Vegetarians and Heart Disease: Will Ditching Meat Really Save Your Arteries?

http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/01/06/ve...-heart-disease/

This pretty much sums it up.

They should study vegetarians with life-timer LCers. We have similar mind-sets. This posting is awesome.

I loved this part:



What the????

They thought that being vegetarians meant to eat a big salad on the weekend.

Really, people on average seem awfully clueless, not to say anything else.

I'd like to see a study that shows you the percentage of people who are dumb as a post.

Haha, apparently those are the Mark Bittman vegans.

I'm just starting to read the blog. But one thing jumps out at me: she could easily have just sent everyone to the NCBI website. Let them do their own look-see and read the abstract themselves, for God's sake. Like that's not just one tab away in your browser!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21155029

Yeah, that took one half of a minute.

(It takes almost another half minute to get the free PDF and read the study yourself.)

I'm interested in the whole meat-eater/vegetarian thing because I spent hours in NCBI recently looking at just that. (By the way, there are 17, that's SEVENTEEN, studies when you search for 'Buddhist vegetarian' and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the studies!)

One thing I thought was incredibly interesting - downright twisted, actually - is how 'meat-eaters' are compared to vegetarians. I was seeing some surprising stuff and the researchers were actually pointing to 'vegans' and 'vegetarians' and 'lacto-ovo vegetarians' and fine-tuning those distinctions. Then I realized that if they said 'meat-eater,' they included people who eat mainly fish, even ONLY fish, in the 'meat-eater' category. Even people who hardly ever eat meat and even people who rarely touch red meat (listening, Jennifer Aniston? Huh? Guess not..) Because vegetarians only eat plants, it might as well have been stated in terms as general as 'plant-only eaters' and 'people who are not plant-only eaters' and that's hardly saying anything!

As I said, there are hundreds of studies that will pop up of you search 'vegetarians lipids' or 'vegetarians dairy' or 'vegetarians any damned thing' so I'm guessing there are THOUSANDS of studies out there deserving a look. But some Buddhist nuns? OK, start there.

A cursory look at the whole 'omnivore' part of the study, looking at the PDF, shows that they don't mention what THEY ate. You do get the low-down on the foods the Buddhist vegetarians ate and even how they cook them. But the 'omnivores'? Nada. Niente.

So now I'm going to read Ms. Minger's blog and find out how much she cares about what the omnivores in the study ate.

From her blog (and she apparently doesn't care at all what an omnivore eats in Taiwan!):

'Eating less meat goes hand-in-hand with other health-promoting choices, so we often see vegetarians trumping omnivorous control groups in terms of health markers.'

Jeez, eating those garbanzo beans and walnuts... I think they must do that out of boredom. And because they CAN eat garbanzo beans and walnuts, because they're vegetarians. They eat more fiber? How radical can you get? The reason I got so far afield looking at vegetarians and meat-eaters in NCBI was that I read Michael Eades' statement that the emphasis on fiber is a sham created by people who want to make money selling fiber (I'm paraphrasing). Not only is there 'Big Pharm,' now there's 'Big Fiber'! And all those studies examining the role of fiber in the gut and effects on other hormones such as um, INSULIN... lies, lies, and more lies!

Vegetarians fall for that stuff, too, I guess!

Another study produced from exactly the same group of Buddhist vegetarian women:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20941898

And here are some plain old Taiwanese researchers looking at some non-Buddhist vegetarian women and asking, 'What is it that makes their hearts healthier?'

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18666713

(compared to 'omnivores,' which, in Taiwan, means people who eat a lot more fish than we do - it's an island, for God's sake...)

MathManiac-- did you see any studies on Taiwanese vegetarians where actual disease outcomes, as opposed to risk factors, were measured?

teaser,

As I said, there were 17 studies that popped up when you search 'Buddhist vegetarian' by plugging those words into the search box at the top and press enter. The most recent study comes up first.

Because I was already reading the studies about meat-eaters and vegetarians, I know this is a small fraction of what's out there but not for 'Buddhist vegetarian.' What you get for 'Buddhist vegetarian' isn't representative of vegetarian studies or Buddhist studies.

When you're in NCBI, doing a search, it helps to start by joining up, getting a Userid and password. From then on, you can save the studies in 'collections' (folders, I guess) and I have collections for 'meat diet' and 'vegetarian' already. But then there are vegetarian studies I've filed in other folders, too, without duplicating, so I'd have to start a new search to find exactly what you want.

Not that difficult, but I already have a lot of studies on those topics.

When you set up an ID and start building collections, you can 'save' your search argument and tell NCBI to send you any new studies for that search argument, too. The studies will come to your email so you know if anything new is produced in the field. Google has this kind of search save capability, too.

Those 17 don't take much time to look at but I will look at them again for what you ask. I explained the stuff above because 1) it is JUST one tab away to look at the actual studies abstracts and often download the whole PDF and 2) getting good at the search arguments seems to be the most useful (for example, I don't think 'disease outcomes' is a great keyword to search so I'll have to think about how to narrow that down... 'mortality' is better, I think, but casts a pretty wide net for every kind of disease.)

Who knew Taiwan had the highest endstage renal failure rate in the world? Turns out vegetarians and 'omnivores' have the same assessment for that in Taiwan, according to one of those 17 studies!

Interesting! I wonder if they adjusted for smoking? I think they smoke a whole, whole lot over there.

Just a note regarding Buddhism: Generally, only monks are vegetarian in SE Asia, lay people eat meat and fish.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20941898

Nancy LC, there's the abstract. No free PDF for this one! But you made me do a search on 'renal failure' and 'smoking'!

And now there are 24 studies for the 'Buddhist vegetarian' argument instead of 17 - after a day!

Maybe they drink too much water.

According to Wikipedia, in Taiwan:

'Vegetarian restaurants are commonplace with a wide variety of dishes, mainly due to the influence of Buddhism'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_cuisine