Raw Vegan Study

[TylerDurden]

Raw vegan diet reduces anxiety levels/improves mood.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18534324

[TylerDurden]

Raw Vegan diet helps fibromyalgia:-

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11602026

[cherimoya_kid]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's something in cooked food, grains, and/or dairy that causes fibromyalgia.  Certainly my fatigue symptoms went away after I changed my diet, about 12 years ago.

[eveheart]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's something in cooked food, grains, and/or dairy that causes fibromyalgia.

My experience is the same, cooked grains are especially toxic to me. Raw paleo is satisfying to my appetite; raw vegan is not. If it were my study, both raw vegan and raw paleo test groups would be included.

[Raw Kyle]

Wow 1-3 weeks treatment with a 12 week follow up questionnaire, that's a long time to assess a diet's effects on health. I think I might just base my lifestyle after that kind of rigorous investigation.

[TylerDurden]

I think that health and safety is an issue here. They dare not have long-lasting studies as they fear being sued. Also, studies which are considered by the mainstream to be "dodgy" would be especially viewed in this way. Also, long-term studies would be costly.


That said, I have always maintained that raw vegan diets are very healthy for most people in the short-term, and these studies confirm this.

[Raw Kyle]

What isn't healthy in the short term? Not eating? I could feel fine on a fast food diet for a few weeks.

[TylerDurden]

What isn't healthy in the short term? Not eating? I could feel fine on a fast food diet for a few weeks.

I disagree. I reckon most people would feel pretty ghastly if all they had to eat was very highly processed junk food all the time for several weeks. Morgan Spurlock(?), for example, did a Big Mac diet for a month and it ruined him.

In this case, fasting and the raw vegan diet are similiar in that neither involves intake of heat-created toxins, so that either would give the body time to heal and recover a bit. Plus, a raw vegan diet has enzymes and bacteria in it which are useful.

[Raw Kyle]

I don't consider Morgan Spurlock's movie to be a credible study. His record keeping is fuzzy at best and cooking the books at worst, and in Fat Head that guy felt fine after a month of eating processed fast food as long as he didn't eat the buns.

Let me put it this way. I doubt you would post a study that gave those exact same results if it was about a cooked diet, even a cooked paleolithic one. You would tear into it saying it was short term and read it closely for mistakes or questions. Did you critically look at this study at all?

[TylerDurden]

No, I happily accept that a cooked-palaeodiet etc. could be better than a cooked-junk food diet so that some benefit might appear in a study of the former. The main reason why I support such studies is that there are so few raw food studies, anyway, and I myself experienced an immediate improvement as soon as I went raw vegan(I no longer had those crippling stomach-aches after eating).

[Raw Kyle]

My biggest problem with this study is that it is not a controlled study. It states in the abstract that it's an observational study, which means it's not testing any hypothesis. There are no controls, the people who follow this diet know they're doing it. Not only that but the way they go about it is placebo on steroids. In the methods it states that they gave people Halleluya Acres writings which is raw vegan propaganda of a religious nature. So they gave these people propaganda that says all health problems are caused by eating animal products and processed food and then they proceed to do the best they can to follow the recommended dietary regimen for a few weeks, and they say they subjectively feel better. I'm trying to think of a softer way to look at dietary intervention and I can't think of one.

The whole idea of an intervention study is to not induce a placebo effect, and this group turns that idea on it's head by giving to the subjects propaganda saying what they're about to do will cure them. I find it hard to believe that a group of scientists couldn't find the time or had the writing skills to cobble together a raw vegan dietary regimen for their subjects themselves and had to rely on a religious propaganda booklet. The more I think about it the more I find this study one of the worst I've ever read. I just checked where it was published, an alternative medicine journal. I bet they have some high standards for scientific rigor over there. I just realized now there's two studies, the Hallelejah Acres and the Hippocrates Health Institute.

So in the one study they give the subjects information that says if they follow this diet they will get better and lo and behold the subjects say they feel better after a few weeks. Then in the other one they find that people who went to a health resort had better mood after. Well that about proves it huh, who has ever heard of someone going to a resort for three weeks and having an improved mood afterwards? It must be the raw vegan diet, not the fact that they aren't at work, taking care of kids, making their own meals etc. Seriously both of those studies are beyond rubbish imo.

[cherimoya_kid]

..., and in Fat Head that guy felt fine after a month of eating processed fast food as long as he didn't eat the buns.

That's kind of a big part of the whole fast food thing, the grains. Take it away, you've got something substantially different.

[Raw Kyle]

That's kind of a big part of the whole fast food thing, the grains. Take it away, you've got something substantially different.

Right, but Tyler is claiming is the fact that the food is processed that makes it unhealthy. The meat is just as processed as the grain, it's frozen, mashed up and mixed with filler and then cooked.

[cherimoya_kid]

There's a lot more processing that goes into making wheat into a bun, than meat into a patty. Way more. The reason is that we just aren't grain-eaters.

[Raw Kyle]

Do you mean to say that if the grain was picked and cooked and eaten it would then be more healthy than fast food meat because it is processed less? The only necessary step in order to eat grains is to cook them, usually in water.

[cherimoya_kid]

Do you mean to say that if the grain was picked and cooked and eaten it would then be more healthy than fast food meat because it is processed less? The only necessary step in order to eat grains is to cook them, usually in water.

Only maybe oats and rice can be eaten that way, and they are always soaked before being eaten, or should be.

Other grains require several soakings and sometimes fermentation to make them digestible. 

[Dorothy]

I don't know - I feel much better eating plain old boiled grains than I do eating a meat fried in frankenstein oil - but that might be just me.

Good to hear that any studies at all are being done no matter how flawed - I mean - people site horrifically flawed cooked food studies all the time as if they pertain at all to eating the foods raw.

Let's all manifest together Tyler siting here a superb study on raw paleo within the next three years. After all - if flies can manifest on rocks - why can't we manifest a decent study? 

[Raw Kyle]

I don't consider soaking very intensive processing.

[Dorothy]

Totally unsoaked - just boiled grains don't seem to bother me. Grains that are soaked and sprouted I actually do really well on. But give me a fast food burger and you might have to carry me home or to the doctor. Anything processed with bad oils does me immediate harm. Highly processed sugars -- real bad. If soaking and cooking in water I don't consider to be processed. I just consider that to be cooked food. Grains cooked simply without any real processed foods added I personally think is better than highly processed meats with all sorts of chemicals and real fake stuff added .... at least that's true for me.