Essential Information for Any Conversation About Health
This blog is an excerpt from our upcoming book, Plant Powered Persuasion: Effective Communication for Vegans, available June 30th, 2024.
Hardcover, paperback, and kindle versions available for purchase June 30th, 2024!
There is so much misinformation about health, and there is so much misinformation about health with regard to vegan diets. The preponderance of evidence conclusively shows that every measure of health improves on a whole-food plant-based (WFPB) vegan diet. But this evidence has been equivocated by bias in research and the media.
Some vegans may not care about health, and may even proudly identify as a “junk food vegan.” If that’s you, that’s great! But it is important that you are well versed on these health topics so that if other people are motivated by health, you can craft an argument that effectively motivates them to become vegan. Effective communication is about motivating the other person to become vegan. If they are only interested in health and don’t care about animals, it’s going to be more effective to convince them of the health benefits of a WFPB diet than it is to try and make them care about animals.
We need as many people as possible to go vegan as fast as possible. Starting with a plant-based diet is a huge victory. Once they’re already plant-based, we can fill in the gaps about animal exploitation and the environment, and they can subsequently adopt a fully vegan lifestyle. People go plant-based or vegan for a variety of reasons, but the knowledge of animal cruelty is usually what keeps people vegan in the long term.
So even if you’re not motivated by health, it’s important to master these arguments so that you can still effectively empower people who are motivated by health.
General Concept: Bias in Nutrition Research
There is lots of strong research that conclusively shows a WFPB vegan diet is the optimal diet for humans. However, the field of nutrition studies has been historically plagued by bias and assumptions that have long obscured the conclusions of research. It’s important to understand these biases, because they are the basis for many of the health arguments against veganism and in favor of meat, dairy, and egg consumption.
Studying Nutrients in Isolation
Nutrition researchers, especially in the twentieth century, have had a bad habit of studying nutrients in isolation and drawing sweeping conclusions from those isolated studies. For instance, researchers will study the effects of supplementing calcium for people at risk of osteoporosis. When calcium supplementation improves their bone health, researchers will conclude that milk is good for bone health because milk is known to have calcium.
They studied a particular nutrient (calcium) in isolation (supplements) and then concluded that foods which contain that nutrient (milk) are therefore good for health. They don’t take into consideration the totality of the components in milk: saturated fat, cholesterol, casein protein, IGF-1, etc., which overall drastically decrease health and longevity. Yes, milk has calcium, but it also has lots of other bad stuff that outweighs the good stuff! This bias in research has led to an egregious reductionist ideology, in which people essentially equate one food with one nutrient.
For example:
Meat = protein
Milk = calcium
Eggs = protein
Soy = estrogen
If researchers are prone to this reductionist thinking, it is only exacerbated in the media and general public. Studying nutrients in isolation is helpful when investigating the pathways of nutrients within the body. But we should not draw nutritional recommendations from these types of studies.
When thinking about nutrition and how to eat, it’s important to consider the whole picture of the whole food. What “package” are your protein, vitamins, and minerals coming in? Are they packaged with health-promoting compounds or health-degrading compounds? A holistic view of foods is needed to dismantle the errors of past research.
The Cult of Protein
Dr. T. Colin Campbell, landmark nutrition scientist, biochemist, and Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, describes our society’s obsession with protein as a “cult.”
Protein is essential for life, that is absolutely true. But there are two main misconceptions that have led to rampant misinformation in our society about protein. The first misconception is that the more protein we eat, the better. And second, that animal proteins are superior to plant proteins.
Protein was one of the first nutrients to be discovered in 1838 by a German scientist, Gerhard Mulder (Mulder, 1838). Mulder named protein after the Greek word “proteios (πρώτειος),” meaning “of prime importance.” Protein was one of the first nutrients to be discovered, so at the time of its classification as “of prime importance,” it was basically one of the only nutrients that we knew of. It was so important because it was essentially all we had! Mulder’s student, Justus von Liebig, is famous for saying protein is “the stuff of life itself.” At the time, protein had only been discovered in animal flesh, and so it was generally theorized that “flesh made flesh.” In other words, we had to eat muscles in order to build muscles. Von Liebig even went so far as to theorize that vegetarians were incapable of prolonged exercise, because they lacked dietary protein! We’ve since discovered, however, that all protein on earth is originally made by plants. But we’ll get more into that in later sections of Plant Powered Persuasion.
Von Liebig’s student, Carl von Voit, continued to carry the “protein torch,” so to speak. Von Voit found that the average adult male required 52 grams of protein per day, which is actually quite close to the current recommendation by the WHO of around 50 g per day (Intake Health, 2018). Despite his experimental findings, von Voit recommended that adult males consume 120 g of protein per day, more than twice what his experimental results showed. It’s not exactly clear why von Voit more than doubled his recommendations, which was clearly not consistent with his own research, but this is where the myth of “the more protein, the better” began. Von Voit’s student, Max Rubner, who became a famous chemist in the twentieth century, is quoted as saying “protein interchange is civilization itself.”
As you can see, the classification of protein as the king of all nutrients and animals as the only or best source of protein is the result of a single lineage of researchers. Mulder discovered protein, and Mulder taught von Liebig who taught von Voit who taught Rubner. After a hundred years of this lineage of very prominent and famous researchers espousing the omni-importance of protein, the nutrition science field was saturated with bias. Their theories influenced the entire field of nutrition research for the rest of the twentieth century. This is how the “cult of protein” began.
And in the last seventy years or so, with the pervasive marketing arms of the animal agriculture industry, this cult of protein has proliferated to every facet of our society. Everyone is concerned about getting as much protein as possible, because marketing has incorrectly equated an overload of protein with optimal health. This is how the “cult of protein” has been solidified.
And don’t get me wrong, protein is essential for life. I’m not arguing that it isn’t. But the manner in which it was discovered and investigated greatly distorted its relative value in the human diet. Protein is so abundant in all foods that the only way humans won’t consume enough protein is if they aren’t eating enough calories. For example, 2,000 calories of black beans has 118 g of protein!
The idea that “flesh makes flesh” is an outdated, illogical, nineteenth-century theorization. If flesh truly made flesh, how do all the herbivores that humans eat make their own flesh? Why are the animals with the largest muscle mass, such as elephants and gorillas, herbivores? This nineteenth-century argument does not hold up to basic logic, and certainly not to advanced scientific research.
And yet, the “cult of protein” persists even today! We will cover the scientific research and debunk all the protein myths in the “protein” section of Plant Powered Persuasion. But it’s important to be aware of the history behind the “cult of protein.”
Chronic Diseases Are Mostly Attributable to Epigenetic Factors
There’s a widely held myth that chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc. are largely genetic. This is not true. All of the major chronic diseases that currently plague our society are mostly attributable to lifestyle factors such as smoking, lack of exercise, and poor diet. Diet and smoking are especially impactful pieces of this equation. In fact, the standard American diet has been identified as the number-one risk factor for death and disability in the U.S. (CSPI, 2018).
Let’s take cancer, for instance. Only 5-10% of cancers are purely genetic – meaning you’ll get it no matter what (American Cancer Society, n.d.). 90%+ of cancers are largely influenced by epigenetic factors, especially diet and smoking. And yet, 40% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, because most Americans consume the standard American diet.
Alzheimer’s is another great example of the incredible power of epigenetic factors. There’s actually a gene that drastically increases your risk for Alzheimer’s, called APOE ε4. Having at least one APOE ε4 gene doubles or triples the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease (Mayo Clinic, 2023). Some people have two APOE ε4 genes, one from each parent. Having two genes increases the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease even more, about eight to twelvefold.
The population of Nigeria has an unusually high occurrence of the APOE ε4 gene, and yet, they have some of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s disease in the world (Gureje et al., 2006). The Nigerian Paradox, as this is referred to in the medical community, is a perfect example of the power of food.
The APOE ε4 gene helps to carry cholesterol and other fats throughout the bloodstream. The APOE ε4 gene leads to accumulation of excess blood cholesterol in brain cells (Bryant, 2021). Alzheimer’s can be (very simply) explained as the clogging of brain cells by amyloid plaques. The accumulation of excess cholesterol in the brain has been found to increase amyloid plaque production (Wang et al., 2021).
So if Nigerians have an unusually high occurrence of the APOE ε4 gene, how can they have one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s in the world? The traditional diet of Nigerians is predominantly whole-food plant-based, which means their diet does not contain large amounts of dietary cholesterol, and consequently, their blood cholesterol levels are extremely low (Gureje et al., 2006). If there’s not a lot of cholesterol in the bloodstream to begin with, then the consequences of the APOE ε4 gene (accumulation of excess cholesterol in the brain) don’t seem to have an effect.
When Nigerians move to western cultures and adopt a western diet, however, their instance of Alzheimer’s mirrors that of western cultures (Hendrie et al., 2004).
When thinking about chronic diseases, many people say something like, “Heart disease/diabetes/cancer/Alzheimer’s/etc. runs in my family.” And that’s not necessarily true. Most of us inherit our diet and lifestyle from our families. As adults, we eat what we ate growing up. And we teach our children the same. For the most part, chronic disease doesn’t run in families. Habits run in families.
A recent review of studies on lifestyle medicine showed that as much as 80% of all chronic diseases could be prevented with a non-smoking, active, whole-food plant-based diet and lifestyle (Bodai et al., 2018). Genes play a role – they do. But genes are not destiny. Diet and lifestyle are the most important factors in our overall health.
Plant Powered Persuasion is the ultimate guide for vegans looking to elevate their activism in everyday conversations. In this book, we’ll teach you how to effectively communicate to inspire anyone to embrace a vegan lifestyle. We’ll also show you the roadmap to a vegan future, and how YOU can make that future a reality.
Hardcover, paperback, and kindle versions are available starting June 30th, 2024!