Another Study Suggests That Humans Are Not ‘Designed’ To Eat Meat
By
Arjun Walia
Arjun Walia
In Brief
- The Facts:A recent
study conducted by researchers in California and France found that meat
protein is associated with a very sharp increased risk of heart disease,
while protein from nuts and seeds
is actually beneficial for the human heart. - Reflect On:There are multiple studies linking consumption of animal products to several diseases, and plant foods to the reversal and prevention of them. Does this suggest our biology is not designed to eat animal products?
Are
humans supposed to eat meat and consume animal products? If you look
into it, you may be surprised. Take milk, for example. The majority of
people on the planet are lactose intolerant for a reason. In some parts
of the world, lactose intolerance is 90 to 100 percent.(source)
Humans are the only species to drink milk after weaning and the only
species to drink the milk of another animal. Have we been fooled by big
food marketing? Why are global food guides changing to a more
plant-based foundation? It’s because things are changing.
The reason why I have a hard time
believing that humans are meant to consume meat and animal products is
because there’s so much science proving this. Meat eating of all kinds
is linked to a variety of diseases. Some of the latest information to
emerge in this area compares protein from meat and protein from
plant-based sources, suggesting that plant-based protein is much
healthier.
A recent study conducted by researchers
in California and France found that meat protein is associated with a
very sharp increased risk of heart disease, while protein from nuts and
seeds is actually beneficial for the human heart.
The study is titled “Patterns
of plant and animal protein intake are strongly associated with
cardiovascular mortality: The Adventist Health Study-2 cohort,” It
was a joint project between researchers from Loma Linda University
School of Public Health in California and AgroParisTech and the Institut
National de la Recherche Agronomique in Paris, France.
It was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. The
researchers found that people who ate large amounts of meat protein,
which is a daily norm for many people, represented a portion of the
human population that would experience a 60 percent increase in
cardiovascular disease (CVD), while people who consumed large amounts of
protein from nuts and seeds actually experienced a 40 percent reduction
in CVD.
81,000 participants were analyzed for this study. According to Gary
Fraser, MB, ChB, PhD, from Loma Linda University, and François
Mariotti, PhD, from AgroParisTech and the Institut National de la
Recherche Agronomique, who served as the co-principal investigators:
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“Dietary fats are part of the story in affecting risk of cardiovascular disease, proteins may also have important and largely overlooked independent effects on risk.”
The authors emphasized that they, as
well as their colleagues, have long suspected that the protein from nuts
and seeds in the diet protects against heart and vascular disease,
while protein from meat, especially red meats, increases your risk.
Fraser said the study leaves other questions open for further investigation, such as the particular amino acids in meat proteins that contribute to CVD. Another is whether proteins from particular sources affect cardiac risk factors such as blood lipids, blood pressure and overweight, which are associated with CVD.
While underconsumption of protein is
harmful to the body, overconsumption comes with risks as well. In the
United States, the average omnivore gets more than 1.5 times the optimal amount of protein,
and most of that protein is from animal sources. This is bad news
because excess protein is often stored as fat. This stored animal
protein contributes to weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, and cancer.
The study concluded that:
Associations between the ‘Meat’ and ‘Nuts & Seeds’ protein factors and cardiovascular outcomes were strong and could not be ascribed to other associated nutrients considered to be important for cardiovascular health. Healthy diets can be advocated based on protein sources, preferring low contributions of protein from meat and higher intakes of plant protein from nuts and seeds.
On the other hand, the protein contained in whole plant foods is connected to disease prevention. According to Dr. Michelle McMacken:
The protein found in whole plant foods protects us from many chronic diseases. There is no need to track protein intake or use protein supplements with plant-based diets; if you are meeting your daily calorie needs, you will get plenty of protein. The longest-lived people on Earth, those living in the “Blue Zones,” get about 10% of their calories from protein, compared with the U.S. average of 15-20%.
Multiple studies have shown the difference between animal protein and plant protein. Another great example comes from Colin Campbell, a
Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University,
whose experiments on laboratory rats showed cancer cell growth can be
turned on or off by simply varying the amount of animal protein included
in their diet. This was an enormous discovery, with implications to the
diets of millions of people. His results, from what’s known as the “China Study,” have proven to be replicable.
A study conducted in 2016
by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General
Hospital followed more than 130,000 people for 36 years, monitoring
illnesses, lifestyles, diets and mortality rates.
They found that substituting between 15g
and 19g of animal protein, the equivalent of a single sausage, for
legumes, pulses, nuts and other planet protein, significantly decreased
the risk of early death. Replacing eggs with plant-based protein also
lead to a 19 percent reduction in mortality risk.
Researchers found that a 10 percent
higher intake of meat was associated with a two percent higher mortality
rate and an eight percent higher chance of cardiovascular death.
So Why Do We Eat Meat?
Again, I ask, what makes us believe we
need to eat meat? Many people like to point to those who roamed the
Earth before use, like Neanderthals. I found those arguments to be very
weak, and they always fail to acknowledge Neanderthal groups that were completely vegan, and how animal protein wasn’t really important. They may also not even be related to us, but that’s a separate topic.
The evidence is mounting. It seems to be
quite clear that our bodies suffer from meat eating and benefit from a
whole foods, plant-based diet. This is why I am so confused.
“When you actually look at the way our digestive systems are constructed, we have the anatomy and the physiology of a strict plant eater or herbivore. We don’t have any adaptations in our digestive system or in our physiology that is adapted to eating or consuming animal flesh. And that’s why we can’t consume animal flesh without the aid of technology. But when you look at the jaw structure, jaw mechanics, our esophagus, our stomach and the length of our intestines, it’s clear that we have the anatomy of a committed herbivore.”
The quote above comes from Dr. Milton Mills, an internal medicine physician who, in the video linked within this article,
explains that human beings aren’t really built to digest meat, or at
the very least, they have a choice. More and more research is pointing
towards the benefits of consuming a plant-based diet.
The Takeaway
One thing is quite clear, and that’s the
fact that a plant-based diet has great benefits for our health and
impacts our biology in a very positive way, while meat eating and
consuming animal products does the exact opposite. This is not really a
matter to debate, we instead need to question what we are doing on this
planet and how we are treating other animals as well. They are being
tortured and it’s extremely heart-breaking. It’s very cruel and very bad
for our planet to consume meat. All signs point to the fact that it’s
not natural at all.
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In Brief
- The Facts:Multiple studies have shown that a whole foods, plant-based diet can help manage, prevent, and, in some cases, even reverse diabetes.
- Reflect On:Why is dietary intervention not a priority of conventional doctors? Especially when it can be much more beneficial to the patient than medication?
Food
truly is medicine, and nutrition is a great way to combat multiple
diseases. What’s extremely confusing is why so many doctors still choose
to prescribe medication first, without considering the power of
nutrition. Many doctors are not even aware of the power of nutrition and
its ability to heal diseases, and this is probably because they know
next to nothing about it given that they learn nothing about it in
medical school.
However, things are changing. There are
an abundance of doctors who are not prescribing medication when it’s not
needed, and instead prescribing a proper diet. Many of them are
starting to educate themselves using the literature and science
surrounding nutrition. It’s not only doctors, but patients are choosing
to self educate themselves now as well.
When it comes to the medical
industry, self education is important, given the fact that “The medical
profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in
terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and
research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing
themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry.” – Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal (source)
Not long ago, Dr. Asseem Malhotra, a
well-known Doctor in Britain, had some choice words to say in front of
the European Parliament about modern-day medical education and the
overall knowledge doctors possess. He’s one of many who continues to
emerge and speak out. You can read more about that here.
When it comes to type 2 diabetes, it’s
one of the diseases that can easily be managed with a proper diet. The
undue influence the pharmaceutical industry has on the medical industry
and doctors’ lack of understanding of nutrition is why, I believe, more
than 370 million people around the world suffer from diabetes, and
approximately 100 million Americans have it or are likely to get it.
It’s firmly established in scientific
literature and quite clear now that moving to a whole-food, plant-based
diet can drastically reduce the symptoms of type 1 diabetes and can even
help manage, or in many cases completely reverse, type 2 diabetes and
pre-diabetes. Giving up animal products and processed foods helps as
well, and there is an abundance of research that shows this.
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Perhaps one of the most important pieces of evidence is the fact that there are real life success stories. Forks over Knives has a plethora of examples and real-life case studies that
support the notion that eliminating animal products and following a
healthy, whole-foods diet can make it easier to live with diabetes.
In 2016, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a study that
showed plant-based diets can lower the risk of type 2 diabetes by a
third. This involves simply switching out animal products for
plant-based alternatives. A whole-foods, plant-based diet is rich in
beneficial dietary fiber, antioxidants, and micronutrients, and low in
saturated fats. This is excellent for overall health outcomes, whether
they’re related to diabetes or not.
Multiple studies have shown that red and processed meats (also recently linked to cancer by the WHO), as well as animal protein in general, increase the risk of type 2 diabetes. In omnivore populations, the risk of diabetes is doubled compared with vegans. Another study found that eating meat once a week or more over a 17-year period increased the risk of diabetes by a startling 74%.
A follow up study was conducted and found that increasing red meat
intake by more than just half a serving per day was closely associated
with an almost 50% increased risk of contracting diabetes over four years.
Removing animal products and shifting to a diet consisting of whole
and minimally processed plant foods can reduce the problems created by
type 1 and type 1.5 autoimmune diabetes big time. Although there’s no
cure for this type of diabetes, the right diet has plenty of benefits. Cyrus Khambatta, PhD, writes that following a low-fat, whole-foods plant-based lifestyle can:- Boost insulin sensitivity and reduce insulin use by more than 40 percent after six months.
- Lead to more predictable blood glucose, making it easier to manage diabetes.
- Increase blood flow to tissues in the body and reduce the likelihood of diabetes-related nerve damage.
- Reduce the burden on the kidneys, decreasing the chances of getting kidney disease.
The Complete Guide To Fasting & Reversing Type 2 Diabetes: A Special Interview With Dr. Jason Fung.
Here are some other related articles you might be interested in as well:
9 Things That Happen When You Stop Eating Meat
Internal Medicine Physician Shares What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Eating Meat
Plant-Based Protein VS. Protein From Meat: Which One Is Better For Your Body
The Takeaway
The takeaway here is to recognize that a whole foods, plant-based diet can be life changing. There are a number of studies that have emerged and continue to emerge showing this, while many more show a strong connection between various diseases and eating meat. It makes one ponder, are humans even designed/supposed to eat meat, or has this simply been the tactic of clever marketing by the big food industry? Something to think about.You Can Help Stop The 5G Infrastructure
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In Brief
- The Facts:This article was written by Sayer Ji, Founder of Greenmedinfo.com where it first originally appeared. Posted here with permission.
- Reflect On:The average American consumes their body weight annually in this cancer-causing substance, and yet hospitals freely feed it to their cancer patients, seemingly oblivious to the harm it does.
Hospitals
feed cancer patients sugar and high carbohydrate diets for a simple
reason: they are abysmally ignorant of the role of nutrition in health
and disease — hence their burgeoning growth, packed rooms, and ‘return
customers.’
Even though the science itself shows – at least since the mid-20’s with Otto Warburg’s cancer hypothesis —
that tumors prefer to utilize sugar fermentation to produce energy
rather than the much more efficient oxygen-based phosphorylation* –
hospitals have actually invited corporations like McDonald’s to move into their facilities
to ‘enhance’ their patient’s gustatory experience, presumably to
provide comfort and take the edge off of the painful surgery, radiation
and chemo treatments erroneously proffered to them as the only
reasonable ‘standard of care.’
But the times are changing, with new
research requiring these medical institutions to reform their dietary
strategies, at least if they wish to claim that their interventions are
in fact ‘evidence-based,’ as they so often claim.
Study Reveals Sugar Doesn’t Just Feed But Causes Cancer
A groundbreaking study, uncovered by one
of our volunteer researchers at Greenmedinfo, is the first of its kind
to identify sugar, not only as fuel source for an already existing
cancer, but as a primary driver in oncogenesis – i.e. the initiation of
cancerous characteristics (phenotype) within previously healthy cells.
Published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and titled, Increased sugar uptake promotes oncogenesis via EPAC/RAP1 and O-GlcNAc pathways,
researchers addressed a common perception (or misperception) in the
cancer research community regarding sugar’s relationship to cancer:
namely, “increased glycolysis [sugar based metabolism] is frequently
viewed as a consequence of oncogenic events that drive malignant cell
growth and survival.”
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Contrary to this conventional view, the
new study “provide[s] evidence that increased glycolytic activation
itself can be an oncogenic event.” That is to say, the activation of
sugar-based metabolism in a cell – driven by both the presence of
increased quantities of glucose and the increase glucose receptors on
the cell membrane surface (i.e. “overexpression of a glucose
transporter”) – drives cancer initiation.
Moreover, the study found that
“Conversely, forced reduction of glucose uptake by breast cancer cells
led to phenotypic reversion.” In other words, interfering with sugar
availability and uptake to the cell causes the cancer cell to REGRESS
towards its pre-cancer structure-function (phenotype).
What Are The Implications of This Research to the Diet?
What this new research indicates is that
sugar – of which Americans consume an astounding 160 lbs annually
(imagine: 31 five-pound bags for each of us!) – is one of the primary
causes of metabolic cell changes in the body consistent with the
initiation and promotion of cancer. And, the research indicates that
removing it from the diet, and depriving the cells of it, could REVERSE
cancer. Why is this so surprising? It’s because Americans have been lead
like lambs to the slaughter to think of “prevention” as “early
detection,” focusing not on identifying and removing the well known
nutritional and environmental causes of cancer, rather, to spend their
time, energy, and money on cause-marketing campaigns focused on “finding
a cure” — as if one didn’t already exist right in front of our noses,
or more aptly, on the end of our forks.
Hidden Sugar, Crouching Cancer
It has been estimated by the USDA that
the average American consumes 200 lbs of grain products annually. Why
is this relevant to the question of sugar in the diet? Because refined
carbohydrate products – e.g. crackers, bread, pasta, cereal – are
actually ‘hidden’ forms of sugar. In fact, puffed rice causes your blood
to become sweeter (and presumably feeds more cancer cells sugar) than
white sugar, as it is higher on the glycemic index. Adding the two
figures together – annual per capita consumption of sugar and
grain-based products – we get a jaw dropping 360 lbs of sugar (both
overt (table sugar/high fructose corn syrup) and covert (grain carbs)
annually – all of which may contribute to promoting the ideal metabolic
situation of cancer cells: aerobic glycolysis.
This is one reason why the ketogenic
diet – that is, a fat- and protein-focused diet devoid of carbohydrate,
both in simple (sugar) and complex (grain product) form – has been found
so useful in the most aggressive of cancers: including brain cancer.
Once you ‘pull the rug out’ from under the sugar/carb-craving cancer
cells, they are forced to either undergo programmed cell death
(apoptosis) or re-differentiate back into non-cancerous phenotypes.
If It’s So Bad For Us, Why Do We Eat So Much?
One of the primary reasons why we eat
sugar and carbohydrate rich diets is because they are addictive. Within
minutes of consuming sugar/carbs our body goes through a neuroendocrine
roller coaster. Your brain can not survive very long without glucose,
the fundamental energy unit of the cell, and will ‘freak out’ if
deprived of a steady stream of this ‘nutrient’ within only 2-3 minutes.
The endocrine system, on the other hand, perceives the danger of high
sugar – namely, glycation associated damage to protein and lipid
structures within the cells of our body; think: blood caramelizing,
getting sticky, and gumming up the finely tuned works – and will release
hormones such as insulin, adrenaline and cortisol, in order to try to
get the elevated sugar in the blood and tissues under control. Insulin
forces the sugar into storage within the cell, both as glycogen and as
fat, but often does its job too well, causing available glucose levels
in the brain to be depleted – setting off a vicious cycle of ’emergency
signals’ telling the body to release more cortisol and adrenaline to
increase the levels of glucose in the blood. This, of course, will
result in additional insulin production and release, causing the same
cycle to be repeated over and over again.
This seemingly endless vicious cycle is
responsible for the insatiable cravings a high carb/sugar diet generates
– not to mention the fructose-based hedonic effects generated in the brain that
modulate both opioid and dopamine receptors in the nervous system (not
unlike alcohol), and the pharmacologically active peptides in many gluten-containing grains, which also drive addictive behaviors and an almost psychotic fixation on getting carbs at each meal.
No wonder we have an epidemic of cancer
in a world where the Westernized diet prevails. Certainly, we do not
mean to indicate that a sugar/carb-rich diet is the only cause of
cancer. There are many other factors that contribute to cancer
initiation and promotion, such as:
- Chemical exposure
- Radiation exposure
- Chronic stress that suppresses the immune system
- Vaccines containing hidden retroviruses and cancer causing viruses
- Natural infection with bacteria and viruses that are cancer causing
- Lack of sleep
- Insufficient nutrients (lack of methyl donors such as B12, folate, and B6 will prevent the body from ‘turning off’ (methylating) cancer-promoting genes
Even though cancer is a complex,
multi-factorial phenomena, with variables we can not always control, one
thing we can do is control what goes into our mouth. Sugar, for
instance, does not belong there if we truly want to prevent and/or treat
cancer. And don’t forget, carbohydrates that don’t taste sweet on the
front end – bread, crackers, cereal – certainly convert to sugar in the
body within minutes post-consumption.
In a nutshell, if you are concerned
about cancer, have cancer, or would like to prevent recurrence, removing
sugar and excess carbohydrates is a must. Not only is it common sense,
but it is now validated by experimental research.
Additional Research
Note: another recent study found that Candida albicans (yeast)
also contributes to cancer initiation and promotion. C. albicans
thrives on sugar, lending additional support to the notion that sugar
(consumed excessively) may be a primary driver of the cancer epidemic in
those consuming the modern Western diet. For information on sugar
alternatives that are not synthetic toxicants like Splenda (sucralose), read my latest article on the topic: 4 Sugar Alternatives That Won’t Poison You.
*Note: Cancer cells prefer to ferment sugar as a form of energy even when there is sufficient oxygen available to the cells to do so; hence Warburg’s description of cancer metabolism as ‘aerobic glycolysis’ or the so-called ‘Warburg effect’
Originally published: 2017-12-04
Article udpated: 2019-07-19
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Link to the original article
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[Note: This is Part IX in a series of articles adapted from the second Children’s Health Defense eBook: Conflicts of Interest Undermine Children’s Health. The first eBook, The Sickest Generation: The Facts Behind the Children’s Health Crisis and Why It Needs to End,
described how children’s health began to worsen dramatically in the
late 1980s following fateful changes in the childhood vaccine schedule.]
The vaccine industry and its government
and scientific partners routinely block meaningful science and fabricate
misleading studies about vaccines. They could not do so, however,
without having enticed medical journals into a mutually beneficial
bargain. Pharmaceutical companies supply journals with needed income,
and in return, journals play a key role in suppressing studies that
raise critical questions about vaccine risks—which would endanger
profits.
Journals are willing to accept even the most highly misleading advertisements. The FDA has flagged numerous instances of advertising violations, including ads that overstated a drug’s effectiveness or minimized its risks.
An exclusive and dependent relationship
Advertising is one of the most obviously beneficial ways that medical journals’ “exclusive and dependent relationship” with the pharmaceutical industry plays out. According to a 2006 analysis in PLOS Medicine, drugs and medical devices are the only products for which medical journals accept advertisements. Studies show that journal advertising generates “the highest return on investment of all promotional strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies.” The pharmaceutical industry puts a particularly “high value on
advertising its products in print journals” because journals reach
doctors—the “gatekeeper between drug companies and patients.” Almost
nine in ten drug advertising dollars are directed at physicians.
In the U.S. in 2012, drug companies spent $24 billion marketing
to physicians, with only $3 billion spent on direct-to-consumer
advertising. By 2015, however, consumer-targeted advertising had jumped
to $5.2 billion,
a 60% increase that has reaped bountiful rewards. In 2015, Pfizer’s
Prevnar-13 vaccine was the nation’s eighth most heavily advertised drug;
after the launch of the intensive advertising campaign, Prevnar
“awareness” increased by over 1,500% in eight months,
and “44% of targeted consumers were talking to their physicians about
getting vaccinated specifically with Prevnar.” Slick ad campaigns have
also helped boost uptake of “unpopular” vaccines like Gardasil.
Advertising is such an established part of journals’ modus operandi that high-end journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) boldly invite medical marketers to “make NEJM the cornerstone of
their advertising programs,” promising “no greater assurance that your
ad will be seen, read, and acted upon.” In addition, medical journals
benefit from pharmaceutical companies’ bulk purchases of thousands of
journal reprints and industry’s sponsorship of journal subscriptions and
journal supplements.
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In 2003, an editor at The BMJ wrote about the numerous ways in which drug company advertising can bias medical journals (and the practice of medicine)—all of which still hold true today. For example:
- Advertising monies enable prestigious journals to get thousands of copies into doctors’ hands for free, which “almost certainly” goes on to affect prescribing.
- Journals are willing to accept even the most highly misleading advertisements. The FDA has flagged numerous instances of advertising violations, including ads that overstated a drug’s effectiveness or minimized its risks.
- Journals will guarantee favorable editorial mentions of a product in order to earn a company’s advertising dollars.
- Journals can earn substantial fees for publishing supplements even when they are written by “paid industry hacks”—and the more favorable the supplement content is to the company that is funding it, the bigger the profit for the journal.
Discussing clinical trials, the BMJ editor added:
“Major trials are very good for journals in that doctors around the
world want to see them and so are more likely to subscribe to journals
that publish them. Such trials also create lots of publicity, and
journals like publicity. Finally, companies purchase large numbers of
reprints of these trials…and the profit margin to the publisher is huge.
These reprints are then used to market the drugs to doctors, and the
journal’s name on the reprint is a vital part of that sell.”
… however, even these poor-quality studies—when funded by the pharmaceutical industry—got far more attention than equivalent studies not funded by industry.
Industry-funded bias
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), nearly three-fourths of
all funding for clinical trials in the U.S.—presumably including
vaccine trials—came from corporate sponsors as of the early 2000s. The
pharmaceutical industry’s funding of studies (and investigators) is a
factor that helps determine which studies get published, and where. As a
Johns Hopkins University researcher has acknowledged, funding can lead
to bias—and while the potential exists for governmental or departmental
funding to produce bias, “the worst source of bias is industry-funded.”
In 2009, researchers published a systematic review of several hundred influenza vaccine trials.
Noting “growing doubts about the validity of the scientific evidence
underpinning [influenza vaccine] policy recommendations,” the authors
showed that the vaccine-favorable studies were “of significantly lower
methodological quality”; however, even these poor-quality studies—when
funded by the pharmaceutical industry—got far more attention than
equivalent studies not funded by industry. The authors commented:
[Studies] sponsored by industry had greater visibility as they were more likely to be published by high impact factor journals and were likely to be given higher prominence by the international scientific and lay media, despite their apparent equivalent methodological quality and size compared with studies with other funders.
In their discussion, the authors also described how the industry’s vast resources enable lavish and strategic dissemination of favorable results.
For example, companies often distribute “expensively bound” abstracts
and reprints (translated into various languages) to “decision makers,
their advisors, and local researchers,” while also systematically
plugging their studies at symposia and conferences.
The World Health Organization’s standards describe reporting of clinical trial results as a “scientific, ethical, and moral responsibility.” However, it appears that as many as half of all clinical trial results go unreported—particularly when their results are negative. A European official involved in drug assessment has described the problem as “widespread,”
citing as an example GSK’s suppression of results from four clinical
trials for an anti-anxiety drug when those results showed a possible
increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents. Experts warn that
“unreported studies leave an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the risks and benefits of treatments.”
Many vaccine studies flagrantly illustrate biases and selective reporting that produce skewed write-ups that are more marketing than science.
Debased and biased results
The “significant association between funding sources and pro-industry conclusions” can play out in many different ways, notably through methodological bias and debasement of
study designs and analytic strategies. Bias may be present in the form
of inadequate sample sizes, short follow-up periods, inappropriate
placebos or comparisons, use of improper surrogate endpoints, unsuitable
statistical analyses or “misleading presentation of data.”
Occasionally, high-level journal
insiders blow the whistle on the corruption of published science. In a
widely circulated quote, Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of
NEJM, acknowledged that
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical
research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted
physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.” Dr. Angell added that
she “[took] no pleasure in this conclusion, which [she] reached slowly
and reluctantly” over two decades at the prestigious journal.
Many vaccine studies flagrantly illustrate biases and selective reporting that
produce skewed write-ups that are more marketing than science. In
formulaic articles that medical journals are only too happy to publish,
the conclusion is almost always the same, no matter the vaccine: “We did
not identify any new or unexpected safety concerns.” As an example of
the use of inappropriate statistical techniques to exaggerate vaccine
benefits, an influenza vaccine study reported a “69% efficacy rate” even
though the vaccine failed “nearly all who
[took] it.” As explained by Dr. David Brownstein, the study’s authors
used a technique called relative risk analysis to derive their 69%
statistic because it can make “a poorly performing drug or therapy look
better than it actually is.” However, the absolute risk difference
between the vaccine and the placebo group was 2.27%, meaning that the
vaccine “was nearly 98% ineffective in preventing the flu.”
… the reviewers had done an incomplete job and had ignored important evidence of bias.
Trusted evidence?
In 2018, the Cochrane
Collaboration—which bills its systematic reviews as the international
gold standard for high-quality, “trusted” evidence—furnished conclusions
about the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine that clearly signaled
industry bias. In May of that year, Cochrane’s highly favorable review improbably
declared the vaccine to have no increased risk of serious adverse
effects and judged deaths observed in HPV studies “not to be related to
the vaccine.” Cochrane claims to be free of conflicts of interest, but
its roster of funders includes
national governmental bodies and international organizations pushing
for HPV vaccine mandates as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—both of which are
staunch funders and supporters of HPV vaccination. The Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation’s president is a former top CDC official who served
as acting CDC director during the H1N1 “false pandemic” in 2009 that ensured millions in windfall profits for vaccine manufacturers.
Two months after publication of
Cochrane’s HPV review, researchers affiliated with the Nordic Cochrane
Centre (one of Cochrane’s member centers) published an exhaustive critique,
declaring that the reviewers had done an incomplete job and had
“ignored important evidence of bias.” The critics itemized numerous methodological and ethical missteps on
the part of the Cochrane reviewers, including failure to count nearly
half of the eligible HPV vaccine trials, incomplete assessment of
serious and systemic adverse events and failure to note that many of the
reviewed studies were industry-funded. They also upbraided the Cochrane
reviewers for not paying attention to key design flaws in the original
clinical trials, including the failure to use true placebos and the use
of surrogate outcomes for cervical cancer.
In response to the criticisms, the
editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library initially stated that a team of
editors would investigate the claims “as a matter of urgency.”
Instead, however, Cochrane’s Governing Board quickly expelled one of
the critique’s authors, Danish physician-researcher Peter Gøtzsche, who
helped found Cochrane and was the head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre.
Gøtzsche has been a vocal critic of Cochrane’s “increasingly commercial business model,”
which he suggests is resulting in “stronger and stronger resistance to
say anything that could bother pharmaceutical industry interests.”
Adding insult to injury, Gøtzsche’s direct employer, the Rigshospitalet
hospital in Denmark, then fired Gøtzsche.
In response, Dr. Gøtzsche stated, “Firing me sends the unfortunate
signal that if your research results are inconvenient and cause public
turmoil, or threaten the pharmaceutical industry’s earnings, …you will be sacked.” In March 2019, Gøtzsche launched an independent Institute for Scientific Freedom.
In 2019, the editor-in-chief and research editor of BMJ Evidence Based Medicine—the
journal that published the critique of Cochrane’s biased review—jointly
defended the critique as having “provoke[d] healthy debate and pose[d]
important questions,” affirming the value of publishing articles that
“hold organisations to account.” They added that “Academic freedom means
communicating ideas, facts and criticism without being censored, targeted or reprimanded” and urged publishers not to “shrink from offering criticisms that may be considered inconvenient.”
In recent years, a number of journals have invented bogus excuses to withdraw or retract articles critical of risky vaccine ingredients, even when written by top international scientists.
The censorship tsunami
Another favored tactic is to keep
vaccine-critical studies out of medical journals altogether, either by
refusing to publish them (even if peer reviewers recommend their
publication) or by concocting excuses to pull articles after
publication. In recent years, a number of journals have invented bogus
excuses to withdraw or retract articles critical of risky vaccine
ingredients, even when written by top international scientists. To cite
just three examples:
- The journal Vaccine withdrew a study that questioned the safety of the aluminum adjuvantused in Gardasil.
- The journal Science and Engineering Ethics retracted an article that made a case for greater transparency regarding the link between mercury and autism.
- Pharmacological Research withdrew a published veterinary article that implicated aluminum-containing vaccines in a mystery illness decimating sheep, citing “concerns” from an anonymous reader.
Elsevier, which publishes two of these journals, has a track record of setting up fake journals to market Merck’s drugs, and Springer, which publishes the third journal as well as influential publications like Nature and Scientific American, has been only too willing to accommodate censorship requests.
However, even these forms of censorship may soon seem quaint in
comparison to the censorship of vaccine-critical information now being
implemented across social media and other platforms.
This concerted campaign to prevent dissemination of vaccine content
that does not toe the party line will make it harder than ever for
American families to do their due diligence with regard to vaccine risks
and benefits.
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