There are very few people who live to be one hundred, Bill, and they seem to do it by not having getting any of the major diseases--cancer, diabetes, arterial/heart disease--that stop most of us before then. They typically come from families with a lot of very ancient specimens, as well. They seem immune to the damage that smoking and drinking and eating meat and drinking milk do--a lot of them do smoke and drink, for example. And yet statistically, for example, smoking reduces life expectancy by about ten years.
So in order to determine if meat and dairy products are harmful you have to study large populations, like the China Study we debated so fervently. You have to watch the rates of cancer and heart disease increase as populations with plant-based diets take on Western diets, which that book did. The Ornish study is also interesting, and I'm sure there will eventually be others like it. But you have to take groups, not anomalies like people who live to be 100, and try to come to scientific conclusions that other scientists can replicate.
There are LOTS of studies supporting better health through vegetarian and vegan diets. Of course anyone is free to continue to eat a cancer and heart-disease producing diet. I just have no idea why they would want to do that. But bon appetit or whatever! |
