An interview with the author of 'The Vegetarian Myth' - comments?

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Permalink Reply by Frances on March 14, 2011 at 8:40am

She seemed to have some good points, they were mixed up with claims that weren't fully backed up logically, and outright incorrect information. A lot of what she had to say was more anti-people and anti-civilization than anti-vegetarian, and it didn't always get tied back to dietary choices.

It's true that plant foods do not contain vitamin D, and this is a real issue for vegans. Mushrooms do contain vitamin D, but they are not plants, of course. Vegans who live in cooler climates are almost guaranteed to have low vitamin D if they don't supplement.

It's not true that vitamins A and E aren't available in plant sources. I never have any trouble getting enough of these from vegan sources, so I have no idea where she got this idea.

I had to research vitamin K2. I found almost no information breaking down levels of vitamin K into K1 and K2 in specific foods, but apparently K1 is more often found in plant foods and K2 is more often found in animal foods. I did find references to a deficiency in K2 specifically being associated with increased risks for certain conditions. This was a new idea, and I'd need to know more before deciding that it's a serious concern. Vitamin K2 is apparently one of those that we need less of if our colons are healthy due to improved absorption. I might ask my doctor to include this in a blood test panel before assuming that I _must_ be deficient.

A lot of her broad statements about what constitutes healthy and unhealthy diets didn't seem related to vegetarianism. It's certainly true that too much sugar is a problem in anyone's diet, but she seemed to be arguing that excess sugar is more of a problem for vegetarians because meat-eaters eat all that meat and then don't have as much room for sugar in their diets. None of us try to subsist entirely on meat, so it seems like the real determining factor when it comes to our sugar load lies in our other food choices. It's also true that a diet too low in fat is a problem, but she didn't really make any good arguments for why animal fats are better than plant fats (she _said_ they were better, she just didn't give reasons). She spent a lot of time talking about the consequences of a diet too low in fat, and I don't disagree with that, but there are plenty of plant sources of fat, so that didn't seem connected to her argument against veganism.

I was left unimpressed by this interview. I have heard much better arguments about specific nutrient deficiencies that can arise when avoiding animal foods. While arguing that we need nutrients from animal sources, she didn't say how much meat she thought people should eat to get those nutrients. Her rants about the evils of modern corn agriculture seemed accurate, but don't seem to lead to any conclusions about whether to eat meat. Her rants about the evils of factory farming of animals seemed accurate, but she didn't suggest where people should find a more ethical source of meat that would be affordable. (If she's recommending only small amounts of meat consumption, then affordability is less of a concern, but she didn't make that clear.) Arguing that human civilization does more damage to the land than a nuclear explosion was an interesting and thought provoking comparison, but assuming that she was not trying to advocate use of nuclear weapons to alleviate the environmental damage people cause, then I'm not sure what if anything she was suggesting we should do about it.

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Permalink Reply by Julian on March 14, 2011 at 9:43am

Haa. That's a good, solid answer, well written, fair info., and impressively quick, too. Thanks very much, Frances!

I agree that with reflection, I find her line which was something like "We can agree to call them complex carbohydrates if you like but let's face it, they're really just sugars" was a bit too over-simplistic and basically patronizing. It's virtually implying there's no difference between white rice and brown or black rice, or, by extension, eating a meal with white sugar instead of any rice or any complex carbs at all, which just seems inane.

She does raise the question of insulin swings (or however she phrases it) which is something of which I'm aware, but I have no information on how vegans and veggies tend to cope differently, physiologically, with such challenges. As I understand it, the more complex the carbohydrate, the less the risk of insulin spikes and crashes, and so the greater the feelings of fulfillment and the lesser the urges for binging on unhealthy (and typically processed) foods. I can't see that meat is necessary in any of that. Have I missed something? What else is useful to keep in mind, or be aware of here, in relation to her spiel on insulin etc.?

 

Do you have any opinion on Weston Price's work, and her interpretation of it?

 

I'd be curious and even interested on any findings you manage on the K vitamins.

 

Thanks again!

Regards,

j.w.

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Permalink Reply by Frances on March 14, 2011 at 11:03am

I found this well put-together article on vitamin k2. The site is one devoted to the primal diet, so the author concludes that his readers have little reason to fear k2 deficiency, but his overview of the subject is fairly broad even so.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/vitamin-k2/

My understanding is that whole grains are only moderately better in glycemic load than white grains, and I actually agree with her when she argues that excessive consumption of grains is problematic. In fact, the reason we eat grains in such quantity has everything to do with the fact that they are an ample source of calories that stores well without refrigeration. To the extent that we are able to replace grains with healthier fruits and vegetables, I believe it is a good idea to do so.

Too much sugar can bring on type 2 diabetes over time, which can lead to all sorts of serious secondary effects. (The good news is that type 2 diabetes can be cured by a sufficiently determined dietary correction.) The current accepted plan is to monitor the glycemic load of foods, which is a measure of how much and how quickly those foods increase your blood sugar. (This is pretty much what you described.) I like nutritiondata.com. Their database includes estimated glycemic loads for each food. Sugars that take longer to hit the bloodstream to cause less of a problem, and I thought her description of the mechanism was more or less in line with my own understanding. My objection was simply that she didn't connect any of this to vegetarianism.

A lot of her focus was on the transition from hunt-and-gatherer to agricultural life, and the introduction of grains to the human diet did go along with that transition. She discussed this transition so much, that I wondered whether she was advocating a switch all the way back to a pre-agricultural diet, presumably consisting of meats and foraged nuts and berries in whatever ratio is regionally appropriate. If so, I'm curious whether she also means to advocate the lifestyle as well. While vegans tend to get little or no dietary vitamin D (depending on whether they like mushrooms), meat eaters don't generally get enough either. One of the reasons these hunter-gatherers would have not been deficient would have been all the time they spent outdoors.

That gets at one of my other thoughts about her argument, which is that life changed a whole lot of ways with the dawn of agriculture. Once people settled into the land they tended, everything changed, and it took a while for people to figure out things like the importance of keeping their sewage away from the drinking water. Population density shot way up, dietary variety went way down. Little was understood about nutrition, so without the enforced variety of foraging it would have been easy for deficiencies to take root. While I'm not a huge fan of grains as compared to more nutritious foods, these first farmers were not suffering from pre-diabetes. They were still very hard working and they were not overeating. The modern issues related to excessive sugar aren't going to be an issue for someone eating barely enough to keep themselves alive.

I haven't read anything about Weston Price's work, so all I have to go on is her interpretation, which I don't consider very definitive. I have heard arguments that connected eating more denatured foods with a lot of the symptoms she listed, including bone deformity and more difficult and risky childbirth. The way I've usually heard the argument made, the conclusion is that we should all eat raw foods, as cooking is the modern dietary scourge that is making us all unhealthy. If Weston Price is the source of these theories, I would be interested in reading his original observations and theories without the interference of the slants different people put on them.

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