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