Thu, Aug-17-06, 10:10
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Senior Member
Posts: 1,409
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Plan: Atkins OWL
Stats: 296/178/150
BF:Much less
Progress: 81%
Location: Shenandoah Valley of VA
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Who Needs Vegetables Anyway?
Produce doesn't pass his lips, but whole grains do. I rather enjoyed this article.
http://health.msn.com/dietfitness/a...entid=100142240
Quote:
Who Needs Vegetables Anyway?
No produce has passed his lips in more than 25 years. And by all outward appearances, he's as healthy as the next guy. Now he finds out what's been going on inside—and if his carnivorous ways are killing him.
By Matt Marion
Long before Robert Atkins drew up his diet, Vilhjalmur Stefansson met the Inuit. In 1928, the Arctic explorer turned high-protein pioneer when he tested whether man can live by meat alone. He wasn't exactly sweating the results; he'd already survived in the wild by adopting the Inuit food plan of caribou, fish, and whale fat. But he was trying to win over the nonbelievers. And, sure enough, after a year of eating carnivorously, he emerged 5 1/2 pounds lighter but otherwise intact. To be truthful, a researcher did report one issue early on: "[Stefansson] developed a stubborn constipation coincident with a craving for special foods, particularly calves' brains."
My own hankerings for veal are more likely to involve spaghetti than cerebrum. Still, I view Stefansson as something of a kindred spirit. See, I, too, eat like the Inuit.
Granted, there are no caribou burgers on my menu, but neither are there are any fruits or vegetables. It's estimated that produce makes up 4 percent of the traditional Inuit diet—roughly equal to my own intake, if you count ketchup. For nearly three decades, I've eschewed chewing anything that sprouts from the ground or falls from a tree. Whereas most children grow out of their vegetable-loathing phase, I regressed into mine. When I was old enough to choose my foods, I chose not to eat vegetables.
I know there must be downsides to my diet. Then again, I should, having served as the Men's Health nutrition editor for several years. But there's just one "problem": I feel fine. Can't be? It's true. I've had two kidney stones, but otherwise my medical history is unremarkable. I realize there are several possible explanations for my asymptomatic existence, but I'm betting my life on the most controversial one: Fruits and vegetables simply aren't necessary for our survival.
"You're the classic picky eater," says Marcia Pelchat, Ph.D., a food psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia. "I used to work with a guy who subsisted on potato chips and Coke, and an occasional crab. And you know, he was a big, healthy guy. People do survive on pretty marginal diets." She pauses a moment. "Do you eat whole-grain products?"
"I try to."
"That's probably one of the reasons you're still alive."
She's being dramatic, of course. Most people who hear that I've gone more than a quarter of a century without the protective effects of nature's most powerful disease-fighting foods assume the worst. But is their pro-green prejudice justified? With the help of a battery of high-tech tests, I hope to find out.
When the first one arrives—the biomarker report from Biophysical Corporation, in Austin, Texas—it's as if I'm holding my fate in my hands. The 38-page packet contains the results of a blood test designed to measure everything from simple LDL cholesterol to the hematological head-scratcher "ribosomal nuclear protein C antibody" (a marker for vascular diseases such as lupus). There are a total of 250 such biomarkers, which together are designed to create "a comprehensive profile of your personal health and your risk factors."
The cost: five vials of blood and $3,400. Insurance won't cover the test, so opening a vein is the easy part.
My tour guide to the results is George Rodgers, M.D., the company's president and chief medical director. After some small talk about my eating idiosyncrasies, we review the cancer biomarkers. He explains that from PSA (prostate-specific antigen) to CEA (carcinoembryonic antigen), my scores are all within the normal range. I'm relieved, especially when I learn that CEA is a biomarker for colon cancer: The disease killed my grandmother, which makes me 1 1/2 times more likely to grow my own polyps than someone with a clean family history. Several years ago, a gastroenterologist took a look-see in my large intestine, and I received a passing grade. Now that I have this CEA result, I almost start to feel a little cocky.
Dr. Rodgers has the cure for that. He points out that even though I try to compensate with whole grains, the dearth of roughage in my diet could be laying the mutagenic groundwork for future tumors.
"Studies have shown that high-fiber diets are protective with regard to colon cancer," he says. "But even in non-fiber eaters, the cancer doesn't usually appear until the sixth or seventh decade of life."
The remainder of the report seems positive. One by one, Dr. Rodgers checks off "low risk" ratings for dozens of biomarkers representing a variety of categories, including diabetes and inflammation. Then, just as my confidence is climbing again, he brings up my cardiovascular scores.
"The only small issue is an elevation in your LDL," he says. "This is the 'bad' cholesterol. It's best to have an LDL of less than 100. However, at 121, yours isn't too elevated; it's just not optimal."
This bothers me, though it shouldn't. Not only do I avoid fruits and vegetables, but I'm also allergic to exercise, managing to go months at a time without budging my resting heart rate. So, if anything, I should be grateful that the few cardioprotective measures I do employ—monounsaturated fats, fish oil, green tea, a multivitamin—are helping to intercept my invitation to atherosclerosis.
But for how long? Dr. Rodgers offers one final assessment.
"Perhaps your diet is not ideal as a long-term strategy, but you are healthy now," he says. "In fact, I would say that you are as healthy as our vegetarian clients."
I wonder what this says about vegetarians.
I've just FedExed my urine to Baltimore. I realize this is an odd alternative to flushing the toilet, but overnighting my morning pee is necessary for the next test—one that can see even deeper into the human body and illuminate the earliest evidence of illness.
I'm referring to my oxidative-stress profile, which puts hard numbers to the hypothesis that cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other assorted ailments are, to a large degree, caused by free-radical damage. The process is a kind of internal industrial pollution—when the body burns fuel (calories), it produces waste by-products (free radicals). And just as the black stuff spewing from smokestacks can be dangerous in large quantities, so too can a surplus of free radicals. Worst case, they do enough cumulative damage to the DNA to trigger a tumor. Or a blocked artery.
There are only two ways to rein in the radicals: Consume fewer calories or ingest more antioxidants, substances with the power to neutralize the troublemakers. The hitch for someone like me is where the majority of antioxidants are found: the produce aisle.
In order to find out what havoc free radicals may have wrought, I offered up the aforementioned urine sample and two more vials of blood. (If my diet doesn't do me in, anemia might.) This time, the testing is performed by Genox Corporation, in Baltimore. It's one of the few laboratories in the country that measure free-radical damage as well as a person's level of antioxidant protection.
Unwrapping my latest report card, I see that I have elevated scores for two markers of oxidative damage—8-OHdG and hydroperoxides I—and low scores for others. Why aren't they good or bad across the board?
Wayne Askew, Ph.D., an antioxidant expert and the director of nutrition at the University of Utah, singles out my 32-ounce-a-day green-tea habit as the likely explanation. The problem, says Askew, is that even though I'm swallowing a lot of antioxidants, they're of a limited variety. Specifically, I'm loaded up on thiols but not uric acid, which rises with fruit consumption.
"Antioxidants are an example of teamwork," says Askew. "When you have a basketball team, there are a bunch of people all trying to achieve one ultimate goal, but they do different things to get there. So you might have the tallest center in the world, but without contributions from the rest of the team, giving the ball to him won't do any good."
In case I'm not convinced that my diet is Shaq without Wade, Askew draws my attention to the part of the report covering carotenoids, plant pigments with powerful antioxidant properties.
I'm not exactly a free-radical-ridden mess. My arteries aren't plaque factories. And I don't have tumors out the wazoo (or inside it). All of which proves . . . not much.
That, in a nutshell, is the verdict of Jeffrey Blumberg, Ph.D., FACN, C.N.S., director of the antioxidant-research laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. In addition to the parade of letters after his name, Blumberg has to his credit more research into the healing power of produce than perhaps anyone else. So I presented the case of an unnamed man who had managed to make it to his mid-30s without the aid of a single blueberry or brussels sprout. His response could just as easily have applied to Stefansson, who stuck to his belief in meat all the way to a fatal stroke at 83.
"Your antivegan is simply ignoring all the advice that biomedical and nutrition science has to offer about promoting health and reducing the risk of chronic disease through proper diet," he says. "Regardless of his apparent health today, his functional levels—cognition, endurance, strength, and so on—are certainly not as high as they might be if he ate healthfully. That is, he could be 'well' rather than 'not sick.' "
On an intuitive level, I know he's right. What I've spun as evidence against fruits and vegetables is merely the absence of illness. In other words, the fact that I don't have scurvy doesn't mean that I'm healthy. Furthermore, if I dispense with my denial, I can acknowledge that my odds of enjoying a disease-free future are slim.
And the weird thing is, I'm glad. Like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, I've been given a glimpse into where I'm headed while there's still time to change where I end up. I don't know if I'll ever be able to stomach spinach or carrots, but for the first time in decades, I'm willing to try.
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