Tag: whole food plant based diet

How Cooking Changed Us

Richard Wrangham is a Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. He is also the curator of Primate Behavioral Biology at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda.

Wrangham began his career at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania as a member of Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research team.

The standard view of evolution is that by eating meat, humans were able to evolve the larger brains that distinguish us from other primates. Wranghams’s view is that cooking food is a fundamental activity that transformed humans and our society. He is not the first to propose this view but has developed the concept.

Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social relationships.
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20 March 2016
TIME Magazine Article – Eat Butter

It is with alarm that I read Bryan Walsh’s article Ending the War on Fat that was published in TIME magazine on 23 June 2014.

According to Walsh:
Keys' work became the foundation for a body of science implicating fat as a major risk factor for heart disease. The Seven Countries Study has been referenced close to 1 million times. But Keys' research had problems from the start. He cherry-picked his data.

If the book has really been "referenced close to a million times", it means that it has been referenced close to 80 times every day, including weekends, since the book was published in 1980.

Walsh claims that Keys “cherry-picked” his data. It is evident that Walsh has confused with Keys’ 1953 paper Keys’ paper, Atherosclerosis, A Problem in Newer Public Health and his later study Seven Countries, A Multivariate Analysis of Death and Coronary Heart Disease.

Walsh fails to elaborate on how Keys “cherry picked” his data. Commencing in 1957, the Seven Countries Study studied 12,763 men in 16 regions in seven countries. What data was omitted from this study? How was the data “cherry-picked”?
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11 July 2014
Why are there so many points of view regarding nutrition?

There can be a tendency for researchers and commentators to become attached to one particular area and not be able to see the relationship and interconnectedness with the different aspects of the same disease.

Also, much research is focused on individual components of nutrition, such as individual minerals, vitamins, or components such as fats or saturated fats.

Once again, researchers can become attached to one particular element of nutrition. We search for the magic supplement or the one miraculous cure.

Nutrition is the result of endless number of components in food. Health is the result of the relationship between all that we eat (and absorb during digestion), our relationships with others, the community that we live in and the world that we inhabit.

Looking at individual components of food in isolation can never give a complete picture.
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4 May 2014
Diet Does Not Affect Breast Cancer?

The objective of The Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) Randomized Trial was to:

To assess whether a major increase in vegetable, fruit, and fiber intake and a decrease in dietary fat intake reduces the risk of recurrent and new primary breast cancer and all-cause mortality among women with previously treated early stage breast cancer.

The conclusion of this “controlled trial of dietary change in 3088 women previously treated for early stage breast cancer” was:

Among survivors of early stage breast cancer, adoption of a diet that was very high in vegetables, fruit, and fiber and low in fat did not reduce additional breast cancer events or mortality during a 7.3-year follow-up period.

This made headlines all over the world. This is the proof people were waiting for – that changes to your diet has no impact on breast cancer. Medical practitioners, dieticians and the public now have the evidence that there is no need to change your diet.

It appears that the authors are deliberately being deceptive.
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23 January 2014
About Richard Harding

I have been a lecturer in nutrition in Newcastle, Australia at WEA Hunter and has been involved in the design of nutrition courses for degree and diploma qualifications in Health Sciences.

I worked in the IT industry since the 1970s as a computer programmer, system designer and project manager for companies such as CBC Bank, National Australia Bank, Burroughs Australia and Unisys working on projects for ANZ Bank, State Bank of NSW, Health Insurance Commission (Medicare), NRMA, Reserve Bank of Australia, City Bank, North Power, Chase Manhattan Bank and ACIRL (Australian Coal Industry Research Laboratories).

I worked as the system manager for a large pathology business that had a network of 10 pathology laboratories, from Coffs Harbour in northern NSW to Sydney - a distance of 500 km (300 miles) which operated online 24 hours a day for 6 days a week.

My website consists of over 140 webpages and with more than 120,000 words. Most are related to health and nutrition with others relating to the environment, agriculture, philosophy and psychology. Many issues that the ancient Greeks wrestled with are still relevant today.
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2 July 2013
Dr Caldwell Esselstyn

Dr. Esselstyn is a US surgeon who has researched the effects of diet and health. He is one of the doctors along with Colin Campbell and Dean Ornish that Bill Clinton has credited with his health transformation.

He won an Olympic gold medal in rowing at the 1956 Olympics. He was an army surgeon in Vietnam, a member of the Board of Governors of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s top cardiac centres and was named in 1994-1995 as one of the top doctors in USA.

Dr. Esselstyn demonstrates that a plant-based, oil-free diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease but also reverses its effects.
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1 July 2013
Dr Neal Barnard

Neal Barnard, MD, is a clinical researcher, author, and health advocate. He has been involved with a number of clinical trials investigating the effects of diet on health.

He is an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

His book, Dr Neal Barnard's Program to Reverse Diabetes Now, outlines a whole-food, plant-based diet that reverses diabetes, prevents and reverses heart disease and other common ailments.
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1 July 2013
Dan Buettner – Blue Zones

In the early 1970s, National Geographic magazine approached the world-renowned physician, Alexander Leaf, asking him to visit, study, and write an article about the world's healthiest and most long-living people.

More recently, Dan Buettner began his research into Blue Zone examining communities in Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Monterrey, Nuevo Leon and Loma Linda, California.

He published an article Secrets in Longevity in National Geographic Magazine's November 2005 edition In April 2008, Buettner released a book on The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest, through National Geographic Books. A second edition has recently been published.
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1 July 2013
The Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism – William Harris, MD

Dr Harris was born in 1930. He is a pilot, trampoline exponent and long term nutritional advocate.

His book The Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism is a landmark study in nutrition.

Animal source food is adaptive when there's not enough food, but in a world with abundant and diverse plant foods, animal source food is obsolete and only causes problems.
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1 July 2013
Dr Dean Ornish

Commencing in 1977, Ornish has directed a series of clinical research studies proving, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes could not only stop the progression of heart disease, but could reverse it.

These lifestyle changes included a whole foods, plant-based diet, smoking cessation, moderate exercise, stress management techniques including yoga and meditation, and social and community support.
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1 July 2013