The Half-Baked Story

This is the story of the low-fat, high cooked-starches diet promoted by Dr. McDougall.

Dr. McDougall is a relatively successful doctor that promotes preventative/curative health practices through diet and lifestyle. He has helped many people become healthier, including one of my heroines Dr. Ruth Heidrich who overcame her breast cancer through a low-fat, mostly raw, high fruit, vegan diet. Dr. McDougall has dispelled, through scientific study and promotion, many of the myths regarding the consumption of animal products and especially fat, including plant fat such as coconut oil. I appreciate many of his health articles.

However, it is my opinion that Dr. McDougall's approach is not optimal. He has not followed through to their scientific and logical conclusion his diet research and application. This is obvious by the majority of vegans that follow his recommendations, yet are still very often acutely and chronically sick. Colds, flus, allergies, arthritis, celiac disease, obesity, digestive disorders, cancers and many other diseases are still extremely prevalent in the cooked vegan population. It can not be otherwise because a cooked vegan diet is a nutritionally deficient diet.

All epidemiology studies, as well as individual nutritional studies, have shown that the higher the level of whole, fresh, raw, organic fruits and vegetables promotes the best health. Even Dr. McDougall recognizes that raw fruits and vegetables are nutritionally superior to cooked starches.

Let's do a cursory nutritional comparison of a typical cooked starch diet vs a typical 811rv diet, I'll use a simple program like www.nutridiary.com for the comparison:

811rv day one menu plan, p. 176 "The 80/10/10 Diet": 4lbs. watermelon, 1lb. bananas, 1lb peaches, 1lb mangos, 8 oz mango, 8 oz heirloom tomatoes, 1 lb romaine lettuce, 8 oz each cucumbers, mangos, and red peppers, 4 oz tomatoes. With this menu you get approximately 2000 calories, 102% RDA for iron, 1278%RDA for vitamin A, 2292% RDA for vitamin C and 291% RDA for fiber. Plus you get lots of the best quality water and many other nutrients not yet even known to science.

If you were to do a McDougall half-baked 80/10/10 diet and replace 1000 calories of 811rv with cooked starches-even the best quality cooked starches like a baked potatoe with skin and without salt (only 3.5 large baked potatoes=almost 1000 calories), you would immediately notice all of the most important vitamins dropping significantly, the water source dropping drastically, the fiber source becoming sticky and binding which causes bloating and constipation. Therefore, you would have a significant decrease of important nutrients. Not only that, you would increase exposure to scientifically proven toxins such as cancer causing acrylamide and other maillard reaction products with each bite. All of this for 3.5 measly potatoes!

It would be even worse if you were to add gut shredding whole grains, with their broken glass like fibers, gluten and predominantly acid minerals.

Is it any wonder that cooked vegans, who follow this low-fat, high starch diet only displace their cardio-vascular disease symptoms with allergies, celiac, arthritis, cancer, and more?

Dr. McDougall's only quibble with a raw diet is that he doesn't believe it's possible to get enough calories from raw foods. This is a lame and sorry excuse because it is more than possible to eat enough calories from raw fruits and vegetables. It does take some adjustment, mostly by overcoming psychologically our culturally conditioned bad habits. But it is very possible and even delicious to do so.

He also claims that no successful society has lived exclusively on raw fruits and vegetables. This too is false, because all archeological, paleo-botanical, anthropological evidence clearly shows that there has been NO successful human society since we left our original tropical forest home. We've just been destroying one habitat after another and moving on to plunder different ones with each successive boom/bust cycle we have created. Now we realize that it's a small world after all, and we're running out of resources to plunder.

In conclusion, Dr. McDougall's diet is a step in the right direction. It is healthier and more sustainable than an omnivore diet. However, it doesn't make it to the finish line. Sorry Dr. McDougall et al, I and many others have been there, and done that. I'm not buying your half-baked story anymore.