Vegetarians are Destroying America

August 28, 2002

These kinds of studies are always inevitably skewed. They compare

vegetarians with people who eat traditional western high fat, high refined

carbohydrate diets. I would like to see some more realistic comparisons with

groups that traditionally have long life spans, such as Okinawa diets, or

Hunza type diets, or even Mediterranean diets. There is a lot of vegetarian

propaganda going around that is based solely on comparing itself with

traditional western style diets. And the followers tend to be so fanatic

that they refuse to look at the reality of things, and act offended if

anyone should oppose their views.

I fell for it for 26 years, (I was a fanatical vegetarian for health and

ethical reasons) only to suffer with neurological problems from B12

deficiencies, protein deficiencies, and especially Omega 3 deficiencies.

(because I'm one of the 20% of the population who lack the genetics for

metabolizing Omega 3's from plant sources) Not everyone can tolerate a

vegetarian diet without going to some very inconvenient extremes to

accommodate individual needs.

And believe me, I've seen vegetarians with Parkinson's, cancer, diabetes, in

spite of a life time vegetarian diet. It isn't a sure thing that you won't

suffer a degenerative disorder because of a vegetarian diet. I've known

plenty of people who attempted to become vegetarians, but simply couldn't

deal with the food cravings and fatigue and other health problems that

developed. The statistics for vegetarians don't tell you all the people who

failed to thrive on it and went back to an omnivore diet. The probable link

with a decrease in degenerative diseases isn't because of the lack of animal

products in the diet, it is more likely that people who are willing to eat

an alternative diet are generally more health conscious, and are consuming

more healthy antioxidant rich foods than people who don't care about what

they eat. But this doesn't necessarily equate to it being the ideal diet.

It's just better than the worst diet.

Linda Jones

lindaj

-

" angelprincessjo " <angelprincessjo

Wednesday, August 28, 2002 11:02 AM

Vegetarians are Destroying America

> VEGETARIANS ARE DESTROYING AMERICA

>

> In 1950, 16.5 wage earners contributed

> for every person drawing social security

> benefits. Unfortunately, people are living

> longer, and depleting retirement funds.

> Today, just over 3 workers pay for a

> lifetime of benefits for one retiree. The

> annual report of the Federal Old-Age

> Survivors Insurance and Disability Trust

> Fund predicts that in 20 years, less than

> 2 of America's workers will provide for

> each person receiving social security

> benefits.

>

> America's pension funds are nearly bankrupt.

> Social security cannot pay for itself. As

> people live longer, our valuable resources

> become depleted. Vegetarianism may be a healthy

> lifestyle, but it is unhealthy for the American

> economy. We would do better by having our

> citizens live an average of ten years less.

>

> Science supports the absolute correlation between

> a healthy vegetarianism diet and an unhealthy

> economy.

>

> " Scientific data suggest positive relationships between

> a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic

> degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity,

> coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus,

> and some types of cancer. "

>

> Journal of the American Dietetic Association,

> November 1997, 97(1)

> ____

>

> " Vegetarians often have lower mortality rates from several

> chronic degenerative diseases than do non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1996; 313

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets low in fat or saturated fat have been

> used successfully as part of comprehensive health programs

> to reverse severe coronary artery disease. "

>

> Journal of the American Medical Association 1995; 274

> ____

>

> " Mortality from coronary artery disease is lower in

> vegetarians than in non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1994; 308

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets have been successful in

> arresting coronary artery disease. "

>

> Am J Epidemiol. 1995;142

> ____

>

> " Serum cholesterol and low density lipoprotein

> cholesterol levels are usually lower in vegetarians.

> Vegetarians have a lower incidence of hypertension

> than non vegetarians. "

>

> American J Clin Nutr. 1994;59

> ____

>

> " Type 2 diabetes mellitus is less likely to be a

> cause of death in vegetarians than non vegetarians. "

>

> American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1988;48(suppl)

> ____

>

> " Breast cancer rates are lower in populations that

> consume plant based diets. "

>

> American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures, 1994

>

> So, for the good of America and near-bankrupt retirement

> funds, please do not become a vegetarian and live longer.

> Your friends and neighbors require your altruistic sacrifice.

>

> Robert Cohen

>

> Submitted by:

>

> JoAnn Guest

> jguest

> Friendsforhealthnaturally

> DietaryTipsForHBP

>

> Getting well is done one step at a time, day by day, building health

> and well being.

>

> list or archives: Gettingwell

>

> ........ Gettingwell-

> post............. Gettingwell

> digest form...... Gettingwell-digest

> individual emails Gettingwell-normal

> no email......... Gettingwell-nomail

> moderator ....... Gettingwell-owner

> ...... Gettingwell-

>

August 28, 2002

I dont know if I agree. Vegetables are sprayed with chemicals and now they are

genetically altered. I remember Linda McCarthy dying of cancer at a very early

age and she was a notorious vegetarian. I would just say my mind is not quite

made up on this.

sharon

-

angelprincessjo

Gettingwell

Wednesday, August 28, 2002 11:02 AM

Vegetarians are Destroying America

VEGETARIANS ARE DESTROYING AMERICA

In 1950, 16.5 wage earners contributed

for every person drawing social security

benefits. Unfortunately, people are living

longer, and depleting retirement funds.

Today, just over 3 workers pay for a

lifetime of benefits for one retiree. The

annual report of the Federal Old-Age

Survivors Insurance and Disability Trust

Fund predicts that in 20 years, less than

2 of America's workers will provide for

each person receiving social security

benefits.

America's pension funds are nearly bankrupt.

Social security cannot pay for itself. As

people live longer, our valuable resources

become depleted. Vegetarianism may be a healthy

lifestyle, but it is unhealthy for the American

economy. We would do better by having our

citizens live an average of ten years less.

Science supports the absolute correlation between

a healthy vegetarianism diet and an unhealthy

economy.

" Scientific data suggest positive relationships between

a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic

degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity,

coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus,

and some types of cancer. "

Journal of the American Dietetic Association,

November 1997, 97(1)

____

" Vegetarians often have lower mortality rates from several

chronic degenerative diseases than do non vegetarians. "

British Medical Journal, 1996; 313

____

" Vegetarian diets low in fat or saturated fat have been

used successfully as part of comprehensive health programs

to reverse severe coronary artery disease. "

Journal of the American Medical Association 1995; 274

____

" Mortality from coronary artery disease is lower in

vegetarians than in non vegetarians. "

British Medical Journal, 1994; 308

____

" Vegetarian diets have been successful in

arresting coronary artery disease. "

Am J Epidemiol. 1995;142

____

" Serum cholesterol and low density lipoprotein

cholesterol levels are usually lower in vegetarians.

Vegetarians have a lower incidence of hypertension

than non vegetarians. "

American J Clin Nutr. 1994;59

____

" Type 2 diabetes mellitus is less likely to be a

cause of death in vegetarians than non vegetarians. "

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1988;48(suppl)

____

" Breast cancer rates are lower in populations that

consume plant based diets. "

American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures, 1994

So, for the good of America and near-bankrupt retirement

funds, please do not become a vegetarian and live longer.

Your friends and neighbors require your altruistic sacrifice.

Robert Cohen

http://www.notmilk.com

Submitted by:

JoAnn Guest

jguest

Friendsforhealthnaturally

DietaryTipsForHBP

August 28, 2002

---Sharon,

Good Afternoon!

It is my opinion this becomes just one more reason that we should

buy exclusively Organic Produce. Apparently few people realize that

the Soy Proteins vegetarians derive from products such as those put

out by Worthington foods are rampant with gmos (unless they

specifically state otherwise)!

The genetically engineered soy products have been found to be a

contributing factor in *angiogenesis*.

How can meats/poultry derived from animals fed exclusively on gmo

corn/grain varieties be any healthier? Or gmo fish species?

Cancer is a breakdown of the immune system according to articles

I've come across. The immune system (T-cells) immediately destroy

cancer cells if they're efficiently working.

By far the most important thing we can do is to build up our

immune systems in addition to eliminating known free radicals

(carcinogens) in our food and environment. Foods are not the only

source of carcinogens.

There are other factors involved in the proliferation of cancer

cells such as stress,pollutants,household chemicals,radiation, etc.

One cannot just look at dietary factors to the exclusion of

everything else. Heredity also plays a vital role.

JoAnn Guest

jguest

Friendsforhealthnaturally

In Gettingwell, " shar2 " <shar2@s...> wrote:

> I dont know if I agree. Vegetables are sprayed with chemicals and

now they are genetically altered. I remember Linda McCarthy dying

of cancer at a very early age and she was a notorious vegetarian.

I would just say my mind is not quite made up on this.

>

> sharon

> -

> angelprincessjo

> Gettingwell

> Wednesday, August 28, 2002 11:02 AM

> Vegetarians are Destroying America

>

> VEGETARIANS ARE DESTROYING AMERICA

>

> In 1950, 16.5 wage earners contributed

> for every person drawing social security

> benefits. Unfortunately, people are living

> longer, and depleting retirement funds.

> Today, just over 3 workers pay for a

> lifetime of benefits for one retiree. The

> annual report of the Federal Old-Age

> Survivors Insurance and Disability Trust

> Fund predicts that in 20 years, less than

> 2 of America's workers will provide for

> each person receiving social security

> benefits.

>

> America's pension funds are nearly bankrupt.

> Social security cannot pay for itself. As

> people live longer, our valuable resources

> become depleted. Vegetarianism may be a healthy

> lifestyle, but it is unhealthy for the American

> economy. We would do better by having our

> citizens live an average of ten years less.

>

> Science supports the absolute correlation between

> a healthy vegetarianism diet and an unhealthy

> economy.

>

> " Scientific data suggest positive relationships between

> a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic

> degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity,

> coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus,

> and some types of cancer. "

>

> Journal of the American Dietetic Association,

> November 1997, 97(1)

> ____

>

> " Vegetarians often have lower mortality rates from several

> chronic degenerative diseases than do non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1996; 313

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets low in fat or saturated fat have been

> used successfully as part of comprehensive health programs

> to reverse severe coronary artery disease. "

>

> Journal of the American Medical Association 1995; 274

> ____

>

> " Mortality from coronary artery disease is lower in

> vegetarians than in non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1994; 308

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets have been successful in

> arresting coronary artery disease. "

>

> Am J Epidemiol. 1995;142

> ____

>

> " Serum cholesterol and low density lipoprotein

> cholesterol levels are usually lower in vegetarians.

> Vegetarians have a lower incidence of hypertension

> than non vegetarians. "

>

> American J Clin Nutr. 1994;59

> ____

>

> " Type 2 diabetes mellitus is less likely to be a

> cause of death in vegetarians than non vegetarians. "

>

> American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1988;48(suppl)

> ____

>

> " Breast cancer rates are lower in populations that

> consume plant based diets. "

>

> American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures, 1994

>

> So, for the good of America and near-bankrupt retirement

> funds, please do not become a vegetarian and live longer.

> Your friends and neighbors require your altruistic sacrifice.

>

> Robert Cohen

>

> Submitted by:

>

> JoAnn Guest

> jguest@s...

> Friendsforhealthnaturally

> DietaryTipsForHBP

>

August 29, 2002

What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

By GARY TAUBES

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective

find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it.

They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the

phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New

Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to

discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this:

they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more

carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America.

Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

When Atkins first published his ''Diet Revolution'' in 1972, Americans were

just coming to terms with the proposition that fat -- particularly the saturated

fat of meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the

American diet. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising

that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire,

because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused

obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless.

Atkins allowed his readers to eat ''truly luxurious foods without limit,'' as

he put it, ''lobster with butter sauce, steak with bearnaise sauce . . . bacon

cheeseburgers,'' but allowed no starches or refined carbohydrates, which means

no sugars or anything made from flour. Atkins banned even fruit juices, and

permitted only a modicum of vegetables, although the latter were negotiable as

the diet progressed.

Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that

restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American

Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A.

attacked Atkins's diet as a ''bizarre regimen'' that advocated ''an unlimited

intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,'' and Atkins even had to

defend his diet in Congressional hearings.

Thirty years later, America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of

weight. On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by

everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with

almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption

of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the

other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades' worth of

best-selling diet books, including ''The Zone,'' ''Sugar Busters'' and ''Protein

Power'' to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the

alternative hypothesis: it's not the fat that makes us fat, but the

carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live

longer.

The perversity of this alternative hypothesis is that it identifies the cause

of obesity as precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous

Food Guide Pyramid -- the pasta, rice and bread -- that we are told should be

the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and then on the sugar or corn syrup in

the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming

in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear

intrinsically healthy. While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality

as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of

dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has

been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy.

Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the

scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the

alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by

association. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have

come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all

along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard

School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this

heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running,

most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already

cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals.

Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message

''and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse

effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.''

These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that

the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of

time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that

started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of

the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also

rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets

have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on

top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing

for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been

smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would

be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that

something else bad is happening.''

The science behind the alternative hypothesis can be called Endocrinology 101,

which is how it's referred to by David Ludwig, a researcher at Harvard Medical

School who runs the pediatric obesity clinic at Children's Hospital Boston, and

who prescribes his own version of a carbohydrate-restricted diet to his

patients. Endocrinology 101 requires an understanding of how carbohydrates

affect insulin and blood sugar and in turn fat metabolism and appetite. This is

basic endocrinology, Ludwig says, which is the study of hormones, and it is

still considered radical because the low-fat dietary wisdom emerged in the

1960's from researchers almost exclusively concerned with the effect of fat on

cholesterol and heart disease. At the time, Endocrinology 101 was still

underdeveloped, and so it was ignored. Now that this science is becoming clear,

it has to fight a quarter century of anti-fat prejudice.

The alternative hypothesis also comes with an implication that is worth

considering for a moment, because it's a whopper, and it may indeed be an

obstacle to its acceptance. If the alternative hypothesis is right -- still a

big ''if'' -- then it strongly suggests that the ongoing epidemic of obesity in

America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a

collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise. Rather it occurred, as

Atkins has been saying (along with Barry Sears, author of ''The Zone''), because

the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of

intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We

ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then

heavier. Put simply, if the alternative hypothesis is right, then a low-fat diet

is not by definition a healthy diet. In practice, such a diet cannot help being

high in carbohydrates, and that can lead to obesity, and perhaps even heart

disease. ''For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent,

low-fat diets are counterproductive,'' says Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director

of obesity research at Harvard's prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center. ''They have

the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.''

Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because

the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost

inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still

remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward

position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to

real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively

expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of

foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind

of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study

something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental

situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with

reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to

find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. The

result is a balkanized community -- ''splintered, very opinionated and in many

instances, intransigent,'' says Kurt Isselbacher, a former chairman of the Food

and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science -- in which researchers

seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and thoroughly

uninterested in testing any other hypotheses but their own.

What's more, the number of misconceptions propagated about the most basic

research can be staggering. Researchers will be suitably scientific describing

the limitations of their own experiments, and then will cite something as gospel

truth because they read it in a magazine. The classic example is the statement

heard repeatedly that 95 percent of all dieters never lose weight, and 95

percent of those who do will not keep it off. This will be correctly attributed

to the University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Albert Stunkard, but it will go

unmentioned that this statement is based on 100 patients who passed through

Stunkard's obesity clinic during the Eisenhower administration.

With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity

epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's. According to Katherine

Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, the

percentage of obese Americans stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and

1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in

the 1980's. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese.

That steep rise, which is consistent through all segments of American society

and which continued unabated through the 1990's, is the singular feature of the

epidemic. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for

that. Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And for the first

time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2

diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes

and now, for the obvious reason, is not.

So how did this happen? The orthodox and ubiquitous explanation is that we

live in what Kelly Brownell, a Yale psychologist, has called a ''toxic food

environment'' of cheap fatty food, large portions, pervasive food advertising

and sedentary lives. By this theory, we are at the Pavlovian mercy of the food

industry, which spends nearly $10 billion a year advertising unwholesome junk

food and fast food. And because these foods, especially fast food, are so filled

with fat, they are both irresistible and uniquely fattening. On top of this, so

the theory goes, our modern society has successfully eliminated physical

activity from our daily lives. We no longer exercise or walk up stairs, nor do

our children bike to school or play outside, because they would prefer to play

video games and watch television. And because some of us are obviously

predisposed to gain weight while others are not, this explanation also has a

genetic component -- the thrifty gene. It suggests that storing extra calories

as fat was an evolutionary advantage to our Paleolithic ancestors, who had to

survive frequent famine. We then inherited these ''thrifty'' genes, despite

their liability in today's toxic environment.

This theory makes perfect sense and plays to our puritanical prejudice that

fat, fast food and television are innately damaging to our humanity. But there

are two catches. First, to buy this logic is to accept that the copious negative

reinforcement that accompanies obesity -- both socially and physically -- is

easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of

a supersize bargain meal. And second, as Flegal points out, little data exist to

support any of this. Certainly none of it explains what changed so significantly

to start the epidemic. Fast-food consumption, for example, continued to grow

steadily through the 70's and 80's, but it did not take a sudden leap, as

obesity did.

As far as exercise and physical activity go, there are no reliable data before

the mid-80's, according to William Dietz, who runs the division of nutrition and

physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control; the 1990's data show

obesity rates continuing to climb, while exercise activity remained unchanged.

This suggests the two have little in common. Dietz also acknowledged that a

culture of physical exercise began in the United States in the 70's -- the

''leisure exercise mania,'' as Robert Levy, director of the National Heart, Lung

and Blood Institute, described it in 1981 -- and has continued through the

present day.

As for the thrifty gene, it provides the kind of evolutionary rationale for

human behavior that scientists find comforting but that simply cannot be tested.

In other words, if we were living through an anorexia epidemic, the experts

would be discussing the equally untestable ''spendthrift gene'' theory, touting

evolutionary advantages of losing weight effortlessly. An overweight homo

erectus, they'd say, would have been easy prey for predators.

It is also undeniable, note students of Endocrinology 101, that mankind never

evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars. ''Grain products and

concentrated sugars were essentially absent from human nutrition until the

invention of agriculture,'' Ludwig says, ''which was only 10,000 years ago.''

This is discussed frequently in the anthropology texts but is mostly absent from

the obesity literature, with the prominent exception of the

low-carbohydrate-diet books.

What's forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself

is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70's, the accepted wisdom was that

fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that

carbohydrates made you fat. In ''The Physiology of Taste,'' for instance, an

1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food,

the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily

identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ''stout

party'' after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a

''particularly stout party'') potatoes. Brillat-Savarin described the roots of

obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ''floury and feculent

substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.'' He

added that the effects of this fecula -- i.e., ''potatoes, grain or any kind of

flour'' -- were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet.

This is what my mother taught me 40 years ago, backed up by the vague

observation that Italians tended toward corpulence because they ate so much

pasta. This observation was actually documented by Ancel Keys, a University of

Minnesota physician who noted that fats ''have good staying power,'' by which he

meant they are slow to be digested and so lead to satiation, and that Italians

were among the heaviest populations he had studied. According to Keys, the

Neapolitans, for instance, ate only a little lean meat once or twice a week, but

ate bread and pasta every day for lunch and dinner. ''There was no evidence of

nutritional deficiency,'' he wrote, ''but the working-class women were fat.''

By the 70's, you could still find articles in the journals describing high

rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost

exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the

Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that

prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with

plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This

was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825.

It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health

dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and

gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific

evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was

eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977,

when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for

the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake

to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country. It

peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially

recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat

had become ''this greasy killer'' in the memorable words of the Center for

Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and

bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a

glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined

carbohydrates.

In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars

trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease

and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such

link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that

reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H.

administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the

relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed

to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits.

But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat,

cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,''

Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do

your best with what is available.''

Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that

good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were

effectively ignored. Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had

done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern's

committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a

scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but ''a

betting matter.'' Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of

Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980. ''What right,''

Handler asked, ''has the federal government to propose that the American people

conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the

strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?''

Nonetheless, once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal

forces took over. The food industry quickly began producing thousands of

reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from

foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced

with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of

sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to

create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And

because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with

a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry

dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the

less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls

the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health

reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful

eating.

Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If

nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive

oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol,

high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density

lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates.

While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it.

What this means is that even saturated fats -- a k a, the bad fats -- are not

nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad

cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words,

it's a virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will gain little to no

health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead.

But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under

the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at

their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for

instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in

comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will

raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is

true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion

that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of

heart disease.

The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is

shown by the impact -- potentially lethal, in fact -- of low-fat diets on

triglycerides, which are the component molecules of fat. By the late 60's,

researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in

heart-disease patients as high L.D.L. cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat,

high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels,

lower their H.D.L. levels and accentuate what Gerry Reaven, an endocrinologist

at Stanford University, called Syndrome X. This is a cluster of conditions that

can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

It took Reaven a decade to convince his peers that Syndrome X was a legitimate

health concern, in part because to accept its reality is to accept that low-fat

diets will increase the risk of heart disease in a third of the population.

''Sometimes we wish it would go away because nobody knows how to deal with it,''

said Robert Silverman, an N.I.H. researcher, at a 1987 N.I.H. conference. ''High

protein levels can be bad for the kidneys. High fat is bad for your heart. Now

Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.''

Surely, everyone involved in drafting the various dietary guidelines wanted

Americans simply to eat less junk food, however you define it, and eat more the

way they do in Berkeley, Calif. But we didn't go along. Instead we ate more

starches and refined carbohydrates, because calorie for calorie, these are the

cheapest nutrients for the food industry to produce, and they can be sold at the

highest profit. It's also what we like to eat. Rare is the person under the age

of 50 who doesn't prefer a cookie or heavily sweetened yogurt to a head of

broccoli.

''All reformers would do well to be conscious of the law of unintended

consequences,'' says Alan Stone, who was staff director for McGovern's Senate

committee. Stone told me he had an inkling about how the food industry would

respond to the new dietary goals back when the hearings were first held. An

economist pulled him aside, he said, and gave him a lesson on market

disincentives to healthy eating: ''He said if you create a new market with a

brand-new manufactured food, give it a brand-new fancy name, put a big

advertising budget behind it, you can have a market all to yourself and force

your competitors to catch up. You can't do that with fruits and vegetables. It's

harder to differentiate an apple from an apple.''

Nutrition researchers also played a role by trying to feed science into the

idea that carbohydrates are the ideal nutrient. It had been known, for almost a

century, and considered mostly irrelevant to the etiology of obesity, that fat

has nine calories per gram compared with four for carbohydrates and protein. Now

it became the fail-safe position of the low-fat recommendations: reduce the

densest source of calories in the diet and you will lose weight. Then in 1982,

J.P. Flatt, a University of Massachusetts biochemist, published his research

demonstrating that, in any normal diet, it is extremely rare for the human body

to convert carbohydrates into body fat. This was then misinterpreted by the

media and quite a few scientists to mean that eating carbohydrates, even to

excess, could not make you fat -- which is not the case, Flatt says. But the

misinterpretation developed a vigorous life of its own because it resonated with

the notion that fat makes you fat and carbohydrates are harmless.

As a result, the major trends in American diets since the late 70's, according

to the U.S.D.A. agricultural economist Judith Putnam, have been a decrease in

the percentage of fat calories and a ''greatly increased consumption of

carbohydrates.'' To be precise, annual grain consumption has increased almost 60

pounds per person, and caloric sweeteners (primarily high-fructose corn syrup)

by 30 pounds. At the same time, we suddenly began consuming more total calories:

now up to 400 more each day since the government started recommending low-fat

diets.

If these trends are correct, then the obesity epidemic can certainly be

explained by Americans' eating more calories than ever -- excess calories, after

all, are what causes us to gain weight -- and, specifically, more carbohydrates.

The question is why?

The answer provided by Endocrinology 101 is that we are simply hungrier than

we were in the 70's, and the reason is physiological more than psychological. In

this case, the salient factor -- ignored in the pursuit of fat and its effect on

cholesterol -- is how carbohydrates affect blood sugar and insulin. In fact,

these were obvious culprits all along, which is why Atkins and the low-carb-diet

doctors pounced on them early.

The primary role of insulin is to regulate blood-sugar levels. After you eat

carbohydrates, they will be broken down into their component sugar molecules and

transported into the bloodstream. Your pancreas then secretes insulin, which

shunts the blood sugar into muscles and the liver as fuel for the next few

hours. This is why carbohydrates have a significant impact on insulin and fat

does not. And because juvenile diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin,

physicians believed since the 20's that the only evil with insulin is not having

enough.

But insulin also regulates fat metabolism. We cannot store body fat without

it. Think of insulin as a switch. When it's on, in the few hours after eating,

you burn carbohydrates for energy and store excess calories as fat. When it's

off, after the insulin has been depleted, you burn fat as fuel. So when insulin

levels are low, you will burn your own fat, but not when they're high.

This is where it gets unavoidably complicated. The fatter you are, the more

insulin your pancreas will pump out per meal, and the more likely you'll develop

what's called ''insulin resistance,'' which is the underlying cause of Syndrome

X. In effect, your cells become insensitive to the action of insulin, and so you

need ever greater amounts to keep your blood sugar in check. So as you gain

weight, insulin makes it easier to store fat and harder to lose it. But the

insulin resistance in turn may make it harder to store fat -- your weight is

being kept in check, as it should be. But now the insulin resistance might

prompt your pancreas to produce even more insulin, potentially starting a

vicious cycle. Which comes first -- the obesity, the elevated insulin, known as

hyperinsulinemia, or the insulin resistance -- is a chicken-and-egg problem that

hasn't been resolved. One endocrinologist described this to me as ''the

Nobel-prize winning question.''

Insulin also profoundly affects hunger, although to what end is another point

of controversy. On the one hand, insulin can indirectly cause hunger by lowering

your blood sugar, but how low does blood sugar have to drop before hunger kicks

in? That's unresolved. Meanwhile, insulin works in the brain to suppress hunger.

The theory, as explained to me by Michael Schwartz, an endocrinologist at the

University of Washington, is that insulin's ability to inhibit appetite would

normally counteract its propensity to generate body fat. In other words, as you

gained weight, your body would generate more insulin after every meal, and that

in turn would suppress your appetite; you'd eat less and lose the weight.

Schwartz, however, can imagine a simple mechanism that would throw this

''homeostatic'' system off balance: if your brain were to lose its sensitivity

to insulin, just as your fat and muscles do when they are flooded with it. Now

the higher insulin production that comes with getting fatter would no longer

compensate by suppressing your appetite, because your brain would no longer

register the rise in insulin. The end result would be a physiologic state in

which obesity is almost preordained, and one in which the carbohydrate-insulin

connection could play a major role. Schwartz says he believes this could indeed

be happening, but research hasn't progressed far enough to prove it. ''It is

just a hypothesis,'' he says. ''It still needs to be sorted out.''

David Ludwig, the Harvard endocrinologist, says that it's the direct effect of

insulin on blood sugar that does the trick. He notes that when diabetics get too

much insulin, their blood sugar drops and they get ravenously hungry. They gain

weight because they eat more, and the insulin promotes fat deposition. The same

happens with lab animals. This, he says, is effectively what happens when we eat

carbohydrates -- in particular sugar and starches like potatoes and rice, or

anything made from flour, like a slice of white bread. These are known in the

jargon as high-glycemic-index carbohydrates, which means they are absorbed

quickly into the blood. As a result, they cause a spike of blood sugar and a

surge of insulin within minutes. The resulting rush of insulin stores the blood

sugar away and a few hours later, your blood sugar is lower than it was before

you ate. As Ludwig explains, your body effectively thinks it has run out of

fuel, but the insulin is still high enough to prevent you from burning your own

fat. The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It's another

vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity.

The glycemic-index concept and the idea that starches can be absorbed into the

blood even faster than sugar emerged in the late 70's, but again had no

influence on public health recommendations, because of the attendant

controversies. To wit: if you bought the glycemic-index concept, then you had to

accept that the starches we were supposed to be eating 6 to 11 times a day were,

once swallowed, physiologically indistinguishable from sugars. This made them

seem considerably less than wholesome. Rather than accept this possibility, the

policy makers simply allowed sugar and corn syrup to elude the vilification that

befell dietary fat. After all, they are fat-free.

Sugar and corn syrup from soft drinks, juices and the copious teas and sports

drinks now supply more than 10 percent of our total calories; the 80's saw the

introduction of Big Gulps and 32-ounce cups of Coca-Cola, blasted through with

sugar, but 100 percent fat free. When it comes to insulin and blood sugar, these

soft drinks and fruit juices -- what the scientists call ''wet carbohydrates''

-- might indeed be worst of all. (Diet soda accounts for less than a quarter of

the soda market.)

The gist of the glycemic-index idea is that the longer it takes the

carbohydrates to be digested, the lesser the impact on blood sugar and insulin

and the healthier the food. Those foods with the highest rating on the glycemic

index are some simple sugars, starches and anything made from flour. Green

vegetables, beans and whole grains cause a much slower rise in blood sugar

because they have fiber, a nondigestible carbohydrate, which slows down

digestion and lowers the glycemic index. Protein and fat serve the same purpose,

which implies that eating fat can be beneficial, a notion that is still

unacceptable. And the glycemic-index concept implies that a primary cause of

Syndrome X, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity is the long-term damage

caused by the repeated surges of insulin that come from eating starches and

refined carbohydrates. This suggests a kind of unified field theory for these

chronic diseases, but not one that coexists easily with the low-fat doctrine.

At Ludwig's pediatric obesity clinic, he has been prescribing

low-glycemic-index diets to children and adolescents for five years now. He does

not recommend the Atkins diet because he says he believes such a very low

carbohydrate approach is unnecessarily restrictive; instead, he tells his

patients to effectively replace refined carbohydrates and starches with

vegetables, legumes and fruit. This makes a low-glycemic-index diet consistent

with dietary common sense, albeit in a higher-fat kind of way. His clinic now

has a nine-month waiting list. Only recently has Ludwig managed to convince the

N.I.H. that such diets are worthy of study. His first three grant proposals were

summarily rejected, which may explain why much of the relevant research has been

done in Canada and in Australia. In April, however, Ludwig received $1.2 million

from the N.I.H. to test his low-glycemic-index diet against a traditional

low-fat-low-calorie regime. That might help resolve some of the controversy over

the role of insulin in obesity, although the redoubtable Robert Atkins might get

there first.

The 71-year-old Atkins, a graduate of Cornell medical school, says he first

tried a very low carbohydrate diet in 1963 after reading about one in the

Journal of the American Medical Association. He lost weight effortlessly, had

his epiphany and turned a fledgling Manhattan cardiology practice into a

thriving obesity clinic. He then alienated the entire medical community by

telling his readers to eat as much fat and protein as they wanted, as long as

they ate little to no carbohydrates. They would lose weight, he said, because

they would keep their insulin down; they wouldn't be hungry; and they would have

less resistance to burning their own fat. Atkins also noted that starches and

sugar were harmful in any event because they raised triglyceride levels and that

this was a greater risk factor for heart disease than cholesterol.

Atkins's diet is both the ultimate manifestation of the alternative hypothesis

as well as the battleground on which the fat-versus-carbohydrates controversy is

likely to be fought scientifically over the next few years. After insisting

Atkins was a quack for three decades, obesity experts are now finding it

difficult to ignore the copious anecdotal evidence that his diet does just what

he has claimed. Take Albert Stunkard, for instance. Stunkard has been trying to

treat obesity for half a century, but he told me he had his epiphany about

Atkins and maybe about obesity as well just recently when he discovered that the

chief of radiology in his hospital had lost 60 pounds on Atkins's diet. ''Well,

apparently all the young guys in the hospital are doing it,'' he said. ''So we

decided to do a study.'' When I asked Stunkard if he or any of his colleagues

considered testing Atkins's diet 30 years ago, he said they hadn't because they

thought Atkins was ''a jerk'' who was just out to make money: this ''turned

people off, and so nobody took him seriously enough to do what we're finally

doing.''

In fact, when the American Medical Association released its scathing critique

of Atkins's diet in March 1973, it acknowledged that the diet probably worked,

but expressed little interest in why. Through the 60's, this had been a subject

of considerable research, with the conclusion that Atkins-like diets were

low-calorie diets in disguise; that when you cut out pasta, bread and potatoes,

you'll have a hard time eating enough meat, vegetables and cheese to replace the

calories.

That, however, raised the question of why such a low-calorie regimen would

also suppress hunger, which Atkins insisted was the signature characteristic of

the diet. One possibility was Endocrinology 101: that fat and protein make you

sated and, lacking carbohydrates and the ensuing swings of blood sugar and

insulin, you stay sated. The other possibility arose from the fact that Atkins's

diet is ''ketogenic.'' This means that insulin falls so low that you enter a

state called ketosis, which is what happens during fasting and starvation. Your

muscles and tissues burn body fat for energy, as does your brain in the form of

fat molecules produced by the liver called ketones. Atkins saw ketosis as the

obvious way to kick-start weight loss. He also liked to say that ketosis was so

energizing that it was better than sex, which set him up for some ridicule. An

inevitable criticism of Atkins's diet has been that ketosis is dangerous and to

be avoided at all costs.

When I interviewed ketosis experts, however, they universally sided with

Atkins, and suggested that maybe the medical community and the media confuse

ketosis with ketoacidosis, a variant of ketosis that occurs in untreated

diabetics and can be fatal. ''Doctors are scared of ketosis,'' says Richard

Veech, an N.I.H. researcher who studied medicine at Harvard and then got his

doctorate at Oxford University with the Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs. ''They're

always worried about diabetic ketoacidosis. But ketosis is a normal physiologic

state. I would argue it is the normal state of man. It's not normal to have

McDonald's and a delicatessen around every corner. It's normal to starve.''

Simply put, ketosis is evolution's answer to the thrifty gene. We may have

evolved to efficiently store fat for times of famine, says Veech, but we also

evolved ketosis to efficiently live off that fat when necessary. Rather than

being poison, which is how the press often refers to ketones, they make the body

run more efficiently and provide a backup fuel source for the brain. Veech calls

ketones ''magic'' and has shown that both the heart and brain run 25 percent

more efficiently on ketones than on blood sugar.

The bottom line is that for the better part of 30 years Atkins insisted his

diet worked and was safe, Americans apparently tried it by the tens of millions,

while nutritionists, physicians, public- health authorities and anyone concerned

with heart disease insisted it could kill them, and expressed little or no

desire to find out who was right. During that period, only two groups of U.S.

researchers tested the diet, or at least published their results. In the early

70's, J.P. Flatt and Harvard's George Blackburn pioneered the ''protein-sparing

modified fast'' to treat postsurgical patients, and they tested it on obese

volunteers. Blackburn, who later became president of the American Society of

Clinical Nutrition, describes his regime as ''an Atkins diet without excess

fat'' and says he had to give it a fancy name or nobody would take him

seriously. The diet was ''lean meat, fish and fowl'' supplemented by vitamins

and minerals. ''People loved it,'' Blackburn recalls. ''Great weight loss. We

couldn't run them off with a baseball bat.'' Blackburn successfully treated

hundreds of obese patients over the next decade and published a series of papers

that were ignored. When obese New Englanders turned to appetite-control drugs in

the mid-80's, he says, he let it drop. He then applied to the N.I.H. for a grant

to do a clinical trial of popular diets but was rejected.

The second trial, published in September 1980, was done at the George

Washington University Medical Center. Two dozen obese volunteers agreed to

follow Atkins's diet for eight weeks and lost an average of 17 pounds each, with

no apparent ill effects, although their L.D.L. cholesterol did go up. The

researchers, led by John LaRosa, now president of the State University of New

York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, concluded that the 17-pound weight

loss in eight weeks would likely have happened with any diet under ''the novelty

of trying something under experimental conditions'' and never pursued it

further.

Now researchers have finally decided that Atkins's diet and other low-carb

diets have to be tested, and are doing so against traditional

low-calorie-low-fat diets as recommended by the American Heart Association. To

explain their motivation, they inevitably tell one of two stories: some, like

Stunkard, told me that someone they knew -- a patient, a friend, a fellow

physician -- lost considerable weight on Atkins's diet and, despite all their

preconceptions to the contrary, kept it off. Others say they were frustrated

with their inability to help their obese patients, looked into the low-carb

diets and decided that Endocrinology 101 was compelling. ''As a trained

physician, I was trained to mock anything like the Atkins diet,'' says Linda

Stern, an internist at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Hospital, ''but

I put myself on the diet. I did great. And I thought maybe this is something I

can offer my patients.''

None of these studies have been financed by the N.I.H., and none have yet been

published. But the results have been reported at conferences -- by researchers

at Schneider Children's Hospital on Long Island, Duke University and the

University of Cincinnati, and by Stern's group at the Philadelphia V.A.

Hospital. And then there's the study Stunkard had mentioned, led by Gary Foster

at the University of Pennsylvania, Sam Klein, director of the Center for Human

Nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis, and Jim Hill, who runs the

University of Colorado Center for Human Nutrition in Denver. The results of all

five of these studies are remarkably consistent. Subjects on some form of the

Atkins diet -- whether overweight adolescents on the diet for 12 weeks as at

Schneider, or obese adults averaging 295 pounds on the diet for six months, as

at the Philadelphia V.A. -- lost twice the weight as the subjects on the

low-fat, low-calorie diets.

In all five studies, cholesterol levels improved similarly with both diets,

but triglyceride levels were considerably lower with the Atkins diet. Though

researchers are hesitant to agree with this, it does suggest that heart-disease

risk could actually be reduced when fat is added back into the diet and starches

and refined carbohydrates are removed. ''I think when this stuff gets to be

recognized,'' Stunkard says, ''it's going to really shake up a lot of thinking

about obesity and metabolism.''

All of this could be settled sooner rather than later, and with it, perhaps,

we might have some long-awaited answers as to why we grow fat and whether it is

indeed preordained by societal forces or by our choice of foods. For the first

time, the N.I.H. is now actually financing comparative studies of popular diets.

Foster, Klein and Hill, for instance, have now received more than $2.5 million

from N.I.H. to do a five-year trial of the Atkins diet with 360 obese

individuals. At Harvard, Willett, Blackburn and Penelope Greene have money,

albeit from Atkins's nonprofit foundation, to do a comparative trial as well.

Should these clinical trials also find for Atkins and his high-fat,

low-carbohydrate diet, then the public-health authorities may indeed have a

problem on their hands. Once they took their leap of faith and settled on the

low-fat dietary dogma 25 years ago, they left little room for contradictory

evidence or a change of opinion, should such a change be necessary to keep up

with the science. In this light Sam Klein's experience is noteworthy. Klein is

president-elect of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity,

which suggests that he is a highly respected member of his community. And yet,

he described his recent experience discussing the Atkins diet at medical

conferences as a learning experience. ''I have been impressed,'' he said, ''with

the anger of academicians in the audience. Their response is 'How dare you even

present data on the Atkins diet!' ''

This hostility stems primarily from their anxiety that Americans, given a

glimmer of hope about their weight, will rush off en masse to try a diet that

simply seems intuitively dangerous and on which there is still no long-term data

on whether it works and whether it is safe. It's a justifiable fear. In the

course of my research, I have spent my mornings at my local diner, staring down

at a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage, convinced that somehow, some way, they

must be working to clog my arteries and do me in.

After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the

nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in

clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I

have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have

not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may

have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have

interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back

on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart

Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have

even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on

my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine

the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be

caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet

begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently

does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related.

This is the state of mind I imagine that mainstream nutritionists, researchers

and physicians must inevitably take to the fat-versus-carbohydrate controversy.

They may come around, but the evidence will have to be exceptionally compelling.

Although this kind of conversion may be happening at the moment to John

Farquhar, who is a professor of health research and policy at Stanford

University and has worked in this field for more than 40 years. When I

interviewed Farquhar in April, he explained why low-fat diets might lead to

weight gain and low-carbohydrate diets might lead to weight loss, but he made me

promise not to say he believed they did. He attributed the cause of the obesity

epidemic to the ''force-feeding of a nation.'' Three weeks later, after reading

an article on Endocrinology 101 by David Ludwig in the Journal of the American

Medical Association, he sent me an e-mail message asking the

not-entirely-rhetorical question, ''Can we get the low-fat proponents to

apologize?''

Gary Taubes is a correspondent for the journal Science and author of ''Bad

Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion.''

August 29, 2002

Linda McCarthy was a vegetarian. They eat dairy dairy dairy products.

The growth hormones in dairy make cancer grow like crazy.

Not to mention all the other pesticides, hormones, chemicals,

antibiotics and so on that are in dairy products. See:

http://www.notmilk.com/ and look up cancer. The research

has been done.

Larry

-

" shar2 " <shar2

Wednesday, August 28, 2002 3:09 PM

Re: Vegetarians are Destroying America

> I dont know if I agree. Vegetables are sprayed with chemicals and now they

are genetically altered. I remember Linda McCarthy

dying of cancer at a very early age and she was a notorious vegetarian. I

would just say my mind is not quite made up on this.

>

> sharon

> -

> angelprincessjo

> Gettingwell

> Wednesday, August 28, 2002 11:02 AM

> Vegetarians are Destroying America

>

> VEGETARIANS ARE DESTROYING AMERICA

>

> In 1950, 16.5 wage earners contributed

> for every person drawing social security

> benefits. Unfortunately, people are living

> longer, and depleting retirement funds.

> Today, just over 3 workers pay for a

> lifetime of benefits for one retiree. The

> annual report of the Federal Old-Age

> Survivors Insurance and Disability Trust

> Fund predicts that in 20 years, less than

> 2 of America's workers will provide for

> each person receiving social security

> benefits.

>

> America's pension funds are nearly bankrupt.

> Social security cannot pay for itself. As

> people live longer, our valuable resources

> become depleted. Vegetarianism may be a healthy

> lifestyle, but it is unhealthy for the American

> economy. We would do better by having our

> citizens live an average of ten years less.

>

> Science supports the absolute correlation between

> a healthy vegetarianism diet and an unhealthy

> economy.

>

> " Scientific data suggest positive relationships between

> a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic

> degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity,

> coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus,

> and some types of cancer. "

>

> Journal of the American Dietetic Association,

> November 1997, 97(1)

> ____

>

> " Vegetarians often have lower mortality rates from several

> chronic degenerative diseases than do non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1996; 313

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets low in fat or saturated fat have been

> used successfully as part of comprehensive health programs

> to reverse severe coronary artery disease. "

>

> Journal of the American Medical Association 1995; 274

> ____

>

> " Mortality from coronary artery disease is lower in

> vegetarians than in non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1994; 308

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets have been successful in

> arresting coronary artery disease. "

>

> Am J Epidemiol. 1995;142

> ____

>

> " Serum cholesterol and low density lipoprotein

> cholesterol levels are usually lower in vegetarians.

> Vegetarians have a lower incidence of hypertension

> than non vegetarians. "

>

> American J Clin Nutr. 1994;59

> ____

>

> " Type 2 diabetes mellitus is less likely to be a

> cause of death in vegetarians than non vegetarians. "

>

> American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1988;48(suppl)

> ____

>

> " Breast cancer rates are lower in populations that

> consume plant based diets. "

>

> American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures, 1994

>

> So, for the good of America and near-bankrupt retirement

> funds, please do not become a vegetarian and live longer.

> Your friends and neighbors require your altruistic sacrifice.

>

> Robert Cohen

>

> Submitted by:

>

> JoAnn Guest

> jguest

> Friendsforhealthnaturally

> DietaryTipsForHBP

August 29, 2002

-

" Linda Jones " <lindaj

Wednesday, August 28, 2002 2:15 PM

Re: Vegetarians are Destroying America

> These kinds of studies are always inevitably skewed. They compare

> vegetarians with people who eat traditional western high fat, high refined

> carbohydrate diets. I would like to see some more realistic comparisons with

> groups that traditionally have long life spans, such as Okinawa diets, or

> Hunza type diets, or even Mediterranean diets. There is a lot of vegetarian

> propaganda going around that is based solely on comparing itself with

> traditional western style diets. And the followers tend to be so fanatic

> that they refuse to look at the reality of things, and act offended if

> anyone should oppose their views.

>

> I fell for it for 26 years, (I was a fanatical vegetarian for health and

> ethical reasons) only to suffer with neurological problems from B12

> deficiencies, protein deficiencies, and especially Omega 3 deficiencies.

> (because I'm one of the 20% of the population who lack the genetics for

> metabolizing Omega 3's from plant sources) Not everyone can tolerate a

> vegetarian diet without going to some very inconvenient extremes to

> accommodate individual needs.

>

Did you check for proper intestinal flora? The flora produce B12. If

you are deficient you will have trouble regardless of what you eat. How

do you become deficient? Antibiotics, birth control pills, cortisone

use, drugs, alcohol, processed foods and other factors that come into

play. Did you do any of these things as a vegetarian? Remember,

your milk and dairy products were loaded with antibiotics that kill

the intestinal flora.

Did you eat enough protein while on the vegetarian diet? You were deficient

because you didn't get enough in your diet, not because the diet was wrong.

I have never heard of genetic problems with Omega 3 plant sources.

Sounds like someone simply didn't want you staying vegetarian.

What inconvenient extremes are involved with a vegetarian diet? Staying

out of certain isles at the supermarket? Driving past fast food joints

without stopping? Not spending more than a few minutes on the toilet?

> And believe me, I've seen vegetarians with Parkinson's, cancer, diabetes, in

> spite of a life time vegetarian diet. It isn't a sure thing that you won't

> suffer a degenerative disorder because of a vegetarian diet.

Vegetarians can choose to eat as much garbage food as everyone else and they

do in fact get sick from it. Vegetarian is a loose term. What else is

being consumed with the vegetarian diet? Some vegetarians smoke, drink, eat

junk foods, don't exercise, take drugs and other medications, don't

consume enough water and so on. All of these factors lead to disease.

Just because someone is a vegetarian and gets sick does not mean that

eating more vegetables and no meat was what made them sick.

> I've known

> plenty of people who attempted to become vegetarians, but simply couldn't

> deal with the food cravings and fatigue and other health problems that

> developed.

See above. There are many factors to what you suggest. Too many to go

into here.

Larry

> The statistics for vegetarians don't tell you all the people who

> failed to thrive on it and went back to an omnivore diet. The probable link

> with a decrease in degenerative diseases isn't because of the lack of animal

> products in the diet, it is more likely that people who are willing to eat

> an alternative diet are generally more health conscious, and are consuming

> more healthy antioxidant rich foods than people who don't care about what

> they eat. But this doesn't necessarily equate to it being the ideal diet.

> It's just better than the worst diet.

>

> Linda Jones

> lindaj

August 30, 2002

Thanks for your imput you thoughts are well said.

sharon

-

angelprincessjo

Gettingwell

Wednesday, August 28, 2002 3:02 PM

Re: Vegetarians are Destroying America

---Sharon,

Good Afternoon!

It is my opinion this becomes just one more reason that we should

buy exclusively Organic Produce. Apparently few people realize that

the Soy Proteins vegetarians derive from products such as those put

out by Worthington foods are rampant with gmos (unless they

specifically state otherwise)!

The genetically engineered soy products have been found to be a

contributing factor in *angiogenesis*.

How can meats/poultry derived from animals fed exclusively on gmo

corn/grain varieties be any healthier? Or gmo fish species?

Cancer is a breakdown of the immune system according to articles

I've come across. The immune system (T-cells) immediately destroy

cancer cells if they're efficiently working.

By far the most important thing we can do is to build up our

immune systems in addition to eliminating known free radicals

(carcinogens) in our food and environment. Foods are not the only

source of carcinogens.

There are other factors involved in the proliferation of cancer

cells such as stress,pollutants,household chemicals,radiation, etc.

One cannot just look at dietary factors to the exclusion of

everything else. Heredity also plays a vital role.

JoAnn Guest

jguest

Friendsforhealthnaturally

In Gettingwell, " shar2 " <shar2@s...> wrote:

> I dont know if I agree. Vegetables are sprayed with chemicals and

now they are genetically altered. I remember Linda McCarthy dying

of cancer at a very early age and she was a notorious vegetarian.

I would just say my mind is not quite made up on this.

>

> sharon

> -

> angelprincessjo

> Gettingwell

> Wednesday, August 28, 2002 11:02 AM

> Vegetarians are Destroying America

>

> VEGETARIANS ARE DESTROYING AMERICA

>

> In 1950, 16.5 wage earners contributed

> for every person drawing social security

> benefits. Unfortunately, people are living

> longer, and depleting retirement funds.

> Today, just over 3 workers pay for a

> lifetime of benefits for one retiree. The

> annual report of the Federal Old-Age

> Survivors Insurance and Disability Trust

> Fund predicts that in 20 years, less than

> 2 of America's workers will provide for

> each person receiving social security

> benefits.

>

> America's pension funds are nearly bankrupt.

> Social security cannot pay for itself. As

> people live longer, our valuable resources

> become depleted. Vegetarianism may be a healthy

> lifestyle, but it is unhealthy for the American

> economy. We would do better by having our

> citizens live an average of ten years less.

>

> Science supports the absolute correlation between

> a healthy vegetarianism diet and an unhealthy

> economy.

>

> " Scientific data suggest positive relationships between

> a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic

> degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity,

> coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus,

> and some types of cancer. "

>

> Journal of the American Dietetic Association,

> November 1997, 97(1)

> ____

>

> " Vegetarians often have lower mortality rates from several

> chronic degenerative diseases than do non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1996; 313

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets low in fat or saturated fat have been

> used successfully as part of comprehensive health programs

> to reverse severe coronary artery disease. "

>

> Journal of the American Medical Association 1995; 274

> ____

>

> " Mortality from coronary artery disease is lower in

> vegetarians than in non vegetarians. "

>

> British Medical Journal, 1994; 308

> ____

>

> " Vegetarian diets have been successful in

> arresting coronary artery disease. "

>

> Am J Epidemiol. 1995;142

> ____

>

> " Serum cholesterol and low density lipoprotein

> cholesterol levels are usually lower in vegetarians.

> Vegetarians have a lower incidence of hypertension

> than non vegetarians. "

>

> American J Clin Nutr. 1994;59

> ____

>

> " Type 2 diabetes mellitus is less likely to be a

> cause of death in vegetarians than non vegetarians. "

>

> American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1988;48(suppl)

> ____

>

> " Breast cancer rates are lower in populations that

> consume plant based diets. "

>

> American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures, 1994

>

> So, for the good of America and near-bankrupt retirement

> funds, please do not become a vegetarian and live longer.

> Your friends and neighbors require your altruistic sacrifice.

>

> Robert Cohen

>

> Submitted by:

>

> JoAnn Guest

> jguest@s...

> Friendsforhealthnaturally

> DietaryTipsForHBP

>

August 30, 2002

---Sharon, My pleasure.:-) This comes from some information I

compiled at the time of my sister's passing. Her's was breast

cancer.

I have a feeling that if this were common knowledge the mortality

rates would be much lower. we all know allopathic medicine witholds

this basic knowledge from us. Its a horrendous crime in my

estimation. There ARE things one can do effectively to offset the

damage, especially in the earlier stages.

JoAnn

In Gettingwell, " shar2 " <shar2@s...> wrote:

> Thanks for your imput you thoughts are well said.

>

> sharon

> -

> angelprincessjo

> Gettingwell

> Wednesday, August 28, 2002 3:02 PM

> Re: Vegetarians are Destroying America

>

> ---Sharon,

> Good Afternoon!

> It is my opinion this becomes just one more reason that we

should

> buy exclusively Organic Produce. Apparently few people realize

that

> the Soy Proteins vegetarians derive from products such as those

put

> out by Worthington foods are rampant with gmos (unless they

> specifically state otherwise)!

> The genetically engineered soy products have been found to be a

> contributing factor in *angiogenesis*.

> How can meats/poultry derived from animals fed exclusively on

gmo

> corn/grain varieties be any healthier? Or gmo fish species?

>

> Cancer is a breakdown of the immune system according to

articles

> I've come across. The immune system (T-cells) immediately

destroy

> cancer cells if they're efficiently working.

> By far the most important thing we can do is to build up our

> immune systems in addition to eliminating known free radicals

> (carcinogens) in our food and environment. Foods are not the

only

> source of carcinogens.

> There are other factors involved in the proliferation of cancer

> cells such as stress,pollutants,household chemicals,radiation,

etc.

> One cannot just look at dietary factors to the exclusion of

> everything else. Heredity also plays a vital role.

>

> JoAnn Guest

> jguest@s...

> Friendsforhealthnaturally