17 April 2023
As a long-time advocate for healthy plant-based diets for both prevention and treatment of chronic illness, the last three years have been bitterly disappointing for me on two related fronts:
Firstly, most of the leading figures in the world of plant-based nutrition joined the Covidian cult. It was shocking and disheartening to see health professionals whom I’ve admired for years for their courage and tenacity in pushing against the status quo (including the profligate use of pharmaceuticals for lifestyle-induced conditions), now endorsing non-evidence-based biosecurity theatre such as face coverings and lockdowns, and urging their followers to take rushed-to-market injections with no meaningful safety data… and all for a respiratory condition with the same infection fatality rate as the flu. The only exceptions that I’m aware of are:
- Naturopath and health educator Dr Pam Popper, who was one of the earliest and most consistent voices speaking out against COVID tyranny, and whose book COVID Operation: What Happened, Why It Happened, and What’s Next has proved remarkably prescient despite being published back in October 2020;
- The elder statesman of the plant-based nutrition world, Dr T. Colin Campbell, who defended people’s right to choose how they care for their own health, and personally declined to take the experimental transfection agent;
- Cardiologist Dr Joel Kahn, who has expressed concerns about the shoddy approval process and clear evidence of serious cardiovascular harm from COVID injections;
- Cardiologist Dr Baxter Montgomery, who did not take the COVID jab and does not advise his patients to get it because his analysis of the Pfizer and Moderna trial data did not indicate any survival benefit, and who advocated for prophylaxis and early treatment with ivermectin and nutraceuticals;
- Chiropractor and founder of TrueNorth Health Center Dr Alan Goldhamer, who pointed out that cases and deaths attributed to COVID were being overcounted, and railed against the imposition of COVID ‘vaccine’ mandates as a “dangerous precedent” and emphasised the importance of taking personal responsibility for one’s own health;
- Naturopath Dr Henry Ealy, who uncovered gross malfeasance by the CDC in its data collection and reporting on COVID-19;
- Psychologist Dr Doug Lisle, who defended the right of every person to choose whether or not to take the COVID jabs and asserted that vaccinating children against COVID was “insane”;
- Health journalist Jeff Nelson, who highlighted the dangers of taking new, experimental pharma products in a video that masterfully dodged the GooTube censorship algorithm; and
- Nutritionist, author, and radio show host Gary Null, who has interviewed and featured the work of many COVID anticultists on his podcast.
(If you, dear reader, know of any other prominent figure in the plant-based world who stood for medical freedom and open scientific discussion during the scamdemic, please let me know so I can add them to this tragically short honour roll.)
Secondly, the plant-based nutrition movement has increasingly been infiltrated and co-opted by a cabal of globalists, multinational corporations and venture capitalists peddling ultraprocessed vegan junk food, rather than the minimally-processed plant foods that facilitate disease reversal and support optimal human health. This has unfortunately led the majority of the ‘medical freedom movement’ to reject any and all versions of plant-based diets, and to enthusiastically embrace (so-called) paleo– or even carnivore-style diets as insignia of their vehement opposition to having their dietary choices dictated to them by the global nanny state.
So when a new study comes out with findings that a healthful plant-based diet decreases the risk of premature death, cancer, and cardiovascular disease, while an unhealthful plant-based diet has the opposite effect, I have mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it’s gratifying to have hard data from a large study (126 394 participants in UK Biobank, a long-running population-based study) that supports the dietary advice that I give to my clients: draw as much of your food intake as you possibly can from fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices.
On the other hand, many of the people I’m now talking with are – not unreasonably, given the events of the last three-plus years – deeply suspicious of the entire scientific enterprise, and are therefore dubious about any research that seems to support the globalist agenda of wiping out animal agriculture to appease the weather gods.
Let me reassure you that this study is not propaganda issued by the wealthy wackadoodles promoting fake meat, synthetic breast milk and disgusting stuff made from bugs. Their findings actually argue for more real food consumption.
With that rather lengthy preamble, let’s dig into the study.
The UK Biobank study began recruiting participants aged between 40 and 69, from across England, Scotland, and Wales, in 2006, with the stated mission of identifying the causes of a wide range of complex diseases of middle and old age. Participants agreed to a comprehensive baseline assessment and regular submission of questionnaires on health-related behaviours, along with invitations to participate in various sub-projects (some of which I’ve discussed in previous articles).
For this study, participants’ intake of 17 food groups – whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, tea and coffee, fruit juices, refined grains, potatoes, sugar-sweetened beverages, sweets and desserts, animal fat, dairy, eggs, fish or seafood, meat, and miscellaneous animal-derived foods – was used to sort them into four groups (quartiles) on the basis of their level of adherence to a healthy plant-based diet index (hPDI) and an unhealthy plant-based diet index (uPDI).
The hPDI was constructed by summing the intake of healthy plant foods (whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, tea and coffee), and subtracting intake of unhealthy plant foods (refined grains, potatoes*, sugary drinks, fruit juices, sweets and desserts) and animal foods.
The uPDI, conversely, was constructed by summing the intake of unhealthy plant foods and subtracting intake of healthy plant foods and animal foods.
The differences in intake of the various categories of food were significant, but not particularly dramatic. For example, participants ranked in the lowest quartile of the hPDI averaged 1.6 serves of whole grains, 1.5 serves of fruit, 1.7 serves of vegetables, 0.1 serves of nuts and 0.3 serves of legumes per day. Those in the top quartile averaged 2.8 serves of whole grains, 3.2 serves of fruit, 3.5 serves of vegetables, 0.3 serves of nuts and 0.6 serves of legumes per day. I’d give that a B- if it was one of my clients’ food journals, with advice to eat a lot more vegetables and legumes, and bump up their nut intake.
Those who scored in the top quartile of the hPDI ate considerably less refined grains, sugary drinks, sweets and desserts, animal fat and meat than those in the bottom quartile, but were much the same on dairy, fish and seafood intake.
But despite eating what I would consider a fair-to-middling diet, those who scored in the highest quartile of the hPDI had a significantly lower risk of premature death, cardiovascular disease and cancer than those with the lowest scores, as shown below (Interpretation primer: the blue-grey square represents the mean, or average value for the hazard ratio i.e. the likelihood of occurrence of the outcome of interest in each group, while the horizontal grey lines represent the confidence intervals; if any of these horizontal lines crosses the dotted vertical line, the result is not statistically significant, i.e. more likely due to random chance than to a causal effect of diet choices):
The protective effects of healthful plant-based diets were particularly marked for heart attacks and ischaemic strokes (the most common form of stroke):
On the other hand, those in the highest quartile of the uPDI had a dramatically increased risk of premature death, cancer and cardiovascular disease (especially heart attack and ischaemic stroke):
Importantly, healthful plant-based diets were protective even (and perhaps especially) in participants with heightened genetic susceptibility to cardiovascular disease:
The study’s authors propose two major mechanisms by which healthful plant-based diets might decrease the risk of chronic disease and premature death:
- Higher consumption of unprocessed plant foods may decrease the risk of obesity, low-grade inflammation, and impaired insulin sensitivity, all of which contribute to the development of both cardiovascular disease and cancer;
- Plant constituents including fibre (and, I would add, other microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, and polyphenols) may beneficially affect the composition and function of the gut microbiome, resulting in heightened production of health-promoting bacterial metabolites such as short-chain fatty acids and decreased production of harmful products such as secondary bile acids and trimethylamine-oxide, which may be associated with CVD and certain cancers, although further research in human populations is needed.
It’s important to point out that the assemblages of highly-processed plant food components that are being heavily promoted by the Davos crowd and their acolytes have the exact opposite effect: they impair insulin sensitivity, cause inflammation, and trigger overeating and consequent weight gain.
The moral of the story is quite simple: if you want to maximise your chances of living a long, healthy life, eat more plant-derived foods in a state as close as possible to their natural form, and minimise your intake of highly processed plant-derived foods and animal foods. Your body will thank you for it, and your would-be overlords will be bummed that they’ve lost a customer for their sick-care business empire. That’s a pretty damn good outcome, in my book.
Update:
I really wanted to highlight this comment by Rogier van Vlissingen and recommend his article, Innocence Lost at Lifestyle Medicine Conference:
One paragraph from Rogier’s excellent article particularly caught my eye, as it sums up my own position perfectly:
“The essence of [T. Colin] Campbell’s critique is that the materialistic, reductionist mode of reasoning that is imparted with medical education flies in the face of the more holistic, whole systems type of thinking, and the terrain theory of disease. Medicine simply invents disease and raises hypochondriacs, who come to a doctor all trained to think that for every ill, there is a pill, and the doctors know which side their bread is buttered, so they prescribe the pills. We’ll need a new type of healthcare that actually cares for health first.”
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* I don’t consider the humble spud to be an inherently unhealthy food. However, potatoes are classified as an unhealthy plant-based food because previous studies have associated high potato intake with negative health outcomes in US cohorts, regardless of cooking method. Interestingly, Italian, Spanish and Swedish population studies have not found detrimental effects of high potato consumption, suggesting either that the US studies have an unidentified confound, or that there may be differences in cultivars, preparation method or patterns of consumption in these latter countries.
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