I wasn’t attempting to “insult” anyone’s intelligence by listing the names of the credentialed individuals involved with PCRM which promote plant-based diets.
I was only confirming that well-respected professionals of every stripe understand the benefits of vegetarianism and that these people cannot be dismissed as fringe nut cases, as Dr. Eades would have his readers believe.

There are much broader issues to consider when eating a meat-based diet than health.
Issues that affect all of us. A meat-based culture is destroying the environment through intensive factory farms, which are nothing more than toxic hellholes of abuse for the animals which are treated with as much compassion as a stick of furniture, and where the land and water (including underground aquifers) are contaminated for miles around with tons of animal waste run-off and which pollute the air. Lung-blistering noxious ammonia can waft for several hundred miles on wind-driven days.

When educated to the facts, a meat-based diet is INDEFENSIBLE.
http://www.upc-online.org/pp/winter2011/comfortable_unaware.html
Dr. Richard A. Oppenlander has just written a book entitled: Comfortably Unaware.
Studies have shown that Methane and Nitrous Oxide, “are much more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases.” These treacherous gases enter the atmosphere mainly through the flatulence and manure of the 65 billion land animals who are now being raised for food – a number that could double by 2050.

Comfortably Unaware insists that animal agriculture, including fishing and aquaculture (factory farming of freshwater and sea creatures for human, companion animal and farmed animal consumption), is the primary cause of global depletion – the loss of our renewable and nonrenewable resources including our drinking water, air quality, land, oceans, rainforests, and biodiversity. Reports on the health and environmental havoc of farmed animal production and consumption stop short of advocating the animal-free diet that would solve the problem. For instance, 80 percent of the world’s protein-rich soy crop is not being fed to starving children, but to farmed animals, and most of this soy “is now grown on rainforest-cleared land.” In 2004-2005 more than 2.9 million acres of rainforest were destroyed, “primarily to grow crops for chickens used by Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

Oppenlander explains why “grass-fed, pastured” animal production is a false solution to factory farming and why small-scale operations cannot sustainably meet the demands of billions of people wanting cheap, readily available meat, dairy and eggs. Smaller farms don’t alter the amount of resources required to raise, transport and slaughter hundreds of billions of animals. Currently, 55 percent of our fresh water is given to animals raised for food, and 89,000 pounds of excrement are produced by farmed animals every second in the United States alone, says Oppenlander. Moreover, what is fashionably called “humane” farming does not meet the behavioral and cognitive needs of, or show any genuine respect for the animals trapped in our food production systems and belittling attitudes.

Not only is a meat-based diet unhealthy for our bodies, it is unsustainable for the planet.

However, don’t insult our intelligence by your appeals to authority. There are an equal number of decorated physicians and scientists who both practice and preach the type of dietary approach the Drs. Eades advocate.

The topic of diet is intensely personal. For your health, you absolutely should do your own research and listen to your body. Physicians and scientists exist to parse through the detailed scientific minutiae that operate behind the scenes. But the core tenet of science is that hypotheses are falsifiable through testing — and no science is absolute. That is why you have scientists such as Drs. Barnard, Esselsyn, McDougall, Ornish and others on one side of the fence and Drs. Eades, Volek, Frasetto, Feinman and others on the other side, and Drs. Mozzaffarian, Krauss, and others firmly in the middle, with plenty of science to back up all sides. I’ll grant that there has been “several decades-worth of scientifically proven benefits of a plant-based diet,” but much of the post-millennial research has supported a low-carb approach.

Please keep this in mind next time. The low-carb, whole-foods, plant-and-animal-based diet is a highly defensible position backed by a lot of good research, and recognize that this fact is not mutually exclusive with a plants-based approach if it works for you.

Congratulations on the rabid hatchet job regarding PCRM and the condemnation of several decades-worth of scientifically proven benefits of a plant-based diet. You can stoop no lower than to lie in order to protect your profits, which is so obviously your agenda here. Unless, of course, those lies are killing people — that hits rock bottom.

As a vegetarian / vegan [on a high carb diet, e.g. pasta, brown rice, potatoes] for over 30 years and one who has been successfully controlling chronic kidney disease on this plant-based diet, your “theory” that high protein diets do not diminish kidney function, is a dangerous, deadly, bald-faced lie and holds about as much merit as comparing PCRM to “terrorists.”

You state: “PCRM uses what is at best anecdotal information and presents it in the guise of a scientific investigation.” If my life is ‘anecdotal’ and the results of my diet hold no more value to the medical community than to be dismissed, so be it. But I am alive today because I found, through personal experimentation, and not listening to individuals such as yourself, that I and I alone control my own health.

By following my own instincts, listening to my body and using common sense, I have been able to completely avoid medical intervention — dialysis and transplant. My discoveries were made well before PCRM existed, so it was not by indoctrination that I came to exactly the same conclusions which PCRM espouses.

You claim that PCRM is comprised of “militant vegetarians” and I’m paraphrasing here…individuals with dubious credentials.

PCRM’s prestigious advisory board includes 19 health care professionals from a broad range of specialties, some names of which you may recognize:

Leslie Brown, M.D., Pontchartrain Pediatrics

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., Cornell University — Author of
The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health [A study-- one among many -- that refutes your claim that " Overall there is no evidence that meat causes colon cancer, or any other cancer, for that matter."

Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D., The Cleveland Clinic

Roberta Gray, M.D., F.A.A.P., Pediatric Nephrology Consultant

Suzanne Havala Hobbs, Dr.PH., M.S., R.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Henry J. Heimlich, M.D., Sc.D., The Heimlich Institute
[Inventor of the life-saving Heimlich Maneuver]

David Jenkins, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D., St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto

Lawrence Kushi, Sc.D., Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente

John McDougall, M.D., McDougall Program, St. Helena Hospital

Virginia Messina, M.P.H., R.D., Nutrition Matters, Inc.

Milton Mills, M.D., Gilead Medical Group

Baxter Montgomery, M.D., Houston Cardiac Association and HCA Wellness Center

Carl Myers, M.D., Sonoran Desert Oncology

Ana Negrón, M.D., Community Volunteers in Medicine and family physician

Myriam Parham, R.D., L.D., C.D.E., East Pasco Medical Center

William Roberts, M.D., Baylor Cardiovascular Institute

Joan Sabaté, M.D., Dr.PH., Loma Linda University Nutrition School of Public Health

Gordon Saxe, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., Moores Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego

Andrew Weil, M.D., University of Arizona

I venture to guess that the experience, credentials and standing within the medical community of these individuals far outweighs your own Dr. Eades.

You have zero credibility in my book.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070611113729.htm

I know I am late to the ballgame on this one, but a quick Google search on the topic showed these studies; one linking certain cancers and another not linking them. I am not a scientist, but have studied this topic closely for a documentary film my wife and I are making (It started off as a test to see how a meat lover, myself, would do on a vegetarian diet for 90 days. Since then, we have fallen down the rabbit hole of contradictions, inaccuracies and life changing discoveries.)

So, it appears there are studies that link red meat consumption to certain cancers, and others that do not. I find that no matter which side of the argument one stands on, there seems to be “science” and evidence backing each one. What is the lay person to think?

Needless to say, I felt great at first on a vegetarian diet. initially lost weight, had a lot of energy, etc. After a while, my energy started to drop, I became depressive (which is not natural for me at all), and to top it off I gained not only weight but a significant amount of body fat. I think I was insulin resistant before starting the veg diet, but must have been a whole lot worse after my body grew accustomed to it.

Now, my wife and I are both experimenting with a paleo or low carb diet. We both feel amazing, but since my cholesterol was moderately high going into this whole venture a year ago, I still have worries about that. Even though I have read Taubes and studies to the contrary. We shall see how it progresses. Needless to say, my weight is coming back down, I feel emotionally strong again, and my energy levels are fantastic. It has only been 2 months, so I am sure I have to give it at least the amount of time I gave the veg diet to see if things change, but so far so good.

Regards,
Shane Close

Thanks for doing what you do: prior to finding your’s and Gary Taubes’ books, I had not run across any reasonably complete and coherent discussions of the subjects of weight loss and metabolic control. I ate the “healthy” high-carb “balanced ” diet for years, gained weight and eventually started showing other ill-effects. Now I keep my carbs in the 30 – 50 g range, walk ~ 21 miles/week, and feel much better. A complete life change, and -45 lbs to date. I feel like I’ve finally been given a good hammer insead of a small rock to drive the nails of my house.

One request: would you consider giving weight-based (grams & ozs) rather than volumetric nutritional information in the future? My conception of a medium something might be very different from yours, and my mushrooms might pack differently each time depending on how I slice them…

Thanks again.

It was enough for me learning that every nutrient we think we need to get from veggies is also available in animal foods, and that I can’t get vitamin A from vegetables at all unless I’m converting beta carotene. I have no idea whether I’m converting it nor whether I’m converting it *enough.* I do know that I was plagued by menstrual problems for something like three years, and I mean horrid stuff to the point I sometimes could not leave the house for a few days a month for fear of an accident. After three to four months on retinol supplementation from fish liver oil capsules (10,000 IU minimum) daily, suddenly I don’t get the weird pains I was getting the day before it would start. I was curious and went Web-surfing, and turns out other women have found relief the same way.

I’m furious the government lets food companies put a vitamin A value on plant food labels when there’s not a scrap of vitamin A in the food and I’m absolutely LIVID that they allow health “experts” to claim that beta carotene and A are the same thing. I wonder how many people out there are subclinically deficient in A. It’s going to kill them, slowly and unpleasantly.