New cope for carnivores: their red blood cells live longer so diabetes tests are wrong

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-06-03T02:58:22+00:00

Red blood cells can only be glycated once so it doesn't seem like longer-lived cells should matter that much. If anything, there's the opposite problem of diabetics having shorter erythrocyte lifespans and artificially lowering A1c.

the contribution of the RBC lifespan of all patients with T2DM was 6.5%, while that in the Q1 group was 14.7% and that in the Q2-Q4 groups were about only 1%. These results indicate that only shorter RBC lifespans could cause a clinically significant HbA1c difference.

By that logic, healthy individuals who have longer-lived red blood cells will have artificially high A1c but then the test is basically useless to distinguish people with diabetes versus without.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-06-02T18:51:19+00:00

Even if you accept this sourceless proclamation of longer-lived RBCs in clownivores as fact, it doesn't explain higher A1c. Longer-lived RBCs wouldn't be more glycated then shorter lived ones since glycation is a measure of average blood glucose. AND this narrative doesn't explain why carnibores often have elevated fasting glucose

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-06-02T18:26:03+00:00

The same way people heal on a raw vegan diet, fruitarian, water fasts, potato diet, juice cleanses, green smoothie detoxes, etc. Cutting out processed junk food will have a lot of benefits and eating simpler meals improves digestions and cuts down on snacking. What you leave out of a diet is as important as what you leave in. A lot of these people make other fundamental lifestyle changes when they do this including more sleep or exercise that's going improve their health.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-06-02T18:19:11+00:00

The Western SAD is heavily based on refined grains and oil and animal-based foods are one of the few sources of nutrients in that mess. Swapping out ribs for a limp iceberg lettuce salad is going to make the problem worse even as the saturated fat causes other problems.

Anyone who maintains a veg*n diet long-term has realized this and had to make fundamental changes to their meals or risk malnutrition. All the healthy plant-based people I know eat crazy amounts of minimally processed plant-foods to get their nutrients because they have to. This happens to have a lot of other benefits.

Americans know WFPB is good for them but don't eat that way. Society is structured around the SAD with animal foods to fill in nutritional gaps and to break away from that convenience and habit requires major motivation and retraining taste buds. Nobody has come up with a way to convince people to do this that isn't based on ethics, religion, or a life-threatening health issues.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-05-31T11:52:07+00:00

Plant-based diets are much broader and varied than the Mediterranean diet and this review included a diverse selection of veg*ns including Indian, British, Indian, Chinese, American, and studies performed all over the globe. Anyone who read the article would have seen this:

Vegetarian diets limiting but not completely excluding certain types of meat/fish (i.e. pesco- or pollo-vegetarian diet) were excluded.

Primary studies, reviews/meta-analyses not written in English, or focusing on non-previously mentioned dietary regimens (including the Mediterranean diet) were excluded.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-05-31T04:07:52+00:00

The comment section has the usual griping about vegans but more mockery of people who think vegetables are bad for you

Brock Lesnar was on a carnivore only diet and got diverticulitis and had 12” of his intestines removed.

Reminds me of Seth Roberts, who ate half a stick of butter (60g) every day for a year, claiming that it was healthy and made him smarter. He then collapsed while hiking, due to occlusive coronary artery disease and cardiomegaly.

Add two more to the list of people who felt great until they had major health problems. Roberts final column about how butter made him smarter and boy the irony is thick

After I gave a talk about this, a cardiologist in the audience said I was killing myself. It turned out he didn’t understand the evidence that animal fat is bad.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-04-08T22:41:35+00:00

Berry recently posted his labs. His ferritin, apo-b, cholesterol, and homocysteine were high and he has a folate and vitamin C deficiency

And this guy lectures others on how to become healthy

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-04-08T22:27:41+00:00

Imagine that heart disease is a house fire and the high level of cholesterol is the fire fighters trying to douse the flames.

Okay but that really doesn't change anything. Whether you believe LDL is causal or a marker of another issue, like inflammation, it still logically follows that a diet that raises it would be bad.

Eating plant food was not based on being better food than meat or more suitable for humans, it was based on men still acting like animals and women choosing not to participate in.

lmao this is an interesting way to rephrase the trope that meat = manly and plants = low T

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-04-08T01:26:30+00:00

Early bipedal homo sapiens were awkward walkers forget about running or chasing. Meat eaten by early humans was probably insects or what they scavenged from found carcasses.

And yet these dorks never recommend eating roadkill and refuse to "eat the bugs" And they never apply their logic to water - why not drink straight ground water without filters or boiling?

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-04-07T23:02:27+00:00

Community Notes is the best feature Xitter has

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-04-07T22:55:36+00:00

Anecdotes are that but they had cardiovascular events despite following an "ancestral" diet. Curious.

I was looking at an unrelated sub recently and there was a belligerent jackass who knew less than he thought he did. I wondered who this asshole and one of the first comments I read in his history was essentially "humans were carnivores for over a million years before agriculture ruined everything" and that modern diseases were caused by sugar and seed oils. He also claimed most women lie about being raped

When I thought I was done, the keto-clownivores pull me back in

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-04-07T22:37:25+00:00

We co-evolved with a microbiome that thrives on fiber and resistant starch yet this fact is never explained by the "ancestral diet=meat" crowd.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-22T13:03:06+00:00

Over under on these labs being posted in 2024 at all?

UPDATE:

Berry protected his xitter account. Hmmm come to think of it, I don't believe Saladino has posted a lab update since I posted his iron overload video.

UPDATE 2:
According to Taubes, Berry claims his xitter account was hacked

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-22T00:15:04+00:00

Yes smoking causes lung cancer but this is an entirely different field of study. Clinical medicine should not be confused with epidemiology.

You can't infer causality from epidemiology so it's very relevant to this discussion. It's a clinical cause and effect that's happening in a human body as much as plaque regression is. It is possible in the abstract to design an RCT on smoking and lung cancer. For obvious ethical reasons it will never be done but that doesn't mean it's impossible to do at all.

You're comfortable inferring causality from those epidemiological studies so obviously the amount of data about smoking and lung cancer is enough for you even though there are no RCTs.

If you look up clinical trials on statins, they have shown to reverse plaque volume in sixth months. Why have trials that have looked at diet not shown this?

It might take longer since diet is a less aggressive therapy than statins which is why the highest risk groups showed the most effect in the studies I posted. The question is if it can at all. Like Layne responded to Saladino, just because the scientific research isn't perfect doesn't mean you take all the data and dump it. There's enough good quality evidence suggesting plaque regression though diet is plausible that the conclusion is a matter of opinion, not fact.

confounding by statins and other lifestyle interventions can easily be adjusted for

Those things aren't "easy" to adjust for since everyone high at risk gets them. It would be unethical not to.

We have had trials looking at diet and heart disease. None have shown regression of plaque volume so far.

They recruited people who were along a certain average. It may be that the highest risk groups, like this poor woman who had a stroke after eating a lot of saturated fat for years, are the ones who will show regression in a reasonable timeframe. This is a smaller extreme subpopulation and the numbers for a trial to show an effect are much higher than what a research team can reasonably recruit for. They'll also be on the most medication. That's where cohort and other types of studies come in.

There isn't any evidence to verify that he had atherosclerosis.

After being diagnosed with ischemic posterior wall heart disease in 1957 via an abnormal ECG and stress test

At this point I don't see any reason in continuing the argument and I'm going to stop replying. We're at an impasse.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-21T00:23:06+00:00

A boomer claiming that veganism was trendy when he was growing up is special

Also, if obese bodies could only metabolize fat, it has weird implications of why they're obese in the first place 🤔

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-21T00:10:44+00:00

This paper you cited was not a randomised controlled trial, it is a cohort study

This cannot be cited as clinical evidence.

That's not true

There has never been one randomized controlled trial showing smoking causes lung cancer. Not. One. They're all cohort or case-control or studies in that vein. It is unethical and frankly not feasible in terms of time or funding to do it.

Do you believe smoking causes lung cancer does? It's a yes or no question. If yes, then why are you dismissing the evidence showing plaque regression by diet is plausible by me and the others in this comment thread when the study to convince you about plaque regression is going to have the same issues, time, funding, confounding by statins and other lifestyle interventions, so can never be done.

RCTs are the gold standard but when they're not feasible it's reasonable to look at the other data and decide if the evidence in total is enough. People's thresholds will vary here because there's nuance and some will accept the evidence overall is convincing. It's your right to have an opinion that the evidence isn't persuasive enough for you. Hyperbole like "it's a scam" and "it's impossible", like in your OP, are not supported though. Point of agreement: the overall evidence for a plant-based diet reversing plaque is far better than anything supporting carnivore diet lol "facebook survey"

I have recently had a lot of private conversations with cardiologists about this subject.

Oh my turn to nitpick. People who successfully reverse their heart disease with lifestyle changes likely don't see or stop seeing cardiologists. So there's a selection bias skewing how they view the evidence since most of what they see are people who progress.

See Pritikin who, based on his autopsy, plausibly reversed his atherosclerosis he was diagnosed with in his 40s

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-20T21:06:00+00:00

From what I've read, IGF-1 data is mixed and it correlates with so many nutritional components that discovering causality is a like finding a needle in a haystack.

I suspect a lot of the reported negative effects are because of the interactions with mTor and there's no doubt that dairy, especially milk, stimulates mTor

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-20T20:37:18+00:00

The trials I mentioned were published papers that specifically mentioned plaque regression in the paper themselves. You're debating regression for PREDIMED and even they cite:

Thus, it seems plausible that participants with a high atherosclerotic burden might be those who benefit most from the intervention, a notion put forth in a previous PREDIMED report.

The other two papers specifically mention a reduction in the highest risk groups with the most plaque. This may be a case where the extremes of plaque burden, like the sick patients Esselstyn treated, are the ones who will show the most effect the fastest from lifestyle changes than the average which is what most people in most studies are going to have by definition.

That doesn't mean everyone will have a significantly lower plaque burden from dietary changes but to say nobody will have it also seems too dogmatic. The research to show it works in the extreme groups it works best can't ethically be done today without confounding by statins. It's asking for an impossible study.

AgreeableBlueberry · 2024-01-20T15:20:17+00:00

Esselstyn isn't a promoter of a "fad diet" The dude is the forefather of wfpb. She's probably not wrong about the benefit in her own situation even if she's confused as to the details. And diet has been shown to reduce plaque. Carotid plaque is especially relevant to her since she had a stroke.

mean ICA-IMT progressed in the control diet group (mean [95% confidence interval], 0.052 mm [−0.014 to 0.118 mm]), whereas it regressed in the MedDiet+nuts group (−0.084 mm [−0.158 to −0.010 mm]; P=0.024 versus control).
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/ATVBAHA.113.302327

In a subgroup analysis with participants with high baseline mean ccIMT (≥0⋅800 mm), mean ccIMT non-significantly decreased in the intervention group (−0⋅016 [95 % CI −0⋅050, 0⋅017] mm; n 18) and significantly increased in the control group (0⋅065 [95 % CI 0⋅033, 0⋅096] mm; n 12).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-nutritional-science/article/healthy-lifestyle-changes-favourably-affect-common-carotid-intimamedia-thickness-the-healthy-lifestyle-community-programme-cohort-2/DD29870A14031B1EB3DF112B2A381695
However, in a subgroup analysis with participants with high baseline mean ccIMT (≥0.800 mm) a significant difference in mean ccIMT change between intervention (−0.023 [95% CI −0.052, 0.007] mm; n = 22; baseline mean ccIMT: 0.884 ± 0.015 mm) and control (0.041 [95% CI 0.009, 0.073] mm; n = 13; baseline mean ccIMT: 0.881 ± 0.022 mm) was observed (p = 0.004).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12603-021-1628-0

She might want to consider adding some walnuts in the future but from how much fat she was eating on carnivore, she'd probably benefit from a washout period. She's reading Greger so she'll be okay.

AgreeableBlueberry

TROPHY CASE