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Blood Pressure
& Heart Disease
Cancer
Diabetes
Gallstones
Kidney Stones
Osteoporosis
Protein
Calcium
Dairy Products
Asthma
Common Concerns
Vitamin B12
Pregnancy, Infants,
& Children
Mad Cow Disease
The New Four
Food Groups
Further Reading
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Beating Heart Disease
Vegetarian diets help prevent heart disease.
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"The
vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases,
and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented
simply by adopting a plant-based diet."
T.
COLIN CAMPBELL, Ph.D.
former Senior Science Advisor to the American Institute for Cancer
Research
Director, Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition, Health and
Environment 1983-1990 |
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"If
you change to a vegan diet, and do it very vigorously,
you have enormous power. You can reverse heart disease.
You can prevent it. You can, I believe, prevent most cases of
cancer if you combine dietary changes with avoiding tobacco.
You could prevent probably 70% or 80% of cancers,
just by those steps alone. And, obviously, there’s a whole host
of other diseases that you would be able to
live without."
NEAL BARNARD,
M.D.
President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,
author, Turn Off The Fat
Genes |
Animal products are the
main source of saturated fat
and the only source of cholesterol in the diet.
Vegetarians avoid these risky products.
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"The
first reason why I don’t consume dairy products,
and why I think other people should not, is the fat content.
The fat is saturated fat, and you may as well be eating beef tallow.
The fat in these dairy products encourages heart disease
and numerous other problems.
It’s a risk factor for some forms of cancer as well."
NEAL BARNARD,
M.D.
President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,
author, Turn Off The Fat
Genes |
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"Animal
fats, especially those in milk, butter, cheese and meat,
are highly saturated, and an excess intake of such foods
may be partly responsible for the development of atheroma,
which causes atherosclerosis."
AMERICAN
MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
Family Medical Guide |
Additionally, fiber helps reduce
cholesterol levels,5
and animal products contain no fiber.
One study
even demonstrated that a low-fat, high-fiber, vegetarian diet
combined with
stress reduction techniques, smoking cessation, and exercise
could actually
reverse atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries.6
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"Patients
fed a vegan (meat and dairy free) diet
during an intensive 12-day live-in program experienced
an average reduction of 11% in total cholesterol levels.
Most patients also lost weight
and had improved blood pressure levels."
JOURNAL OF THE
AMERICAN COLLEGE OF NUTRITION, 1995 |
Heart diets
that include animal products are much less effective,
usually only slowing the
process of atherosclerosis.
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"A
low-fat plant-based diet would not only lower
the heart attack rate about 85 percent,
but would lower the cancer rate 60 percent."
WILLIAM
CASTELLI, M.D.
Director, Framingham Health Study;
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
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Blood
cholesterol levels of vegetarians
compared to non-vegetarians:
14%
lower
Blood
cholesterol levels of vegans
compared to non-vegetarians:
35%
lower
Risk of death
from heart disease for vegetarians
compared to non-vegetarians:
Half
Chicken has
about as much cholesterol as beef.
There is simply no escaping the
correlation
between meat consumption and cholesterol levels.
JOHN
ROBBINS
American author,
Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Diet for a New America,
(excerpt from The Food
Revolution, Conari Press 2000) |
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making the transition
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5. Sacks FM, Castelli WP, Donner A, Kass EH. Plasma lipids and lipoproteins in
vegetarians and controls. N Engl J Med 1975;292:1148-52.
6. Ornish D, Brown SE, Scherwitz LW. Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary
heart disease? Lancet 1990;336:129-33.
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