FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Vegetarian study was just a hypothesis

Vegetarian study was just a hypothesis

Eric Bahrt regularly puts pen to paper to promote vegetarianism, invariably quoting "The China Study". "The China Study" is flawed from the very title.

 

It is not a study but a comprehensive set of observations by author Dr Campbell, who is not a practising physician and has no real-world experience to support the veracity of his nutritional recommendations for the population at large. While this approach can be valuable, it can never prove assertions that animal protein should be avoided, as he never tested that theory on real live patients.
The data from Dr Campbell’s study was first published in “Diet, Life-Style and Mortality in China”. It contains several thousand statistical correlations, which Campbell insists show that animal protein intake is convincingly associated with prevalence of cancer. However, it’s important to realise two things: 
The study was an observational study. Correlations deduced from an observational study do not – in fact, cannot – prove causation. All you can really do with data from an observational study is to form a hypothesis, which must then be tested in randomised, controlled trials, to ferret out the truth about whether or not x actually causes y.
In many cases, the data (presented in arduous detail in the book “Diet, Life-Style and Mortality in China”) did not show statistically significant correlations between animal protein consumption and disease such as cancer at all. On the contrary, it would seem that sugar and carbohydrates are correlated with cancer – not animal protein. In addition, the data indicates that fat is negatively correlated with cancer mortality, which again contradicts the claim that meat is harmful.
As regards Eric’s assertion that meat is heart-harmful, we assume he refers to meat’s high cholesterol content. Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD, who exposed the cholesterol hoax in Sweden, (which now has a butter shortage!) stated, “I knew that cholesterol was one of the most important molecules in your body, indispensable for the building of your cells and for producing stress and sex hormones as well as vitamin D”. The idea that cholesterol in the blood should kill us if its concentration is a little higher than normal, as they wrote in the Framingham paper, is absurd.
Clark HR PhD ND wrote in 1995... 40 per cent of the double cell membrane of your trillions of cells is composed of cholesterol, and dietary cholesterol is needed to preserve the cell wall integrity to prevent invasion of carcinogens. 
While red meat may contain pesticides, growth hormone, anti-biotics, and damage from being fed GMOs and soy, we find that range fed, organic beef has none of those. If we discuss the cruelty of killing animals for meat, consider that plants are a conscious part of the creation. There is an excellent article at www.viewzone.com/plants.html, where scientists have documented that plants feel pain, have feelings, mourn death of other plants and even extend energy to people who planted and bred them I guess they may remove some of your energy when you eat them Eric.
Thomas Turk
Phuket
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