Vegan raw food diet influencer Zhanna D’Art dies of starvation: report

ok, I am not gonna change your mind, your not gonna change mine, so I am done

 

That's the same thing. If no fiber is better . . . then fiber is worse. You seem to have issue thinking.

 

Agreed. If you can't even agree that fiber is good for your gut, then you are incapable of making an informed, honest statement about health. Glad we agree.

 

Yes, I know. But only chimpanzees do that, not "monkeys," in general. Nor do our equally close evolutionary relatives, the Bonobos, as far as I am aware. The meat which I imagine Bonobos eat, in common with chimpanzees, comes from termites.

My point had been that there had been a change in environmental conditions, which had caused our ancestors to move out from the forest, onto the growing savannah-- not any innate deficit in the nutritive value of the fruit, on which those ancestors had been adapted to subsist.

Secondly, we did not just abandon vegetable foods, to become a hunting tribe. For the first half million years or so, our tastes of carrion, were sparse, when we found kills left up in trees, by the ancestors of modern leopards-- because we were adapted to climb those trees, which generally had kept the feline's food safe from other carnivores, up till our arrival on the scene.

But I don't dispute that meat was a valuable source of fat, and so calorically dense, which provided the necessary nutrition to support our expanding brain size, when our previous diet had not provided all that fat and extra calories. Yet, today, human existence, in general, or at least in our first world environment, our diet is not so deficient in calories and fats, that meat is the only source for these. That was, I think, my implication: that today, a vegetarian/vegan can get sufficient fats (and calories) without eating meat. Again, I am not advocating this diet, since I am a meat-eater, myself. But I think research bears out the idea that our Western diets would be much healthier, if we ate a lot more vegetables, and cut down on the degree to which we rely on meat, for our calories & protein.

 

It's still a fad diet by the sound of it and unnecessarily extreme, but I don't doubt that people can get a lot of necessary nutrients that way. We're eating parts of a body like our own, so it's going to have the same building blocks present and thus feed us well.

When it comes to potential negatives, they can be harder to gauge, as I imagine it varies from one person to another. Some are more prone to heart attacks than others and may need to be more careful about what they eat, and such a diet may pose elevated risks for them. I wouldn't just point to a bunch of people who seem to be doing well on such a diet and conclude that everyone is going to be better off accordingly, and I wouldn't assume that they're better off than they would be on another diet, be it another fad diet like the Mediterranean Diet or simply a more balanced one.

 

Gorillas are another good example:

Around 85% of their diet is made up of leaves, shoots and stems, but gorillas can also eat larvae, snails, ants, and even roots, barks and rotting wood (a good source of sodium/salt).

https://www.wwf.org.uk/learn/fascinating-facts/gorillas

Probably every primate eats some kind of animal protein, but the majority probably is insects rather than other vertebrates.

 

Chimps will occasionally eat other primates, such as small monkeys, but it isn't a major part of their diet. Gorillas are less violent than chimps, though.

 

Only want to insert a small note-- that I wouldn't call the Mediterranean diet a "fad," as it is merely emulating a diet that has been followed by a large population, in our present day, for a considerable length of time. Any "natural" diet like this, or even the Neolithic diet, has a leg up, over artificially constructed ones (IMO).

 

Worked at a pizza place in Austin in college. We had vegan cheese (ie cardboard). Vegans would order garlic cheese bread with vegan cheese.
It wouldn't ****ing melt. And either way we didn't have vegan butter.

They never did understand why they liked the garlic cheese bread so much was it had real food in it.

 

Right. They seem to be opportunists and will take what they can get. They probably prize monkey the same way we prize beef. It's probably not necessary for survival, but it's a sort of luxury food that offers a lot of calories and nutrients.

 

Any attempt to emulate such a diet is artificial, I would say. It's picking certain items from whatever is customarily consumed by a target group.

As for neolithic, that's as much imagination as science since it's hard to know now what people were eating back then. It also would have varied by region and season and culture, you name it.

 

Even deer will occasionally eat birds and carrion. With chimps, they can be pretty vindictive, and even eating monkeys could just be an opportunist territorial thing. But, no, not necessary for survival at all or even all that beneficial.

 

True, they'd probably take McDonald's if they could get it. Just because they like it doesn't mean it's necessarily better for them.

 

Yeah, I don't know much about the Mediterranean diet, but from what my ex told me, it's really just mostly eating veggies and occasional fish. I wouldn't regard it as a fad diet because I'm sure most doctors would sign off on it. Unless I'm wrong on the details.

 

I take McDonalds all of the time. Definitely not better for me. I think we evolved to crave things like fats and salts that were less common in nature. Now those things are plentiful. My dogs would eat fast food every day if they could.

 

Yes, it was Modern Paladin's mentioning of this, which had spurred this line of conversation.

It's all in the testicles! Male chimps have higher levels of testosterone than gorillas, whose testicles are actually tiny, relative to their body size. I think our other close relative, the Bonobo, may have even bigger balls, but is not as aggressive as chimpanzees, because their groups use sexual gratification of one another, in a ubiquitous way, to keep all the members pacified.

 

There's actually also some interesting research out there showing that even alpha male chimps (at least the most successful ones) are MORE empathetic and kind than their other male counterparts, show better regard for females and children, and (rather than being the biggest and most aggressive) tend to just be the ones that form better social bonds. Don't get me wrong, though, chimp politics is still brutal and full of assassinations and the like.

 

As advertised, it is just the typical way that those in the Mediterranean region, eat: lots of veggies, oodles of olive oil, fish, and some meat, but smaller portions than the typical American serving. They also drink wine, & eat bread, and cheese. The keys are their filling up on a wide variety of nutritious veggies and healthy olive oil, so that the meat only supplements the meal-- doesn't have to carry all the weight, so to speak.

A great example of this, if you ever find yourself in a French restaurant, is a Salade Niçoise. It is a very filling bowl of greens, with red peppers, green beans, all manner of veges, sliced egg (IIRC), and then topped with a seared tuna fillet. Outstanding meal-- and wine makes an enjoyable accompaniment!

 

I'm leaning more toward that style of eating, with a bunch of legumes added in. It's hard to balance with my wife being a runner. She's running marathons and I'm doing yoga, strength training, and hiking, so our dietary needs are different, and I'm the one doing most of the cooking. Although it is also a bit of a fad, I've had a LOT of great results from intermittent fasting.

 

Oh, intermittent fasting is no fad-- it's the secret to longevity! There's research, backing this up. It is also the most natural way for us to eat, as food was not always readily accessible, for 3 squares a day. The only diet that has ever been found to extend the life of laboratory mice, is a reduced calorie diet. There are some who follow that, which requires, then, that everything one eats, be especially nutritive. Berries are an essential part. But research has shown that the same general benefits come just from periodic fasting.

I believe it was @FreshAir , who'd clued me in as to the reason, this fasting has such a salubrious effect: it causes your body to scavenge itself, of old, dead & defective cells. I forget the word he used, for the process.

 

Darwin award bestowed posthumously...

 

More likely anorexia killed her. Would have made no difference whether she ate meat or veg

 

Only if you’re a bodybuilder who is cutting. They need no more than 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight, down to 0.7 when bulking (per evidence, some gymbros disagree). Peas and soybeans are a decent source of protein and should allow adequate protein when bulking without supplements. But the % protein required when cutting is similar to the richest plant source soy, and people don’t typically just eat soy, so vegan protein supplements help there. Other people? Not hard at all to get adequate protein on a vegetarian/vegan diet.

A plant predominant diet is definitely healthier. But we are omnivores and extremes are not ideal.

 

As I mentioned in a post after the one you quoted, it is certainly possible to get adequate protein from plant-based protein powders.

 

It's easier to be anorexic and anemic on a raw vegan diet. Especially if she wasn't doing it properly.
Some of those raw foods take up lots of space in the stomach and do not digest very thoroughly.