How's it going?

I've been 3 weeks off all high fat foods: no oil, no nuts, no avocado, no Durien, no chocolate... all of which I had been eating increasingly in recent years. I've lost about a pound. I was hoping for more weight loss by now, but I'm feeling lighter & more energetic, & it's going in the right direction. Slow weight loss is to be expected when already within one's healthy BMI range.

Another important advantage of eating only the low-fat plant foods is protection of the colon. Dr. McDougall explains how high fat foods trigger the release of bile acids, which increase our risk of developing colon cancer.

I found some details on that on Dr. Mirkin's web sites: "Eating a high-fat diet causes your liver to make more bile, and bile is loaded with a chemical called lithocholic acid, a bile acid that helps digest fat. Lithocholic acid is probably the most toxic compound that your body makes. Lithocholic acid damages the DNA, the genetic material in cells to cause cancer."

http://www.drmirkin.com/morehealth/G210.htm

It's been just over 2 months now of eating 100% low-fat, whole plant foods (eliminated ALL oil, avocado, nuts, seeds, chocolate, Durien. I've lost 11 pounds while eating all I want. There are other improvements too: I always used to enjoy cooking and trying new recipes, which went by the wayside once I got into "treating" myself with high fat foods. I have started opening my recipe books again! Yay!

I added up the calories from fat that I had been eating before the change; it was amazing how fast it added up! According to my calculator (9 calories per gram of fat) I was eating about 500 calories JUST from fat. I had been "justing" myself into gaining weight: JUST a 1/4 of an avocado on my salad,JUST one piece of Durien, JUST 1 ounce of chocolate, JUST 1/4 cup of unsalted cashews... as if saying "just" somehow magically takes away the high fat content.

I think you're mistaken, VegHead. I don't believe Dr. Greger say "nuts do NOT cause weight gain."

He did assert that previously. But he changed his video and now concludes that: "Nut consumption does not appear to lead to the expected weight gain."

That's a big difference, and if you look a little further up this discussion string, you will see he linked to his newer video with the newer conclusion.

So Dr. Greger agrees that nuts do cause weight gain, just not as much as he expected, based on estimated calorie counts of nuts.

But every study that has looked at adding nuts to diet has shown that nuts do always cause weight gain. I am not aware of any studies that show nuts do not cause weight gain. Can you find me just one?

Also, it's well established that cutting fat (which nuts contain a lot of) really does help you lose weight, e.g. --

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Nutrition/Diet/fatty_foods_weight_loss_1211120654.html

I highly recommend the new talk on nuts by Jeff Novick MS RD, which he gave at our Expo in October. It's 2 hours long and Jeff goes through all the studies on nuts, including those Dr. Greger cites, and breaks it down.

Also, you really have to look at the quality of a study before deciding how strong or weak it is. For example, the Nurses Health Study is regularly cited by some, including Dr. Greger I believe, to support this claim or that. The Nurses Health Study, for example, shows that nuts, olive oil, and dairy products are all associated with reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, and lower BMI.

Now using this same data, the dairy industry made claims in advertising that milk helped with weight loss. Well PCRM hates it when animal food manufacturers use junk science or very weak science to make unfounded nutrition claims. So PCRM sued the dairy industry. PCRM said the Nurses Health Study and other such association studies like it were extremely weak evidence and could in no way justify a conclusion about milk and weight loss.

PCRM won in court, and the dairy industry had to withdraw the marketing claims about dairy and weight loss, and toss out their commercials.

So if you cheer PCRM for beating dairy industry exaggerations based on very weak science, why would you applaud Dr. Greger when he uses the exact same weak science to make similar claims about nuts?

If you follow Dr. Greger's studies there, you would have to accept that milk is a wonderful health food, and that olive oil is just the thing to combat heart disease. But none of the veg MDs (other than Dr. Greger) advises that olive oil is good for your heart. Not Fuhrman, McDougall, Esselstyn, Barnard, Ornish -- they all contend olive oil is bad for your heart. And all of them, including Greger, give a thumbs down on dairy. So why is Dr. Greger using a study selectively? Agreeing with the data when it supports his beliefs, but rejecting the same data when it shows something he doesn't believe?

It's a serious question, and I do like Dr. Greger and respect a lot of his work, and look to promote what he is doing.

So that is my suggestion to you -- watch Jeff Novick's DVD so you can start to see that you can't take a study at face value, but have to go a little deeper to evaluate the quality of a study, and see whether it says what the authors of the study claim it shows (especially when those authors may have been paid by the food industry).

Colin Campbell PhD, famed researcher and author of The China Study, says of Jeff Novick:

"Jeff, your ability to probe and analyze the research literature is as good as anyone I know, inside or outside of the professional research community. You actually obtain the papers and critically review the tables and charts of the data, then see if the authors discussion of their own data is consistent. "

By the way, when is the last time you picked up a can of nuts and read a claim that nuts aid in weight loss? Never. That's cause the nut industry isn't allowed to make such a claim. If it were true that nuts caused weight loss, and the nut industry could back it up, don't you think it would be in nut commercials or at least on every package of nuts out there? But it's not. Think about it.

Association studies like the Nurses Health Study have large numbers of people fill out questionnaires about what they normally eat, then researchers come back many years later and check on the participants' health, and try to draw sweeping conclusions about the food the people said on their questionnaire years earlier they were eating, and the diseases they did or didn't get. At best you can get information about eating patterns from these kinds of studies, but not about a specific food, like nuts, dairy or olive oil.

Here's a short excerpt from Jeff Novick's recent 2-hour presentation on the actual science behind nuts and health claims, this section being about diabetes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvYq6WTm258

But there is much much more in the full talk. Don't be "super fooled" by super foods. :)

Novick pulls back the curtain on the studies and claims someuse to promote nuts, and it is massively convincing. Nuts are a good food, but they are way overhyped in some quarters, and when you look at the studies, you start to understand how it all works.

And here's where you can get Jeff's full 2-hour nuts talk from the Expo: https://secure2.vegsource.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=73&products_id=501

VegHead - I love nuts too, and I do eat them, as well as seeds. Jeff Novick does too. Hey, I've seen Jeff eat peanut butter (once) with my daughters when we were filming! He must've been hungry! :)

Nuts are a good food, we can agree on that for sure. Novick recommends about an ounce a day, for people who wish to eat them, as he says in his talk.

Where I'm going to disagree with some others: I don't subscribe to the "superfood" mentality on nuts or just about any other food.

And nuts and avocados and other high-fat plant foods can definitely be a problem for vegans who are trying to bring their weight down.

Did AJ put her health at risk in some way when she gave up nuts and quickly lost 15 or 20 pounds as a direct result?

Definitely not, is my take.

But the nut people seem to disagree almost violently, and went apoplectic claiming she somehow made a huge mistake and was going to fall over and die any minute when she pushed away the nut jar.

That's all this has been, is push back against people pushing nuts based on very shaky, mostly nut-industry funded science.

Nuts aren't bad foods, they're good. But they aren't required for nutritional excellence and great health. The Okinawans are some of the longest living people on the planet, and nuts had nothing to do with it. Sweet potatoes did, but even though sweet potatoes are a great food in a lot of ways, once again you can have a very healthy diet even if you don't eat very many of them, just like nuts. Your overall dietary pattern is what matters, not any individual food or particular tea or special ingredient. That kind of stuff is just an interesting distraction.

Now here's a piece of advice that CAN really save your health, from Dr. McDougall: http://bit.ly/W6y0r9

Cheers.