I just posted about a study which found that a higher intake of dairy foods increased death from prostate cancer for men who had been diagnosed. Here’s a study by the same group of authors, using the same cohort: 926 men from the Physicians’ Health Study.

Dietary Patterns after Prostate Cancer Diagnosis in Relation to Disease-Specific and Total Mortality, Cancer Prevention Research, June 2015

In this study, men who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer were 2.5 times more likely to die from it if they ate a “Western Diet” compared to a “Prudent Diet”:

Two post-diagnostic dietary patterns were identified:
– A Prudent pattern, characterized by higher intake of vegetables, fruits, fish, legumes, and whole grains.
– A Western pattern, characterized by higher intake of processed and red meats, high-fat dairy and refined grains.

Those eating the Western Diet also had a 67% increased risk for death from causes other than prostate cancer.

Conclusion: A post-diagnostic Western dietary pattern was associated with higher prostate cancer–specific and all-cause mortality, whereas a Prudent dietary pattern was related to lower all-cause mortality after prostate cancer diagnosis.

I just saw a quote by Dr. Greger on these findings:

“The results of this study are consistent with previous findings showing eggs and poultry consumption is associated with two to four times the risk of prostate cancer progression and linking dairy consumption to the development of prostate cancer in the first place. In contrast, a whole-food, plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle changes have been shown to reverse the progression of prostate cancer in men with early stage disease.”

I write a lot about dairy food, especially its link to prostate cancer. I’ll probably continue writing about it, because the link isn’t going away:

Dairy Intake After Prostate Cancer Diagnosis In Relation To Disease-specific And Total Mortality, International Journal of Cancer, November 2015

We evaluated intake of total, high-fat and low-fat dairy after prostate cancer diagnosis in relation to disease-specific and total mortality. We included 926 men from the Physicians’ Health Study diagnosed with non-metastatic prostate cancer between 1982 and 2000 who completed a diet questionnaire a median of 5 years after diagnosis and were followed thereafter for a median of 10 years to assess mortality.

During 8,903 person-years of follow-up, 333 men died, 56 due to prostate cancer. Men consuming ≥3 servings/day of total dairy products had a 76% higher risk of total mortality and a 141% higher risk of prostate cancer-specific mortality compared to men who consumed less than 1 dairy product/day (hazard ratio (HR) = 1.76, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.21, 2.55, p trend < 0.001 for total mortality; HR = 2.41, 95% CI: 0.96, 6.02, ptrend = 0.04 for prostate cancer-specific mortality). The association between high-fat dairy and mortality risk appeared to be stronger than that of low-fat dairy, but the difference between them was not statistically significant (p for difference = 0.57 for prostate cancer-specific mortality and 0.56 for total mortality).

Conclusion: Among men without metastases when diagnosed, higher intake of dairy foods after prostate cancer diagnosis may be associated with increased prostate cancer-specific and all-cause mortality.

Related: Harvard: “Dairy Food Is One Of The Most Consistent Predictors For Prostate Cancer In The Published Literature”

Study author Jerry Siegel with San people in the Kalahari Desert. University of California at Los Angeles, Newsroom

I had intended on posting about this sleep study when it came out last year but I was derailed. Yesterday I saw an article about it, yet another that took the results of this age-specific study and extrapolated them onto people of all ages. People writing about it are also applying the results to those who live in modern, developed countries, with all the accouterments that implies … climate-controlled homes and offices, artificial light, food in the fridge, drugs (caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, over-the-counter, pharmaceutical, and street drugs), beds and pillows! … when the data was collected on people who live without these products.

Here’s the study:

Natural Sleep And Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-Industrial Societies, Current Biology, November 2015

Researchers studied members of 3 groups, 2 in Africa and 1 in South America, and found they slept 5.7 to 7.1 hours a night. Napping and insomnia were almost nonexistent. News sites are concluding:

Sleep Study On Modern-Day Hunter-Gatherers Dispels Notion That We’re Wired To Need 8 Hours A Day, Washington Post, 15 October 2015

Remember, this is a population study, an epidemiological study. It can inform our thinking; it allows us to draw hypotheses. It was not designed, nor can it tell us the answer to the question: What is the ideal length of time for humans to sleep? Even if it could, that time would vary by age, health, lifestyle, and other variables. You simply cannot claim that we need less than 8 hours of sleep, as the author of the Washington Post article did, given this data. That was a made-up story to sell their site, to sell advertising. That is what news stories have become.

First of all, look at the tables. There were 94 participants. Their average age was 30.4. For the 54 subjects from South America the average age was 24.9. There was no data collected on sleeping times (including naps and insomnia) in children, teenagers, or adults over 55.

Hadza, average age 36.6, 10 participants
Tsimane, average age 24.9, 54 participants
San, average age 38.2, 30 participants

These are people in the thick of their child-bearing years and in excellent health (“those who were ill were excluded” “caffeine or alcohol use excluded”). Because of their life-stage alone, they have a different physiology than children, teenagers, and older adults. Perhaps napping would have been found if they studied younger people, insomnia if they studied the elderly or women and men experiencing a mid-life change in hormones.

Their lifestyle is very different from ours, for example:

The Hadza sleep on animal skins on the ground. Families sleep close together, 2-6 people often sharing a single sleeping space. San participants slept on a blanket on the ground, covered by an additional blanket, without pillows in the winter and without a blanket or much clothing in the summer. Tsimane participants slept on beds above-ground made of tree-bark slats.

Each population eats locally acquired foods. The San eat meat from local game, baobab fruit, fish and berries. The Hadza eat game meat, baobab fruit, honey, tubers, and berries. The Tsimane eat a mix of hunted game, fish, and cultivated plant foods, primarily rice, manioc and plantains.

You just cannot extrapolate these data onto modern humans at all life stages, as news sites were prone to do. The National Sleep Foundation recommends a sleep duration of 7 to 9 hours for adults 18 to 65 years old. I don’t see how this one study of 94 pre-industrial-living, young adults would impact that advice.

This is a bit eerie. It’s a photo of our picture window, into which a bird, possibly a dove, flew. I can’t imagine it survived but I couldn’t find it in the ground beneath the window. It’s so perfectly etched on the glass, even the wings which are hard to see in this photograph. It’s like a phantom bird.

A few GIFs…

How the face develops in the womb. This is something else. The eyes are on the side, like a bird, until the very end:

How the gladiator spider hunts:

How a dog drinks water. It picks it up on the back of the tongue!

Source: 25 GIFs That Explain How Things Work
Thank you, Bill.

George Carlin:

“[Big wealthy business interests] don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. … You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”

“They don’t care about you … at all … at all … at all.”

Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, arthritis … all of these chronic diseases are preventable. They don’t suddenly appear because our genes encoded them. The environment we put people in fosters them. But that environment makes some people very rich, which provides them the influence to perpetuate it.

Case Report: A Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet Reversed Angina Without Medications Or Procedures, Case Reports in Cardiology, online 12 February 2015

A 60-year-old man presented with typical angina and had a positive stress test. He declined both drug therapy and invasive testing. Instead, he chose to adopt a whole-food plant-based diet, which consisted primarily of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, potatoes, beans, legumes, and nuts. His symptoms improved rapidly, as well as his weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels. Plant-based diets have been associated with improved plasma lipids, diabetes control, coronary artery disease and with a reduction in mortality. Adoption of this form of lifestyle therapy should be among the first recommendations for patients with atherosclerosis.

Look at his previous diet, the darling of dietitians:

He described his prior diet as a “healthy” diet of skinless chicken, fish and low-fat dairy with some vegtables, fruits, and nuts.

On that diet, he couldn’t walk 1-2 blocks without chest pain. So, he dropped the animal food, and…

Within a few weeks of lifestyle change his symptoms improved. After four months, his BMI fell from 26 kg/m2 to 22 kg/m2, his blood pressure normalized, and his LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol decreased from 158 mg/dL to 69 mg/dL. Previously unable to engage in physical exercise, he could now walk one mile without angina.

When you stop eating animal food, your diet naturally becomes more carbohydrate-rich. Does that carbohydrate give you diabetes? Does it make diabetes more difficult to manage? No, and no:

A whole-food plant-based diet improves plasma lipids [2], glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus [3,4], reduces weight [5] and blood pressure [6–8], improves vascular function [9], may profoundly improve coronary artery disease [10–13], and is associated with reduced mortality [14–17]. Furthermore, a dose-response-like effect has been noted where the greater the adherence to a healthy lifestyle including a WFPB diet the greater the apparent benefit [18], and a growing body of evidence suggests animal based foods may not be optimal for health [19–21].

Some of that body of evidence:

Our case reinforces these findings and highlights that even in our “modern” Western society such improvements can be achieved without medications or procedures. These results support prior epidemiologic studies which documented the virtual absence of coronary artery disease in plant-based indigenous populations, such as in parts of China [22], a highland population of New Guinea [23], the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico [24] and in South Africa [25]. Furthermore, mortality from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease decreased when access to animal products was restricted in Norway during World War II and increased as access was returned [26].

Why wouldn’t you want to at least try a plant-based diet?

Some facts about heart disease from the CDC:

• Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women.
• About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year. That’s 1 in every 4 deaths.
• Every year about 735,000 Americans have a heart attack.

You don’t have to be overweight to have a heart attack. You don’t have to be a smoker. You don’t have to have high cholesterol. Certainly, being a lean, nonsmoker with low cholesterol helps, but it’s not failsafe. If you’re eating the Standard American Diet (“characterized by higher intakes of red and processed meat, butter, high-fat dairy products, eggs, refined grains”), according to Dr. Esselstyn, you’re putting yourself at risk.

Let me share a story about a young man (44 is young!) from:

Figure 1. “Coronary angiography reveals a diseased distal left anterior descending artery (a). Following 32 months of a plant-based nutritional intervention without cholesterol-lowering medication, the artery regained its normal configuration.”

Resolving the Coronary Artery Disease Epidemic Through Plant-Based Nutrition, Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. MD, Preventive Cardiology, June 2007

A recent case is particularly telling. During September and October of 1996, a 44-year-old physician experienced occasional chest discomfort, yet neither electrocardiography, stress echocardiography, nor thallium scanning found evidence of disease. While eating the typical American diet, he had a total cholesterol of 156 mg/dL and an LDL of 97 mg/dL. He was lean, nondiabetic, and normotensive; he did not smoke and had no family history of coronary disease. His lipoprotein(a) and homocysteine levels were normal. On November 18, 1996, after his surgical duties, he became acutely ill with pain in the left arm, jaw, and chest. Immediate coronary catheterization found all vessels to be normal except for the left anterior descending artery, the distal third of which was diseased. Enzyme tests confirmed a myocardial infarction. However, no intervention was deemed appropriate.

This patient was aware of my ongoing study and was curious for more information. He and his wife consulted me for an in-depth review of the plant-based diet and techniques of this coronary disease arrest and reversal study. He became the personification of commitment to the plant-based diet. Over the next 32 months, without cholesterol-lowering drugs, he maintained a mean total cholesterol of 89 mg/dL and an LDL of 38 mg/dL. The repeat angiogram 32 months after his infarction showed that the disease was completely reversed (Figure 1).

Look at that photo. He fixed his artery. He did it without a stent, without drugs, without roto-router. The big deal here is that he fixed not just this one artery, but probably a lot of other arteries in his body that were diseased. If there was a drug that could do this, its creator would be incredibly wealthy.

Dr. Esselstyn, the author of the paper above, wrote a book describing the diet he uses with his patients:
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn

Here’s Dr. Esselstyn’s site.

In a nutshell, the diet eliminates all animal food. No meat, fish, chicken, eggs, cheese, yogurt, etc. It also eliminates all added fats and oils. There’s no fast food (no pizza, burgers, fries, donuts, cakes, soda). I know it sounds extreme, but:

Dr. Esselstyn has had enormous success with his diet. In the mid-1980s, he recruited 18 people who had advanced heart disease (heart attacks, angioplasty, bypass). Five were told they had less than a year to live. All but 5 were still alive in 2013. The ones who died did not die of cardiac failure. After beginning the diet, there were no more cardiac events in the 18 people in a 12-year period. Their cholesterol dropped, on average, from 246 mg/dl to 137 mg/dL.

Foods on the diet include grains (rice, oatmeal, corn, whole grain breads and pasta), all fruits, all vegetables, all legumes (beans, peas, lentils). The book includes recipes. His son, Rip Esselstyn, a firefighter, is the author of the popular books, The Engine 2 Diet, and My Beef With Meat both of which promote the work of his father. Good recipes there too.