Bob
Biased and cherry picked
Since vegans love citing Greger/NutritionFactsOrg/How Not To Die as a credible source on nutrition, I put together a few examples of how Greger selectively cites his sources. He will never acknowledge the positives of any animal product or white meat, cherry picks many things and selectively uses data. In Uprooting The Leading Causes Of Death, Greger asks "what happens if we put cancer on a vegan diet?" He proceeds to cite several studies from Dean Ornish and The Pritikin Institute. Have a look at this paper and you can read what sort of diet the Pritikin scientists used: "the diet consisted of natural whole grains, fruits and vegetables with limited amounts (<3.5 oz) of fish, fowl or lean meat and nonfat milk." So, the diet was NOT vegan, but rather LOW in animal foods. The Ornish study is hidden behind a paywall everywhere I look, and I'm not in the mood to pay for it, but I suspect Greger is pulling the same trick, since Ornish allows his patients to eat small portions of fish and nonfat dairy. Greger cited the Pritikin researchers again on page 222 of How Not To Die, calling the diet "plant-based." If you look up the study Greger cites, you see the same thing as above: "Food was provided ad libitum except for animal protein that was restricted to 3.5 oz portions, mainly cold-water fish or fowl, served 3 days per week." This is a good example of how the term "plant-based" can mislead. It allows people who advocate eating no animal foods at all to piggyback off of findings on low animal food diets, when they're not the same thing. Greger reported on a meta-analysis linking egg consumption with fatal prostate cancer, but made no mention of poultry being inversely associated with advanced and fatal prostate cancer in the same study. Later in the same video, Greger cites another study, and neglects to mention advanced and fatal prostate cancer inversely associating with chicken and fish consumption. Greger's video on the findings of the Harvard Nurse's Health Study is rather misleading. He plucks out the part of the abstract which says “substitution of other healthy protein sources for red meat is associated with a lower mortality risk," and mentions that substituting red meat with nuts was associated with the greatest decline in all-cause mortality. What Greger does not mention is that poultry, fish, and low-fat dairy were three of the things the authors considered "healthy protein sources," and that substituting these three things for red meat was also associated with a significant decline in mortality, just not to the same extent as nuts. Greger badly misrepresents a study of half a million people from the NIH. The abstract clearly says "Red and processed meat intakes were associated with modest increases in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality." Greger says "Meat intake means increases in cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality. End. Of. Story." The study didn't find anything negative for white meat except a mild increase in CVD risk for men. White meat consumption inversely associated with cancer and all-cause mortality in both men and women. Greger cherry-picks a study in a video about dietary sources of phthalates, which are used in plastic manufacturing. Greger mentions one type of phthalate being most concentrated in poultry, but not another type of phthalate being most concentrated in potatoes and tomatoes. I'm not arguing against potato or tomato consumption, just pointing out Greger's selective reporting. His video editing is also rather convenient. Within seconds, a text excerpt from later in the study whizzes onto the screen, and covers up the text in the abstract incriminating potatoes and tomatoes. Here's another good one from Denise Minger's critique of How Not To Die. Greger cites a study from India which correlated meat consumption with asthma, but left out that milk consumption was inversely associated with asthma.