I was, I assured her.
"True or false," she read, "Eating red meat increases a man's risk for heart disease and diabetes"?
The question of course made me think of Jim the Directrix, who has been tutoring me in the health benefits of the starch-centered, vegan diet promulgated by Dr. John McDougall. No way could this be false, if Jim (and McDougall) are right. But I thought it was probably true, anyway: "Uh, well, I guess it's...true?"
Sorry; I'm not going to tell you the answer provided. You can take the quiz yourself (there are ten questions altogether). It's by Joe Kita and can be found on the web. (The site will probably try to fob ads on you; sorry about that.)
Happy Father's Day, Jim. Please take the quiz, then let us know what you think.
_______________
Of course, whether the first quiz question is true or false, I oppose eating animals, on moral grounds; see New Ten Commandments #6 (which I see I need to revise to make more explicit what is entailed by treating other animals humanely).
June 20: questioning "moral grounds."
The quiz is clearly biased by its author’s obvious love for “red” meat. Eating cholesterol containing foods regardless of color has the same health consequences.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the wisdom of Lennon/McCarthey:
He’s as blind as he can be
Just sees what he wants to see
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?
Happy Father’s Day
I got 6 out of 10. Since you asked.
ReplyDeleteJim, is the quiz simply biased, or can you counter the evidence summarized for the "false" answer to Question #1:
ReplyDeleteAfter examining 20 studies involving 1.2 million individuals, Harvard researchers found no association between eating unprocessed red meat (beef, lamb) and developing these diseases.
Twenty studies, 1.2 million individuals, sounds impressive, as does "Harvard researchers." All just a pseudo-learned conspiracy against Dr. McDougall?
Steve, I didn't ask anyone to report how well they did, but your responding served to bring me to your pictorial journal of the squirrels that visit your balcony, where I learned that something seems to have befallen the valiant little squirrel named Ditto.
ReplyDeleteCommon Sense
ReplyDelete"Research" can be and not infrequently is used as the drunkard uses the lamppost - for support rather than illumination.
Just because some “Harvard researchers found no association between eating unprocessed red meat and heart disease …” does not mean that one does not exists. It simply means that they couldn’t or didn’t want to find the correlation.
I think most everyone reading the Parade Father’s Day Quiz knows that answer to question 1, “false”, is false.
I have said in the past that ingesting copious amounts of cholesterol containing foods over time is the one and only cause of Heart Disease. This unequivocal statement has caused skeptical eyebrows to raise, so let me clarify. When I say “Heart Disease” I am not referring to Heart Failure in general for which there are many causes. I am referring to the number 1 killer in the United States, Atherosclerosis (commonly referred to as “Heart Disease”) which occurs when fatty substances such as cholesterol build up in the walls of arteries and form hard structures called plaques. When these plaques rupture and blood flow is restricted, a heart attack occurs which all too often results in death.
So, isn’t it obvious that if you don’t provide your body the raw material to build these plaques (i.e. if you don’t eat cholesterol containing foods)you won’t get Heart Disease?
This is not rocket science folks. This is common sense!
Jim, I've hesitated to respond because I think that you (and certainly common sense) ought to have the last word, at least in relation to me, the host of this discussion (as it were).
ReplyDeleteI leave it to others to try to get in a word if they might want, for example,
(1) to challenge that you seem to want the Harvard researchers to have found a correlation apparently as fervently as you allege they didn't want to find one, or
(2) to point out the scientific difficulty of proving that something as involved as heart disease has one and only one cause (and that it's the very one the Harvard researches found no evidence of).
Or they might want to try to find what those "20 studies involving 1.2 million individuals" actually were and examine their methodology, etc.
I googled a bit and in less than five minutes found the paper reviewing the 20 studies, "Red and Processed Meat Consumption and Risk of Incident Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke, and Diabetes Mellitus," which was received November 25, 2009, and accepted for publication in the journal Circulation April 8, 2010—over a year ago.
But as host here (and because I'm an armchair philosopher rather than a clinical researcher, and it has been almost fifty years since I studied statistics), I'll refrain from trying to interpret the paper for others more equipped to do that.
Addition to Point #2 of my preceding comment:
ReplyDeleteJim (or anybody) might ask: "What's so involved or complex about heart disease?"
I was thinking of the fact that a number of risk factors affect the disease. In fact, it's a pretty large number. Around 240, says my wife ("the last time I looked at the number of factors contributing to coronary artery disease").
"It's not a one-cause- fits-all disease," she says. She adds that "the reason cholesterol is so heavily emphasized is because (1) it can be measured (2) its production can be altered (3) so big pharma can make a ton of money off it. The thing about cholesterol is that most of what is flowing around in a body was manufactured by that body. That's why statins work to reduce cholesterol."
THE Cause vs Risk Factors
ReplyDeleteBy definition Heart Disease (specifically atherosclerosis) is the build-up of animal fats particularly cholesterol in the arteries which harden into plaques, potentially rupture and block blood flow causing heart attack and death.
I reiterate - THE ONE AND ONLY CAUSE of this disease is the consumption of cholesterol via animal products.
I do not disagree that there are many “risk factors” associated with the disease.
But risk factors are NOT causes!
Indeed most risk factors are themselves a consequence of THE CAUSE.
For example, how do you get High Cholesterol? Why you eat cholesterol containing foods!
It’s a no brainer.
You're a persistent man, Jim. I'm not sure I can approve your argumentative technique, however, which seems to be to repeat and repeat and repeat your refrain until your correspondents give up and roll over, or, keeping with my metaphor, decide to quit listening and to find a station that plays another genre of song.
ReplyDeleteThe phrase, "cause vs risk factors" is curious. As I understand "risk factor," it's something that contributes to a result. I suppose that eating fat might be the #1 risk factor in terms of its potential causal contribution to artherosclerosis. I'm not arguing with that, although I'm not certain that it's #1 (and I don't really care). But it seems to me that for someone to say that the consumption of cholesterol via animal products is THE CAUSE of artherosclerosis is just wrong, logically, and for the following reason:
ReplyDeleteSome of the other risk factors contribute, for example, to the extent or rate at which consuming animal flesh has its effect. I remember reading about studies of people who had immigrated to America and retained their diet pretty much intact, a diet including a high intake of fat. Other people from the same "old country," where they (and their neighbors who had emigrated) were farmers or whatever, had a very low level of artherosclerosis, for all the fat they consumed. But the immigrants, who weren't farmers anymore (but were encountering a lot of the other risk factors now that they lived in America and were exposed to them), had much higher levels. The fat intake was more or less constant for the two groups, but one group fared much worse than the other in terms of artherosclerosis. The other risk factors aren't negligible. The old-country farmers ate more animal flesh and dairy products than I (or Jim, I think) has ever eaten, but they died of something unrelated to heart disease.
I'm not even sure that intake of fat is essential; I don't think it is, at least for the people (but I can't remember the sources of my vaguely remembered information) for whom a certain combination of other risk factors was sufficient to result in their artherosclerotic condition (for example, in some way triggering their bodies' own manufacture of cholesterol). Medicine was able to pinpoint the factors and save their lives (so that they could live long enough to die from something other than heart disease).