And see this link that rips apart most of the China Study, or this debate(PDF) where Campbell basically resorts to saying, “I have more academic qualifications than you, so I win.” Which means that he can’t beat Cordain on facts and has to resort to ad hominems instead. He cherry-picked cases from the study that supported the message he wanted to send. The study itself doesn’t support his conclusions.
Googled it. Might pick it up from the library (if I can find it here) and see for myself, but from what I read in a few in-depth reviews, I’m not impressed. He apparently proposes an extremely strict diet, which makes it unlikely to be sustainable.
A few of the reviews said that the book was poorly cited also. Why don’t you check out the two books I recommended? There’s over 20 pages of bibliography in the Paleo Diet (which I have at home) and I remember a huge chunk of citations in the back of Good Calories, Bad Calories, to the point where I was actually finished reading the book before I realized that the last “chapter” was densely-printed endnotes and works cited. Oddly enough, neither one of those books seems to have the same views Fuhrman does.
I’m not even going to get deep into the wrong-headedness of the pro-vegan bias that every single review mentioned. Suffice it to say that hominids have been top-level carnivores since before we branched off and became recognizably Homo sapiens. Humans have never been anything close to vegans. A vegetarian lifestyle is not particularly sustainable without access to modern industrial processing of foodstuffs from half a planet worth of plant species.
You’re right, it doesn’t. But it does beg the question, which time were they full of shit? During the decade and a half when they were crowing about how soy was the food of the gods, or when they wrote a retraction of virtually every single health benefit they ever claimed for it?
Even an abstract of an article that really, really wants to like soy (the title is “Nutritional and Health Benefits of Soy Proteins”) has fun little pieces like, “Adverse nutritional and other effects following consumption of raw soybean meal have been attributed to the presence of endogenous inhibitors of digestive enzymes and lectins and to poor digestibility,” and, “Most commercially heated meals retain up to 20% of the Bowman−Birk (BBI) inhibitor of chymotrypsin and trypsin and the Kunitz inhibitor of trypsin (KTI).” This is in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, which means it’s part of the big agribusiness combine that mainly wants to sell you “food products” and has next to no interest in making people healthy. The thrust of the article is, “how do we process this stuff so that people don’t get sick from eating it?”
The problem with that is that cuisines are not individual foods. Some foods need to be eaten in combination with other foods to provide health benefits. Case in point, tofu is consumed in small quantities, often in combination with seaweed and fish broth. The combination offsets the high phytic acid load that would otherwise inhibit mineral absorption, and provides iodine to offset the goitrogenic effects. They don’t wolf down a 500 g tofu steak with pasta and a cake chaser like many Westerners do.
This synthesis of food effects is almost certainly the reason for the “paradoxes” in nutrition studies, like the “French paradox.” They eat a lot of fat, but aren’t fat, and have fewer heart and artery problems than North Americans who eat a high fat diet. There isn’t a paradox. It’s not just how much total fat, it’s what fats in what proportions, in combination with what other foods, eaten in what style, with what condiments and style of preparation, in what kind of social environment?
Also note that soy products are heavily fermented in Asia, which helps reduce the phytic acid levels and break down some of the lectins. They don’t eat the stuff raw. You can’t eat it raw; you’d get sick. Until they figured out good ways to ferment it, the Chinese considered soybeans to be food that was only fit for pigs. (Mmm, pork!)
Now in the West, of course, we try to figure out what kind of chemical processes we can use to make the stuff palatable. With mixed results. (Oops, it still tastes crappy and it irritates the gut lining, making you miserable and provoking immune responses to the inflammation. Back to the chem lab! We must be able to find a way to sell this crap as something other than pig feed.)
If you want to eat like an Okinawan, better be prepared to eat a lot less too. They eat far fewer calories than even the Japanese do. Calorie restriction has effects on longevity as well. How much of the longevity boost is due to eating about 800 calories less than the average American?
And lifestyles have even more to do with health than just diet. Okinawa still has a lot of little close-knit neighborhoods. People who are connected with the community, and who get out and visit other people, are much more likely to live for a long time.
Or, it could have something to do with the fact that long-lived Okinawans actually eat more meat than the people selling the Okinawan Diet would have you believe. I’ve eaten traditional cuisine in Okinawa, and I’ve got to tell you, the truth is closer to this than this. The latter is bullshit packaged in all the misguided preconceptions the high-carb, low-fat crowd has used to make people fat and unhealthy over the last 30 years. The former features recipes for Okinawan cuisine (Hint: they eat a lot of pork. In fact, this site claims that the reason they live so long is because they eat everything but the squeal and the hooves.)
But you don’t need to cook chicken or pork or seafood to eat it. Believe me, given that I’ve lived in Japan for a decade, I’ve eaten almost anything you can imagine (and a few things most people probably wouldn’t want to) raw. I’ve had raw pheasant, sea cucumber, shellfish, fish of all types, wild boar, venison, beef, and rabbit, and probably some things I can’t even remember.
You don’t need to process meat or organs with chemicals or heat to be able to eat them. The only health concerns are parasites and bacterial contamination. Some plants, like grains and legumes, cause at the very best acute intestinal distress without proper preparation.