1mo ago

Emergency Room Epidemiology and PBF patients

What if everything you've been told about pbf diets and heart disease is wrong? In this exclusive interview, I sit down with Dr. Ankur Verma, an emergency medical doctor in India who's compiling one of the largest observational datasets on diet and metabolic illness (over 10,000 real patients and counting). What he's seeing is incredibly alarming. From rampant B12 deficiencies and soaring homocysteine levels to heart attacks in so-called "healthy" pbf eaters, this conversation pulls back the curtain on what’s actually driving India's exploding diabetes and cardiovascular epidemic despite near-perfect adherence to mainstream dietary guidelines. We discuss why LDL and cholesterol are the wrong targets, the silent crisis of undiagnosed diabetes in young adults, how even "omnivores" are undernourished in meat-deficient diets, and why emergency doctors may be the last line of defense in failed systems. This is a video for anyone who suspects that nutrition science, as we've been told, is broken, and wants to hear what frontline data is starting to show us. Watch until the end for insight on where this research is headed and how you can follow the results when they're published!

5 comments

I was wondering when Indian content would make it here, with their religious objection to meat and a cultural ideal of strict vegetarianism
Since finding out about the paucity of plants to meet nutrient needs — after hearing all my life that fruit and vegetables were not just healthy but vital — I have wanted to see population health stuff from places that eat meat or don't
Of course I don't think the huge populations of vegans and carnivores in America will ever be allowed to be compared
- We spoke of India before, they do lead the world in diagnosed T2D (30%). It will be a area of really interesting research.
  I have wanted to see population health stuff from places that eat meat or don’t
  Carnivores are probably the most data driven nutritional community I have ever seen! I would like to know more. This is why I read about the FGF-21 diets.
  Of course I don’t think the huge populations of vegans and carnivores in America will ever be allowed to be compared
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egc2ZBUYDTg
  You watched this video, yeah! The Anti-meat crowd is never going to do real science doing a head to head comparison, associational papers are enough for their promotional purposes, no need to risk finding out something inconvenient.
  
  An old study of various populations in India is mentioned in 1.1.2.3 of Ketogenic
  McCarrison fed rats diets modelled on Punjab in the north part of India and Madras in the south. Many of the rats on the Madras diet became ill, but not the ones on the Punjab diet.
  From the chapter:
  The experimental rats, he wrote ‘were nervous and apt to bite the attendants; they lived unhappily together and by the sixtieth day of the experiment they began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them. When they had disposed of three in this way, I was compelled to segregate the remainder …’. McCarrison’s wished to determine if these different dietary patterns might explain the different body shapes, physical abilities and disease patterns in the different ethnic groupings in India: ‘Indeed, nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the manly, stalwart and resolute races of the north – the Pathans, Baluchis, Sikhs, Punjabis, Rajputs, and Maharattas – and the poorly developed, toneless and supine people of the east and south: Bengalis, Madrassas, Kanarese and Travancorians’, he wrote (p. 268 in Ref. [100]). McCarrison noted that the Pathans are meat-eaters whereas the Bengalis, Madrassas and Kanarese are, for the most part, vegetarian. He found that in humans, as in the rats, there was a strong correlation between diet and health. He found that the Madrassas, who lived mainly on plant foods, were between two and ten times ‘sicker’ in a range of illnesses than were the Punjabis [101].
  https://mccarrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/National-Health-and-Nutrition-Cantor-Lectures-scan-smaller-version.pdf
  As a personal observation, I've always thought it unusual that the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) had a lot of visceral fat and was affected by poor health. He was strictly vegetarian. There are pictures of him with his peers on the Wikipedia page, and his story is fascinating to read!
I'm always a little trepidatious when people talk about their research before it's released, but I also understand how exciting it can be to see data unfolding in front of your very eyes. I very much want to see the data, even understanding the limitations of epidemiology, but there is value in clinical observations