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Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Thu Jun 20, 2013 3:29 pm
by Spiral
Plant Positive is the name of someone who seems to have done a large amount of research on the benefits of consuming whole, plant foods and on the health hazards of consuming animal based food. This person has recorded over 100 YouTube videos.

I have decided that I am going to listen to these videos again and journal about these videos here.

And you are welcome to do the same. You can reference some of your favorite Plant Positive videos, all of which can be found on this web page.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Thu Jun 20, 2013 3:53 pm
by Spiral
I am watching the 1st video in Plant Positive's Nutrition Past and Future series.

The title is: 1 The Journalist Gary Taubes 1: Controlling History.

At 3:41 of this video, Plant Positive describes the exchange between Dr. Dean Ornish and author/journalist Gary Taubes.

ORNISH: First of all, I think the science is there. In fact, one of the people that you quoted, David Ludwig, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing clearly that when you eat a diet that is rich in whole food … you don’t go from simple carbohydrates to pork rinds, what you do is go from … Come on, Gary. You’ve got to at least let me finish my sentences, ok?Crosstalk.

TAUBES (interrupting): First off (?), to take Dr. Atkins and try to define his diet as pork rinds?! Just, stay honest, Dean. That’s all I’m asking, ok?

ORNISH: I am staying honest.

TAUBES: Ok, well try harder.

Ah, but who isn't being honest here. It turns out Dr. Atkins' book did recommend fried pork rinds.

Ooops. :shock:

You can watch the video here.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Thu Jun 20, 2013 11:54 pm
by dinska
What a great idea to revisit these videos! I have not seen them from Plant Positive's site with the transcripts attached. I'll be reading along with you.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Fri Jun 21, 2013 3:07 am
by Spiral
dinska wrote:What a great idea to revisit these videos! I have not seen them from Plant Positive's site with the transcripts attached. I'll be reading along with you.

dinska, thanks. There is so much interesting information packed into these videos and there are so many of them. So, I figured that journaling might be a good way of learning more from them.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Fri Jun 21, 2013 3:29 am
by Spiral
Now it's on to the 2nd Plant Positive video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series, 2 The Journalist Gary Taubes 2: A Parajournalism Paradox.

This video discusses how Gary Taubes, in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes makes his readers think that Eisenhower's experience with a "low-fat diet" as he attempted to recover from a heart attack represents a paradox, evidence that low-fat diets don't work and that dietary fat is not implicated in heart disease.

But what caused Eisenhower's first heart attack? At 2:55 in the video, we learn that Eisenhower ate a burger with onions just before his heart attack. At 3:17 we see where Taubes got the reference for that burger and onions meal. This reference shows that on the morning of September 23, 1955, Eisenhower ate sausage, bacon, mush and hotcakes for breakfast. Is this an example of a high fat diet causing a heart attack?

Yes. At 4:39 in this video we learn that Eisenhower, after his initial heart attack, consumed a "low-cholesterol" butter and chicken with the fat cut out of it. Really? How can anyone remove all of the fat from chicken, since even when you take the skin off, the skinless chicken is still a moderately high fat food?

At 5:40 we learn that Eisenhower ate sausages for breakfast even after his heart attack.

This is an example of Taubes cherry picking "evidence" to make it appear that "low-fat diets" are ineffective. But this video makes it clear that Taubes doesn't give you the whole truth, only fragments of the truth.

You can watch this video here.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 7:42 am
by Spiral
I am now watching the 3rd video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series, 3 The Journalist Gary Taubes 3: Ancel Keys Was Very Bad 1

This video discusses how low-carbers, some paleo supporters and advocates of a high fat diet argue that Ancel Keys fooled most of the scientific community with flawed scientific studies. This argument is made by Gary Taubes in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Dr. Lustig also makes these arguments in the BBC series, The Men Who Made Us Fat.

Lustig's argument is that Ancel Keys decided that saturated fat was the cause of cardiovascular disease in 1952, before he did any scientific studies and then Keys spent the next 50 years of his career trying to justify this belief of his.

The problem with this is simple. It's not true.

In the 6 countries study of 1953, Keys showed a correlation between dietary fat and heart disease. But Keys had not yet focused on saturated fat. That would come later.

In the 7 countries study, released in 1970, Keys argued that serum cholesterol levels and dietary saturated fat was correlated with heart disease. So, Keys was willing to change his views based on the scientific evidence.

Also, this video takes on the mythology that Keys cherry picked the 7 countries included in the 7 countries study, that Keys deliberately excluded most of the 22 countries because if Keys had included them Keys' beliefs would have been proven false.

Again. Not true. A careful look at the data taken from 22 countries that Yerushalmy and Hilliboe talked about in their 1957 criticism of Keys shows that dietary animal fat was correlated with heart disease, but that dietary animal protein was even more strongly correlated with heart disease.

You can watch this video here.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 4:12 am
by Spiral
This morning I am watching the 4th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series by Plant Positive, titled 4 The Journalist Gary Taubes 4: Ancel Keys Was Very Bad 2

This video covers Ancel Keys' 6 countries study, the 7 countries study and also the French Paradox. It also covers the Yerushalmy and Hilleboe paper that criticized Ancel Keys' 6 countries study.

But going back to the original research and putting all of those studies in perspective, we can learn that Gary Taubes and other cholesterol skeptics don't really have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to advocating a high fat, low carb diet.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:40 am
by vgpedlr
I watched these videos a few months ago when I became very disturbed that a great vegan triathlete podcaster began singing the praises of low carb, high fat, "metabolic efficiency" and drawing it back to Gary Taubes. I sent him these links for an alternate view. He replied to me on the podcast by attacking Plant Positive's annoying nasal voice (true) and his "cherry picking" studies and data (maybe.) But that's what Taubes did. His new podcast is Fit Fat Fast. I left for good, but not before listening to two great interviews, one with Maffetone and one with Mark Allen.

As for your project, it might be even more interesting to get a copy of Good Calories, Bad Calories and follow along with Plant Positive. Especially since you have family enamored with Taubes. That's what I want to do, but it will take a strong stomach to get through massive book that I already disagree with.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:23 pm
by Spiral
vgpedlr wrote:As for your project, it might be even more interesting to get a copy of Good Calories, Bad Calories and follow along with Plant Positive. Especially since you have family enamored with Taubes. That's what I want to do, but it will take a strong stomach to get through massive book that I already disagree with.

That's easy. A relative of mine purchased me a copy of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and the DvD "Fathead" in the summer of 2010, a few months before I went vegan/McDougall. In fact, it was that family discussion about nutrition and low-carb/high-fat that motivated me to re-read Dr. Dean Ornish's book "Program for Reversing Heart Disease," which I originally read in 1991. Then I watched Bill Clinton's interview about why he decided to go "vegan."

But your idea sounds like a good one. Re-read Taubes' book in the light of Plant Positive's criticisms of it.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:57 pm
by Spiral
This morning I watched the 5th video in the Nutrition: Past and Future video series. This one is titled. 5 The Journalist Gary Taubes 5: John Yudkin Was Very Good

This video discusses the sugar hypothesis, which is important because people like Gary Taubes and Dr. Lustig argue that our health authorities mistakenly concluded that dietary fat (or saturated fat) was the main dietary cause of heart disease, but the real cause of this disease is sugar.

If you read "Good Calories, Bad Calories," you would come away with the idea that scientists just never bothered to take a serious look at the possibility that sugar could be implicated in heart disease.

That never sounded right to me. Why would the world's scientists lack curiousity in this one area of nutrition research? They didn't lack curiousity. Once again, Gary Taubes and Dr. Lustig mislead their readers/viewers.

This is an excellent video and you can watch it here.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 2:49 pm
by Ruff
Gonna try and follow along here, but I have a bit of catching up to do.

I have good calories bad calories, going against the grain, several of Barry Groves books etc etc. it was a hard turn around for me......

Later today I shall try and catch the first one.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 5:33 pm
by Spiral
This morning I watched the 6th video in the video series Nutrition: Past and Future by Plant Positive. This video is titled 6 The Journalist Gary Taubes 6: Lessons from the Dead and you can watch it here.

The video discusses an argument made in Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories," that studies of cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis at autopsy do not show a correlation between the two. Taubes implies that this means elevated serum cholesterol levels do not cause atherosclerosis.

The video points out that Taubes is relying primarily on very old scientific studies, some dating back to the 1930s. At that time, the scientific community did not know how serum cholesterol levels vary over a person's lifetime, that a person's serum cholesterol level can fall due to ill health, not based on a switch towards a healthy diet.

In modern times it is believed that to be able to demonstrate an association between serum cholesterol and atherosclerosis, one must record serum cholesterol over a period of years prior to death, sometimes as long as 9 years.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sat Jun 29, 2013 5:45 pm
by Spiral
I just finished watching the 7th video in Plant Positive's Nutrition: Past and Future video series.

This video is titled 7 The Journalist Gary Taubes 7: Anomaly Hunter 1.

It's the first of four videos discussing how Gary Taubes, in his book "Good Calories, Bad Calories," points to anomolies in scientific data in order to lead his readers to think that high fat diets are not implicated in heart disease.

As Plant Positive runs through the list of anomolies supplied by Gary Taubes, the case for avoiding high fat diets for the purpose of avoiding heart disease gets stronger, not weaker, upon closer and non-biased analysis.

Regarding the Framingham study, Taubes does something that other proponents of a high-fat diet like to do: quote someone who believes that high fat diets are unhealthy or who believes that high serum cholesterol levels are unhealthy in a way that makes the reader think that the person is arguing just the opposite. The person Taubes quoted out of context (without a clear reference that could be verified) in his Framingham example was a bio-statitian named Tavia Gordon.

In the Puerto Rico study and the Honolulu study, a look at the abstract would tell the reader that starch and/or carbohydrate intake was inversely related to cardiovascular disease. That's why Taubes didn't quote those parts of those abstracts.

It's great that Plant Positive took the time to hunt down these references used by Gary Taubes. The casual reader could easily come away with the mistaken impression that those references support Taubes' thesis, as vague and confusing as it is.

You can watch this video here.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sat Jun 29, 2013 6:07 pm
by Spiral
I just finished watching the 8th video in Plant Positive's Nutrition: Past and Future video series.

This video is titled 8 The Journalist Gary Taubes 8: Anomaly Hunter 2 and is the 2nd video in the 4 part video series that discusses Gary Taubes' search for anomolies in the diet-heart hypothesis and the lipid hypothesis.

In this video Plant Positive discusses the Western Electric study (Gary Taubes calls it the Chicago study), the Tecumseh, Michigan study and two other studies.

In the Western Electric study, the researchers very clearly wrote that there was a step-wise relationship between serum cholesterol and heart disease incidence. The apparent anomoly of 2 more CHD deaths in the low-fat group compared to the high-fat group was due to the fact that "low-fat" in this study meant 39 percent of calories from fat while "high-fat" meant 45 percent of calories from fat.

In the Tecumseh study, the diet lacked contrast. Everyone was eating mostly the same type of diet, so it was hard to show diet as a factor in heart disease.

At 21:29 in this video, an interview with Dr. David S. Ludwig is excerpted in which Ludwig mentions that in a low-carb diet trial, measures of inflammation rose in the low carbers, specifically cortisol and C-reactive protein.

Re: Spiral's Plant Positive Journal

PostPosted: Sat Jun 29, 2013 11:39 pm
by Debbie
You have received another Facebook nod by PlantPositive.

https://www.facebook.com/plant.positive?fref=ts
I want to say thank you to two bloggers who are trying to raise the profile of my last video project, the user "Spiral" at the McDougall forums and Keith Akers at CompassionateSpirit.com. Thank you both!
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=37551
http://www.compassionatespirit.com/wpbl ... tpositive/



Of course, we all thank you too. :cool: