| SvennoJ said: Cheese makes you happy though and is also good for you |
What evidence do you have that people who choose a vegan lifestyle are more health conscious on average? I don't see a lot of evidence for that. I see more evidence for the reverse, I see omnivores buying supplements like crazy, going to the gym, obsessing over fish and so-called "white meat", etc. Until recently the vegan movement was focused on animal welfare, not optimal health. I'm a part of a vegan Facebook group with over 2000 members, and another with over 5000 members, and there are legions of people there getting excited every time some new processed food comes out (or some grocery store puts a popular processed food on sale). This is a commonly asserted claim, but it seems to fly in the face of a lot of evidence. Has it ever been studied, or are you simply assuming it's true?
I'm right with you that a stress reduced lifestyle is good for health. I think stress reduction, lots of sleep, and an appropriate diet are the three pillars of health, but I wouldn't put stress reduction above the other two.
To your first point, the independent research continues to call BS on the idea that dairy and eggs are good for you. The science suggesting otherwise is being funded by vested interests connected to industries that sell cholesterol laden foods, and they're manipulating the science in the same way the tobacco industry used to before they gave up trying to defend tobacco on the health front.
If you want a study that suggests cholesterol is not bad for you, there are several ways to do it. For example:
- Construct a study that *slightly* increases or slight reduces cholesterol, find no statistically significant change, and declare victory. This is akin to taking someone who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day and doing a study that reduces that by one cigarette, and finding no significant health benefit to the reduction. Similarly, if you take someone who smokes two packs a day and increase their cigarette smoking by one cigarette you're unlikely to find a significant health detriment.
- Publication bias. Independent research is likely to publish their findings no matter what, but research funded by vested interests typically only publishes when they get the result they want. If they come up with results that don't fit their narrative, you'll never hear about it. Yet the research funded by public health agencies, charities, etc., usually gets published whatever the result.
- Correlative studies on cholesterol is another way they manipulate the data. For example, put people on diets with the same amount of cholesterol, note that each participant ends up with different levels of cholesterol, declare no correlation, and that eating cholesterol makes no difference to health. Declare victory.
The above is the approach of the vested interests. Independent research continues to do studies where they take people and significantly increase their cholesterol intake, and they find bad cholesterol skyrockets. Or take groups of people and significantly reduce their cholesterol intake, and their bad cholesterol plummets. Open and shut.
The Canadian government for its most recent round of proposed nutrition guidelines chose to ignore *all* research funded by vested interests. Didn't matter if it was funded by a dairy board, or an alliance of rice producers. And they concluded that while research funded by vested interests was all over the place, the independent research all had a consistent narrative that cholesterol was bad, caused heart disease, and should be reduced in the diet for optimal health. That was preceded by a similar decision by the Brazilian government, and followed up by a similar decision by a Northern European government.
The research that says cholesterol is A-OK is bad science. It usually doesn't get submitted to peer review, and generally fails peer review when it does get submitted. It's true junk science in the worst sense of the word. That's not cherry-picking, as that's ignoring not only the pro-cholesterol science paid for by meat/dairy/egg industry, it's also ignoring science by the pomegranate industry trying to oversell the health benefits of their product. It's choosing to look at independent science that is submitted to rigourous scientific scrutiny only, and that's increasingly the approach that government health agencies are having to take as vested interests become more daring in their attempts to over-sell their products.
