If you were directing this at my post, that was exactly my point. Why don't we ever hear about her diet being called into question in her death, whether it be the carb or soy content? But if you had someone who admitted to eating a meat based low carb diet and they developed a disease, the first thing people would jump on would be their diet. Look at Atkins. I think Taubes mentions his fear of even sustaining the slightest illness or injury and having it reflect upon his low carb eating in an article or interview. Even my husband who low carbed relatively short periods has to listen to his parents and brother ask if he thinks it's the LCing any time he has anything wrong with him.

It's silly really.

my mother ate a whole foods, organic, vegetarian diet. she juiced carrots daily and also made this blended raw vegie drink w broccoli, etc.
she died of pancreatic ca.

one of my good friends developed breast ca, had a lumpectomy and some type of therapy. she was in remission for maybe a year. by the time they discovered it, there was liver mets.
she was a vegetarian but when it was rediscovered, went raw veg w daily juices.
it was truly horrible watching her waste away and die...which was not really a long process.

these are not unusual stories. look around you.

we are wearing out the old pancreas w our belief that vegetarian is the way to good health. the amt of sugars in the vegetarian diet is huge even if you don't eat sugar per se.

my vote is to not go extreme; eating adequate protein and vegies w the lc spin, of course. also moderate fat (that means there is no need to force fat).

i really don't know how lc came to some of these conclusions. i guess it's the same thinking that made us follow the food pyramid and eat tons of starch and no meat; more must be better.....i am not convinced.

also grilling is questionable so that may not work on a regular basis. only time will tell if that is the case.

Thanks Jen and Moggsy

There's a lot of reasons LCers rely upon meat and high fat. It's definitely not that if the pyramid says meat and fat should be eaten sparingly, we should eat a lot of it. If you want to know some of the reasons, read GCBC or some of the research into the increase in cancer risk (and other diseases) as you add plant based food, especially certain plants. I just think cancer risk is the most dramatic.

Right now I eat some vegetables, herbs, and dairy just because I can't seem to cut them out entirely and remain happy. I use them to enhance my meat and not vice versa. I am a former vegetarian, so eating meat is hard enough. I've tried all meat a few times, and I am too weak or too something and it falls apart. I fully recognise the fact that most of the health benefits of eating them are exaggerated or non-existent.

i think we need to be careful of at least two things here:

1. Correlation equaling causation. We really don't know what causes cancer. It could be that eating lots of meat and sat fat have a direct correlation to cancer, but based on what we have as evidence in the OP, so could toothpaste or laundry detergent or a host of other things. We just don't know and shouldn't jump to conclusions until more evidence is in. Which brings me to number:

2. Confirmation Bias. If the evidence is out there that eating meat leads to cancer, we shouldn't automatically discount it because we have found this way of eating has a particular benefit for us. Sometimes we tend to ignore things that are staring us in the face just because we don't like the answers.

moggsy. i've read the books, all of them.

crisor, that is my point, exactly. thank you.

hello, would you mind siting scientific references for your claim here?
would appreciate proof.
thank you.

My vegetarian former boyfriend died of stomach cancer.
After I switched from vegetarian to a more carnivorous diet, the moles that kept popping up after my melanoma was removed stopped. Stopped DEAD.

I'll never go back!

http://www.targetedbodysystems.com/.../vegetarianism/

http://www.targetedbodysystems.com/...lycation+theory

Then I am at a loss why you would have posted that about low carbers inverting the food pyramid in some mass belief in a false dichotomy (since we're on the subject of cognitive bias and fallacies).

How you overcome bias and fallacies is to examine the evidence. Please do not assume that people just really want to hear that eating meat is the healthiest choice. Believe me, I'd rejoice if real evidence to the contrary was found. I would love to hear the preponderance of real scientific research going to a vegetarian diet rather than a carnivorous one. Unfortunately, it's more of a preponderance indicating that the opposite is true.

Widening this to other posters, please don't assume that because someone is claiming that a vegetarian diet is unhealthier than a diet high/exclusively meat that they are saying that plant based food is the only cause of cancer. When I mentioned vegetarian diets never being questioned it was simply because it's the "prevailing wisdom" that they are healthier than low carb or, increasingly, healthier than even the "balanced and moderate" omnivorous diet that has taken over from low-fat as the diet pushed by the media and dietitians. When someone dies of cancer or other horrible disease as a vegetarian, no one brings up diet outside of low carb circles. I didn't say definitively that the diet caused the death. If a low carber gets a disease or even falls down (Thatcher, Atkins) it must be the diet, even if that person hasn't eaten low carb in decades (Thatcher).

I think that the point here is that whatever diet you have, if it isn't balanced you put your health at risk. Before the diet what were they eating? The body holds toxins from previous food choices in the fat cells of the body (and we all have at least some fat cells). When you choose an alternative way of eating, that releases toxins in to the system, which, if they are not flushed out very quickly, lead to more problems in the organs/systems of the body. It might be prudent to say that cancer is dependent not only on diet but how the body of the dieter is working - and what systems were compromised in the course of that diet, and before.

moggsy, i am so sorry that my post was misunderstood.
even as i reread it, i do not see how that happened.
i am not pro vegetarian...in fact, quite the opposite.
i am not pro zc, but i tried it.
i eat an animal and vegetable based diet. and have for many years.
i have plenty of room in my aging brain to absorb new information....that's all.

We know that burning carbs inside the mitochondria produces much more free radicals (ros) than burning fat. Free radicals can destroy almost anything in your body and surely the mitochondria. When mitochondria are dead, the only way the body has to produce energy is anaerobic fermentation of glucose in the cytoplasm. As this is a very inefficient proces (20%) it is overtaxed extremely. Some experts believe this will at some point in time create a mutation that we call cancercells. That could be the reason cancercells have dysfunctional mitochondria.

If this is true, it is hard to believe that eating meat and fat can cause cancer. More so, when we realise that ketosis (the state we get into on low carb diets) doubles glutathione production, the mother of all antioxidants.

this post is already on here some were .. but it should be here to .. if not please move !

A hundred years ago, before Americans changed their diet and the calamitous events of the 20th century began, heart disease was far less common that it is now. Few Americans were overweight, and coronary heart disease was not yet recognized as an illness. Pneumonia, diarrhea and enteritis, and tuberculosis were the three most common causes of death, whereas coronary heart disease is now the most common cause of death in the United States. The medical subspecialty of cardiology was created in 1940. Since then the number of cardiologists in the U.S. has grown from 500 in 1950 to 30,000 now – a 60-fold increase.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller33.1.html And it would be nice if we dad some scientific
evidence Please .. thanks Ron*

Thank you all this is a very interesting