/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>6306209

Okay, so you're coming into the argument with the assumption that a diet needs to include meat, dairy, and eggs for optimum health, leaving out the possibility that the opposite might be true. The largest healthcare organization in the US recommends a vegan diet for all of its patients because of how effective it's proven to be in reducing risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, etc, beating out even the respected mediterranean diet, which itself is considered a mainly vegetarian diet

http://www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2013/spring/5117-nutrition.html
http://mydoctor.kaiserpermanente.org/ncal/Images/New%20Plant%20Based%20Booklet%201214_tcm28-781815.pdf

They do make the distinction between a "vegan diet" and a vegan diet based on whole foods though

Healthy and usually environmentally friendly, but people have an irrational fear of it.

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v60/n7/full/1602387a.html

This survey in Australia found that the people more likely to accept a vegan diet were younger and better educated, while those opposed to it were older people set in their ways and those with lower education.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12943567

This survey found that the main barrier keeping people from eating a vegetarian diet was just the enjoyment of the taste of meat and stubbornness about changing their current way of eating.

It may be more realistic for population-level diet strategies to just focus on weaning people off of animal sourced foods and encourage people to eat more plants. The World Health Organization says that a healthy diet is "based mainly on foods of plant origin, rather than animals." The World Cancer Research Fund says to "eat mainly foods of plant origin," encouraging whole grains and legumes as the foundation of every meal, accented with vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Kaiser Permanente, the largest healthcare organization in the US, flat-out states that their "healthy eating program" doesn't include meat, poultry, fish, dairy, or eggs.

People associate the word "vegetarian" or "vegan" with hysterical hippies and social justice warriors, bringing way too much baggage into their views of diet and health, so the phrase "plant-based diet" helps to circumvent some of the prejudice people have. Even then, people get defensive when you bring up the idea of simply reducing their meat intake and eating more whole grains and beans, foods that are foreign to the average American

It's going to take a while for the average person to accept a vegan diet since every time a respected doctor or an organization tries to tell people to avoid animal foods and eat more whole plant foods, they just get brushed off as "vegan propaganda" by people who don't want to accept that their favorite diet isn't ideal for their own health or the health of the planet

>>5896419

>but you can consume excessive cholesterol without eating animals

I agree, you can eat dairy and eggs and get saturated fat and cholesterol, and even certain plant oils like coconut oil and palm oil contain significant amounts of saturated fat

> Likewise, you can eat animal foods and maintain healthy cholesterol levels

It's rare that someone is able to maintain lifelong low cholesterol levels while still having an appreciable amount of animal-based foods in their diet. Not impossible, but for most people who don't have a genetic abnormality like familial hypobetalipoproteinemia, it's very hard. In any case, it will always be in spite of those foods, the same as you can say "there's healthy cigarette smokers" but we can both understand that the act itself is actively working against them

>And chronically elevated blood glucose levels absolutely do cause heart disease, not sure where you've heard otherwise.

Due to the nature of heart disease, that can't be true. As the editor of the American Journal of Cardiology points out, the only direct cause is hypercholesterolemia. Other things can influence and increase the risk, but the only direct cause of the disease is high cholesterol

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1312295/

>if the serum total cholesterol is 90 to 140 mg/dL, there is no evidence that cigarette smoking, systemic hypertension, diabetes mellitus, inactivity, or obesity produces atherosclerotic plaques. Hypercholesterolemia is the only direct atherosclerotic risk factor; the others are indirect. If, however, the total cholesterol level is >150 mg/dL and the LDL cholesterol is >100 mg/dL, the other risk factors clearly accelerate atherosclerosis.

>>5768352

>found the carnist

>>5734662

>falsehoods are also commonly ridiculed and violently opposed

One difference is that among medical professionals, this kind of diet is widely accepted and even used to treat serious illnesses. It's mainly the uneducated public who are less receptive to the idea. According to this Australian survey:

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v60/n7/full/1602387a.html

People more accepting of a plant-based diet are university-educated people and younger people, while uneducated people and older people set in their ways are more likely to be opposed.

>Firstly you ridicule people for their incredible education, and then you finish by recommending youtube channels rather than the medical studies you boast about?

I was assuming I was talking mainly to people who are already eating this diet and, like OP, had done prior research. Plantpositive is a great source of medical studies, and more importantly offers complete refutations of common fallacious arguments used to promote diets heavy in animal foods.

>>5722410

>Most vegans are unhealthy, this is pretty blatantly obvious to anyone who knows vegans.

So why does that not reflect in epidemiological studies? Why is that diet recommended to people to help with various health problems? Kaiser Permanente is the largest healthcare organization in the US, and they promote a vegan diet

http://mydoctor.kaiserpermanente.org/ncal/Images/New%20Plant%20Based%20Booklet%201214_tcm28-781815.pdf

But it should be stressed again, WHY do you ignore the hordes of unhealthy meat eaters?

>>5691258

It's not just vegans/animal rights activists who can recognize that saturated fat and cholesterol clearly ties to heart disease and that whole plant foods are preferable to animal foods. Heart disease has been cured with a low fat vegetarian diet. The president of the college of cardiology tells people to cut out the meat and dairy and eggs for the sake of their health. Kaiser Permanente, the largest healthcare company in the united states, tells people to eat a plant-based diet that encourages whole plant foods and discourages meat, dairy, and eggs because that's how you make people healthy.

https://www.thepermanentejournal.org/issues/2013/spring/5117-nutrition.html

The world health organization tells people to decrease saturated fat and increase whole grains and legumes

http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/diet/en/

Nobody in the world agrees with your crazy "meat defense force" views about diet. If you want to eat bacon all day, fine, but don't act like everyone else is wrong to say it's not good for you

>consider a high-fiber, mostly vegan diet for the sake of heart health since it's been shown to be very effective
>everybody acts like I'm a smug asshole because I started eating beans and oats more in place of chicken and beef

what is it about eating plant foods that causes some people to get so upset? even the president of the college of cardiology gets attacked for promoting a heart-healthy diet