medman

If they don't understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and real science, then you'll never be able to get through to them on the health argument. Just because you know someone who drank and smoked and ate half a stick of butter every day yet lived to 95 doesn't mean that any of those things were a good idea or helped him reach that age! Same thing with the "I knew this one girl in high school who went vegetarian but her doctor made her eat meat again because she was so anemic" story. Congrats, you knew an anemic girl who didn't balance her diet properly. Go take a look at the recent studies showing the 100%+ increase in iron intake amongst patients prescribed a vegan diet as part of a prostate cancer study. On the factory farming issue - yes, if you want to feed everyone in the world meat, factory farming is 'necessary'. So is clear-cutting old-growth rainforest if everyone in the world wants tree-based paper for their books. That kind of argument is ridiculous because you have to assume that meat, or paper-based books are essential items. If you're looking at feeding the world, consider how much less water (I believe it's 2000 times), less farming area (I believe it's about 50 times), and less pesticide/fertilizer (forget the figure) it takes to grow vegetable protein instead of extremely energy-inefficient meat. Same thing with paper - you can get several times as much paper pulp out of a hectare (or acre for you Americans ) of hemp than forest, and it grows back every year instead of every 40+ years (with the accompanying disruption of the forest ecosystem). It's about changing the way we think. With the ever-increasing world population and environmental damage we're facing, it's obvious that we can't keep going like this. We need to change the way we think - meat, oil-based energy, tree-based paper, chemical fertilizers - all of these things have sensible, practical, and lower-impact alternatives. The "We can do whatever we want" attitude is what got us to this point.

Fruit, nuts, veggies, and grains - you didn't mention legumes. I'd be concerned that one of the reasons that you're having trouble improving your strength might be that you really aren't getting enough protein. Without soy, other beans, lentils, chick peas, and our other nitrogen-fixing friends, and just a 1200 calorie diet at that, you might be in trouble. And without legumes to balance out the essential AA 'holes' found in the grains, you really might not be getting a full complement of essential amino acids.. Something else to keep in mind - and I know a lot of girls who have fallen into this trap - is that your metabolism adjusts when you take in a reduced-calorie diet for too long. That's one of the reasons for the yo-yo effect of so many diets. Right now, for your size and activity level, 1200 sounds like a shockingly low daily calorie intake. If you started eating more, maintaining a healthy diet, and keeping the activity level up, I suspect you'd adjust to it and wouldn't have as many problems with increasing strength and such. I had a (vegan) girlfriend who did something similar - she would be eating about 1/3 as much as me at any given meal, but her body just adjusted to the low calorie intake and it didn't help her lose weight; all it did was sap her energy levels and make her iron deficiency worse (less food eaten = less vitamins and minerals taken in, keep that in mind as well).

Amen to that! So much good local fruit right now where I am...I love summer . You have to know there's something fishy going on if someone tells you that eating fruit is bad, haha...

The thing about old studies is that the science that provided the basis for the author's interpretation can be outdated. Yes, quality studies stand the test of time, and as DV noted, those "landmark studies" end up referenced many times over the years for that very reason. If a study isn't referenced in decades, it's often an indication that an updated opinion has been formed, and that newer studies provide a more solid knowledge base for moving forward in that particular area. One thing to be very careful of is professing that diet (or any other single factor) is responsible for "reversing" or "curing" or even "preventing" a disease. Some conditions are idiopathic - nobody knows why that person developed it. Similarly, some remissions are idiopathic as well - nobody knows why it went away. Maybe they changed their diet. Maybe they also changed the colour of clothes they wore, or the brand of television they watched, or how many children they hugged on a daily basis. It's very difficult to show causation (and it can only be done in very controlled settings, and is therefore rarely achieved in human studies - usually it involves trying to induce a condition, which will only be approved by an ethics board if performed on animals). One of the core tenets of science is that you can never prove anything - you can disprove or support a hypothesis. That's why a lot of science talks about correlations and "risk factors" - this is the correct way to interpret statistics. That said, there's still a mountain of evidence showing the health benefits of veganism. But it's still only scientifically valid to talk about how much it reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc. You can't say it prevents those diseases or cures them. Why? If your hypothesis is, for example, that "veganism cures diabetes", and you find even a single diabetic in the world who isn't cured by becoming vegan, your hypothesis must be rejected, and you can never say that veganism cures diabetes. That's what leads to all these statements of "reduced risk" and things like that.

The Atkins diet is completely ridiculous. We actually spent a day in one of my biochemistry classes learning why Atkins causes you to poison yourself (flaming Atkins wasn't the purpose of the lesson...it was actually on "altered lipid metabolism", but nearly everything in the lesson applied perfectly to the situation of someone on Atkins). The problem is that your body runs on carbs, specifically glucose - and if you starve yourself of carbs, your body starts making them from proteins and fats. The worst case scenario is long-term carb deprivation (like Atkins), where you can actually use up your Krebs intermediates (used by the mitochondria in your cells in the last and most important steps of turning food into energy) to produce extra glucose. This totally f*cks with your metabolism, since you're not only running off of protein and fat, but you can't even turn them into energy the way you would if you weren't carb-starved. The end result is the production of a lot of ketones - wonky molecules you DO NOT want to be producing. It's the reason a lot of people on Atkins get bad breath - this is due to the production of ketones, which is a similar (but milder in the case of Atkins) reason that people in ketoacidotic diabetic comas have that smell to their breath. I can't even begin to describe how bad that is for you. Plus all the cholesterol and saturated fat you get from Atkins...it's just such a bad idea for your health.

Eating whole insects is generally a lot healthier and lower-impact environmentally than eating meat, but that's a completely different issue. As far as 'insect fragments' are concerned - don't even worry. It's not enough to have any impact nutritionally. A good thing to also keep in mind is that insect exoskeletons are made of chitin, which is a non-digestible relative of cellulose (plant fiber). So any of those fragments that are exoskeleton will actually pass through you without even being digested.

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to correct this. Your life-long # fat cells is not constant after you hit puberty or anything like that. Fat cells have a half-life of about 12 years, meaning that over the course of 12 years, half the fat cells you had in your body are now dead, and new ones are created according to demand. Generally speaking, yes - fat cells just fill up or empty as you gain/lose weight. HOWEVER, if they fill up to a certain point, they are triggered to divide (multiply). You couldn't gain 200 lbs of fat just by filling your existing fat cells. And once you've created that fresh batch of fat cells, it'll take a long time for them to reduce in number even if you drop your weight (remember that 12-year half-life) - at that point, they're just emptying. So that guy mentioned earlier who has a 10-pack but used to be a fat kid...he wasn't stuck with those fat cells for life. But, should he pig out, he would produce more again (as anyone would). Your number of fat cells is very slow to change if you're losing fat, but they can multiply quickly if you're gaining massive amounts of weight (and you're stuck with those extra cells for a long time, even if you empty them out).

Here's a bit of food for thought, I know I found it really interesting. I just read a 1999 paper by McCarty (check my post history for a discussion of it) that suggested that many vegan proteins - because of their lower essential AA content - could have a wide variety of health benefits. So maybe absolutely maxing out the essential AA content of your protein isn't the only thing to think about? Also, regarding finding a 'perfect' essential AA score - this is really tricky. When you look at what ratios are 'ideal' for maintaining health, keep in mind that that involves all the protein synthesis in the body - from hemoglobin to the keratin in your hair and nails. I've never seen the exact balance used by skeletal muscle - which is what you'd be most concerned about if you're trying to find the right balance to support weight training.

DV, I agree - some of those references are very old, and it's important to stick with recent data as confounding factors can often be teased out over the years to elucidate the actual mechanisms at work. It's also a very valid point that you have to be careful about extrapolating from studies done on diseased populations - for example, a diabetic's biochemistry is really altered. I am fortunate to have access to a lot of online journals, so here's some stuff I found just from the last year (plus an older one that I found through a reference from the second paper, and was too interesting to pass up): Vang et al, Meats, processed meats, obesity, weight gain and occurrence of diabetes among adults: findings from Adventist Health Studies.. Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism, 2008;52(2):96-104. 8,401 members of the 17-year longitudinal Adventist Mortality Study and Adventist Health Study in California were involved in the study, all of whom were non-diabetic at the start of the study. Over the 17 years, 543 incident diabetes cases were reported. The authors found that weekly consumers of meat were 29% more likely to develop diabetes than the "zero meat intake" group, and that weekly consumers of processed meat were 38% more likely to develop diabetes than the zero meat group. They found that, over the 17 year study, that a long-term adherence to a diet that involved meat at least once a week was correlated with a 74% increased risk of diabetes compared to a long-term adherence to a vegetarian diet. You can check the stats yourself, but the authors concluded that, even after adjusting for weight and weight change, that meat-eating was a statistically significant risk factor for diabetes. I haven't looked at the internal controls within the studies whose data this paper used, so you can't rule out confounding lifestyle factors (though their adjustment for weight and weight gain does address this to a certain degree). Dewell et al, A Very-Low-Fat Vegan Diet Increases Intake of Protective Dietary Factors and Decreases Intake of Pathogenic Dietary Factors.Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2008, Volume 108, Issue 2, Pages 347-356 This study involved about 42 men each in the control and experimental groups, all diagnosed with the early stages of prostate cancer (it was linked to a prostate cancer mortality study). They ate very low fat (10% caloric intake) vegan diet. There's a very detailed breakdown of how their various vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients changed over the course of the next year compared to the control group. The usual culprits (if you know vegan diets) increased - vitamins, iron, omega fatty acids, etc, and the usual culprits decreased (saturated fats, triacylglycerols, cholesterol). The authors' conclusion, in their own words: "Adopting a very-low-fat vegan diet for at least 1 year increased the intake of several dietary constituents that may reduce the risk of many chronic diseases such as cancer, CVD, diabetes, and age-related macular degeneration, and decreased the intake of dietary components that have been implicated with an increased risk of these health problems." This study I found really interesting: M.F. McCarty, Vegan proteins may reduce risk of cancer, obesity, and cardiovascular disease by promoting increased glucagon activity, Medical Hypotheses 53 (1999), pp. 459–485. McCarty states that, because soy (and other vegan) protein is higher in non-essential amino acids than most animal proteins, it should preferentially favour glucagon production (if you're not familiar with glucagon, think of it as an "anti-insulin"; it promotes release of glucose from stores in your liver in response to low blood sugar levels or high amino acid levels, among other things). The author points out that glucagon downregulates the production of lipids and cholesterol, and upregulates the number of LDL ('good cholesterol') receptors in the liver, and that the low-saturated-fat and high-fiber vegan diet has an insulin-sensitizing property by reducing insulin secretion. Glucagon also upregulates an IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1) antagonist, though I won't go into too much depth here. To skip a bit of the biochemistry, the author argues that these metabolic effects should result in lower serum lipid levels, delayed puberty and shorter stature in children, reduced risk of breast and colon cancer (since they are insulin-dependent cancers), reduced risk of degenerative disorders, but increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke, and provides some references with clinical evidence supporting his conclusions.

Congrats man! Other than the weight, you just plain look a lot healthier now! What a difference. I bet you probably don't get as many annoying "but you have to eat meat to be healthy" comments as some of us. If veganism had a late-night infomercial, you'd definitely be one of those before/after stories!

@DV: Thanks! I'll have to check that book out when I can. Going to failure on every set makes sense, and I love the talk of type IIb/x fibers - now you're speaking my language ! I guess failure on every set was something that contradicted my general mindset - having done endurance sports for years, it's been ingrained in me that if a muscle becomes completely exhausted, you're going to end up injuring yourself and impeding your progress. It's a completely different world when it comes to weight training, though! Unfortunately, I'll have to make do with what mass I can gain while maintaining my cardio - endurance sports are such an important part of my life right now, and I just find them so much fun that I couldn't cut them out. @veganmaster: I look forward to reading some of those studies. I have access to pretty much any journal through school, so I'll have to see what I can find on my own as well (right now my summer research job has a lot of down time and journal browsing is actually encouraged!). I ask about insulin and diabetes mainly because I know that increased levels can lead to desensitization, which can in turn increase risk of developing type II diabetes. However, I know that insulin spikes are generally the culprit (like from guzzling coke, not from regularly eating complex carbs), and it's also important to note that "can lead to desensitization..." and "can increase risk of developing..." don't mean "will lead to..." Of course, a low-sat. fat balanced vegan diet and regular exercise is one of the best ways to decrease risk of CV disease and diabetes, so I'm not particularly worried! More just curious about what literature is out there (I'll have to start reading up on what you and DV have suggested).

@Marcina: This is what I figured. And, in fact, my primary reason for starting up weight training for the first time in 3 years has been to improve my form and endurance (upper body strength aids particularly in maintaining a proper 'aero' form on a triathlon bike). @DV: Do you recommend reaching muscle failure during each set, and if so, how many sets do you recommend per exercise? For the past 3 weeks, I've been aiming to keep a consistent weight and number of reps per set, with failure only occuring on the third set. Is my routine of [whole upper body routine]X2 per week a good idea, or should I try to mix some weights in on a day that I also do cardio? @veganmaster: The idea of liquid supplementation is clever, and has merit. I've looked at some of your past posts. There is some info there that I find really interesting. Could you provide me with some of your 'top' (most recent) references? I'm actually a med student with a previous B.Sc. in Physiology so I do well with entire articles vs synopses . I find the issue of insulin levels particularly interesting - while I agree that aiming to elevate insulin should help with muscle hypertrophy, have you come across any papers that look at the risk of insulin desensitization on such diets? Although insulin spikes are generally considered more detrimental, I'm wondering what you might have found on the subject. It would be a shame to inadvertently end up with diabetes while trying so hard to improve your health! It's really nice to hear encouragement from fellow vegs - I get really weird looks and occasional snide comments from my gym jock friends whenever the issue of veganism and weight training comes up.

Hi guys, I'm new to this forum (which is so cool by the way) and I thought I'd start with an intro about me. I'm 22, vegan for the past 9 years, 5'6" and 112 lbs. I'm very active and have a lot of discipline when it comes to training. I've recently decided that I'd like to build some muscle mass, but I have one affliction that I believe may cripple my progress...I am in love with endurance sports. Marathons and half-marathons in the past, currently more into duathlons (the biking breaks up the routine of training so nicely). Right now I run 4-5 days a week and bike about 2 days a week (trying to increase the bike:run ratio now in keeping with my duathlon goals). My long runs these days are about 14km, and my bike rides are 20km twice in one day (to work and back). I'm thinking of scaling back the running and upping the cycling as I mentioned earlier, not only to aid in my duathlon training but also because I see cycling as more of a muscle-builder whereas running tends to be a muscle-toner. On my two 'cardio rest days' per week, I've been doing an upper body workout (chest, back, shoulders, arms, core). I've been improving in strength, tone and definition, but not in mass. I haven't been doing any squats or deadlifts, though, since I depend on my legs so much on the other 5 days of the week. I know that these exercises are usually great for building mass, though - but haven't figured out a way to incorporate them without crippling my ability to train and race. So I guess what I'm asking is - is it possible to train cardio for the purposes of amateur racing, while also building muscle mass? Or are these two opposing forces? If anyone has any recommendations for blending these goals, I'm all ears. I've always been under 115 lbs, and though I am very fit and toned, I would ideally like to add about 15 lbs of muscle. I don't do cardio to burn fat - I have to be careful about getting enough calories just to support my training - I do it for the love of running and biking and the fun rewards on race day. I'll add that I'm quite careful about balancing my diet, as I am no newcomer to either veganism or endurance training. Right now, I get about 70g of protein between weight training days and closer to 100g when I'm lifting weights that day (I mention protein for the purposes of input regarding weight training...it's obviously not the only thing I keep an eye on in terms of diet!) I look forward to any input or advice anyone has! I guess I'm hoping to move from "lean and green" to "mean and green", hehe. Maybe I'll start up some progress photos for you guys as extra motivation.