Vegetarians have 15% chance of developing heart disease compared to 50% chance for meat eaters
Risk statistics prove that the vegetarian diet done right reduces heart disease risk. In fact, Bill Clinton has relied on a plant based diet to overcome his genetic vulnerabilities. If you know someone in your family has had a heart attack then the video below is in your interest:
Not all vegetarian diets are equal
If you are vegetarian for health not just morals then it's not enough to not just eat meat. Oils and in specific processed oils are some of the worst substances you can consume even if it's vegetable oil. Processed foods bring negative risks to the vegan and vegetarian plant based diets proving that not all vegetarian diets are equal. It has to be limited in processed oils and limited in dairy.
Conclusion
There is the same all cause mortality rate between vegetarian and omnivore. So you might become "heart attack proof" as some say but you're risk of mortality from all other causes are similar no matter the diet. The American diet seems associated with heart disease and meat eaters have a 50% lifetime risk of developing heart disease. Vegetarians have only a 15% risk of developing heart disease but to be more specific if you're a vegetarian of the wrong kind (eating a lot of processed unhealthy food) then you will still be at risk. I would highly recommend everyone eat to live if you care. Low or high carb is somewhat irrelevant because what matters is the glycemic index of the carbs and the processing, but I can say if you are genetically vulnerable to diabetes or and metabolic syndrome then slow digesting carbs in reasonable amounts can control blood sugar which can according to some studies result in lower insulin levels which is associated with lower cancer risk.
Vegetarians and carnivores have the same all cause mortality. If you are bound and determined to not die from heart disease, then vegetarianism is great. But be aware -- you are then accepting a greater likelihood of dying from something else.
Research says that vitality in old age is inversely correlated to cholesterol. The lower your cholesterol, the less active and strong you are and the higher likelihood you will have of dementia and mental illness.
Solitary focus on heart health, as if that's all there is, is part of what is wrong with medicine today. Information ends up in these silos, just like happened to the intelligence community prior to 9/11 and before going into Iraq, and the whole system ends up listening to recommendations that are constructed from a very narrow point of view without being balanced by counter-factuals from other specialists.
Cardiologists just tell us about heart disease -- but they don't know anything about the effect of low cholesterol on the immune or nervous system. And then breathless headlines about low cholesterol reducing heart attacks gets extrapolated to everyone when it shouldn't be.
Great comment.
I know the best way to experience illness, for myself, is to follow the 'heart healthy grain, low fat, and low salt' diet. I tried it, it gave me cancers, two of them.
This idea of treating everyone as the average verges on cult like monomania. It reduces to 'meat bad', 'grain good', and no distinction is made among the types of things that might be bad for some people, and not for others, or the methods of their production.
It turns out that cholesterol is not the culprit after all. The cholesterol is there to remove calcification that is misplaced as a result of vitamin deficiencies. These are due to our depleted cropland, as a result of poor farming practices. This is but a small piece of the puzzle, but it's a start.
The body does create it's own cholesterol. You don't have to eat it. There is HDL and LDL generally, and LDL is the sort which is bad. Specifically apob is better than even LDL as a biomarker.
There has been tests to see how low is too low for LDL and so far the only side effect of very low LDL is depression. My own opinion for my own health goals, I like to keep my LDL under 60, and sometimes under 50. I also track the ratios which are more important.
Ideally you cannot reduce all risks but you can know what you're more vulnerable to by genes and adapt. If you know you're more likely to die of heart disease than something else then you would want to adapt your diet accordingly. If you know you're vulnerable to diabetes, then you might not want to eat too much processed sugar. If you know you're vulnerable to suicide then you might have to worry about the depression side effect of low LDL. We are all different.
References
Yes. But medicine has not caught up with this paradigm nuance yet. They are still operating in the industrial revolution mode, where the process is to determine the "best practice" and then apply it to everyone in a blanket way.
Excellent points raise, I particularly want to zero in on one point you made "if you are genetically vulnerable". It's a very important point that a lot of people don't pay attention to. Your genes play a very huge role in your overall health. An I like to think of your environment (diet) as an ingredient that shows your strength or weakness. Given the genes involved, if they are dominant, even with a good diet it would eventually show up. Quite a few of these cardiovascular disease are genetic and multifacturial involving several genes, one should always consider they family history to give them an idea of their vulnerability. Vegan also have to be aware of B12 deficiencies associated diseases that may arise and it is just as dangerous as eating loads of cabs. To sort of end off, before one considers a specific diet, they should be aware of their genetic deposition and gauge their diet accordingly.
Thanks for the well reasoned comment.
The more I dig, The more I find that can be issues for vegans. It's not just B12. Albumen, DHA, Vitamin K2, and the healthy saturated fats are just some of the missing elements in the vegan diet. Plant derived ALA converts to DHA only about 2% to 5%. It's just not enough, our brains need more. This does not even include the huge overdose of omega-6's that vegans have to try to balance to limit inflammation. High omega-6 content is also a problem with the grain fed meats.
Brant Cortright, Ph.D. in his book 'The Neurogenesis Diet and Lifestyle' discusses a bit of this, though it is not the main focus of the book, and not the only resource discussing this.
Genetics is a substantial part of the puzzle, but epigenetics is a handle that we have to alter how the genes are expressed. Diet and environment play large parts in this.
I find, that in all anti-meat arguments, the difference is never made between the factory farm, feed lot, grain fed meat and the healthy, pastured, grass fed, grass finished meat, devoid of feed treated with pesticides, herbicides, and devoid of animal treatments with antibiotics, hormones, and feed efficiency increasing drugs. It usually seems just a bit disingenuous to me, hiding behind poorly considered pretenses at morality to bolster a vegan argument with so many obvious holes. There is no sound logic supporting the presupposition that veganism of vegetarianism is more or less moral than omnivorous dietary habits.
Torturing animals with the wrong food, and drugs and hormones they've never encountered in nature, does not lead to a positive outcome for the animal regardless of it's end, but that does not render omnivorous diets immoral. It could even be that carnivores are immoral, but I doubt it.
Genes, diet, and environment literally as in the location you live, all influence risk. For example in environments with higher air pollution it is shown that this air pollution causes all kinds of damage. In that environment maybe it's much more important to eat clean and focus on maintaining low insulin levels.
The B12 thing I know from personal experience.
Yep, what is interesting, well it was known since 2000's a phenomenon known as epigenetics, where certain environmental factors seem to influence the behavior of certain genes turning them on and off. Like you said "environments with higher air pollution it is shown that this air pollution causes all kinds of damage", the enigma now is identifying how it actually occurs. If we can find that out, we can easily influence the disease course of many conditions today...It's also a good area in genetics where funding in available and these thesis tend to generate Nobel prizes because its impact can be immense
No one has figured it out. We do know inflammation goes up and asthma rates rise but as far as I know they haven't determined exactly whats going on. Inflammation causes endothelial damage which leads to heart disease.
You are right with that...you just tap into my cerebrum when you mention inflammation, one of my personal favorite topics....excuse the excitement... we have a reasonable understanding of the role of type 1 cytokines play in inflammation together with antigen presenting cells and their specific effects on the endothelial cell, in fact it is a known fact that this is start of many cardiovascular disease, when you have endothelial damage added with leakage into those tiny spaces and adhesion of by-products of metabolism with kinetic dynamics of the cardiovascular system its the origin of many of these disease...Interesting enough there certain adhesion factors that need those B vitamins as co-factors to function properly...thanks for the info, its good revision for me
My theory on inflammation is that it is a main contributor to aging and early death. It not only causes heart disease through endothelial damage but it also seems to be a possible cause for asthma, diabetes, possibly even a contributor to development of cancer.
Inflammation is a problem but we don't know where it comes from. It seems to have a casual relationship with cardiovascular disease and has some strange effects on the immune system which I don't understand. These immune reactions can trigger asthma, diabetes, and other problems.
Perhaps blood tests which check for inflammation can be a way to track the biological age of a patient? If a person has chronic inflammation which is rising then is this a sign that they are aging or aging at an accelerated rate? Exposure to toxic mold could possibly trigger asthma and other illnesses too, so air quality has a definite role.
References
You are certainly correct...In some peer reviewed journals it has been shown that inflammation is often the starter of many of these disease...in fact, any astute physician or scientist will look at inflammation markers to ascertain whether inflammation is playing a role. One of the markers that are used are CRP (C reactive protein), its an excellent diagnostic tool and it can also tell the stage of disease progression and state of liver. We have two main types of cytokines that play a role in inflammation, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 basically mashes the X while type 2 mashes the brakes. Now you have what is known an Antigen Presenting Cells like dendritic cells that produce type 1 cytokines an create a battle field like environment where cells try to get rid of what they perceive to be foreign. When type 2 cells fail to neutralize the environment it create condition where you can have varying disease manifestation. Now this is simplified picture but there are other factors involve that assist in disease progression or prevent disease progression. The body has a number of check-points to ensure that these mechanisms are kept in check however, these checkpoint fails and result in varying conditions. Cancer, for example, depending on the type is a direct result of a fail check-point. This is what makes immunology such a fascinating study because you can look at inflammation and the possibilities are endless. I hope I did justice to your question...thank you for the intellectual stimulation, we have only touch the surface
It's worth the risk.
50/50 risk, flip a coin.