Dr. McDougall recently started putting video profiles of his Star McDougallers online. Here are the first two entries:

In the latest McDougall Newsletter, Dr. McDougall compares the health of the presidential candidates, based on reports of their diet, exercise routines, medications, and other factors. To be fair, the conclusion isn’t too surprising: “While it is impossible to predict with certainty any person’s future health, time of death, or degree of disability, the evidence at hand clearly says John McCain is in relatively poor health and Barack Obama is in excellent health. All politics aside, no one could conclude otherwise. To McCain’s credit he appears to be holding up well during this grueling campaign, but his current appearances do not negate the medical facts.”

McDougall also reviewed his recent Advanced Study Weekend, including a photo slideshow.

And, of course, some more recipes. The Garden Potato Medley sounds great.

Congratulations, Nettie!

Taylor says: “In September 2006 at age 58 I found myself sitting in the parking lot of my favorite fast food restaurant, crying to God to help me with my food addiction. I was stuffing down a sandwich, fries, brownies and a Diet Coke. I had failed again to keep the promise to myself to do something about my weight, but I felt helpless to do anything about it. I felt like I was 98 instead of 58. I weighed 282 pounds.”

Dr. McDougall says: “Like Nettie, until you discover the central role of starches in your life, you will remain out of control, and likely overweight and burdened with bad health. Once starch becomes your predominate calorie source, then the appetite correctly regulates the amount of calories consumed.”

By Jeff Walsh

Of all the McDougall DVDs, his latest is the one that I really want to carry with me at all times and whip it into DVD players everywhere I go whenever these questions come up.

“Dr. McDougall’s Common Sense Nutrition: The Truth About Protein, Soy, and Fish” is really a tour de force, and watching it will make it harder for soy burger-loving vegans, fish-eating vegetarians, and people whose defensive “But where do you get your protein?” to stay on these paths.

The disc features three individual lectures on the three main topic areas of protein, soy, and fish.

“When Friends Ask: Where Do You Get Your Protein?” does more than show the absurdity of this often-asked question, which wouldn’t take long to disprove on its own, but looks into why so many people believe what they do about the importance of protein. It also shows how long all of this information has been known, with studies dating back multiple decades coming to conclusions that hold up today but are still largely unknown. I’m not saying the “Where do you get” people will be converted by this lecture, but they’ll certainly have to look for new material after watching this.

“Soy Is Food, Not A Poison or A Miracle Drug” addresses a lot of the controversy and myth around soy that exist online. McDougall has always been consistent that he considers soy foods OK very sparingly and in small portions. On the McDougall plan, soy foods include tofu, edamame, tempeh, miso, soy milk, and other things that have a minimum level of processing. What he’s always been against (although he admits to having tried and loving a lot of) is the processed soy foods, where the soy protein no longer resembles its origins, because the protein has been entirely removed and reconfigured to make burgers, hot dogs, deli meats, and is also put into “health” bars and other stuff where the high amount of protein is used to help sell the product. Ifyou have any questions about soy, I can’t imagine it will be left unanswered after watching this lecture.

“Fish Is Not Health Food” is also nothing new as far as major topics go. We’ve overfished the oceans, it has no unique benefits for heart health, contains toxins, and we’ll run out of fish the way it’s available today in about 40 years. The major benefit given for eating fish is actually because the fish eat the seawood and algae which has the omega-3 fatty acids, so we’re eating the fish to get what the fish eats and, of course, there are other superior sources. McDougall also addresses the fallacy of fish being health food, better for you than other animal muscles, and necessary.

These are all topics that come up repeatedly and it’s good to know such concise, informative lectures are just a DVD away when they do. But the thing that’s really important to emphasize is that Dr. McDougall is an amusing lecturer, so a lot of what could be dry, boring medical study results are peppered with anecdotes, jokes, and even the occassional comic strip. So, showing these lectures to people will never be a bore.

If you want the complete word on these common themes, this is a great DVD to have on hand. If you don’t know the ins and outs of these topics, these lectures will be eye-opening, make you question your choices, and give you all the information you need to live a healthier life.

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You can find more information about this DVD on the McDougall website. It costs $24.95.

McDougall says it’s time to stop scapegoating standalone salt: “The overpowering taste of salt tricks us into eating foods that innately repulse human beings.This flavoring will disguise the repugnant tastes of animal flesh and cow’s milk secretions, which are the real sources of body damage. Eighty percent of the salt consumed by people following the Western diet is irreversibly intermingled with our processed foods.”

McDougall shares more recipes from Celebrity Chef Weekend, including Gazpacho Verde, Smoky Refried Bean Soup, Skillet Gardener’s Pie, White Miso Soup, and Chai-Spiced Oat Crepes with Grilled Mangos or Nectarines and Citrus-Almond “Ricotta” Filling.

Congratulations to the latest Star McDougaler Donna Byrnes: “The hardest part of changing my diet was being different. So much of life is centered around food. While I am the only one I know that eats this type of diet (aside from the people I have met on the McDougall Costa Rica adventures and on the McDougall discussion board), I was fortunate to have the support of my family and friends.”

McDougall talks about the four obstacles to following the McDougall Diet:

• Change is difficult: “People are always amazed by how many of their incurable ills are fixed after only a few days of eating right. They are equally surprised by how forcefully their problems return when they slide back into their old ways.”
• McDougall is not about vegetables: “The primary purpose of eating is to obtain life-giving energy. This is accomplished safely only by whole plant foods plentiful in carbohydrates. These special plant foods are known as starches.”
• Failure to appreciate the body’s efficiency: “Give up the nuts, seeds, cold-pressed olive oil, dried fruits, refined flours, and all the other rich treats you have been pampering yourself with since your gave up meat and dairy. Right, they are all vegan (not from an animal), and even more holy, they are mostly “raw.” But they are still “calorie bombs,” which are guaranteed to stop weight loss and cause fat gain.”
• No one responsible is fixing your food: “The cost of doing nothing could be as expensive as a $100,00 heart bypass operation. Now does that make financial sense to a businessperson like yourself?”

There’s a new McDougall DVD coming out soon, all about protein, soy and fish. Should be good, look for a review in the future.

Recipes from the McDougall Celebrity Chef Weekend include a lot of gems, such as Vietnamese-Style Stuffed Grape Leaves, Easy Macaroni and Cheeze, Red Lentil and Bulgur Salad Balls in Lettuce Cups with Creamy Basil Dressing, and No-Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Pie.

Congratulations to the most recent Star McDougaler, Mary Splady: “People often tell me that they could not do what I do because they love to eat. Well, I really love to eat too, and that is what first led me to become vegetarian, then vegan. In counting calories, I quickly figured out that I would rather eat a big bowl of cauliflower than a small piece of meat. It is really quite simple: Vegetables are not as calorie dense, and therefore I can eat more of them.”

In his recent McDougall newsletter (free, so sign up!), Dr. McDougall urges people to stay out of the medical business, but also says your health plays a big role in your financial stability. His four considerations, all explained in great detail in the newsletter are:

• Healthy People Attract Employers and Customers
• You Can Regain Lost Health and Appearance
• Reduce Medication Costs
• Buy Only the Medical Insurance You Need

McDougall also shares some of the comments he received to his assertion that Bill Clinton is showing signs of brain damage that might be a result of his heart-bypass surgery.

And, no newsletter woud be complete without recipes! The Southwest Jambalaya sounds especially good.

Dr. McDougall recently released some Breaking News to his e-mail list, under the headline “Bill Clinton’s Madness: A Consequence of Heart-Bypass Surgery Brain Damage.” I was sort of surprised the headline didn’t end with a question mark but, in his article, McDougall compares the Clinton that stood against impeachment and being known for his wit, charm, and ability to stay calm under his pressure to the one out stumping for his wife’s campaign:

“Now, he is easily angered by hecklers, and makes factual mistakes and racial slurs while aggressively defending his wife’s campaign for presidency. Everyone sees his mental and emotional decline, yet to date, no medical professionals have spoken out about the cause or offered help.

Not a single one—not one bypass surgeon, cardiologist or psychiatrist—has stepped forward in his defense; even though all of them are trained to recognize “post bypass surgery cognitive dysfunction.” One of the best-kept secrets in medicine is the brain damage caused during bypass surgery.

McDougall gives a lot of facts and figures about the procedure, and finishes up by saying:

“I am saddened to see our former president suffer from public humiliation, but I am disgraced that my profession has thus far failed to come forward with a long over-due explanation and an apology to the Clintons and our nation for the harm they have done and the secrets they have kept.”

Wow, interesting stuff from Dr. McDougall… Definitely worth a read.

The fifth and final McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD review is on T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study. I’m a huge fan of The China Study, which is why I put this lecture last, sort of the dessert for my week of watching lectures. The first lecture on this DVD is “The China Study,” and the second one is “Hidden Hazards of Animal Protein.”

In “The China Study,” Campbell spends half of his hour-long lecture showing the results of his epidemiological work done in China over a more than 30-year period. In a nutshell, his team found that protein was linked to cancer promotion. It is important to point out that Campbell is very clear to use the word promotion, as there are three stages of cancer: initiation, promotion, and progression. Animal protein doesn’t necessarily cause cancers, although it can, but it is amazing fuel to grow a cancer.

In animal experiments whereby all of the subjects were given cancer, they found that diets consisting of five percent protein did not promote cancer growth, whereas 20 percent protein diets would promote growth. In fact, if they switched their diets back from 20 percent to five percent, it actually turned off the cancer promotion.

Further testing found the threshold to be at around 10 percent as to when the cancer promotion actually began. On the same diet over time, all of the animal subjects on the five percent protein survived 100 weeks, the normal lifecycle for a rat, whereas all of the subjects on the 20 percent protein were dead at 100 weeks.

The protein used in all of these experiments was casein, the main protein found in cow’s milk. They found that switching to soy or wheat protein didn’t promote cancer even at 20 percent.

These findings were found to hold up in human populations, as well, as the research team had unprecedented access to the population of China to perform these tests. Rather than experimentation, they based their research on areas where people couldn’t afford animal protein compared to areas where they could. Where the population was able to afford to increase their intake of animal protein, cancer in that region climbed as well.

In the second part of his lecture, Campbell is quick to point out that although his research might appear otherwise, he actually thinks reductionism is a “tragic consequence of Western medicine.” He specifically cited the recent studies attempting to link low-fat diets to cancer promotion, and that there is no way to isolate the fat from everything else a person eats.

Studying their research data, Campbell found that the people who were on the low-fat diets actually increased their animal protein consumption rather than eat more fruits and vegetables, specifically eating lower-fat meat and dairy products. If you factor that into the slide showing no correlations, and switch the criteria to people who consumed animal products (rather than fat or protein), it completely lines up to show an increase in animal product consumption lining up with increased cancer promotion. If you plot out the vegetable protein consumption, no correlation appears.

Campbell ends this lecture by noting how vegetarian diets aren’t new concepts and that books were written on the subject in Ancient Greek times, and by Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Isaac Newton, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and others. It is estimated in a book on the history of vegetarianism that there were over a thousand books by the 1700s on vegetarianism and how it relates to issues of health, which prompts Campbell to ask how that information got lost for so long.

He finishes by saying the information isn’t new, but now we are finally getting the scientific data to support claims that have been around for centuries.

In “Hidden Hazards of Animal Protein,” Campbell starts by giving a history of protein. Discovered in the 1850s, it is immediately heralded as the chief component of life. But by 1908, a researcher already made the connection between increased protein intake, which was primarily synonymous with meat at the time, and cancer.

In 1905, a Yale researcher did tests with the school’s ROTC program and put a group on a plant-based diet, and they reached the same fitness level as people who consumed animal protein and also had a high fitness level. Some people questioned his work as not factoring in the differing fitness levels, so he repeated the test on people who already had a high fitness level and they increased their level even further. But by 1922, this researcher was disparaged within his field and was never heard from.

Revisiting some more research he did before the China Study, he determined that excess dietary protein (especially animal) is more responsible for cancer than chemical carcinogens.

Campbell also goes into the problems with reductivism and public policy. He says we are overfixated on daily recommendations of specific nutrients, when all of this is regulated by our bodies. There is no need for us to micromanage all of the specific components of the food we eat to make sure we are getting everything our body needs if we are eating a healthy plant-based diet.

The only beneficiaries of reductivism are the food and pharmaceutical industries, both of which are adept at affecting public policy to support the nutritional breakdown of their products, such as 2002 government guidelines that recommend, amazingly enough for the prevention of chronic conditions, a diet that includes between 10 and 35 percent protein.

Campbell said the important thing is to think of nutrition as a symphony, whereas one person sitting at a piano and hitting one note over and over… that’s reductive science.

This lecture is part of the McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD set. The DVDs cost $20 each, but you can get all five new DVDs for $60 total, including additional lectures from Howard Lyman, John Abramson MD, Michael Greger MD, and Neal Barnard MD. You can order them from McDougall’s website.

The fourth McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD I’m going to review is from John Abramson, MD, author of Overdo$ed America. It is the only disc in the series that contains three lectures, the first two run about 45 minutes in length, with the third lasting for an hour. The first lecture is “The Misdirection of American Medicine: The Biomedical/Commercial Juggernaut,” with the second lecture on “Evidence-Based Medicine vs. Epidemiologically-Based Medicine,” and the third lecture on “National Cholesterol Education Program Guidelines: Pushing Statins or Preventing Heart Disease”

As you can tell from the lecture titles, this disc is all about the medical industry and not as much about diet and nutrition. In “The Misdirection of American Medicine: The Biomedical/Commercial Juggernaut,” Abramson talks about his revelation that the medical journals had been infiltrated by the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and that it was no longer safe to trust the information as the medical community had previously done. He is also aware that he comes across to his colleagues as a conspiracy theorist of the highest order. Thankfully, he has a lot of studies and photographs in his lecture to let us know that he’s on the right side of the evidence.

He documents that the medical community gets a lot of credit for things it hasn’t accomplished, which is often the basis for our trust. For example, the tuberculosis epidemic is something that was greatly reduced in society, but medicine was introduced when it was already nearly controlled by public health campaigns, so it played a very minor role. Similarly, people are living up to 30 years longer than before, but Abramson shows studies whereby the medical community only accounts for five of those 30 years, though they are often credited for the whole thing. In this lecture, he also explores the paradox whereby the more we spend on medical care, the worse the end result; and the complete co-opting of the medical community by the pharmaceutical industry, whereby even going to get re-accreditation is now navigating a big pharma obstacle course. It’s an interesting lecture and one you hope will someday show up in a time capsule as a document to what things were like before the reform.

“Evidence-Based Medicine vs. Epidemiologically-Based Medicine” builds on the information in the first lecture, showing how drug companies use misdirection to tout the benefits of their products. Compared to doctors working with their patients to discuss better health responses to their issues, which have dramatically better results, they are instead shown very processed data showing the effectiveness of one drug versus another. But the sad part is, the medical journals and clinical trials have been corrupted by the drug makers. With research money drying up, academia entered into a relationship with the pharmaceutical companies for their funding. While they don’t necessarily influence the process itself, many times the drug companies write the first draft of the findings, and use their more favorable data slides than the ones the academics prepared. With Vioxx, the company actually based its research findings on the first six months of a 12-month trial, because more cardiac issues were found in the second six months. But this information was never included in the report, which means it never was included as part of the information doctors use to determine whether to prescribe drugs. Ironically, the government reviewed the study and knew what had happened, but said they couldn’t stop them because the drug companies have a “first amendment right to commercial speech.” Abramson is passionate about this issue, although it does make you wonder what path there is to get things back on the right course.

In the final lecture “National Cholesterol Education Program Guidelines: Pushing Statins or Preventing Heart Disease,” Abramson digs down into what he showed in his previous lectures to show how this system works against us, focusing on cholesterol-lowering statins. He shows how the numbers don’t add up in the bigger picture, seeing that the United States currently takes twice as many statins as other industrialized nations, but still has three times as many angioplasties, and three times as many bypass procedures. In addition, for some populations of people for whom statins are recommended, such as women at risk of heart disease, there are no studies that show it would have any benefit, and one study indicates there might be a possible cancer increase as a result of taking statins.

Ironically, studies also show that diet, exercise, and stopping smoking all have extremely higher rates of preventing heart disease compared to statins, but they are not the recommended path because doctors are programmed to prescribe medications and their patients have similar expectations.

Abramson shows the vast different between what the medical studies say, how that information is reported in medical journals, and how those studies are then used as supporting documents in future recommendations despite them having no connection to the conclusions they are used to support.

Although this review is long, it is worth noting that these are incredibly dense lectures with a lot of facts, figures, charts, and additional resources. This information barely scratches the surface of what was presented. The overall thing that kept running through my mind as I watched these lectures was wondering how, in a time where candidates are running on universal health care, how the end result if it based on our current system still wouldn’t be health. In fact, the inability to get on medications for chronic conditions based on perpetually-reduced dosage guidelines might actually save more lives than giving everyone access. (Although, this doesn’t apply to necessary things the medical community provides that would save people’s lives who currently can’t afford them).

This lecture is part of the McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD set. The DVDs cost $20 each, but you can get all five new DVDs for $60 total, including additional lectures from Howard Lyman, T. Colin Campbell, Michael Greger MD, and Neal Barnard MD. You can order them from McDougall’s website.