Is a little good for you?: Earlier this year... - Healthy Eating

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Is a little good for you?

andyswarbs profile image
10 Replies

Earlier this year Sridevi Kapoor sadly died after cardiac arrest aged 49. This is despite, according to her family, of having no history of heart disease timesofindia.indiatimes.com.... Also it is certainly true that cocaine is implicated in the death, and the pressure of being a celebrity cannot have helped.

Being the diet nerd that I am I looked into what she ate and at indianbeauty.tips/sridevis-... there is one description of her daily food plan. A video youtube.com/watch?v=YOQiKop... goes into her diet and seems to agree with this. Much of this was clearly vegetables and fruit and I am sure she considered it a very healthy diet. And certainly I would agree that much of that diet was extremely healthy.

However according to both of the above she regularly ate fish, milk and cheese. These are cholesterol raising foods and therefore, in my book, puts her at risk of a heart attack, family history notwithstanding.

My main concern is that often people like the concept of moderation, "a little of everything does you good". Even in the kind of diet I love & promote the word "variety" is key to good health.

However I argue that, beyond removing refined foods, it is ONLY when you completely remove animal foods from your diet that your body becomes almost totally immune to heart attacks. Not only that it has been shown that heart disease can be reversed. pcrm.org/health/health-topi... has the full back story as well as links to supporting research.

What is not in that page is whether eating a little bit of meat is good for you. For this can I refer you to nutritionfacts.org/2016/10/..., which has a video to go with it for those who like that format.

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andyswarbs
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Rignold profile image
RignoldKeto

I would argue that a.) a vegan diet does not make you almost totally immune to heart attacks and b.) if you are maintaining a coke habit at the age of 49, your diet is really neother here nor there

andyswarbs profile image
andyswarbs in reply toRignold

You are totally right that a vegan diet per se does not guarantee immunity. I have been following vegan zombie on youtube who has been reporting regularly on his blood tests over months. He found his cholesterol numbers simply would not come to order until in this last episode he has about got his numbers about right (which I attribute to him removing nuts & oil). youtube.com/watch?v=7c_9tHR...

This shows to me that whilst some people might get their blood numbers in order relatively easily, others may have to go further.

Rignold profile image
RignoldKeto in reply toandyswarbs

No oil, no salt and vegan diet... I can't imagine how much fun that must be. He does look pretty much how I would picture him from that description of his diet though.

andyswarbs profile image
andyswarbs in reply toRignold

You are right, people who live on meat cannot understand. This is not because they don't want to, or are ignorant rather but because their gut is not tuned towards a vegan lifestyle. From the date of going completely vegan for many people it takes a month for the gut to change. The intestines etc are completely replaced every three months and that is how long some people take, but I am ware that for further sub-group it can even take a year (typically with gut health issues).

Once that change is complete what might have seemed bland flavours suddenly come alive. A whole new world opens up of exploring colours, textures and tastes.

TheAwfulToad profile image
TheAwfulToad in reply toandyswarbs

This shows me what Carl Sagan warned us about 20-odd years ago:

youtube.com/watch?v=3HU8kCX...

"It's not that pseudoscience and superstition and ... fundamentalist zealotry are something new. They've been with us for as long as we've been human. But we live in an age based on science and technology ... and if we don't understand it, then who is making all the decisions about science and technology?"

Which reminds me also of Clarke's Third Law:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Where 'sufficient' is relative to your understanding. So we get people with absolutely zero understanding of science making up incantations and rituals based on some sciencey buzzwords they've picked up. Salt and fat are bad for you not because there's any experimental evidence showing that they are, but because science is magic, and doing magic spells means doing bizarre things. The more bizarre the spell, the more likely it is to work.

Here's my critique of the undernourished young man in the video:

1) No single number in your cholesterol panel has any predictive value for disease risk. The interpretation is complicated, and frankly there's no strong correlation with ANY cholesterol subfraction. For what it's worth, his numbers went from 'awful' to merely 'pretty bad'. There's certainly no miracle cure here. This is all in mmol rather than mg, but the same principles apply:

profgrant.com/2016/12/01/th...

If you want one single number that correlates with risk, it's TG/HDL-C:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

If your measurements are in mg, you should be looking at better than 2:1 for TG/HDL-C. His progression is 4.4, 3.2, 2.8, 2.5. Even so, it's worth remembering that correlation is not causation, and the fact that he works out will probably help (in real terms) more than anything he does with his diet.

2) LDL-C is completely irrelevant, for all sorts of reasons. The main one is that it isn't even measured - it's estimated from the other measurements. In other words it CANNOT be an independent predictor of anything; whatever information is in the LDL number is also in your other numbers. Doctors focus on it because it can be dramatically tweaked with statins ... even though this has virtually zero effect on heart disease.

3) Experiments that change multiple variables are worthless. In the last dietary change he eliminated even more this and that and ... oh, by the way, just in passing, all flour- and starch-based products. Hmm. Which basically means he's surviving on fresh air and fibre. I'm amazed he's still alive. But what was the critical factor affecting his TG/HDL-C? We don't know, because he changed too many things at once.

This guy isn't eating vegan. He's not eating anything at all. I'd expect him to have started munching the kitchen table in desperation by now.

Anyway, andyswarbs , your entire thesis is disproved by the millions of people eating proper food (things containing fat and salt) with their vegetables, and who have spot-on perfect cholesterol numbers (for whatever that's worth) and good health.

There aren't many people who "live on meat". Mongolian nomads, maybe (and AFAIK they're not all dying of heart disease). The rest of us merely have some meat in our diet. I don't disagree with you that people generally should eat more vegetables and not smother them in MSG. However, that's mainly an issue of enjoyment, not health risk.

And on a lighter note, a nice fat and salt free recipe for y'all:

youtube.com/watch?v=0MpL1Kf...

andyswarbs profile image
andyswarbs in reply toTheAwfulToad

Awakening with JP is so funny.

Agoodenough profile image
Agoodenough

This is very interestin. Thanks for posting it.

Agoodenough profile image
Agoodenough

I wasn’t suggesting her family would think anything. The person who posted this I would imagine did with the best of intentions. As they had said, they are interested in exploring different diets, as am I. I don’t know the person who posted this but have seen other posts from them and I would say they didn’t post it to be malicious. Have a good day 🌞

andyswarbs profile image
andyswarbs

very wise

andyswarbs profile image
andyswarbs

The fact is she was a celebrity explaining what diets are healthy in her opinion. That surely is worth exploring. It is certainly better than any amount of testing on live animals!

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