Corporate Owned Media Wants You On a "Plant-Based Diet"

Why do you think that is?

Every single day, I watch the local morning news - for the traffic and the weather. But it seems like the whole "plant-based diet" meme permeates every aspect of the news broadcasts programming, and the food product commercials shown between segments.

It's ubiquitous.

The commercial break will feature some low fat, whole grain cereal, followed by a spot for cholesterol lowering medication, and than back to the broadcast where they are giving tips on making some tasty, low-fat, vegetarian recipe. Than they'll do a spot on how the latest studies "show" that low-carb diets "may" reduce your life span.

Sometimes I just want to yell at the TV, "quit lying, you lying liars!"

But it doesn't end there.

People in real life that know me and my dietary lifestyle will than forward me emails, txts, or tell me that "my diet" will cause me to get heart disease or cancer..even though I lost weight and have kept it off for so long, I'm still slowly killing myself.

They know this, because they saw it on TV or heard it on the radio or read it in the paper...

It never ends.

I no longer even bother trying to explain to people how "scientific" studies that "prove" low-carb/high-animal protein/high-animal fat diets are usually statistical manipulations designed to mislead people into internalizing the meme that a "plant-based diet" is the key to good health.

I just tell them, "We're all gonna die sometime. When I die, I want to go knowing I ate good food and enjoyed life to the fullest. I had bacon and a 3-cheese-tomato-fresh basil omelette for breakfast, and it tasted damn good. What did you eat? A multi-grain cereal with skim milk and a piece of whole grain toast with low-fat margarine on it?"

That usually shuts 'em up.

Anyhow, yesterday's morning news broadcast once again had a report on "the latest studies show that a low carb diet is bad for you."


Here's the latest lies put forth by the Big Ag Corporate Sponsored "studies":

Conclusion: A low-carbohydrate diet based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality rates.

When I see this on the TV, I already know it's a lie.

But than you get people like Denise Minger, who actually look into the supposed research and prove that it is in fact, nothing but lies.

She notes:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: In most cases, abstracts tell you a whole ‘lotta nothing—so don’t judge a study until you’ve read the full text.

For right now, I’ll give this study the benefit of the doubt and ignore the fact that A) the researchers used a pretty lame decile-based scoring system* and B) employed the notoriously unreliable food-frequency questionnaire to collect their data.

Questionnaires to prove a diet is unhealthy? Where have we seen this before?

Every time the researchers made multivariate adjustments to the data to account for the risk factors they did document (including physical activity, BMI, alcohol consumption, hypertension, and smoking, among other things), the hazard ratio went down for the Animal Group (meaning it got better) and it went up for the Vegetable Group (meaning it got worse). That indicates pretty clearly that the Animal Group had more proclivity to disease right from the get go, regardless of meat consumption, and the Vegetable Group may have been more health-aware than most folks. (To see what I’m talking about, look at the mortality tables under the “10″ column, and compare the “Age- and energy-adjusted HR” with the “Multivariate-adjusted HR” for each group.)

In other words, it looks like what this study really measured was a Standard American Diet group (aka Animal Group) and a slightly-less Standard American Diet group (aka Vegetable Group). Both ate sucky diets, but the latter had slightly less suckage. You can bet the farm that neither was anything close to “low carb.” And if you have two farms, you can bet the other one that neither diet group was anything near plant-based, so I’m not sure the vegan crowd has much to gloat about here.

I look forward to my grass fed steak and butter-drenched broccoli for dinner tonight.