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in 1894 a dentist was on a mission to solve a mystery that puzzled Professionals for a while why were people's teeth becoming so crooked Dr Weston a price set off on a 10-year Journey traveling to 14 different countries in search of people who naturally had excellent teeth he discovered something strange how could crooked teeth be genetic when several parents with perfectly straight teeth had one child with very crooked teeth but another child with straight teeth also having straight teeth seemed to generally mean that the rest of the face was more attractive so what made the difference we'll get to that soon but interest in plant-based diets has exploded recently meat sales fell by 184 million quid this is due to the rise in veganism with the
number of American vegans and vegetarians going from 2.6 million in 1994 to 19.8 million in 2020. starting today ready or not you are a vegan Friday January a vegan now reduce red meat specifically yes but will cutting animal Foods out of our diet really improve health plant-based burger for you really have to focus on the plant-based diet public schools in Brooklyn we will be instituting meatless Monday plant-based at Bellevue Hospital but if eating zero animal Foods improves health so much why would a 2016 study find that 84 percent of vegans eventually quit their diet the actor was vegan for almost four years but started feeling lethargic in February you were a vegan for a while right a couple years
when did you stop doing that no not too long ago I was vegan for a very long time and I've had to introduce fish even vegan influencers weren't able to make it work me and my family have struggled with health on a vegan diet I am no longer following a vegan diet I found it very difficult to maintain a healthy plant-based diet I'm not vegan anymore in this video I'd like to tell you the story behind why I think plant-based is not the best direction to head in we'll have to look at the rest of this puzzle on straight teeth the specific consequences of removing animal foods from the diet the story on why humans may be getting weaker or not stronger and our Rocky history of trying to create brand new fake Foods she wants
advice on how to produce a hell healthy baby and make sure that it will have good teeth Taylor Anthropologist Daniel Lieberman explains in his book The Evolution of the human head that jaws and faces do not grow to the same size that they used to for a very long time it was the norm for humans to have large skulls and quite broad mouths when the mouth the dental Arch is too small there's not enough room for the teeth to come in so they crowd together and become crooked the teeth are forming in the baby's jaw long before it is born based on studies from 2009 to 2019 the prevalence of children developing crooked teeth today is 53 percent in America 56 worldwide and 72 percent in
Europe so the question becomes why would the dental Arch grow big enough for this brother but not for this brother that's where Western prize comes in totally new processed foodstuffs like refined grains sugar and vegetable oil were spreading and these people living in remote areas were finally getting access to them he found a clear pattern those living on the traditional diet were in good health had broad Dental arches straight teeth and very few cavities however other groups in the same area who started eating these new modern Foods developed crooked teeth and had five to more than 30 times the cavities of their counterparts despite sharing similar genetics Dr Price wasn't just saying that sugar processed grains or
vegetable fats were evil but that they were displacing far more nutritious Foods the more modern Foods people ate the less room in their stomach for a highly nutritious traditional diet across all the groups he studied the foods they prized most were nutrient dense animal Foods fresh liver was a delicacy from the people of the outer Hebrides who ate Cod heads and livers while the people of New Guinea who ate dugongs or the people of the Andean Sierras who ate llamas and alpacas wherever he went he found that these groups eating a traditional diet always prized some form of marine or animal Foods eggs cheese and butter also contain the vitamins needed for good teeth and bones orange juice and cod liver oil are also very important for
the expectant mother Weston Price noted that these Foods were particularly high in the vitamins a d and K2 he wrote that the traditional diets commonly provided 10 times the ad and K2 of modern diets research later confirmed that of course along with things like protein and calcium these three vitamins indeed work together to transport minerals to support the proper formation of the bones and of course your facial structure which includes the dental Arch depends on proper development of your facial bones milk is the most important food of all and builds strong bones and teeth Dr Price noted full fat Dairy as one of the traditional foods that these people considered valuable so it's interesting to observe that the Dutch
are competing with montenegrins for the tallest people in the world title and they happen to be second and third on the list for the most milk consumed per capita in the world a study of 105 countries in the Journal of economics and human biology noted that animal food particularly Dairy most correlated with increases in height take all the core parts of meat the amino acids the lipids trace minerals the vitamins combine those with water if we can do that's meat to me so why would it be hard to replace animal derived vitamins with ones from Plants well I recently interviewed Jovana Mendoza who essentially made a career based around her vegan lifestyle vegan meal prep eat vegan about the vegan lifestyle when she had health
issues she tried her best to solve them while staying on the diet using all kinds of supplements and troubleshooting strategies but she eventually had to prioritize her health and quit the diet after six years even though she had every motivation to keep being vegan I spent like the last two years kind of trying to figure out how to make it work for me because my blood tests were always like a little bit low I would go anywhere with like a big bag of supplements my hormones were not great I felt a lot of like a foggy mind I felt that a lot I don't feel that anymore giovanna's case is just a peek at how complex it can be to replace animal Foods in your diet to understand this
let's start by taking a look at these three vitamins Dr Weston Price was focused on take vitamin A for example you might think the average vegan has way more vitamin A because it comes from vegetables like carrots or sweet potatoes but that's not vitamin A that's beta-carotene and that has to be converted into vitamin A and the conversion rate is very poor about 12 to 1. actually it's closer to 21 to 1 because the fiber in Plants makes it harder to absorb not only that the more you eat the worse the conversion rate becomes further depending on your genes your conversion rate could be even lower this is the case for me and for potentially as many as 37 percent of people of European descent actual vitamin A only comes from animal
Foods or synthetic supplements and the 2021 study found vegan Finnish children to have insufficient vitamin A and A 2020 German study found vegans to have a lower vitamin A level than omnivores vitamin D plays an important role in staying healthy vitamin D is only found in animal foods with some exceptions like mushrooms and some algae some people can simply get in a vitamin D from the Sun but if you live at latitudes above 37 degrees your skin barely makes any vitamin D from the Sun except for in summer here are the spoons for your cod liver oil drone it's extra Sunshine for us in winter and spring and a 2016 finished study found vegan's level vitamin D to be 34 lower than omnivores next unless you're eating
fermented foods you only find vitamin K2 in animal Foods the richest sources of K2 are going to be animal livers especially Goose liver egg yolks hard cheese and full fat Dairy unfortunately New York City made it illegal for schools to serve whole milk in 2006 the fermented soybean dish natto does in fact have a ton of K2 and sauerkraut has some too vitamin K2 helps put calcium into the right places like your bones and it keeps it out of your heart which is thought to be one reason why higher vitamin K2 intake strongly correlated with reduced risk of heart disease speaking of all these nutrients good for the skeleton a 2021 polish study found vegan children to have weaker bones and were three centimeters shorter than
their meat eating counterparts a British study and a Dutch study also found vegan children to be shorter other nutrients like high quality protein and calcium are also factors in height and vegans have to be extra careful to get enough of both of these Weston Price wrote in his 1939 book nutrition and physical degeneration as yet I have not found a single group of people who are building and maintaining an excellent Body by living entirely on plant Foods even Gandhi tried his hardest to be vegan but eventually acknowledged that he at the very least needed to include dairy in his diet to prevent his health from deteriorating but that was decades ago and since the arrival of the B12
supplement in 1947 people can now rely on supplements there's nothing stopping high-tech foods like beyond meat from fortifying their product with nutrients that can be difficult for vegans to get enough of things like B12 iron zinc selenium iodine calcium Omega-3s and vitamins A and D so why can't we just look up all the components of meat and make a meat replacement well let's start with B12 as this component is near impossible to get just from Whole plant Foods so you're eating a vegan diet you are going to need to get vitamin B12 as a supplement you ought to take a B12 supplement you need to take B12 supplement most vegans know they need to supplement B12 which is very important
for brain function yet one study looking at B12 status in vegetarians and vegans found that seven percent of vegetarians and 52 percent of vegans were not getting enough B12 however in another study with a more sensitive testing method they found a whopping 77 percent of vegetarians and 92 percent of vegans had instant efficient B12 whereas only 11 percent of omnivores did and this is quite common actually with the vitamin B12 deficiencies that they were misdiagnose depression because the doctors were just pushing antidepressants on me B12 deficiency causes guilt perhaps the B12 supplements don't work exactly like animal foods do also it can take years to deplete the body's B12 stores so people can be
lacking B12 for a while without realizing it 75 percent of vegans are said to be deficient at B12 and pregnancy increases the B12 requirement of the mother almost three times your symptoms started when you were actually in labor and you started to get these pins and needles and after the labor finished it didn't go away when the mother is deficient in B12 the baby can suffer from stunted growth loss of neuromotor skills and permanent Neuropsychiatric conditions psychologist Kimberly Wilson says that there are over 40 case reports of babies being hospitalized for severe B12 deficiency after being breastfed by vegetarian or vegan mothers in two specific cases one where the mother was taking a prenatal
supplement and another where the mother had no symptoms of B12 deficiency despite this the babies still had neurological issues indicating severe B12 deficiency this highlights the need to double check B12 status can go in there with symptoms of anemia shorts and breath palpitations fatigue brain fog Etc B12 levels are in the normal range what the patient should ask for is active B12 this isn't to say it's impossible to get enough B12 from supplements perhaps some people simply need to take more of them or a different type a B12 supplement might not work quite the same as animal derived B12 but another possibility is a vegan diet has impaired digestion poor digestion hurting my stomach bloating bloated it bloated a lot bloating
bloated bloating bloated a severe bloating bloated like I was four months pregnant really bad gastrointestinal issues digestive illnesses like this that were so severe my intestines were actually bleeding really bad pain after I would eat get diarrhea and blood in my stool so as mentioned 84 of vegans eventually go back to eating animal products but to be fair it's for various reasons like social factors and practicality you just drank half and half baby however many do quit the diet because of health issues I had strong faith that I could get everything that I needed on a plant-based vegan diet and you might be confused like okay you ate salmon and then all of your problems went away despite obviously having a lot invested
in this I wasn't able to make it work now our next guest you print even John Venus Elise Parker Bonnie Rebecca Cosmic skeptic Tim schief and others who achieved Fame in part because they were vegan still could not make the diet work got issues talking about my gut health explaining that I've been having some problems for a little while now bloating and a lot of gas like a lot of gas issues digestion I think as many vegans normalize bad digestion it's just something that you kind of like normalize when you're vegan my digestion was just like not great I didn't feel like I was really absorbing nutrients it's understood that a variety of issues with gut impaired B12 absorption there are various compounds in Plants people
can be sensitive to like gluten oxalates lectins and phytates but simply eating too much fiber could be a culprit a 2012 study found in 63 patients with constipation reducing fiber intake improved symptoms but eating a zero fiber diet completely eliminated all symptoms as for B12 you need to have a strong enough stomach acid to properly absorb it and dietary fiber is known to weaken the stomach acid so the context matters what else are you getting with the nutrients for example there are plenty of plant sources of iron but plant foods like whole grains legumes and nuts contain phytic acid that impairs iron absorption take a bite of the national brand spinach thought to be a great source of iron but you can only absorb two percent of it
because of the oxalate in it then where the heme iron in animal Foods is very easily absorbed the non-heme iron in plants and supplements is quite poorly absorbed two different literature reviews suggest that vegans are at greater risk for iron deficiency than omnivores now before we continue why should we assume a meat containing diet was the natural default for humans rather than a plant-based diet well to get a wide variety of nutrients vegans have to eat a huge variety of modern fruits and vegetables but the fruits and vegetables early humans had access to weren't nothing like modern ones before cultivation they had far less actually edible material and there are far more fibrous and filled with seeds
paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman has said that the sweetest fruit available would have been no sweeter than a modern day carrot and we have stable isotope studies finding we ate pretty much whatever meat we could get our hands on and our earliest art is cave paintings of hunts further our stomach acid is very suited for digesting meat at a strong pH of 1.5 it's even stronger than carnivores like cats or dogs lastly the brain is a disproportionately energy expensive organ hogging 20 percent of our oxygen and calories our guts which were also energy expensive shrank in size to allocate more resources to the brain thus to fuel our big brains the more energy efficient animal fat became favored over fibrous
plants that took time and energy to chew and digest most people are not aware that animal foods are packed with far more of a huge variety of nutrients especially ones critical for brain function things like iodine iron zinc B vitamins vitamin D vitamin A DHA and choline would have been near impossible for early humans to get from plant Foods this may have a role in why a 2021 study found that people who don't eat meat have a significantly higher risk of depression and anxiety I tried salmon I had eight ounces of salmon and I woke up the next morning with zero brain fog zero migraine I felt the best that I had in probably like three years I was vegan for a very long time and I've had to introduce fish
because my brain wasn't functioning properly in fact if you eat all the parts of a ruminant like a cow you can get every single essential nutrient even vitamin C you can get a little bit from the liver and adrenal glands but of course plants are a much better source of vitamin C I've been on a pure carnivore diet I only eat meat for the last five years all animal products all the time that's it me can I get 16 just plain patties by themselves oddly enough recently some people are eating only animal foods for years without any identifiable nutrient deficiencies at least so far I don't think there are any risks to eating animal Foods exclusively I'm not saying zero plant Foods is the
healthiest diet but it shows how nutrient dense animal foods are the people eating the traditional diets did eat a few plant foods but they just weren't nearly as important to them as the animal foods that said fruits and vegetables can be a great source of nutrients like vitamin C or manganese and important electrolytes like potassium and magnesium actually the people of the high Andes identified kelp as a very mineral rich food the people's Western price studied had an intuitive understanding of the importance of nutrient-dense foods especially in pregnancy and childhood even without a nutrition label they knew that certain animal Foods encouraged proper robust growth fresh liver was a delicacy at the end of a hunt and the
juicy Angels might please the young ones in fact before pregnancy they would commit to a period of special feeding usually lasting at least six months where they would eat various animal Foods dense in fat soluble vitamins and other nutrients things like fish eggs meat and high fat Dairy I had many vegan family friends they started experiencing and observing some things in their kids that they were not really happy about gut issues and dental issues and growth related issues I was in an event and I saw you know some children that didn't have the most optimal characteristics for their age as Michael Poland has argued in his book defensive food we frequently fall victim to this concept of nutritionism that we don't
necessarily need Whole Foods we just need their components but certain supplements illustrate how it's a lot more complex than that according to a 2012 study despite taking prenatal supplements 58 of pregnant women had iron levels below normal choline is a critical nutrient for brain function and one study estimates 90 of Americans aren't getting enough a 2019 study fund choline from egg yolks to be far better absorbed than choline from the common supplement choline by tartrate just 150 calories of egg yolk will give you over a hundred percent of your requirement Warren Row the calcium and milk helps bone grow one said he found that while dietary calcium reduced the risk of heart attack calcium supplements
increased the risk calcium can be hard for vegans to get enough of without supplementation this 2020 study found vegans had weaker bones and a 43 higher risk for fractures than omnivores I'm not saying all supplements are just bad they indeed have been found to help people reach the appropriate intake of certain nutrients I take some specific supplements myself the point is there can be issues with relying on supplements but we can't just assume something is healthy just because it's natural after all untreated water is very natural but it's a great way to get dysentery I was wondering like what kind of water I was going to drink at Burning Man I got 50 gallons it was just epic
right to look at a different way to think about it let's rewind back to 1932. Dr Francis podinger had been trying to formulate a healthy diet for his laboratory cats he assumed he had all the components necessary for a proper cat diet raw milk cod liver and cooked meat and organs yet for some reason his cats seem to suffer from nutrient deficiencies at some point he had so many cats that he had to cut Corners he started giving some cats their meat raw within a few months though these raw meat-fed cats and their kittens were clearly healthier than the cooked meat fed cats and kittens this is a raw meat animal with the full round face notice the firm gingiva the normal coloring tones the beautiful broad mouth a later examination of the skull showed
a firmly developed zygomatic Arch this prompted pottinger to conduct a 10-year study to puzzle out the effect of cooked versus raw meat on hundreds of cats he found that the cooked meat cats consistently had health problems but the problems were even worse for the kittens the head has begun to flatten and is actually smaller than the comparable raw meat cat the zygomatic Arch is not completed the nasal development is somewhat irregular Dental deterioration was also common the kittens were born underweight with brittle bones their teeth were crooked and crowded they had allergies then all these problems were even worse for their kittens pronounced exhaustion was a typical observation among the third generation of cooked meat kittens
the skull is considerably smaller the bones are paper thin and soft like sponge rubber in fact the third generation of these cats didn't survive more than six months the cooked meat cats were unable to successfully reproduce after the third generation so the thing is initially the deficient cat diet seemed not too terrible sir the first cats had some problems but the bigger problems started to appear in the kittens then the full picture of just how inappropriate this diet was appeared a generation later by the way there was some leeway if the diet was at least 50 raw then the cast developed well the point is not to say that we need to eat raw meat we're not cats the point is it's not about what's natural it's about
track record it's easy to observe the effect of a diet in cats quite quickly in just 10 years pottinger got a grasp for the track record for these two cat diets with humans it takes far longer to see the generational impact of a diet but whatever we've been eating the past couple decades already has a pretty bad track record like the cats some markers of our health seems to be worse with each generation something about our modern environment is leading to all kinds of problems Dr Sandra Khan and Paul Ehrlich have written a book called Jaws the hidden epidemic about the epidemic of small Dental arches leading to crooked teeth and constricted Airways this then leads to breathing problems
like sleep apnea that take a huge toll on health there's been a tripling in peanut allergies prevalence of ADHD has steadily increased over the past 20 years incidents of depression in 12 to 25 year olds has more than doubled since 2008 but when it comes to diets we know of one that has a good track record maybe you've heard of the term diseases of civilization which refers to heart disease cancer osteoporosis diabetes and so on anthropologists can tell you that before agriculture came along hunter-gatherers very rarely had any of these afflictions that are so common today they also had robust skeletons at Broad faces that allowed for straight cavity free teeth if the dangers of living Outdoors without the aid of
modern Medical Care didn't kill them they lived quite long and without chronic disease as the name hunter-gatherer would suggest all parts of fish and animals were very valued in their diet in the late 1800s Plains Indians were the tallest people in the world and according to an anthropologist at Ohio State University they had a remarkable record of nutritional and health success they ate tons of wild game and bison and preserved what they couldn't fit in their stomachs as jerky or pemmican they would even dry out bison stomachs and fill them with blood to drink when they were thirsty while it does sound gross they may have used it to hydrate because blood would provide electrolytes on that note let's take a
moment to thank the sponsor this video element don't worry element has nothing to do with cow's blood it's just a great tasting way to get your electrolytes and stay hydrated without any sugar most people don't realize just how important electrolyte can be for energy levels especially if you're fasting doing a low carb diet or just losing electrolytes through sweat when you exercise rather than a pre-workout or caffeine I usually just have some element before my workouts the other thing is that sometimes hunger can just be a craving for sodium which is why I also have a pack if I'm starting to Crave some snacks element tastes great and there's no junk in it's just a good balance of electrolytes sodium potassium and
magnesium a bit of flavoring and some Stevia there's also a raw and flavored type if you like if you go to drinklmnt.com what I've learned you can get a free sampler pack with any purchase eating red meat can take years off your life red meat can hurt your overall health stay away from large amounts of red meat deleterious effect to our health from red meat cut back you're eating way too much meat so the past several decades has been one long push for reducing animal fats and meat and organs in the diet but plenty of research shows that this isn't really the solution for health cheese and bacon still have saturated fat so you want to limit them cut back on saturated fat a huge 20 review explain that saturated
fat rich foods like whole fat dairy or unprocessed meat themselves are not associated with an increased risk of heart disease and a 2022 systematic review found that the previous evidence that shows unprocessed meat is linked to chronic diseases like cancer or heart disease to be far too weak to make the recommendation to reduce meat consumption I've seen headlines today that suggest that eating red meat is as dangerous as smoking which is just ridiculous yet the anti-meat push has gotten so strong that as investigative journalist Nina teichel's reveals a Tufts University ranking system bogusly ranks Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as healthier than eggs cheese or ground beef and lightly salted potato chips
have twice the score of ground beef and chocolate covered almonds have three times the score and are in the to be encouraged category it's easy to assume that our understanding of individual nutrients is so Advanced that we don't need to rely on outdated meat-based diets we can make Replacements but while the amount of knowledge on nutrition that's been accumulated is incredible is it as complete as we assume in 1989 scientists decided that the standardized purified lab rat feed needed to include several seemingly random things like chromium fluoride Boron Vanadium arsenic nickel tin lithium and silicon why well they didn't really know what these things did they just observed that the
rats didn't grow properly without about them in 1978 a six-year-old girl was admitted to the hospital with a serious gunshot wound to the stomach at the time just how essential omega-3 fatty acids are wasn't fully understood the liquefied nutrition they gave her was deficient in Omega-3s causing her to develop neurological symptoms like numbed legs and feet drastic weakness and blurred eyesight just in 2009 it came to light that the commonly used folic acid supplements May prevent unfollette deficiency but the way it's processed in the liver means it actually prevents you from reaching optimal folate levels it's like filling your wallet with quarters instead of bills what you really want is methylfolate but
still many prenatal vitamins contain folic acid not methyl folate it wasn't even until 1998 that the nutrient choline was recognized to be essential liver disease heart disease and neurological dysfunction taught us that choline is pretty important a paper from just last year in 2022 suggests that we underestimate the optimal intake of choline this choline study found that seven-year-old children had better attention span if their mothers consumed twice the recommended amount of choline during in their pregnancy there's so many doctors know when they confidently approve pet milk for babies finally let's go back to 1865 when the first infant formula was invented it took many
decades for quality and regulations to improve but eventually infant formula came to be widely regarded as a safe substitute for breast milk leading to a significant decline in breastfeeding pet milk is a safe milk for babies so feed your baby the pet Milk Way research has Associated formula feeding with children more easily developing eczema asthma and food allergies as well as diabetes and obesity a 2008 study found breast-fed babies to have five point higher IQ today the AAP wh joined UNICEF all recommend exclusive breastfeeding for at least the first six months of life if a mother can't breastfeed or get donor milk of course modern infant formula is basically a miracle but Dr Rhonda
Patrick has made an excellent video overviewing just how complex breast milk is it contains 415 different proteins two hundred different human milk oligosaccharides 200 different fatty acids four different types of growth factors and that's not even the full list as recent as 2016 and 2019 two different new compounds found in breast milk started being added to formula because they improve infant gut and brain health even a representative of Abbott a leading infant formula manufacturer admits that to mimic and replicate breast milk is not possible yes a newborn will have far more sensitive nutrient requirements than an adult or even a child but it's an example of the difficulty of trying to make a complete replacement of a natural food
in fact there are all kinds of compounds only found in meat that we currently assume are not necessary to have in the diet things like creatine carnosine answering taurine there's evidence that each of these have beneficial effects just to look at two this 2002 paper argues that taurine may be essential in certain circumstances and creatine supplementation as benefits of brain function in adults like improving memory intelligence and mood and it reduces the negative effects of sleep deprivation further creatine is transferred from the mother to her baby during pregnancy providing several benefits to the baby the other thing is reality versus theories in theory you could take a
retinol supplement a B12 supplement a zinc supplement an algae-derived DHA supplement a kelp derived iodine supplement you can take a vitamin D supplement or eat a ton of UV exposed mushrooms then you can make sure that your plant sources of iron and calcium are low in oxalate you could take substantial amounts of soy or pea protein powders to make up for the fact that most plant proteins are poorly absorbed and have lower amounts of amino acids and so on but the reality is that the average person doesn't want to spend time worrying about nutrients again meat is so nutrient dense that you can get a decent amount of well-absorbed zinc iron selenium choline various B vitamins vitamin A calcium and other nutrients just eating a crappy cheeseburger
ideally people shouldn't eat crappy cheeseburgers but the average busy person doesn't have time to craft the perfect meal convenience is important this is evidenced by the fact that a 2021 paper found that the more people avoided animal products in their diet the more they ate convenient Ultra processed foods with vegans eating the most processed foods looking at the updated impossible Burger ingredient lists they basically swap the animal protein with soy and the animal fat with sunflower oil and coconut oil and they throw in several other vitamins to mimic the vitamin profile of meat eating tons of processed soy protein and vegetable oils like sunflower oil is totally new to the human stomach sunflower oil seems
like a simple swap for animal fat but they are totally different many animal fats can be a good source of vitamin K2 but vegetable oil in fact hampers the activity of vitamin K making you need even more it also oxidizes very easily so it will increase your need for the antioxidant vitamin E vegetable oil has several other negative effects which I have talked about in another video the information about soy based foods it's been so confusing is it good for us is it bad for us the hormone disrupting effects of increased soy consumption is somewhat controversial but it may explain why a study on almost 8 000 boys found boys better to vegetarian mothers had a higher risk for a specific deformity in the genitals called
hypospadias soy has this plant-based estrogen isoflavones men think about the estrogen effects as well soy contains the isoflavonoid genistine which a 2022 meta-analysis found has detrimental effects on the male reproductive system lastly impossible Burger has tried to make their product taste meteor with something called soy leg hemoglobin from the roots of genetically modified soy plants gmoscience.org writes that a 28-day study on rats commissioned by impossible Foods in 2017 on soy leg hemoglobin found that soy leg hemoglobin caused statistically significant changes in weight gain changes in the blood that can indicate the onset of inflammation or kidney disease and possible signs of
anemia in the rats further studies did eventually persuade the FDA to designate leg hemoglobin as safe but impossible Foods admitted that a quarter of their new ingredient was composed of 46 unexpected additional proteins none of which were assessed for safety in the dossier this reminds me of how we used to think that margarine was a good heart healthy replacement for butter bottom is natural margarine 100 corn oil low in saturated fat then around 1956 we learned that the trans fats in margarine are ironically awful for heart health and health in general but it wasn't until 2015 that the FDA finally acknowledged trans fats are unsafe to eat and need to be removed from the food
supply I can't believe it's no bother I Can't Believe It's Not Butter this is another big issue with trying to replace animal Foods the replacement almost always comes with plenty of other stuff kidney beans need to be soaked and cooked to reduce the lectin content certain people can still be sensitive to the Trace Amounts of lectins in properly processed kidney beans the beans weren't much good anyway many other plants have lectins too but many commonly consumed plants have various other gut aggravating compounds like oxalate fodmaps gluten or phytic acid phytic acid found in beans seeds nuts and Grains inhibits fat digestion and the absorption of calcium magnesium phos and zinc how much well this study found that
about 35 percent less zinc is absorbed in a vegetarian diet fiber itself worsens the activity of pancreatic lipase which is important for the absorption of fat soluble vitamins like a d and K2 a high intake of goitrogenic plants like cabbage kale and turnips can interfere with iodine functioning food scientists Dr Frederick Leroy has written an extensive article on the various examples of why it's a challenge to acquire enough of certain nutrients just from Plants due to inhibiting compounds like these this nutrient challenge is part of the reason why the German nutrition Society in 2016 and the french-speaking Pediatric hgn Group in 2019 recommended against a vegan diet
for adolescents children or mothers several studies have found that babies born to vegan mothers have a lower birth weight compared to babies of omnivore mothers birth weight can be a predictor of infant health and growth in fact one study that meticulously analyzed the records of 4 300 adults who were in the Danish medical birth register found that to lower their weight at Birth the shorter they would be as adults this study points out that the growth of vegetarian children was adequate but less than average I wonder how people would react to a doctor saying your son won't be as tall as he could be but don't worry his height will be adequate this begs another question what is the
difference between enough nutrients and the optimal amount of nutrients when you look at a nutrition label it will tell you what percent of your requirement for a nutrient that you're getting this is called the RDA but it's not set based on the optimal amount of that nutrient you should get it's set based on determine how much is enough to prevent a deficiency and then they recommend to get a little bit more than that for example that study on choline that I mentioned earlier found that pregnant women getting twice the RDA had beneficial effects on their babies the adult RDA for vitamin D in the U.S is currently 600 ious however the endocrine Society suspects that not even a thousand IUS would be enough to provide all the
health benefits associated with vitamin D they recommend about three times the RDA for adults 1500 to 2000 IUS in fact vitamin k2's importance for bone health wasn't properly recognized until 1997. it wasn't even until 2006 that the USDA thought that it would be a good idea to look at the vitamin K2 contents of common foods and today there's still no RDA established for vitamin K2 so this isn't only a criticism of a plant-based diet obviously the average person's omnivore diet needs to drastically improve and nutrition isn't the only reason people choose to be vegan but cutting out nutrient-dense animal Foods doesn't seem like a move in the right direction for health for 99 of human history we relied
on animal foods for nutrients an animal food containing diet has a strong track record that spans arguably over 1.7 million years various cultures viewed animal Foods as important to growth and despite the challenging circumstances they lived in they're protected from infectious and chronic disease and they enjoyed proper growth in their body faces and mountains with that in mind a plant-based diet is an experiment without any meaningful track record especially when it comes to kids I think it is a very risky thing it's been a couple decades at best that people have been doing purely vegan diets yet so many people are already quitting for health reasons so at the end of the day
science is a promising story of progress maybe one day we'll learn enough to make a sufficient plant-based replacement for animal foods but I don't think it's happening anytime soon
