Vegetarianism And Militancy
Have you noticed the increasing numbers of occasions when small groups of very militant people demonstrate against all sorts of things: animal experiments, butchers' shops, new roads, footpaths, nuclear power stations, civil rights, homosexuals' rights or anybody else's rights. The odds are that the majority are vegetarians.
As we know, when it needs food, our body indicates this to us with the feeling of hunger. But there are also other signals if specific nutrients are deficient. Meat is the best source of several nutrients.
When our bodies are deficient in these, we become irritable and aggressive. This is a perfectly natural signal built into our genetic make-up over our evolution: our bodies are telling us to go out and kill something to eat. This is why strict vegetarians tend to be so vociferous.
It is a trait that was recognized long ago; it was, after all, the vegetarian Cain who killed the carnivorous Abel, not the other way round. The vegan Kikuyu tribe in Kenya were the perpetrators of the murderous Mau Mau in the 1950s, not their wholly carnivorous, but peaceful, neighbors, the Maasai.
And, of course, it is no secret that Hitler was a vegetarian. Have you ever heard of a meat eater bombing a greengrocer's shop? Where there is dissension in our society, it is noticeable that the silent majority tends to be the meat eaters, the vociferous minority, vegetarian - no matter what the protest is about.
Vegetarianism - A Form Of Child Abuse
All the nutrients that the body needs other than vitamin B-12 can be obtained from vegetable sources if extreme care is taken. However, the availability of some of them to the body is often adversely affected by the special characteristics of a strictly vegetarian diet (18).
Nutrients so affected include: energy, iron, calcium, zinc, copper, manganese, selenium, riboflavin and the fat soluble vitamins, particularly vitamin D. The best sources of these are meats, poultry and seafood, which are not eaten.
But not only does the vegan diet consist of foods which are poorer sources of these nutrients, it necessarily contains high levels of fiber, phytic acid and oxalate, all of which are known both to bind with the nutrients in such a way as to inhibit their absorption in the gut and also to deplete the body of the minerals it has. The vegetarian ends up with what is called a negative balance. It is a situation where the more he eats, the worse it gets.
This applies both to adults and to children. In the case of children, however, the situation can be far more serious. Children brought up by vegetarian parents are usually breast fed, often for long periods. Where the mother has a good nutrient-rich diet, this is normally a good thing.
But the nutritional condition of the mother affects the nutrients passed in breast milk to the infant. If the mother is deficient in vitamin B-12, for example, this deficiency is passed onto the breast-fed child (19) with unfortunate consequences.
With the more extreme macrobiotic diets the situation is even worse. Serious brain damage is seen in children on macrobiotic diets where it was found that " Vitamin B-12 is sufficiently low as to have psychological consequences that also raise legitimate concerns about neurological development " (20).
Other research confirms the depth of the problem. Mental development of four-to five-year-old children on macrobiotic diets (almost devoid of animal foods and fat) with long-term growth deficits, was studied.
In addition food consumption and behavioral style of the children, and family and parent characteristics were assessed. Children had only seventy percent of the energy and forty percent of the calcium intake of that reported for children on conventional diets. Thirty three percent of the children studied failed to finish IQ tests due to an inability to concentrate (21).
Long standing mild to moderate malnutrition may not affect mental development if the children grow up in a stimulating social environment.
Infants and growing children have relatively small stomachs but large requirements for energy and the proteins and other materials with which to grow. As they can only eat small meals, they, most of all, need a diet high in energy and rich in nutrients - needs that simply cannot be met from a vegetable-based diet.
When weaned, children of vegetarian parents receive a diet where their small stomachs are filled with relatively nutrient-poor foods.
This can lead to grave nutritional disorders such as suppressed growth and nutritional dwarfing (22) , as well as diseases such as kwashiorkor, a protein-calorie deficiency disease usually seen only in severely malnourished African children (23) , vitamin D deficiency rickets (24) , severe iron deficiency anaemia (25) and learning difficulties (26) .
The children of strict vegetarian parents tend to have lower birth weights which studies have shown increase ill-health later in life (27). Smaller babies suffer more heart disease (28), obstructive lung diseases and asthma (29). Under-nutrition in infancy has also been shown to inhibit brain growth and to have a dramatically adverse effect on intellectual development (30).
This last is a disaster as, not only is it irreversible in those children, studies have shown that their eventual offspring also suffer lower intelligence quotients.
Dr. I.F. Roberts, senior registrar at the Department of Child Health, St George's Hospital in London, and colleagues suggest that these vegetarian type fad diets must be regarded as a form of child abuse 23
But Isn't Vegetarianism Healthier?
Many people become vegetarians because they believe that such a lifestyle is healthier, particularly in terms of heart disease and cancer. They believe that an intake of meat, and particularly animal fat, will shorten their lives.
As evidence of this, a study of largely vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists is usually quoted (31) despite the fact that its authors conclude: ' We hope that no-one will take data from this report and use it to say "Food A lowers or food B raises mortality risk". '
It is certainly true that this religious sect suffers less from heart disease than the general population. However, the use of this argument to show that vegetarianism is healthier is flawed.
A similar study of Mormons in Utah, who eat a considerable amount of meat, found similar low levels of the disease. In fact, the diet of both communities had little or no impact on their incidences of heart disease; the incidences of the disease is low because they are both close-knit and supportive communities, a situation which is known to be protective as far as such diseases are concerned (32).
Comparisons of the health and longevity of cultures with different dietary habits confirms that meat eaters, such as Eskimos, Nagas and Maasai, can expect to live twice as long as primitive vegetarians.
It may be said that such a comparison is flawed because the situations in which these peoples live is very different but there are cases throughout the world where meaningful comparisons can be made.
In Kenya two tribes, the Maasai and the Kikuyu, live in the same country, the same climate, the same political system and the same environment. The Maasai, when wholly carnivorous, drinking only the blood and milk of their cattle, were tall, healthy, long-lived and slim.
The Kikuyu, when wholly vegetarian, were stunted, diseased, short-lived and pot-bellied. Over the last few decades, the Kikuyu have started to eat meat - and their health has improved. Since 1960 the Maasai diet has also changed, but in the opposite direction. They are now eating less blood, milk and meat, replacing it with maize and beans. Their health has deteriorated (33).
A study by Drs. W. S. McClellan and E. F. Du Bois (34) found that the Eskimos in Baffin Island and Greenland living on a diet composed almost entirely of meat and fish, and eating no starchy or sugary foods, suffered few diseases.
This was not the case with the Labrador Eskimos. They had been 'civilized' and lived on preserved foods, dried potatoes, flour, canned foods and cereals. Among them the diseases of civilization were rife.
Dr. Sir Robert McCarrison (35) , working in India, similarly compared the northern tribes - Pathans, Sikhs and Hunzas - who ate meat and fresh vegetables, had fine physiques and were healthy and long-lived with the Plains peoples - Madrassis, Bengalis and Kanarese - who ate little meat or milk, living mainly on rice and who were overweight and unhealthy.
Other studies have purported to show that vegetarianism is healthier. In July 1994, the British press carried headlines like 'Vegetarian diet means longer life' as they reported a vegetarian study from the British Medical Journal (36) which said that vegetarians suffered forty percent fewer cancers and heart disease than meat eaters.
But The Public Were Being Misled - The Study Was Badly Flawed.
¨ The study's vegetarian cohort was selected through the Vegetarian Society and the meat-eaters were then selected by the vegetarians themselves. This is hardly the way to conduct an unbiased trial - if they want to prove a point, and what vegetarian doesn't, they will pick those who are most likely to be unhealthy. It is human nature.
¨ The vegetarians were mostly women, while the meat-eating group contained more men. Women live longer than men. In the age range of the subjects studied, men have four times the heart disease of women - enough to confound the figures significantly.
¨ The vegetarians were younger than the meat-eaters. As younger people have a lower death rate, one would expect more deaths among the meat-eaters regardless of dietary influences.
In this study, the two groups were not comparable and the study is worthless.
Vegetarianism And Coronary Disease
Other evidence refutes the 'vegetarianism is healthier' dogma. London has a high proportion of Asian immigrants. They live in the same environment as the indigenous population and mix freely with them. But the incidence of coronary artery disease is much higher in the Asian population. A study published in 1985 (37) was pretty conclusive evidence that the Asian's diet - high in linoleic acid and predominantly vegetarian - was not protective against the disease.
It is usually better to compare similar populations in the same area as, in the study above, the Asians have a different evolutionary background to northern European Caucasians. One study that did this compares vegetarians and fresh fish eaters from two neighboring Bantu villages. (38)
This study found that the fish eaters had higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, lower blood pressure and lower blood fat levels than the vegetarians. Both blood pressure and lipids increased throughout life in vegetarians but remained fairly constant throughout life in the fish eaters.
The published literature on fruit and vegetables and cardiovascular disease is extensive. In 1997, Drs Ness and Powles reviewed some ten ecological studies, three case-control studies, and sixteen cohort studies reporting measures of association between intake of fruit and vegetables (or intake of nutrients mainly obtained from fruit and vegetables) and coronary heart disease, together with five ecological studies, one case-control study, and eight cohort studies for stroke. (39)
They point out that cohorts at 'low risk' have failed to show a protective association between intake of fruit and vegetables and cardiovascular disease (for example, a study of 26 473 Seventh Day Adventists followed up for six years, frequently quoted in support of a vegetarian lifestyle being 'healthy', showed null findings for fruit, and that many uncertainties remain concerning the relations between consumption of fruit and vegetables and the risk of cardiovascular disease.
The best evidence, surely, is obtained from looking at actual people who have a proven long life. In 1992 scientists at the Department of Community Health, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Japan, published a paper which examined the relationship of nutritional status to further life expectancy and health status in the Japanese elderly (40). It was based on three epidemiological studies.
¨ In the first, nutrient intakes in ninety-four Japanese centenarians investigated between 1972 and 1973 showed a higher proportion of animal protein to total proteins than in contemporary average Japanese.
¨ The second demonstrated that high intakes of milk and fats and oils had favorable effects on ten-year survivorship in 422 urban residents aged sixty-nine to seventy-one. The survivors revealed a longitudinal increase in intakes of animal foods such as eggs, milk, fish and meat over the ten years.
¨ In the third study, nutrient intakes were compared between a sample from Okinawa Prefecture where life expectancies at birth and sixty-five were the longest in Japan, and a sample from Akita Prefecture where the life expectancies were much shorter. It found that the proportion of energy from animalproteins and fats were significantly higher in the former than in the latter.
Vegetarianism and Cancer
An analytical study into the relationship between current diet and breast cancer risk was published in 1994. When breast cancer rates and meat and fruit intakes were compared, both were similar in the under-fifties. However, in women over fifty, eating more meat reduced the incidence of breast cancer by 30%, whilst eating more fruit increased breast cancer incidence by 70%. (41)
This may have been because a conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatty acid known to be a powerful anti-cancer agent, is found only in the fat of ruminant animals. (42-43)
A case control study of over 5000 Italian women was conducted between 1991 and 1994 to assess the influence of high intakes of fat and other macronutrients on breast cancer risk. Dr Franceschi's team found that "The risk of breast cancer decreased with increasing total fat intake . . . whereas the risk increased with increasing intake of available carbohydrates." (44)
Foods of vegetable origin tend to have high levels of carbohydrates. That this should be so finds support from Professor Wolfgang Lutz he showed that epidemiological studies failed to support the current belief that fat intake was at the root of coronary disease and cancer and did his own explorations of epidemiological data.
His findings show a clear, inverse relationship between diseases of civilization and the length of time the people of a given region of Europe have had to adapt to the high carbohydrate diet associated with the cultivation of cereal grains that was begun in the Near East, and spread very slowly through Europe. (45)
This is turn confirmed the work of the eminent explorer and anthropologist, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. (46) In it Stefansson points out that Stanislaw Tanchou "....gave the first formula for predicting cancer risk.
It was based on grain consumption and was found to accurately calculate cancer rates in major European cities. The more grain consumed, the greater the rate of cancer". Tanchou's paper, delivered to the Paris Medical Society in 1843, postulated that cancer would likewise never be found in hunter-gatherer populations.
This began a search among the populations of hunter-gatherers known to missionary doctors and explorers, a search which continued until WWII when the last wild humans in the Arctic and Australia were 'civilized'. No cases of cancer were ever found within these populations - although after they adopted the diet of civilization, it became common.
Continue to Part 4
References