Re: should i be taking vitamins? (EDIT - references added)

Part of the plant based nutrition course I just completed at Cornell online covered supplements. My answer would be never to take supplements.

Dr. Matt Lederman's lecture on supplements (from the ”Principles in Practice” course) covers research showing that supplements - even whole food supplements - and fortified foods with supplements or isolated nutrients can possibly be harmful. He goes on to say that most people can easily get all necessary nutrients with a healthy Diet and sunlight, except for vegans who possibly need to supplement with B12.

However any potential B12 deficiency arises from an over sterile environment, and a lack of eating and growing unwashed organic vegetables.



My opinion on Water Fasting has also changed slighty. I have now read enough to be convinced that fasting is the right thing to do for very serious ilnesses such as cancer (but cancer should be avoided by correct nutrition and lifestyle anyway).

In fact, here is an excerpt from an interview with Dr. Campbell (TCC) and his thoughts on fasting:

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Interviewer: What would you do if you were challenged by cancer?

TCC: I would go do a water-only fast. No hesitation. I would do a water-only fast. My life style and diet’s about as good as we can get it, I think, it obviously can’t be prefect and maybe I have got some residual cancers growing in me that I picked up years ago and maybe I slowed them down a whole lot and eventually they’ll get me some day. So I also have learned quite a lot of information about these water-only fasts, they’re pretty remarkable.

Interviewer: Have you ever done any fasting?

TCC: Yeah I have. I think you probably know I isolated that compound that later became known as dioxin. And I had some serious problems with that years later.

When I was isolating it at MIT, I ended up with polyps in my sinuses that had to be burned out and had bleeding migraines, and then subsequent to that—I didn’t have a name for that compound at the time, I published my work, it was a couple years later when they discovered dioxin.

Interviewer: Because of your work in the lab with dioxin you got dosed very, very heavily. Here we’re talking about a substance that the body doesn’t know how to handle.

TCC: Exactly.... there was one other guy working on it at the time, FDA in Washington and he died. He had filed a complaint with the labor department that he thought he was being poisoned, and he wasn’t being appropriately protected, but he died before action was taken. But in any case, I got heavily dosed, I ended up with some problems, that later evolved into some conditions with my face and my sinuses called chloracne. And that subsequently then was shown in fact dioxin causes, that is one of the thing that people get working with this stuff. And I had a pretty serious case of that. That went on for 8 or 10 years, I tried to deal with it. Finally it gradually went away, when I gradually improved my diet, coincidentally I think.

Interviewer: Coincidentally? Or causatively? Your diet helped clear up the problem.

TCC: The diet was helping to clear up the problem, I’m convinced but not entirely, at least clearing up the problems with this chloracne, these lesions and so forth. So they eventually went away but then after they went away I could still feel this kind of tingling sensation in my face that kind of lingered from time to time. And eventually in the early 90s, just about the time the China Project information was being released, all of that crept into my neck and started affecting the muscles in my neck and my speech and my eating. I had a very hard time to speak then I had a lot of pain I had to hold my mouth, couldn’t eat very well. Went to some doctors, went to the best I could find—Cornell Med School, Columbia Presbyterian, Sloane Memorial, all of the best. They gave me the worst prognosis, they said I probably would not be speaking in another year, they showed me how to use a pen knife to stick in my trachea so I wouldn’t choke to death, all these kinds of things.

So I then had a chance to speak about the China Project to a convention in New York City, I told them I couldn’t do it. So they said ‘well, what’s wrong with you?’ And I told this guy who had been from Cornell, I told him I got a really serious problem, I can’t really talk. He said ‘Well, why don’t you come down here. There are a lot of people in this audience, it’s the National Hygiene Society, lot of chiropractors and naturopaths and some MDs. They had more understanding of your condition’. I thought, well what the hell I can’t lose. So I went down and struggled through it, and they got together 10 of them and sent me off to this fasting place in California at their expense, it was very kind. They sent me there and meanwhile I had tested myself for dioxin and I still had very high levels in my body, 25 years after I had been away from it. So I did the fasting thing in the hope that my body would get rid of it. But when I went there I was very skeptical, but came to learn some things that I will never forget. I learned that water-only fasting is a remarkable medical procedure that is simply not understood by 99% of doctors, I think.

Interviewer: Seems like people who want to try fasting need to do it with the supervision of a health professional and not just at home on their own. There are a lot of ways to trip up with it, including loss of electrolytes.

TCC: Absolutely. You are absolutely right. And now this clinic has done about 5,000 patients this way. And I saw things like uterine fibromas shrink and all kinds of conditions resolve themselves, hypertension almost uniformly reverse itself, and when people get that behind them then they go on to a plant-based diet.
So now coming back to your question what would I do? I think fasting when you allow the body to go to rest and let nature take its course.

I am also impressed with the healing I have witnessed with juice fasting - using fresh vegetable juices to replenish depleted nutrients. Some are concerned that water-only fasting can exacerbate the imbalance of micronutrients many people are dealing with.

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Note the importance of a plant based diet. You are what you eat, you are not what you don't eat.

Water fasting can also be used as a catalyst to an appetite reset which will enable you to stomach a plant based diet. This worked for me and I lost over 100 pounds. If you fail to make the transition to plant based naturally, for example if you are addicted to fat, sugar, salt, then fasting may work for you. See Doug Lisle's talk here at http://video.vsh.org/lisle.html
- he mentions it later (after 48 mins) on and calls his fasting clinic a "prison" - it is heavily supervised, and done for health reasons. But beware, many people fast here, unsupervised, for weight loss and cosmetic reasons, without any concern for proper diet and health. As Hopinso said, fasting is not the best way to lose weight. I agree. If people fail on their first attempt and eat junk after it, then I would say get supervised or forget fasting and concentrate on eating properly. Dr Fuhrman, who wrote "Fasting and Eating and Health" in the 1990s, now tells people on his online forums to learn to eat properly before they consider a fast. I tend to agree with that, with the exception of an attempt at an appetite reset fast. As T Colin Campbell points out, a juice fast works well too.

I am not so keen on fasting these days, I have no need for it now, although I may do another fast in 2010 as an experiment. However, in the unlikely event the casein in all the milk I once drank gets me because I have slacked on my current eating habits or made some other other lifestyle error and I got something such as cancer or heart disease, I'll be Water Fasting again.

Happy fasting

(EDIT)
REFERENCES ADDED
I have now found the full transcripts of this interview online, including the original audio. The index is here http://climatehealth.net/Interviews.html,
the Water Fasting segment is at the end of innterview 1b (tape 2) at 54 mins 30 secs on that page and a full word document containing the whole interview can be found here http://climatehealth.net/Interviews_files/CampbellTranscriptsClimateHealth.ne...
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