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Plant based diets in Crohn's disease.

These Japanese physicians consider Crohn's as a lifestyle-related disease mainly mediated by Westernized diets, which tend to cause dysbiosis in gut microflora.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4315368/

Obviously more research is needed. Studies from Sweden and UK revealed an increasing risk for IBD in the second generation immigrants from third world countries, but the first-generation immigrants had a lower risk as compared to original inhabitants.
 
These Japanese physicians consider Crohn's as a lifestyle-related disease mainly mediated by Westernized diets, which tend to cause dysbiosis in gut microflora.
I have to agree with this, it’s so frickin’ obvious

BUT……..
It would be beneficial for people to understand the claims being made and the ‘evidence’ used to support these claims

But first some context
This link is to a letter to a scientific journal written by Mitsuro Chiba et al [1] praising an article by Philip J Tuso et al. claiming “plant based” (vegan and vegetatian) diets are healthier [2].
Mitsuro Chiba et al. were behind the study “Lifestyle-related disease in Crohn’s disease: Relapse prevention by a semi-vegetarian diet” [3] which promoted a plant based diet (SVD) as a way to prolong relapse in crohns disease and he (they?) used this letter as a way of promoting his own paper.

So, vegetarians referencing vegetarians to promote vegetarianism (the more often an article is referenced the more it gains credibility).
I don't have a problem with that but there is a big problem with the methodology of all the Plant based (and other variations like Vegan,vegetarian and SVD) diet studies that I have seen

This quote from the second article (the one being praised in the link) offered a case study to support their conclusions and sums up my criticism pretty well…..
“His physician also prescribed a low-sodium, plant-based diet that excluded all animal products and refined sugars and limited bread, rice, potatoes, and tortillas to a single daily serving. He was advised to consume unlimited non-starchy vegetables, legumes, and beans, in addition to up to 2 ounces of nuts and seeds daily. He was also asked to begin exercising 15 minutes twice a day.”

if we unpack that we can see that there is no way to honestly claim that reducing the meat intake did anything at all.
A diet that “excluded all animal products and refined sugars and limited bread, rice, potatoes, and tortillas to a single daily serving” as well as “exercising 15 minutes twice a day” does not in any way prove that meat was the problem. It doesn't even seriously suggest that meat might be the problem….
A diet that changes multiple factors and then tries to attribute all the benefit to one of the factors is dishonest and deceptive.

I haven’t unpacked the rest of the paper, just not worth the time.

If anyone is interested I spent a while dissecting the SVD diet promoted by Mitsuro Chiba et al. in this post…
Lifestyle-related disease in Crohn’s disease: Relapse prevention by a semi-vegetarian diet
"So, just to clarify this.........

The study has been framed to deliberately mislead.
For the purpose of this study the 'semi-vegetarians' (from the links in the original study [20-30]) refrained from sugar[20,23,24], carbohydrates[21], fast foods[24], cola,chewing gum and chocolate[25], western foods (bread for breakfast, butter, margarine, cheese, meats, and ham and sausage)[27], and were encouraged to eat more fruit and vegetables.
'Omnivores' were those who did not stick to the diet, either by eating more meat or by eating anything else on the restricted list (sugar, bread, chewing gum?)."

http://www.crohnsforum.com/showthread.php?t=59617&highlight=Lifestyle-related+disease

Any diet that eliminates the crap will be better than any standard western diet, simple as that.
Twisting the results to support a dogma is dishonest.

really happy for feedback, I think this is important

1 -Lifestyle-related disease in Crohn’s disease: Relapse prevention by a semi-vegetarian diet
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877178/
2-Nutritional Update for Physicians: Plant-Based Diets
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/
3- Plant-Based Diets in Crohn’s Disease
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4315368/
 
What the Health Vegan Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avfQCePFWfk

I look forward to your comments.
I haven't seen it, and don't plan to....

From a vegan's perspective
A Vegan Dietitian Reviews “What the Health"
"Repeated blunders and bad science make What the Health impossible to recommend"
https://www.vegan.com/posts/vegan-dietitian-review-what-the-health/

From a paleo perspective
What The Health: A Wolf’s Eye Review
https://robbwolf.com/2017/07/03/what-the-health-a-wolfs-eye-review/
 
That's ok. I'm not going to read Robb Wolf's book The Paleo Solution either.

Yes there was hype in the documentary, but I also learned a lot. For instance, human guts are remarkably similar to those of chimpanzees and orangutans. Their diets consist of fruits, veg and insects. Carnivores' and omnivores' digestive systems are completely different.

This link is to the National Institute of Health - vegan diet clinical trials
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=vegan+diet+clinical+trial

I did not know that the doctors in the documentary were vegan, and I have no idea about the doctors in all these clinical trials either.

Fyi I have been vegetarian for five years. My blood pressure is 95/67, cholesterol and blood sugar levels are normal, so I'm going to continue with it.
 
That's ok. I'm not going to read Robb Wolf's book The Paleo Solution either.
Haven’t read that either,. I have read enough of his stuff to know he gets his science right though (and will revise his opinion as new science comes out).

Yes there was hype in the documentary, but I also learned a lot.
I’m not worried by the hype, highlighting real science to emphasise your point of view (also known as cherrypicking) is one thing,
but deliberate misdirection and lies, tied with a deliberate ignorance of anything that isn’t what they want to hear, well, that’s different.
You might have learned a lot, but you might not have learned a lot that was true…… (just sayin’, might/might not)

For instance, human guts are remarkably similar to those of chimpanzees and orangutans. Their diets consist of fruits, veg and insects. Carnivores' and omnivores' digestive systems are completely different.
Yes, we have similar guts,
That is because they are our closet living relative, 7.5 million years ago we were the same species.
In that 7500000 years we have separated quite a bit [1] (or six thousand years in which nothing changed – if that’s your thing).

Chimpanzees eat insects, and we used to and still do.
Insects are animals, containing fats and proteins
We (humans) can digest the chitin (like crunchy shells)
Chimpanzees regularly hunt and kill and eat meat [2]

But….. our brains got bigger and our guts got smaller.
- they live on fat by fermenting vegetable in a large stinky compost in their bottoms -oooooh, vegetables are gross [3].
We live by pre-digesting much of our food outside our bodies [4].

Personally, I like the suggestion that we are cookavores , but however you look at it, we have important differences as well as similarities.

This link is to the National Institute of Health - vegan diet clinical trials
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=vegan+diet+clinical+trial
I’m going to say it again, because it is my whole entire point when I talk about or to veg*ns [5].
It’s not about whether or not you eat meat, it’s the quality of what you eat ( be it the plant based part of your diet (apples or oreos) or the animal based part of your diet (chicken thigh or mcnuggets)) that will determine your health outcomes.
I’m all for a healthy vegetarian diet if it works for you, but its not healthy because it is vegetarian, it is healthy because it isn’t full of crap.

I did not know that the doctors in the documentary were vegan, and I have no idea about the doctors in all these clinical trials either.
That’s how it works,
you want to make vegan doco, you get vegan doctors, you want to make a paleo doco, you get paleo doctors, you want to make a SAD doco, you get AHA doctors,
Same thing for scientists.
Google’s algorithms will make sure that you see things that confirm your opinion.
That’s the world we live in

Fyi I have been vegetarian for five years. My blood pressure is 95/67, cholesterol and blood sugar levels are normal, so I'm going to continue with it.
I’m glad it is working for you, and I wish you all the best.

[1] “constituting approximately thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion/deletion events, and various chromosomal rearrangements”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/abs/nature04072.html?foxtrotcallback=true

[2] “In a sinister echo of the passenger pigeon story, chimpanzees in one area of Africa have over-hunted the monkeys they prey on. As a result, the monkey population has been pushed close to local extinction”
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-out-monkeys

[3] The Human Colon in Evolution: Part 1, comparative anatomy
“The major difference in this matter between humans and the other great apes is that apes such as the gorilla are able to use their larger colons to obtain as much as 60% of their caloric intake from SCFA [short chain fatty acids] alone”

http://huntgatherlove.com/content/human-colon-evolution-part-1-comparative-anatomy

[4] Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human

[5] bet there are going to be some fights out there amongst the veg*ns over this one, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/veg*n

[6] for example - Top 20 Accidentally Vegan Foods
https://www.peta.org/living/food/top-accidentally-vegan-foods/
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:234778&dswid=-9113
 
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