After the publication of the IPCC’s ‘Red Alert’ for humanity, the media has been full of ‘experts’ telling us what we can do to mitigate our role in the doomsday scenario. According to some of those who call themselves ‘Green Experts’, the most important thing we can do is to eat plants and stop eating animals. Here is a example from The Times:
First of all, I did not know there is a qualification which endows one with expertise in ‘green’. It would appear, from the first two advised changes, that a ‘green expert’ has no need to supply references for their numerical claims. Apparently, we each produce an average of 12.7 tonnes of CO2 each year and this is equivalent to eating 1,000 steaks. Why would you compare total CO2 emissions to a single food item instead of how many miles we drive in a car, or how much fuel we burn to heat our houses? I think the only reason you would do it is because you have an anti-meat agenda. It is a pointless comparison; nobody eats 1,000 steaks per year. I will explain why this statement is nonsense later.
The ‘Eat Plants’ recommendation suggests that we can reduce our carbon footprint by 73 per cent by switching to a plant-based diet. Is that 73% of our dietary carbon footprint or our entire carbon footprint? It is not clear. How does anybody come to the figure of 73%? How can a cow fed on grass in my local farmer’s field and sold by my local butcher be compared to green vegetables flown from Kenya and driven 200 miles by truck? These are the sort of calculations, full of assumptions, which are used to measure the ‘carbon footprint’ of different foods. Even the author, Lucy Siegle, warns about the poor environmental profiles of some of the most popular vegan foods like avocados and almonds. Despite this she states that ‘a careful switch to plants is the biggest change you can make’. Green experts always make these broad claims without any reference to nutrition. It should be illegal to recommend, in print, a plant-based diet without warning the readers of the dangers of vitamin B12 deficiency.
I regard the entire realm of ‘dietary carbon footprints’ as a complete waste of time. All foods, whether plant or animal, obtain their carbon from the air. Plants grow when the process of photosynthesis uses the energy from sunshine to convert atmospheric CO2 into cellulose and other carbohydrates. Whether we eat the plants directly, or the animals that ate the plants, or the animals that ate the animals that ate the plants, the carbon in the food came out of the air. How can it be regarded as adding to greenhouse gas when it is simply recycled. It is absurd to compare the carbon burped by a cow with the carbon from coal or oil, which has to be dug out of the ground.
The argument against cows is always based on methane. The bacteria in the rumen of cows and sheep digest plants by fermentation and a by-product of this process is methane, which is produced at a rate of 5% of the food eaten. Methane is said to be a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and laboratory tests suggest it is 23 times more effective at capturing heat. This is the main reason cited by most climate-based, anti-meat proponents. The important thing to remember is these are laboratory results; they are not real measurements from the atmosphere. In a lab gases are tested individually but in the atmosphere they are mixed with all the other gases.
Methane can only absorb heat radiation in a narrow band of wavelengths. Methane exists in the atmosphere as a rare trace gas with a concentration of less than two parts per million. Water vapour is by far the most important greenhouse gas. It absorbs heat over a wider range than other gases and exists in the atmosphere as at least 10,000 parts per million. This diagram shows the infra red absorption spectrum of all the greenhouse gases.
The red lines in the diagram denote the wavelengths at which methane, CH4, is able to absorb heat radiation, and is taken from Methane, the Irrelevant Greenhouse Gas. These specific wavelengths are already being absorbed by water vapour, H2O. Because water vapour is almost 10,000 times more concentrated in the atmosphere it absorbs almost all the heat at those specific wavelengths. Consequently, there is almost no heat for methane to absorb and reducing it by avoiding meat (and having fewer cows) will make no difference whatsoever. Green experts need to Stop Feeding Us Lies.
According to a study published by the Society for Endocrinology a deficiency of vitamin B12 is linked to obesity during pregnancy. Vitamin B12 is only found in animal-sourced foods and is not present in an entirely plant-based diet. These are the conclusions of the study:
“Low levels of vitamin B12 impair fat metabolism, which could increase the risk of obesity during pregnancy. Pregnant women with low levels of vitamin B12 had metabolic markers indicative of increased fat production and reduced breakdown, which suggests that low vitamin B12 levels could predispose pregnant women to obesity.
Vitamin B12 is a micronutrient found in seafood, meat, and dairy products that is essential for many metabolic reactions that keep our bodies functioning normally. Diets high in carbohydrates and highly processed foods provide poor nutrition and can lead to vitamin B12 deficiency. Approximately 25% of pregnant women worldwide are vitamin B12 deficient, as an even higher intake is needed for the growth and development of the baby. Previous studies suggest B12 deficiency increases the risk for metabolic complications such as obesity or diabetes, but the underlying mechanisms affecting fat metabolism remain poorly understood.
In this study, Jinous Samavat from the University of Warwick Medical School investigated how low vitamin B12 levels affect fat cell function in cultured cell samples and in samples taken from pregnant women. Markers of fat metabolism in both lab-grown fat cells, low in vitamin B12, and in samples from vitamin B12 deficient pregnant women, indicated increased fat production and reduced ability to breakdown fat for energy. There was also increased inflammation, which causes further damage.
Jinous Samavat comments, “Taken together, our data indicate that low B12 levels can impair fat cell metabolism, which may lead to increased fat accumulation, impaired fat metabolism, and inflammatory damage, all of which predispose to weight gain.” Although these findings suggest how fat metabolism may be impaired in vitamin B12 deficiency, particularly in pregnant women, larger studies are needed to confirm this and further explore the underlying mechanisms, to identify intervention strategies and help prevent obesity.
Samavat says, “Our findings reinforce the need for vitamin B12 supplementation during pregnancy and make a strong case for funding further studies and introducing public health policies to help tackle obesity.”
It is interesting that vitamin B12 has a role in fat metabolism as well as all of its other functions. It is also interesting that University academics nearly always end their studies with the suggestion they need to do more research, which they hope will bring more funding to their organisation. It is also curious that they recommend “vitamin B12 supplementation during pregnancy” instead of a vitamin B12 rich diet, which would necessarily include the consumption of plentiful meat and seafood.
The following is a small excerpt from Chapter 11 of Stop Feeding Us Lies.
“Grass grows by taking CO2 out of the air. With the help of energy from sunshine and water from rainfall, grass converts atmospheric CO2 into molecules of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Some of these carbohydrate molecules, called cellulose, are used to create new blades of grass and some, which are more simple sugars, are passed down the plant and into the roots. To keep the arithmetic simple let’s assume a blade of grass absorbs 100 molecules of CO2 and that 80 of them are used for growth and 20 of those carbon atoms go down to the roots, where they will stay if the ground is left undisturbed.
Constance the cow comes along and eats all of those 80 carbon atoms in the grass. The bacteria in her rumen get to work and convert plant cellulose into the fatty acids and proteins that Constance needs to grow. A by-product of this process is methane gas which is produced at a rate of approximately 5% of the food Constance eats. Therefore for every 100 molecules of CO2 absorbed by grass, cows return 4 or 5 of them to the air as methane. Simple arithmetic and basic biology show it is impossible for cows, or sheep, to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. They simply recycle a few of them.”
The NHS directive on healthy eating is known as the Eatwell Guide; never has an official document been so incorrectly named. One of the many fallacies it contains is the recommendation to replace natural fats like butter, lard, dripping and ghee with polyunsaturated ‘vegetable’ oils
This is from the NHS website, Choose unsaturated oils and spreads, and eat in small amounts. Unsaturated fats are healthier fats and include vegetable, rapeseed, olive and sunflower oils. Remember all types of fat are high in energy and should be eaten sparingly.
They make the claim that ‘unsaturated’ fats are healthier (than what?) without providing any evidence. They also make the mistake of suggesting that we should limit fat intake because it contains more calories (than carbohydrates). [This fallacy is debunked elsewhere on this site.] The quoted list of ‘healthy’ oils includes vegetable which is a misleading catch-all term for oils which do not come from animals – it is not a specific oil. Bottles in the supermarket labelled Vegetable Oil are usually blends of cheap seed oils. Rapeseed and sunflower oils are extracted from seeds with an industrial, high temperature and solvent process. Olive oil comes from the fruit of the olive tree and can be obtained by simply pressing the olives. Olive oil has been consumed for about 6,000 years, whereas industrial seed oils have been eaten for only the one hundred years since their extraction method was invented. The last one hundred years coincides with the greatest decline in human health that we know of.
What is wrong with seed oils?
There is nothing natural or healthy about the way in which they are made;
Seeds are gathered from the soy, corn, cotton, safflower, and rapeseed plants.
The seeds are heated to extremely high temperatures, which causes the unsaturated fatty acids in the seeds to oxidize. These oxidised by-products that are harmful to human health.
A petroleum-based solvent, such as hexane, is used to maximize the amount of oil extracted.
Seed oil manufacturers then use chemicals to deodorize the oils, which have a very unpleasant smell. The deodorization process produces trans fats, which are well known to be quite harmful to human health.
Finally, more chemicals are added to improve the colour.
The first edible seed oils were made in America by two soap manufacturers called Proctor and Gamble. They started making soap with cottonseed oil, which was regarded as a toxic waste product from the cotton industry. They soon realised that cottonseed oil could be ‘hydrogenated’ into something resembling lard and they sold it as a substitute for traditional cooking fat under the name Crisco. They had managed to turn ‘toxic waste’ into a food substitute. ‘Vegetable’ oil was not a scientist’s health promoting discovery. It was a heavily advertised profit opportunity, which soon went from just cooking oil to the butter substitute margarine. Proctor and Gamble were now a big company and they gave large sums of money to the recently formed American Heart Association. In return, the AHA promoted P&G’s seed oil concoctions as ‘heart healthy’, without any genuine evidence to prove their claim.
What else is wrong with seed oils?
They do not fit with our evolution. Our bodies evolved over millions of years in response to our environment and the food we ate. Seed oils contain a high proportion of a fatty acid called linoleic acid. It is estimated that the average diet now contains 8 times as much linoleic acid as our distant ancestors used to consume. Our genetic make-up and biological systems cannot cope with such a large dose of this one ingredient.
The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is wrong. There are certain essential fatty acids that we need to thrive but cannot make. We have to eat these in our food and they are known as omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-6 acids give rise to inflammation and omega-3 acids are anti-inflammatory. Our ancient diets had a ratio between these two opposing actions of approximately 1 to 1 and our bodies were, therefore, in balance. Seed oils contain considerably more omega-6 relative to omega-3 and many western diets have a ratio of up to 20 to 1. This imbalance produces a state of chronic inflammation that contributes to numerous chronic diseases.
The polyunsaturated fatty acids in industrial seed oils are highly unstable. They oxidize easily upon exposure to heat and light, creating two harmful substances—trans fats and lipid peroxides. Trans fats are well known for their role in the development of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes; in fact, for every 2 percent increase in calories from trans fats, your risk of heart disease is nearly doubled. Lipid peroxides are toxic by-products that damage DNA, proteins, and membrane lipids throughout the body. The accumulation of lipid peroxides in the body promotes aging and the development of chronic diseases. Restaurants, fast food outlets and fish and chip shops fry their food in seed oils. Every time the oils are reheated they create more toxic by-products.
They contain unhealthy additives. Because the fatty acids in industrial seed oils are so unstable, synthetic antioxidants are added in an attempt to prevent the oils from turning rancid. These chemicals are not healthy. They have hormone-disrupting, cancer-causing, and immunity-disrupting properties. One of them, known as TBHQ, has been found to increase the risk of food allergies.
The NHS tells us to replace the naturally occurring, animal-derived fats like butter and lard with these unnatural, industrial, toxic, inflammation-inducing concoctions because they are the ‘healthy choice’. Our population has never been more unhealthy. The NHS Eatwell Guide is wrong.
In writing a National Food Strategy, you have been tasked with a job which carries a huge workload and equally large responsibility. I commend you on all your hard work. I believe you have produced your plan with a genuine desire to improve the food system in the United Kingdom. There are aspects of your work with which I totally agree: we are an overweight, unhealthy nation because of the poor quality of our diet, and we must change the way we eat to improve health and unburden the NHS. However, there are parts of your strategy with which I totally disagree.
I am a retired Pharmacist. I left my profession feeling frustrated and disillusioned because so many people were taking their medication diligently but never getting better. The drugs were treating the symptoms of their disease but not the root cause. I spent almost 5 years researching and writing a book about why so many people in Britain are ill. It took me so long because I covered a great deal more than just food and because I had to overcome my preconceived biases. I used to be an Olympic Athlete and I believed that everyone would be healthier with more exercise. The more research I did, the more I realised my assumptions were wrong. Whilst exercise is important for good health, the real problem is the food we eat. There is so much misinformation, dogma and downright corruption in the world of food and health I called my book Stop Feeding Us Lies.
I argue that the dietary advice given by the NHS is responsible for the obesity epidemic and all the co-morbidities that go with it. This situation has continued for decades because the hierarchy in the Health Service never steps back and asks itself, ‘Are all of the assumptions we work with factually correct?’ Groupthink has taken over and the experts and the media endlessly repeat the same story, which nobody bothers to examine. I am sorry to say, Mr Dimbleby, I believe you may be guilty of the same thing. You have completely accepted some of the dogma of the day and you appear not to have questioned your assumptions. I believe these assumptions are wrong, which means that parts of your argument are spurious because they are built upon fallacies.
I was somewhat surprised that in a 289-page report on Food Strategy there is no mention of the nutritional benefits of different foods. Surely this is by far the most important factor in any dietary policy? The only nutritional measurement you mention are calories. You seem to think we will reduce obesity by eating fewer calories. This approach has been tried for decades and always fails. Weight is controlled by hormones, mainly insulin, and hormones are affected by the type of food we eat. This was proved in 1956 by Kekwick and Pawan and published in the Lancet. They demonstrated that eating fat does not make us fat; it is carbohydrate that makes us fat. Natural fats do not raise insulin levels and therefore do not increase fat storage. Fats, especially animal fats, have been demonised for decades without any robust evidence against them. However, you quote the oft repeated mantra about reducing food high in ‘sugar, salt and fat’. Indeed, you want to tax sugar and salt.
‘Sugar, salt and fat’ is repeated in the media as if all three are interchangeable in their health-destroying properties. There is no human requirement to eat sugar, nor the carbohydrates from which it is derived. Too much sugar leads to health problems ranging from tooth decay, mood swings and acne all the way to diabetes, blindness, heart disease and amputations. We need to reduce our sugar consumption. Salt, however, is an essential nutrient; our blood is a saline solution and sodium is needed for the transmission of every nerve impulse. People have died of hyponatreamia, or lack of sodium, at running events when they have drunk too much water. Salt is essential for life but you want to put a large tax on it. Fat is also essential for our health; all our cell membranes are made of fat molecules and our brain structure is 65% fat. You are hoping to tax manufacturers into reformulating their food to reduce these three ingredients. What sort of chemicals do you imagine they will substitute them with? Food labels already read like an inventory for a chemistry lab.
Instead of changing the ingredient list in manufactured meals, you should be recommending that people change from eating ultra-processed food and spend more time cooking their own real, natural food. I understand that for many people both time and cost are issues, which make this difficult. The health benefits, however, are so obvious the message should be spoken loud and clear. Fresh food from a farmer or fisherman will always be nutritionally superior to food from a factory. Why not promote home cooking at every opportunity?
You recommend that we all reduce our meat intake by 30%. We became the dominant species on the planet because of our large brains. We evolved excellent brains because our ancestors ate the meat and fat of the big animals they chased and caught. Red meat is the most nutrient-dense, easily absorbed food humans can consume (along with liver and eggs). The fat in our brain structure is largely animal derived. Indeed, 12 % of our brain is made of the omega3 fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). DHA is essential for a multitude of processes in the brain and some neurologists suggest that conscious thought is impossible without it. There is no DHA in the fruit and vegetables you recommend. There is also no Vitamin B12 in plants. B12 is essential for the production of red blood cells and the myelin sheath that surrounds all our nerve fibers. Persuading us to eat less meat will inevitably lead some people into nutrient deficiencies which will damage their health and further burden the NHS.
Taking a broader view of your National Food Strategy, it is not really about food: it is about land usage and climate change. Your document mentions vitamins seven times, climate change 112 times and methane 109 times. This is the other area where it seems you have not failed to question your assumptions and made no attempt to challenge the dogma of the day. There is a powerful anti-meat lobby which constantly promotes the idea that eating red meat is bad for our health and for the climate. Both these claims are wrong. You have written page after page of anti-meat propaganda, which does not stand up to scrutiny. You perpetuate some of the most extreme views I have ever read. I quote, ‘The methane produced by ruminants is estimated to have caused a third of total global warming since the industrial revolution.’ Do you believe, Mr Dimbleby, that the digestive system of cows is a major influence on the climate of this planet? GCSE level biology explains why this cannot be true.
Grass grows by taking CO2 out of the air. With the help of energy from sunshine and water from rainfall, grass converts atmospheric CO2 into molecules of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Some of these carbohydrate molecules, called cellulose, are used to create new blades of grass and some, which are more simple sugars, are passed down the plant and into the roots. To keep the arithmetic simple, let us assume a blade of grass absorbs 100 molecules of CO2 and that 80 of them are used for growth and 20 of those carbon atoms go down to the roots, where they will stay if the ground is left undisturbed. A cow comes along and eats all those 80 carbon atoms in the grass. The bacteria in her rumen get to work and convert plant cellulose into the fatty acids and proteins that the animal needs to grow. A by-product of this process is methane gas which is produced at a rate of approximately 5% of the food eaten. Therefore, for every 100 molecules of CO2 absorbed by grass, cows return 4 or 5 of them to the air as methane. Simple arithmetic and basic biology show it is impossible for cows, or sheep, to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. They simply recycle a few of them.
You correctly state that methane in the atmosphere is oxidised to CO2 after about a decade, but you stress that it is a much more potent greenhouse gas. In laboratories, that appears to be true, but in the real world it is not true. Water vapour is the most effective greenhouse gas by far. It accounts for 90% of all the heat trapped in the atmosphere; the heat which stops us all from freezing to death. Methane only absorbs infra-red radiation at wavelengths of 3.3 and 7.5 microns. Water vapour is very active at those wavelengths and any effect methane might have is completely masked by the action of water. Methane, therefore, has no significant effect on the temperature.
History, as well as physics, proves your statement is wrong. Ruminant animals evolved about 50 million years ago and they have been burping methane throughout all the hot periods and ice ages of that enormous timescale. The figure below shows atmospheric methane levels over the last 1,000 years, measured by ice-core samples. Methane remained remarkably constant until the Industrial Revolution. During the first 800 years of this graph there were an estimated 65 million bison roaming the grasslands of the American Midwest.
I quote you again, Mr Dimbleby, ‘If all the ruminants on earth mysteriously vanished tomorrow, it would take roughly twelve years for the methane they have already produced to leave the atmosphere almost completely. After a couple more decades, the temperature of the planet would have cooled to the same temperature as if those animals had never existed.’
The second figure, below, shows the fluctuations of temperature over the last 2,000 years. Focussing on the last 1,000 years we can compare methane levels, above, with temperature. The methane graph begins with the height of the Medieval Warm Period. Temperature then cools until we are plunged (by the Dalton Solar Minimum) into the Little Ice Age. Temperatures begin to warm again in the early 1700s. Throughout all these temperature fluctuations, methane levels stayed exactly the same. They had no effect on warming or cooling. Whoever you have been listening to, Mr Dimbleby, has led you up the garden path and you have taken them at their word.
You give a passing mention to regenerative agriculture but fail to emphasise its huge benefits to soil health and fertility. Allan Savory has proved that increasing the number of ruminants on the land improves soil fertility and the ground’s ability to absorb and store water. We should have more cattle and sheep on the land and in our diet, rather than less.
NASA satellites have clearly shown that the recent increase in CO2 (plant food) has enabled vegetation to thrive and the world is considerably greener now than when carbon dioxide levels were lower.
There is so much more I could say, but I will make this final comment. You recommend a nationally approved diet and a land use plan overseen by the Government. Do you really believe that Boris Johnson and his cronies could provide better stewardship of the land than experienced farmers, who have been educated in the benefits of regenerative agriculture? Do you think a ‘national diet’ will be free from the influence of global food corporations and their processed fake-food? I, for one, do not.
The following quotes are all comments voluntarily made by people who used to be vegan and went back to eating meat. It is fascinating how many people say their health improved to a remarkable level.
Many years ago, we were warned about the dangers of ‘global warming’. The name for this impending doom was later altered to ‘climate change’. Presumably, this was done so that whatever happened to the climate, our self-indulgent way of life could be blamed. The media have now started to ramp up the fear by referring to this concept as the ‘climate crisis’ or ‘climate emergency’. Daily fearmongering across mainstream media has shown that people can be persuaded to believe implausible ideas if they have already been made to feel sufficiently scared.
Outrageous notions are now coming thick and fast. Recently, we had the Cabinet Minister, Kwazi Kwarteng, telling us we must go vegan to ‘save the planet’. In the Times Magazine of April 24th, there is an article which attempts to rank foods by their greenhouse gas emissions. The piece is inspired by “one of Britain’s top scientists”, who has written a book about food and climate. The top scientist is a Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy. She has become a vegan because of what she believes to be the greenhouse gas emissions produced by livestock.
The headlines in the article included ‘Butter is five times worse for the environment than vegetable spread’ and ‘Eating a large steak is equivalent to driving a fossil-fuelled car for 40 miles’. My first thought was that if I drove 40 miles I would still be hungry, but if I ate a large steak I would be satiated and well-nourished. Sadly, the extraordinary level of misinformation in this is article is no laughing matter.
There are two major problems the Professor has failed to understand. The first one is basic biology and the second is the purpose of food.
1.The rhetoric goes along these lines: cows belch methane; methane is a greenhouse gas; we need to get rid of cows. People who push this idea insist we must stop eating meat because farm livestock are responsible for ‘emissions’ which are so huge they are heating the planet to dangerous levels. The thing none of them seem to grasp is that it is impossible for cows and sheep to emit greenhouse gases; they can only recycle some of them.
Cows and sheep only eat plants. A lot of people think plants grow out of the ground, but this is not strictly true: they are rooted in the ground and get water and minerals from the ground but they grow out of the air. Every carbon atom in the structure of a plant was taken out of the air, as carbon dioxide, during photosynthesis. When animals eat and then digest those carbon atoms to create their own structure, the process produces methane gas, as a byproduct, at a rate of about 5% of the food eaten. After a few years in the atmosphere that methane is converted to CO2 and the ‘carbon cycle’ continues, as it has for tens of millions of years.
When we drive a car 40 miles, we burn carbon-rich fuel, which has been stored underground for millions of years. Therefore, cars emit greenhouse gases which add to the total in the atmosphere whereas cattle recycle some, which does not add to the total. This basic difference seems to be totally ignored in reports on this subject.
We are often told that cattle farming is ‘unsustainable’. This, of course, depends on how it is done. When the settlers and farmers from Europe arrived on the plains of mid-west America, they found the most fertile soil they had ever seen and in places it was between six and ten feet deep. That soil existed because 75 million bison and deer had roamed the land, for thousands of years, eating the grass that grew there and leaving their ‘manure’ upon it, before moving on. This process involves a symbiotic relationship between ruminant animals, grassland plants and trillions of bacteria and fungi in the soil. Universities and farmers around the world have proved that regular movement of herds of livestock to fresh grass, in a way which mimics nature, increases carbon storage in the ground and simultaneously improves soil fertility. Wild herds of ruminants have been doing this for 50 million years; a timescale which suggests to me that it is ‘sustainable’.
One hundred years ago those American farmers were growing wheat on as much of that land as they could because wheat prices were high. They did so much ploughing and planting of a single crop, they turned those deep, fertile soils into what became known as the ‘dust bowl’. The grass, which had covered the prairies for a million years, was turned over; the fungal network was destroyed; the land dried out; and when a period of drought came, the soil was turned to dust and blown by the wind, across the country, as huge, dark clouds. Thousands of farmers were made bankrupt and there was an enormous exodus of people from the mid-west to California, in search of work. The US Government bought millions of acres of land and replanted it with the original prairie grass. History shows us that it is mono-crop arable farming which is unsustainable.
2. In the Times Magazine article the Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy listed a wide variety of foods and quoted the supposed emissions of each. Throughout the article, however, there is no mention of the nutritional value of any food, which is, surely, an essential factor in our diet. Suggesting that we should eat vegetable spread instead of butter, for example, ignores the fact that butter is a natural product with considerable quantities of vitamins A, B12, D, E and K2 and omega-3 fatty acids. Vegetable spread is a highly processed, unnatural food substitute usually made from sunflower oil. This oil contains high levels of omega-6 fatty acids, which are known to increase inflammation. Chronic inflammation is linked to heart disease, arthritis, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and age-related macular degeneration.
Plant foods contain no vitamin B12. A deficiency of this essential nutrient can lead to brain atrophy in children, psychosis, hallucinations, weakness, unsteady gait, fatigue, irritability, loss of appetite, weight loss, symptoms of depression and megaloblastic anaemia. Sadly, many people, like the Professor, are willing to risk the health consequences of a vegan diet because, somehow, they have been persuaded that the climate of this planet is controlled by the digestive system of cows. A far bigger problem, which is not being tackled, is the enormous burden of obesity, diabetes and all the related metabolic disorders suffered by millions. This health catastrophe is intricately linked to a diet containing too much processed, fake-food and not enough nutrient-dense real food, like butter and meat.
The list below contains extracts from the official dietary advice of a wide range of health authorities. They all recommend either caution or avoidance of a plant only diet for pregnant women and children. This list was compiled by the excellent website Aleph2020
The dietary guidelines, which the NHS want us all to follow, advise a high percentage of carbohydrate and a reduction in animal sourced fats. These excerpts, below, are taken directly from the NHS website.
We need to remember that all carbohydrates are broken down by digestion into sugar molecules, usually glucose. So the NHS recommends that over a third of your intake should consist of foods that your body regards as sugar. They also recommend that the natural animal fats which our ancestors have eaten for millennia should be replaced with vegetable oils.
Many decades ago a lot of people were thin and some were very thin. A product was developed and heavily advertised to help those people gain weight. Appropriately, it was called Wate-On. The adverts typically suggested to women that they would be more attractive to men if they gained some ‘female curves’ by adding a little subcutaneous fat.
The manufacturers were so confident that their product worked they offered a money back guarantee if you failed to gain weight after taking it.
What ingredients did Wate-On contain to ensure people taking it would increase their weight. There were some added vitamins to give the product a ‘healthy’ profile but the two main ingredients were sugar and maize oil. Maize oil is the same thing as Corn oil.
Putting more weight on is very rarely an objective for people nowadays because 65% of the UK population are overweight and more than 25% are obese. How did we become so heavy? We became so heavy because we have been following the NHS advice to consume the ingredients of Wate-On, sugar and corn oil.
Everybody in the UK loves the NHS. We have just given up a year of our freedoms to ‘save it’. Parts of the NHS do a wonderful job but their official dietary advice is a national scandal of out-dated misinformation. What they call the Eatwell Guide is nothing of the sort. It is the reason we have an obesity crisis and surging levels of type 2 diabetes. We would all be so much better off if we ignored what they say about food and ate the diet our ancestors ate.
Vitamin A is usually associated with good vision and especially night vision. As a child I was always told to ‘eat my carrots so I could see in the dark’. While it is true that vitamin A is vital for vision, it also has a multitude of beneficial functions throughout the body. However, it is not true to list carrots as a source of this essential vitamin. The biologically active form of vitamin A is called retinol, because it is so prevalent in the retina of the eye. Carrots and other brightly coloured vegetables contain no vitamin A. They contain a pre-cursor to retinol known as carotene or beta-carotene, which has to be converted to the active form before it can do it’s work. This conversion is never very efficient and quite difficult for some people. Genetic variations, too much fibre in the diet, a lack of bile salts and eating raw vegetables can all play their part in making the transition from carotene to retinol more difficult. Healthy individuals without these problems convert beta-carotene to retinol at a ration of about 6:1, which means they need to eat 6 molecules of beta-carotene to absorb one molecule of true vitamin A.
A study from Newcastle University on a group of women showed that 47% of them had a gene variant that made it difficult or impossible to convert beta-carotene into active vitamin A. It is easy, therefore, for some people to become deficient if they do not consume retinol in their food.
The only dietary sources of the active form of vitamin A are found in animal foods. Liver and eggs are the most abundant. Vitamin A gets very little attention compared to vitamins C and D, which is unfortunate because it is absolutely vital for our health and for the proper development of babies and children. It has such a profound effect on our health because it regulates the action of over five hundred genes in the body, which makes it a major controller of all of our cells and how they function.
Long before we knew what vitamin A is, ancient people from around the world were aware that eating liver could prevent or reverse blindness. The Egyptians described it at least 3500 years ago: Assyrian texts dating from 700 BC and Chinese medical writings from the 7th century AD both call for the use of liver in the treatment of night blindness. It has also been written about in 18th-century Russia and among the inhabitants of Newfoundland in 1929. 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates prescribed liver for blindness in malnourished children. Despite all this knowledge, vitamin A deficiency is still the leading cause of blindness in some parts of the world. It is extraordinary that all this ancient knowledge is ignored and the NHS recommends that pregnant mothers should avoid eating liver in case they consume toxic levels. (More about this later.)
Vitamin A helps to prevent us from becoming ill; it keeps our immune system from overreacting; it is necessary for growth and reproduction. We need vitamin A for building bones and teeth, and for the actions of our hormones. It is essential for the development of a foetus into a perfectly formed human baby. These are major roles, which are vitally important for our health.
Babies
A developing human foetus needs to change stem cells into the appropriate cells to construct heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, eyes, brains, head, shoulders, knees and toes. This process requires the presence of adequate levels of Vitamin A. Slight abnormalities will occur if there is insufficient retinol. If there is a serious deficiency in the mother, major defects can arise resulting in miscarriage or the new-born being unable to survive. Recent studies have shown that an insufficiency in maternal retinol can lead to a slight defect in the lungs giving rise to childhood asthma.
Immunity
Vitamin A is vital for the development and maintenance of skin and all our mucous membranes. These are the wet surfaces which make up the nose, mouth, digestive tract and lungs. They appear to be inside the body but, strictly speaking, they are external. They are the surfaces through which viruses and bacteria can gain access to the body and, therefore, their integrity is a vital first defence in our immune system. Optimum levels of Vitamin A maintain these membranes and protect us from infection, including from the coronavirus giving rise to Covid19.
These are some references I have found in other articles about Vitamin A
Vitamin A supplementation of children in Asia and Africa has been extremely effective in reducing the rates of infection, diarrhoea, anaemia and blindness (Reuter’s 2/12/01).
African and Asian children receiving vitamin-A supplements grow faster, have better haemoglobin values and die 30-60 percent less frequently than non-supplemented peers (J Nutr Jan 1989 119(1):96-100).
Vitamin A supplementation of children in Asia and Africa has been extremely effective in reducing the rates of infection, diarrhoea, anaemia and blindness (Reuter’s 2/12/01).
Vitamin A plays a vital regulating role in the immune system. Vitamin A deficiency leads to a loss of ciliated cells in the lung, an important first line defence against pathogens. Vitamin A promotes mucin secretion and microvilli formation by mucosa, including the gastrointestinal tract mucosa. Vitamin A regulates T-cell production and apoptosis (programmed cell death) (Nutrition Reviews 1998;56:S38-S48). These are all important functions in the fight against Covid19.
Treatment with mega doses of vitamin A (100,000 IU per day) resulted in a 92 percent cure rate of menorrhagia (excessive menstrual bleeding) at Johannesburg General Hospital in South Africa (S Afr Med J 1977).
Lack of vitamin A interferes with optimal function of the hippocampus, the main seat of learning. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, found that removing vitamin A from the diets of mice diminished chemical changes in the brain considered the hallmarks of learning and memory (Proc Natl Acad Sci, Sep 25, 2001 98(20):11714-9). Children need a good supply of Vitamin A to succeed academically.
Vitamin A can be helpful in the treatment of psoriasis. Researchers found that patients suffering from severe psoriasis had low blood levels of vitamin A (Acta Derm Venereol Jul 1994 74(4):298-301). Elderly persons who consume adequate vitamin A are less prone to leg ulcers (Veris Newsletter Dec 1999;15(4):5).
In stroke victims, those with high levels of vitamin A are more likely to recover without damage (The Lancet, Mar 25, 1998, pp 47-50).
Vitamin A protects against lung and bladder cancers in men (Alt Cancer Inst Monogr Dec 1985 69:137-42). Fourteen out of 20 patients with prostate cancer achieved total remission and five achieved partial remission using vitamin A as part of a natural cancer therapy in Germany (Drugs Exp Clin Res 2000;26(65-6):249-52).
Official advice
The NHS advises pregnant women not to take too much vitamin A and to avoid foods rich in retinol, like liver. This section below is copied from the NHS website.
Why do they say this? A study published in 1995 suggested that large doses of active vitamin A could cause birth defects in babies. It received a great deal of publicity and guidelines were altered because of it. Medical staff involved in obstetrics and paediatrics repeat this advice because they are fearful of being sued if a child is born with defects and they have not given this warning.
In the study, researchers asked over 22,000 women to respond to questionnaires about their eating habits and supplement intake before and during pregnancy. Their responses were used to determine vitamin-A status. As reported in the newspapers, researchers found that cranial-neural-crest defects increased with increased dosages of vitamin A; what the papers did not report was the fact that neural tube defects decreased with increased vitamin A consumption, and that no trend was apparent with musculoskeletal, urogenital or other defects. The trend was much less pronounced, and less statistically significant, when cranial-neural-crest defects were correlated with vitamin-A consumption from food alone.
There are many problems with this study. It is based on unreliable food frequency questionnaires, which were used to calculate vitamin A status but no measurements of blood levels were taken. They did not highlight the difference between vitamin A from supplements and from natural sources in food. Distinctions between synthetic and natural vitamin A have been absent in the extensive media coverage of this study. In fact, the newspaper reports contain implied warnings against pregnant women eating liver, dairy products, meat and eggs, but none against eating fabricated foods like margarine and breakfast cereals to which synthetic vitamin A is added. And there has been no media coverage for subsequent studies, which found that high levels of vitamin A did not increase the risk of birth defects. A study carried out in Rome found no congenital malformations among 120 infants exposed to more than 50,000 IU of vitamin A per day. A study from Switzerland looked at blood levels of vitamin A in pregnant women and found that a dose of 30,000 IU per day resulted in blood levels that had no association with birth defects. Just like so many other things in nutritional advice, the narrative has been set in stone and it is going to be difficult to change it.
What should you do?
I have shown a selection of the vitally important contributions vitamin A makes to our health. The NHS advises pregnant women not to eat vitamin A rich foods because of one observational study and ignores other studies with opposite outcomes. I do not want to tell anybody what to do, but I do want you to think about what makes sense.
Ancient people were very good at observation; they knew that eating liver could cure night blindness. I find it very difficult to believe they would have failed notice if pregnant women eating liver regularly gave birth to damaged babies. Nobody believed this happened until 1995.
Vitamin A is essential for correct development. How likely is it that evolution would give retinol this role but allow it to cause birth defects if you eat slightly too much?
Vitamins work in harmony with other vitamins and minerals. Taking high doses of one can cause problems because of an imbalance. If the NHS advised against high dose vitamin A supplements I would see no problem. But they do not; they advise against the consumption of real food, which our species has been eating for millions of years. A real food diet provides the balance of nutrients we need to function properly.
