Re: The Dark Side of the China Study Story Supporting Vegetarianism…

Once upon a time, Mercola was pretty much anti-supplement.  Now he likes a number of supplements - at least the ones he sells. Like many people in alternative health, Mercola tends to pick and write articles slanted towards his view and advantage,  In the instance of diet, his claim to fame is his stance against grains and glutens as well as his books and articles about eating according to nutritional type.  He does, however, make some very valid observations about the China Study, foremost of which is that it is not an actual study but rather a work based on observation.  When it comes to observations, they can too easily be slanted by what one chooses to observe.  It is my own observation that the author of the so-called China Study set out to prove a particular point of view and proceeded to observe and manipulate information which supported that point of view.

My own opinion is that we are omnivores, not herbivores or carnivores.  We have developed for millenia eating a diet that includes both meat and vegetables and, though peoples can adapt to diets that are slanted heavily toward either meat or vegetables, the healthiest natural diet is one which includes both.  Other than the innuit, whose diet is very heavily meat oriented, and the Seventh Day Adventist whose diet is lacto-vegetarian, the healthiest and longest lived peoples on earth are those who eat a mixed diet of nutrient rich foods that includes meat and vegetables.  I try to eat plenty of healthy vegetables and am sold on their benefits.  However, I also eat meat as well and I am sold on it's benefits too - provided that it comes from as healthy sources as possible.

Most of the studies which link meat eating to poor health are fundamentally flawed:  First of all, they lump all meat eaters together and thus get a lot of unhealthy sedentary SADS diet types whose meat consumption includes processed meat and other unhealthy meat that includes preservatives, growth hormones and antibiotics.  They also usually fail to account for the fact that those who eat a primarily vegetarian diet tend to be more health conscious as a group and get more exercise and consume less junk and processed foods compared to meat eaters as a whole. I am confident that a study which compared people who ate mostly vegetables but who otherwise lived unhealthily with people who ate healthy organic free range and cold water type meat and lived a healthy lifestyle would not return results in favor of the vegetable eaters.