weight loss
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
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
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