at IGF-1 levels
in meat-eaters, versus vegetarians, versus vegans.
The aim of this study was to determine
whether a plant-based diet is associated with a lower circulating level of IGF-1,
compared with a meat-eating or lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet. And this is what they found. Only the vegans had
significantly lower levels. And the same relationship
found with IGF-1 binding capacity. Only the vegans were significantly
more able to bind up excess IGF-1 in their bloodstreams. This was a study on women. What about vegan men? They found the same thing. So, even though vegan men tend to have
significantly higher testosterone levels than both vegetarians and meat-eaters— which can be a risk factor
for prostate cancer, the reason plant-based diets appear to
reverse the progression of prostate cancer may be due to how low
their IGF-1 levels drop. So, more testosterone, but less cancer. The bottom line is that male or female, just eating vegetarian
did not seem to cut it.
It looks like to get a significant drop
in cancer-promoting growth hormone levels, one apparently has to eliminate
animal products altogether. The good news is that, given what we now know about IGF-1, we can predict that “a low-fat vegan diet
may be profoundly protective with respect to [for example] risk for
postmenopausal breast cancer.”.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Treating Asthma and Eczema With Plant-Based Diets
"Treating Asthma and Eczema With Plant-Based Diets" Twenty patients with allergic eczema were placed
on a vegetarian diet for two months, and their disease scores, covering both
subjective and objective signs and symptoms were cut in half, similar to what you see
using one of our most powerful drugs. The drug worked quicker, within about two weeks, but since side effects may include kidney failure
and cancer the drug is considered a class 1 carcinogen,
the dietary option may be preferable.
But this was no ordinary vegetarian diet. This was an in-patient study using
an extremely calorically restricted diet. They were practically half fasting, so we don't know
which component was responsible for the therapeutic effect. What about using a more conventional plant-based
diet against a different allergic disease, asthma? In Sweden, there was an active health movement that
claimed that a vegan diet could improve or cure asthma. Bold claim. So in order to test this, a skeptical
group of orthopedic surgeons at the University Hospital followed a series of patients who were
treated with a vegan regimen for one year. Patients, participants had to be
willing to go completely plant-based and they had to have physician-verified asthma of
at least a year's duration that wasn't getting better, or even getting worse despite
the best medical therapies available. They found quite a sick group to follow.
Thirty-five patients with long-established hospital-verified
bronchial asthma for an average duration of a dozen years. Of the 35 patients, 20 had been admitted to the hospital
for acute asthmatic attacks during the last two years. Of these, one patient had received acute infusion therapy a total
of 23 times during the period, which is like an emergency intravenous. And another patient claimed he had been brought
to the hospital 100 times during his disease and
on every occasion had evidently required such treatments. One patient even had a cardiac arrest during an asthma
attack and had been brought back to life on a ventilator,
so we're talking some pretty serious cases. They were on up to eight different
asthma medications when they started. They were each on an average of 4.5 drugs
and still not getting better. Twenty of the 35 were constantly using cortisone, which
is one of our most powerful steroids used in severe cases.
So basically fairly advanced cases of the disease,
more severe than the vegan practitioners were used to. Still, how'd they do? Eleven could not stick to the diet for a year. But of the 24 that did, 71% reported improvement
at four months and 92% at one year, and these were folks that had not improved at all
over the previous year before changing their diet. Concurrently with this improvement, the patients
greatly reduced their consumption of medicine. Four had completely given up their medication altogether,
and only two weren't able to at least drop their dose. They went from 4.5 drugs down to 1.2,
and some were able to get off cortisone. Some said that their improvement was so considerable
that they felt like ”they had a new life.” One nurse had difficulty at work because
most of her co-workers were smokers, but after the year she could withstand the secondhand smoke
without getting an attack, as well as tolerating other asthma triggers. Others reported the same thing. Whereas previously they could only live in a clean environment
and felt more or less isolated in their homes, they could now stay out without getting asthma attacks.
And it wasn't just subjective improvements. There was a significant improvement in a number of clinical variables, including most importantly, measures of lung function, vital capacity,
forced expiratory volume, as well as physical working capacity, as well as a significant drop in sed rate,
and IgE, which are allergy associated antibodies. Bottom line, they started out with 35 patients who had
suffered from severe asthma for an average of 12 years, all receiving long-term medication, 20 including cortisone, were subjected to vegan food for a year, and in almost all cases medication was withdrawn or drastically reduced,
and there was a significant decrease in asthma symptoms. Despite the improved lung function tests and lab values, the placebo effect obviously can't be discounted
since there is no blinded control group, but the nice thing about a healthy diet
is that there are only good side effects.
Their cholesterol significantly improved, their
blood pressures got better, they lost 18 pounds, so from a medical standpoint, I figure why not give it a try?.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
IQ of Vegetarian Children
"IQ of Vegetarian Children" Okay, so the bronze goes to
hormonal genital meat malformation. The silver goes to a study
on IQ and vegetarianism. First, let me share
a little background. We’ve known for
nearly 30 years that vegetarian children
test smarter than omnivorous kids. First shown in a
1980 study by Tufts University, the IQ of vegetarian children was found
to be about 16 points above average. And their “mental age” was a year
ahead of the rest of their classmates. Of all the veg kids,
the vegan kids appeared the smartest. The pediatricians and psychologists
knew the veg kids were bright, but the researchers noted
that they were puzzled that they were
so much superior. Which came first, though?
The chicken or the egg? Well, for the vegan kids,
neither, perhaps. But were they smart
because they were vegetarians, and therefore getting
all that good nutrition— or did they become vegetarian
because they were so smart? Well, the mystery has
finally been solved—I guess. Those fantastic Brits followed
8,000 kids for 30 years. Measured their IQ at age 10,
then came back 20 years later and asked which of them had
become vegetarian during that time. Their findings? Higher scores for IQ
in childhood are associated with an increased likelihood
of being a vegetarian as an adult.
Smart people
evidently eat vegetarian. They even quote Benjamin Franklin
saying vegetarian diets result in “greater clearness of head
and quicker comprehension.”.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Treating Advanced Prostate Cancer with Diet: Part 1
"Treating Advanced Prostate
Cancer with Diet: Part 1" Dr. Dean Ornish showed that a plant-
based diet and lifestyle program could apparently reverse the
progression of prostate cancer by making men’s bloodstream nearly 8 times
better at suppressing cancer cell growth, but this was for early stage, localized,
watch-and-wait prostate cancer. What about for more advanced
stage life-threatening disease? There had been sporadic case reports
in the literature suggestive of benefit. A man, for example, with
extensive metastatic disease, given maybe three years to live,
goes on a strict plant-based diet. Four years later, it appears
the cancer has disappeared.
Six years in, he gets a little cocky
and backslides a little bit on the diet. Cancer comes raging
back and he dies. But, that could have been
a total coincidence. That’s the problem with case reports,
which are just kind of glorified anecdotes— you have no idea how representative the
outcome is unless it’s formally studied. But throughout the 20th century, all we had
were these kinds of case reports… until 2001. So, we had this preliminary evidence
based on all the case reports that prostate cancer may be sensitive
to diet even after it metastasizes, may prolong survival
and even cause remission of bone metastases in men
with advanced disease. So, researchers decided to put it to
the test, 4-month intervention. They figured too much saturated fat,
too little fiber, and too much meat may be the biggest players in
tumor promotion and progression. So, they put people on a
whole food plant-based diet of whole grains, beans,
seeds, and fruit. Figuring this would be quite the
departure from their regular diet, they included a stress reduction component
in hopes of improving dietary compliance.
Okay so, who were
these ten men? They all didn’t just
have prostate cancer; they all had underwent a radical
prostatectomy to remove their primary tumor, and then subsequently
had increasing PSA levels, indicative of probable
metastatic disease. PSA stands for prostate-specific antigen;
it’s only made by prostate cells, and they just had their
entire prostates removed. So the level
should be zero. The fact that they not
only still had some PSA, but that it was rising suggests
that the surgery failed, and the cancer had spread
and was making a comeback. Here’s where they started
out before the study began. This is a graph of the speed at
which each of their PSAs was going up. So, if after 4 months of eating healthy,
the graph looked like this, it would mean the
diet had no effect. The cancer would presumably still be powering
away and spreading just as fast as before. Instead, this happened. In two men, it looks like the cancer
accelerated, grew even faster, but in the other 8 men, the
intervention appeared to work, apparently slowing
down cancer growth, and in three it didn’t
just slow or stop, but appeared to
reverse and shrink.
Why the different
responses? Well, in the Ornish study,
the more people complied with the diet and lifestyle
recommendations, the better they did. Dietary changes only work
if you actually do them. Just because you tell people to start
eating a whole food plant-based diet, doesn’t mean patients
actually do it. One can use fiber intake as a
proxy for dietary compliance, since all whole plant
foods have fiber, and Ornish’s patients about doubled
their fiber intake from 31 to 59. How did this group do? They started out even worse,
averaging 14 grams a day, and only made it up
to 19 grams a day. That’s not a whole
food plant-based diet— that doesn’t even make it up to
the recommended minimum daily intake. If you look closely, only 4 men
increased their fiber intake at all. So maybe that may explain
the different responses. Like, how did
patient 2 do? The man whose fiber improved the
most had the best PSA result, and the man whose fiber intake dropped
the most had the worst PSA result. Here’s the graph. And indeed, it appears the
more change they made to their diet, the
better their results.
The researchers concluded that
a plant-based diet delivered in the context of stress management
may slow the rate of tumor progression, and unlike other treatments, may give
patients some control over their disease. And, as Ornish
pointed out, “the only side effects
are beneficial ones.”.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
How Not to Die from Kidney Disease
"How Not to Die from Kidney Disease" Kidney failure may be both prevented
and treated with a plant-based diet, and no wonder; kidneys are
highly vascular organs. Harvard researchers found three
significant dietary risk factors for declining kidney function: animal
protein, animal fat, and cholesterol. Animal fat can alter the actual structure
of our kidneys, based on studies like this, showing plugs of fat literally clogging up
the works in autopsied human kidneys. And the animal protein can
have a profound effect on normal kidney function,
inducing what's called hyperfiltration, increasing the workload of
the kidney; but not plant protein.
Eat a meal of tuna fish and you can see
the increased pressure on the kidneys go up within 1, 2, 3 hours after the meal,
in both nondiabetics and diabetics. So we're not talking adverse
effects decades down the road, but literally within hours
of it going into our mouth. Now, if instead of having a tuna
salad sandwich, though, you had a tofu salad sandwich, with the exact same amount
of protein, what happens? No effect. Dealing with plant protein
is no problem. Why does animal protein cause the
overload reaction, but not plant protein? It appears to be due to
the inflammation triggered by the consumption
of animal products. How do we know that? Because, if you give a powerful,
anti-inflammatory drug along with that tuna fish, you
can abolish the hyperfiltration, protein leakage response
to meat ingestion.
Then, there's the acid load. Animal foods—meat, eggs, and dairy—
induce the formation of acid within the kidneys, which
may lead to tubular toxicity, damage to the tiny, delicate,
urine-making tubes in the kidney. Animal foods tend to be acid forming—
especially fish, which is the worst— then pork and poultry, whereas plant foods tend
to be relatively neutral, or actually alkaline, base-forming
to counteract the acid. So the key to halting the progression
of chronic kidney disease might be in the produce market,
rather than the pharmacy.
No wonder plant-based diets have been
used to treat kidney disease for decades. Here's protein leakage on the
conventional low sodium diet, which is what physicians
would typically put someone with declining
kidney function on. Switched to a supplemented vegan
diet, then back to conventional, plant-based, conventional,
plant-based; turning on and off kidney dysfunction
like a light switch, based on what was
going into their mouths..
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Plant-Based Bodybuilding
"Plant-Based Bodybuilding" We know excess cellular growth isn’t
so good when we’re fully grown adults, since budding tumors may end up being
the main beneficiaries of higher levels of circulating growth hormones. But in some circumstances, a little
extra growth is sought after, particularly for men in this
culture — though not exclusively. The growth hormone IGF-1 is the
reason some dogs look like this, and others like this. What about those who strive
to be the big dog? Yes, lower circulating levels of IGF-1
in vegans lowers cancer risk, but might that interfere with their
accumulation of muscle mass? There certainly are lots of
plant-based body builders, but maybe they’re the exception.
To look like this, does one
have to risk looking like this? True or false: Lower IGF-1 levels
in vegans likely interferes with muscle accumulation. Is this fact, or is this fiction? Well, there’s a couple ways
you attack that question. For example, what’s the skeletal
muscle mass like in acromegaly? People afflicted with giantism — where
they have an IGF overload in the body. If IGF bulks up muscle, you’d think
they’d be musclebound; but no, they don’t have any more muscle,
on average, than anyone else. What if you inject people with IGF-1? They injected women for a year, and
found no increase in lean body mass or grip, bench or leg press strength. What about men? Basically, same thing. They had about a dozen 22-year-olds
flex for 15 weeks under different hormonal milieus, and concluded that
elevations in ostensibly anabolic hormones, like IGF-1,
with resistance exercise, enhances neither training-induced
muscle bulk, nor strength. "Thus it seems that outside of
[genetically engineered mice or a cell culture dish or other
animal models] that the search for the true role of the growth
potential for IGF-1 in adult muscle hypertrophy is a vain one." So, although it’s never been
directly tested, probably fiction.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Plant-based Atkins diet
“Plant-Based Atkins Diet” This was a pretty dramatic case report,
but it was just one person. Recently, researchers at Harvard
decided to look at 100,000 people: “Low-Carb Diets and All-Cause
and Cause-Specific Mortality.” They found that low-carb diets
were associated with higher all-cause mortality,
higher cardiovascular disease mortality, and higher cancer mortality. The final nail in Atkins’ coffin. Men and women on low-carb diets
lead significantly shorter lives; more cancer deaths, more heart attacks. Sure, you may lose some weight,
but the only way we may be able to enjoy it is with a skinnier casket.
But wait! In 2009, some enterprising researchers
came up with a plant-based, low-carb diet; the so-called “Eco-Atkins” diet. They figured that maybe the problem with
the Atkins diet wasn’t that it was high-fat, high-protein, but that it was
high-animal fat, -animal protein. So they constructed a
vegan version of the Atkins diet. How is that possible? Well, lots of mock meats, seitan,
soy burgers, veggie bacon, veggie cold cuts, veggie sausage,
tofu, lot of nuts, avocado, etc. How did they do? Pretty good, actually. Instead of their bad cholesterol going up,
like it does on a meat-based Atkins, after just two weeks on the
plant-based, low-carb diet, their LDL was down more than 20%.
Now the whole study only
lasted a month, though, so you couldn’t really
make any generalizations. But it was intriguing enough that
when the data was run at Harvard, they picked out the people
eating plant-based, low-carb diets to see if they suffered
the same low-carb fate. That’s the nice thing about doing dietary
studies on 100,000 people at a time: you can find people eating
just about anything. What do you think they found? This line represents the
mortality rate of the typical diet. And this is what they found
for people following more of an Atkins-style low-carb diet:
significantly higher risk of death. But what do you think they found
for those following a plant-based, low-carb diet? Do they suffer the same crazy
mortality as the Atkins people? Or maybe they didn’t do that bad, but still had more mortality
than those eating regular diets? Or did they have the same,
or lower mortality? They had lower mortality. They concluded: “A low-carbohydrate diet
based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality
in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based
low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and
cardiovascular disease mortality rates.” So it appears, what matters really isn’t
the ratio of fat to carbs to protein, but rather, the source— whether they’re coming
from plants or animals.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
