The full article he cites is here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1359/jbmr.1997.12.12.1959/full
The sentence Dr. Mirkin is quoting appears nowhere in the text of that article. The article doesn’t even mention clot formation, at least by name. Was he quoting somebody else who was citing the article as evidence of a simple rise in blood calcium levels?
If somebody tells me “I don’t eat meat because I’m a vegetarian for ethical reasons” or “I don’t eat meat because my doctor told me to lower my mumble level from animal protein”, then those are valid reasons. (Admittley I’m a vegetarian for ethical reasons myself, and still don’t like all veggies.)
If somebody tells me “I hate to eat male sheep because of it’s strong distinct taste and smell” that’s very common.
But I’ve never ever met a person who dismisses a whole class for taste reason and who is sincere and not off.
No. If somebody says “I hate broccoli and cabbage”, then I say “well, me, too! And spinach without cream sauce tastes really lousy; I like cucumbers but not zucchini, interesting isn’t it?”
But somebody who claims to hate all vegetables, and then links to a website from some random lunatic - yes, I wonder if that person knows what they are talking about. There are dozens of veggies in the speciality section of the supermarket that are still not common here, but eaten in Asia or Africa or Latin America; my parents generation in the 50s and 60s met exotic veggies like Eggfruit and broccoli and zuccini when the first Italians arrived, and started trying them. (Then in the 60s and 70s, the travel wave to Italy and Jugoslavia came, and people discovered new food on their holidays and kept eating it back home when the first pizzerias were opened).
Maybe because a “Vegephobe” sounds like somebody who needs a therapy? A phobia? Seriously, if you have that much trouble, get professional help.
People who run away screaming from spiders because they have a phobia will also experience prejudice and ridicule, because it’s pretty absurd. Sure, the phobia itself is real, but the cause is disproportionate, and the person should get treatment to get over their problem.
Generally nutrition experts do class potatoes along with grain as “starchy products” in a seperate class from veggies. (They will also class high-fat veggies like olives and egg-fruit and high-carb fruits like bananas differently than low-calorie ones like salad, tomatoes, cucumbers).
Although potatoes do have some vitamins, fiber and minerals, they mostly provide starch = carbohydrates, esp. compared to tomatoes or other “real” veggies.
Don’t know where corn/ maize falls, esp. modern varieties.
No. The burden is on the people pushing a very new form of diet* - replace fresh food with tablets - to proove that this is a long-term good idea.
And minerals, and phytho… the stuff that makes veggies coloured, which is also helpful, the flavo… the stuff that makes veggies taste a certain way, which are also helpful, the fibre…
That’s not added to the vitamin tablets.
The chemical that had bad consequences in Contergan (thalidomide) was also chemically identical to the harmless chemical. The only difference was the orientation under light - one was right-turning, the other left-turning. The pharma company didn’t know that this could matter in any way, so they didn’t pay attention to the orientation during production - because there is no chemical way to figure out which is the harmful and which the harmless variety, as both are exactly the same. The only way to find the harmful variety is … to shine a light through.
I’m not claiming that vitamin tablets are harmful just like Thalidomide was, please note before misunderstanding me again. I’m using an example of how “Chemically identically” is not good enough when dealing with complicated natural processes.
No, this claim is a fallacy based on incomplete knowledge of how the body works. The body is not a simple factory where you input five things and get out three things; it’s a chaotic system trying to keep equilibrium by constantly adjusting things while thousands of different processes go simultaneously, often interfering with and influencing each other, sometimes on purpose, sometimes unintentional.
We know for example that in order to prevent osteoporosis**, simply eating tablets for calcium is not enough - you also need to exercise so that the body will actually use the stuff and not filter it out through the kidneys. The body also wants Vitamin D with the calcium.
It even has a name in medical circles: Bio-availability and resorption. The first means how much or little of a product the body absorbs when offered in a particular form. If the doctors know that the bio-availability of iron in spinach is very low normally (10% ?), but higher with acid added (like a glass of orange juice), then this is helpful when designing meals.
Resorption is your particular body’s ability to absorb the nutrients given to it. Different diseases can affect that, so even if your theoretical amount necessary is reached, you can still be malnourished.
** Yes, you are presumably a middle-age guy not an old woman, so you don’t worry about this yet. It’s another example.
tracer, is that your website? Because it’s…well, silly. If there’s any question about whether the author is genuinely concerned about nutrition, I invite folks to check out its recipe page. There are three recipes there: vegetable-free macaroni and cheese, vegetable-free beef teriyaki, and vegetable-free tuna bake. The closest any of these come to having a vegetable in them is the cream-of-mushroom soup as an alternate choice in the tuna bake recipe.
And no, you’re not a vegephobe. A phobia–trust me on this–is a debilitating, awful thing to have, not something one builds a snarky self-righteous identity around.
The website you reference dismisses lycopene and vegetable fiber, buts its reasoning for dismissing both is entirely unsound and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the studies it references.
What are “vegephiles”? Can you point us to any? Or is any nutrionist, doctor, scientist, researcher who says that veggies/ fruits are healthy for you?
I would agree with the experts though that eating only potatoes is not enough veggies, because no “super-veggie” contains all the vitamins, minerals etc. necessary, hence you need to eat different kinds, and as varied as possible.
Because Grain and starchy foods serve a lot of calories, and therefore the USDA recommends to eat not too much of them; similar for the oil-based foods. Obesity is a problem along with mal-nutrition (and people who are obese because they eat McD junk food can be both!)
Don’t you feel silly claiming that, or are you sincerely that ignorant, that the USDAs recommendations are not about taxonomical relations, but about the calorie amount and it makes a lot of sense to eat only a few olives compared to a heap of spinach?
And please don’t eat sperm whales; whales shouldn’t be hunted.
That assertion is at odds with what the majority of doctors, nutrionists and scientists say. You don’t happen to have a long-term study to prove that?
Because in an emergency situation, people need to surive first, and gruel is easier to transport in big amounts than fruits.
Studies on resorption and bio-availability do show that the mix of vitamins and other compounds that occur naturally are better absorbed by the body than “chemically identically” isolated vitamins in tablets. Scientists don’t call that magical, they call it “Interesting, we need to study this further, meanwhile, eat healthy natural food and tablets only for emergencies”.
Scientists also say “Food is not equal food, there are vast differences according to what is in it and how much it has been processed.”
The human body is far more complex than 5th grade science lesson pretends it, and scientists are still not done by a long shot understanding or even charting all processes going on.
Actually, there are a lot of known components of plants besides vitamins where research is still on-going about their possible benefits. This is not that surprising considering that Vitamin C itself was only discovered in the 1930s, the others later. That phytho… the colour-and the taste compounds, sometimes grouped as “secondary plant compounds”, are also important to human health, wasn’t started as research until the 80s. So just because we know that carrots contain Vitamin A and besides the following compounds X, y1 and w, doesn’t mean we know yet what these do or don’t do for the human body in long-term study.
Part of the reason for the lag of research is that only recently diet and plants were sufficiently changed for this to be a visible problem. That fiber is an important part of the diet can only be seen if industrial processes change normal full-grain bread to white bread for 90% of the population and suddenly fiber is lacking; before that, the effect doesn’t appear.
Similarlily, only since the industrial change in the agro-industry (called misleadingly the “green revolution” in the 1950s) that plants were bred for size only and lost many secondary compounds; that changes in lifestyle habits and new ready-made food suddenly changed the diet of millions of people.
Ah, but if subjects get to choose their treatment group, you muddy the results. People who choose to eat veggies probably have some combination of confounding factors:
Which is why randomized, controlled studies are so critical to medical science. Even if a veg-heavy diet has major health benefits (optimistically, 50% risk reduction for several diseases) you have to sort that out from all of the other random risk factors. All of that “noise” can easily drown out the effect of diet, and you can only see through the “noise” with large, randomized, controlled studies and rigorous statistics.
If one is dextrorotary and the other is levulorotary, then they’re NOT “exactly the same”, are they?
I’ve always found the “better absorbed by the body” argument to be … rather a weak one.
Let’s say a navel orange contains 60 mg of Vitamin C. Let’s also say that the Vitamin C in a navel orange is absorbed twice as well by the body than the Vitamin C in a vitamin pill. Wouldn’t you absorb the same amount by just taking 120 mg of Vitamin C in pill form?
If the absorbency rate is low, upping the dose in a pill is very easy to do.
Do you understand chemistry? 
Their chemical composition IS the same, they are made from the same components! That’s why there was no chemical process to filter them out, and why it can’t be controlled during production! The chemicals fold themselves when coming together, and chemists still don’t know why lab processes result in 50:50 clockwise and counterclockwise polarized molecules, but in nature, the ratio is 90:10. They don’t know what purpose the preponderance of one kind in nature serves, or if there’s a purpose.
They do however assume, that since all of observed nature so far shows this, that all organisms in nature have adapted to this, and it plays a role somehow, even though they can’t say how yet, and to be on the safe side they suggest to eat stuff that shows the same distribution.
Well, I thought you wanted scientific facts? If you decide with a laymens understanding of science, what you like the sound of, then you’re making a personal decision, but not following the scientific consensus.
No. First, I simplified an extremely complex process that applies to dozens of different compounds, and may apply to many more but still not researched yet. By taking a simplified example literal, you are violating the rules of science. Either you accept the analogy or you read a full paper from experts on this effect.
Second, one typical example is not vitamin C in oranges, because that is easily absorbed, but Vitamin A in carrots. Vit. A is fat soluble, which means you need to add a drop of oil to your carrot juice, or dip the carrot into a fatty dip.
If you don’t do that, you don’t get 50% less, you get nothing.
So saying that a pill provides 50% is the wrong idea. The fact is that we have no idea because we are just starting to research this. We see from studies that people on fruits and veggies are healthier than people on supplements, so obviously supplements are not absorbed enough, or don’t provide the necessary secondary plant stuff, or whatever. Maybe you need not only Vitamin C against skorbut, but also a rare mineral to process it into Enzyme X and Hormone Y in addition to its normal job of W and Z. We don’t know yet.
When patients are tested by their doctors and show a low level of Vitamin X or calcium, the doctor proscribes all patients the same tablets to raise the level, and one month later they come back for new tests … and 40% of patients have no raised vitamins, or 60% of patients have no raised calcium.
But until your doctor does the bloodwork, you don’t know if your absorption for this artifical vitamin is 50% or 100%.
Lastly, Vitamin C is usually not isolated, rather, people take multivitamin tablets. Doubling the dosis for Vitamin C can raise other vitamins to harmful levels.
The fact that researchers worry about observable harmful effects of overdoses of artificial vitamins, but not about people overdosing on natural vitamins in green stuff*, should tell you something.
So you prefer to have a doctor test you for every individual vitamin, calculate your individual doses for each, buy single tablets for correct dosage (which presumably are more expensive than the normal multi-vit. tablets) - all to avoid veggies?
What did veggies do to you, kill your mother?
I just received an email updating Tufts’ Health & Nutrition Letter. Since I cannot link to it (it’s an email), I will take the liberty of quoting the relevant paragraph.
Ahem.
Yes, multivitamin supplements are the norm, but there are more single-vitamin supplements out there than you can shake a stick at. You make some good points in your posts … but it kinda casts a shadow on your better arguments when you say stuff like this.
I should have responded to this one sooner, because it seems to be pretty close to what I’m looking for:
Such epidemiological studies, while not conclusive, would probably sway me i-- if I knew they controlled for the right factors.
You state they controlled for income and health care access. Are there any of these studies that controlled for vitamin supplementation? (I was brough up in a household where vitamin pills were par for the course, but I know a lot of other folks – rich and poor – can go their whole lives without ever taking any supplements.)
If such studies exist, I would be very interested in them.
http://www.bronsonvitamins.com/vitamins/vitamin-c You have your choice of tablets, crystals, and powdered. Chewable vitamin C is also available at many places.
This is quite mistaken. No chemist would say that optical isomers are “exactly the same”. There are processes for separating them. We understand perfectly well why certain laboratory reactions produce equal mixtures the the two enantiomers (the relevant laws of physics being symmetric under mirror reflection). We understand perfectly well how it is that living things systems produce just one optical isomer (enzymes and raw materials are, after all, chiral themselves). And we understand why the other enantiomer would usually not be useful (see last point).
I feel your pain, I hate vegetables too, but I force myself to eat them. Like someone else said, there are some nutrients in fruits and veggies that aren’t in a multivitamin. Plus vitamins make me feel lethargic.