The Great Health Debate Starts at 8:00 PM EST / 5:00 PM PST tonight - February 6th, 2011.
The first call will be with Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Gabriel Cousens and will be a debate format.
After this call, there will be a lecture from each doctor separately - tonight. This way you will be able to get some real value and education from this event in addition to the opening discussion.

To listen to the calls, all you'll have to do is visit this page:


[www.renegadehealth.com]

You don't have to sign-up, right?

I'm not sure, it's been a while but I think I did sign up. There were things for sale but I passed on everything except access to the debates.

just started listening to it

[rawkathon.blip.tv]

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

Nope, no need to sign-up. Thanks for the reminder.

AAAHHH! Stop saying Viligant! It's Vigilant! Oh man, that's bugging me.

Well, that was very interesting and so civil. Whenever there was a difference of opinion it was dealt with in a very clear, calm and respectful way. Very nice to hear people debating instead of arguing.

One issue that was addressed by both parties was the amino acid carnitine (not an amino acid in the true sense but a substance related to the B vitamins). Carnitine is available primarily from meat and other foods of animal origin. It can be manufactured by the body if sufficient amounts of iron, B1, lysine and methionine are available.
Lysine cannot be manufactured by the body and must be obtained through foods such as diary, eggs, fish, lima beans, milk, potatoes, red meat, soy products and yeast. (Please bear in mind that I am not advocating those food groups, only retyping what I have found.)
Methionine, a powerful antioxidant, heavy metal detoxer, essential for the synthesis of cysteine and taurine, reducer of histamines, used by the body to derive the brain food choline, etc etc etc, is also an essential amino acid. Food sources include beans, eggs, fish, garlic, lentils, meat, onions, soybeans, seeds and yogurt and lecithin.
B1 (thiamine) is available from these food sources: brown rice, egg yolk, fish, legumes, liver, peanuts, peas, pork, poultry, ice bran, wheat germ, whole grains. Other sources (not the richest) are asparagus, brewer's yeast, broccoli, brussel sprouts, dulse, kelp, most nuts, oatmeal, plums, dried prunes, raisins, spirulina, and watercress. There are a few herbal sources as well, alfalfa, burdock, etc.


I know for a fact that I am not getting adequate dietary sources of any of those things at all. How about you? Do you do anything about it?

I thought they were talking about the amino acid carnosine

L-carnosine, correct.

The interesting thing to me, in a good way, is how civil, even when opposed, the various comments beneath the interview window are. Agreeing to disagree all right!

Sorry! Looking it up in my books the morning after the debate! Carnosine isn't even listed in Prescription for Nutritional healing.

Still "Dietary Sources
Dietary sources of carnosine include high-protein meats such as poultry, fish, pork and beef. Lower concentrations of carnosine exist in other protein-rich foods such as eggs and milk.
Vegetarian Diets
Those who are on vegetarian and vegan diets risk developing a deficiency in carnosine levels. Carnosine levels naturally decrease with age, but early deficiencies can lead to lowered muscle tone and heart function.
Supplements
Supplements that contain both carnosine and L-carnosine are typically inexpensive. The usual dosage recommendation is 100 to 300 mg every day."

Anybody listening to the debates? I'm having a hard time setting aside an hour to sit and listen. My kids keep me pretty busy and when they are sleeping I clean up for the morrow. I'll read your reviews though...

Isn't L-carnosine a non-essential amino acid, meaning our bodies can synthesize it from other amino acids (in this case beta-analine and histidine)? So, why should we be concerned about getting enough? I always thought it was just the essential amino acids that we needed to be concerned about.

On another note, didn't they both agree that there could be benefits to eating eggs, particularly the whole egg. Why do they suggesting including raw egg whites?

Mercola didn't sound anything like he does on his website. He's said that no one should be getting more than 15 g of carbs a day. And, yet in this interview he said it's entirely possible that some people could thrive on high carb diets.

Edit: Oops, sorry for the cross post. I'm still talking about last night's debate.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2011 02:17AM by veghunter.

Lysine and methionine are both essential aminos but the one that the two of them agreed vegans should supplement was carnosine.

Yes, but that's not what I was asking. I had more luck with my search tonight than last night. It seems that histidine is in legumes and nuts, but we don't normally ingest beta-alanine as a free amino acid. We often get it from the breakdown of carnosine (not the other way around), balenine, and anserine which are found predominantly in animal sources.

So... what's the vegan solution? Is supplementation the only option?

Yes, I think so.

The debates have been mildly interesting. So far I feel the vegetarian oriented speakers have been comming out on top IMO.

If I remember reading correctly, I think the idea with carnosine, is that it helps reduce and nullify AGE's (advanced glycation endproducts) in the body and hence reduce aging. (Supposedly a vegetarian diet is low in carnosine) However I think anyone who has their blood sugar under control shouldn't be ravaged be AGE's.

That is not a good option. The compassion of veganism appeals to me greatly but any diet that is so deficient as to require lifelong supplementation for my children is questionable. Hmm.
B-12, D-3, a few essential amino acids. I'd rather a food source, personally.

It is interesting to me how, rather than health, the focus is subtley moving towards "longevity" or age reversal, which isn't synonymous with health, necessarily. Mercola seems to me to represent the latter, and Cousens, the former, but also concerning non-corporeal health.

This AGE concern, which used to be so obscure a concept, is interesting. Everyone used to know that the healthiest diet for most people is one high in plant foods, higher than animal foods, I should say. Now, because some few studies focused on glycation sort of suggest a correlation between cell aging and carbohydrates, plant foods[not just fruit] are becoming a sort of weird bogeyman. And this is, as I said, very subtle; a couple of years ago, I would have been surprised to read on mercola's site that fruit is health-detracting, but these days he is almost adamant about this, and on what seem to be limited data(Dr. Richard Johnson re: fructose, i.e.).

Like Mercola, I find consideration of nutrients in isolation to be imprudent. For example, IMO because it's low in carnosine, that the vegetarian diet can be "aging" isn't really a supportible hypothesis. B12 is the one confounder that I am constantly tripped up on, though . . .

I am looking forward to hearing what Dr. Fuhrman had to say in his debate. It's so great that Kevin Gianni is compiling the opinions of the experts in one place like this, so, so great



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2011 03:15PM by Tamukha.

maybe we should ask mercola

what kind of air to breathe
how to walk
how to climb a tree
and how to chew food

Or perhaps we should just stop asking questions entirely, hmm? Who needs to learn new stuff anyhow? Learning is so overrated .

eating is not a behavior that requires that questions be asked.

it involves modeling parental behavior and establishing a relationship with the environment/food sources based on such things as taste and digestibility.

building a bridge is on the other hand a learned task, so that would require some questions.

i thought the distinction was obvious, but thanks for prompting me to define the distinction.

Perhaps if all our parents didn't come from a SAD eating background and we lived in a natural environment where food was available to hand all year round... but since we don't and since food is shipped to us from all corners of the globe in all states of being it's worth taking the time to examine our dietary practices and evaluate what might be the best course of action when choosing what to eat. But if you don't feel that you need to ask questions, don't, good for you. I for one do not think that I know it all and I certainly appreciate the intelligence and research done by others that can benefit me.
So thanks all for sharing what you know.

I've often wondered why eating can cause so much research and potentially fights at the table so to speak. My sister in law is a professional nutritionist, but it seems to me that she is the person most in the dark about nutrition and health. Also sometimes in a state of cognitive dissonance concerning the state of her children. She has no problem feeding her children processed food daily, with heavy emphasis on animal foods. Her husband recently had some bad blood work, so she has made a few changes, but they don't seem to last long, and have gone back to the old ways.

Every once and awhile I open up one of her nutritional books, which like weigh a ton. Probably not very useful, as they are about twenty years old at least. Often borish highly technical stuff that most people probably don't have to worry about, unless they are eating like she does!

Health is a very controversial topic everyone has there own views on what is optimal, some that go against the grain of science at times and are harmful, deficient in nutrients etc. Others are happy like you say mislu to feed those processed food which in my opinion should never been done.

but fresh saying eating is a behavior that questions shouldn't be asked is quite funny, this site alone has educated and turned many lives around who were eating processed SAD diets everyday. Should that not be questioned either?

You say parental behavior, well i grew up drinking cans of soda, biscuits/sweets whenever i wished, crisps, junk food for tea, and that landed me with a whole load of health problems because parents never questioned the common dietary principles around here.

[www.vegankingdom.co.uk]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2011 08:24PM by powerlifer.

i've got a week's worth of them recorded now, prob about 15 hours worth, gonna plough through them this week! I'll report back if I get through them

Hey, how did you record them? I didn't know you could do that...

Here are some of the debates in MP3 format, that are smaller than the streaming video files (the video files are 4X larger):

Bowden.Fuhrman.mp3 24.67MB
Mercola.Cousens.mp3 42.58MB
Tuttle.Fallon.mp3 26.85MB

Hey thanks, I'll listen to the 2 I missed...

I haven't been listening to the debates, but seriously? They are talking about AGEs as a problem for raw foodists?

I used to work in a medical research institute next to a large laboratory whose specialty was AGEs and was fascinated enough by them to spend a lot of time talking to the researchers and learning up on them. These should really not be a problem at all for anyone who is not eating animal products, especially things like cooked meats, high processed sugar foods and other SAD products. Cooking produces AGEs (think of the brown crust on a piece of meat and that's what it's mainly composed of).

We produce AGEs in our body as a waste product of metabolism, but we consume much of them through our food, mainly in cooking.

I would SERIOUSLY doubt AGEs are a problem in raw foodists, especially vegan raw fodists.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2011 07:42AM by klomasius.