WIL Weekly 5-Point Review #30

The original carnivore dieter, plant-based milks make kids scrawny and more...

This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe (if you haven’t already) if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!

1) 1936 Newspaper on the original pioneer of the carnivore diet

In a 1936 issue of The Detroit Tribune, Josephine Schuyler wrote a brief counter-argument to some points made by vegetarians. He noted that at the time people were saying that meat would cause “acidosis.” Not but 6 years prior, arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson finished demonstrating that he could sustain perfect health on a diet of only meat while under the supervision of doctors at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. He did this meat-only diet for 2 years, but before that he had lived on a meat-only diet while living with the Inuit for 7 years. Yet, he did not develop acidosis.

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2) Lower your LDL cholesterol, increase your risk of cancer?

A 2010 paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that:

there was a significant inverse relationship between baseline LDL-C level and the rate of incident cancer, such that every 10-mg/dl decrement in LDL-C was associated with a 15% relatively higher cancer rate (Fig. 2)

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3) Again, “bad” cholesterol doesn’t work the way we were told it does

Yet another fantastic study from Nick Norwitz dropped just this month. The study was a meta-analysis of 41 randomized controlled trials on low carbohydrate diets. The conventional wisdom says that LDL cholesterol is all about your saturated fat intake.

Eat more saturated fat → increase your LDL “bad” cholesterol.

However, this study study demonstrates that, as Dave Feldman has been explaining for years, LDL is more about energy flux. This would explain why the Norwitz study found that whether LDL increased or not on a low-carbohydrate diet had to do with whether the people were lean or not.

That is, people who were normal BMI (lean) saw a significant rise in LDL on a low-carb diet, people who were overweight didn’t see much of an increase, and people who were obese in fact saw their LDL drop on a low carb diet.

Body Mass Index was a way more important determiner of the change in LDL than dietary saturated fat. In fact, having a normal BMI (being lean) had over 5 times the effect on LDL as eating the most saturated fat among the groups.

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4) Remember, critical thinking is bad and you’re an idiot.

Now, this information about saturated fat and LDL “bad” cholesterol may be hard to reconcile because it goes against the “conventional wisdom” we have been fed for decades. In case you thought that better educating yourself about this topic may help you make better decisions for yourself, remember that you are in fact too dumb to vet information for yourself. You should outsource your decision making process to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vice and Forbes.

This reminds me of the viral video of dozens of local news stations reading from the exact same script about sharing biased information being “extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

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5) Plant-based milk associated with scrawniness and short height in kids

A study from just this month titled Plant-based milk consumption and growth in children 1-10 years of age concluded that:

Plant-based milk consumption was associated with lower BMI and height, but both were within the normal range on average.

In specific, “a child aged 5 y who consumed 3 cups of plant-based milk versus 3 cups of dairy milk had a lower weight of 0.5 kg and lower height of 0.8 cm”