Anecdotal Evidence
Take it or leave it...
Personal recent experience of mine:
As I mentioned a couple entries ago, I've had some set-backs when trying to become a 100% raw vegan. I actually only had my first green drink about two weeks ago. This experience, to say the least, was astonishing.
I have not been drinking green drinks all-along because the smell of blended vegetables makes me feel sick to my stomach. However, I've discovered that the smell is much worse than the taste, and that by holding my nose I find many more vegetable drinks palatable.
[Update from March 18th 2011: I've found ways to drink vegetable juices that a pleasant not. It takes some trial and error. Certain combinations taste really bad, and some combinations taste amazing. Also, it's important to note that making juice and making smoothies are two different things. Juice has the pulp removed and is made with a juicer. Smoothies still have their pulp and are made with a blender. While many people will find vegetable smoothies intolerable, they will find the same ingredients delicious when turned into a juice.]
Eye-Strain
Not so long before having my first green drink, I was suffering from severe eye strain, which I wrote about on my all-purpose blog. This severe eye strain was so intense that I walked about my days wearing eye covers with all the lights in the apartment off. Just a peek of dim light made my head explode in pain. I would suspect that it was a migraine, but I have no history of migraines, and neither do my parents or siblings. Also, I could actually feel the pain in my eye muscles. It was incredibly painful to move my eyes about in their sockets.
As I wrote about in the entry on the eye-strain, I was able to deduce the causes. But what I wasn't able to accomplish in any quick order was a solution. Even after I was able to sit at my computer again, I could not look at a light-bulb without getting a headache, and experiencing intense pain in the eyes and eye muscles, and having my eyes water.
My First Green Drink
And this is where my first amazing green drink comes into play. My husband graciously made me a mild green drink with carrots, carrot-tops (the green stalk that comes out of the top of the carrot), cucumbers and spinach. (If you've been reading my blog, then you know that I'm only just barely able to tolerate cucumbers and spinach.)
Green drink in the making!
I drank it, and was surprised that it wasn't so bad in flavor. It was mild, and only mildly unpleasant. Within minutes (minutes!!!) I was suddenly able to look at a light-bulb without any pain for the first time in well over a month! I was astounded. I had grown into the habit of tilting my line of sight down, and had become used to the slight pressure behind the eyes, and just like that: the pain was gone!
An experience that a friend of my aunt had:
A friend of my mother's oldest sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Multiple sclerosis, or MS, is a chronic condition that affects the central nervous system: the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. The damage caused by multiple sclerosis creates scars, called lesions, that can be seen on the brain, spinal cord and optic nerve. Because the process of developing these lesions is called sclerosis, multiple sclerosis literally means "many scars."
This is not something you're expected to ever 'recover' from. It's not something that is expected to be 'cured.'
A friend of this friend of my aunt brought her a huge sack of carrots. She ate carrots three or more times a day. She said (jokingly), "I ate carrots until they were coming out of my ears!" And upon returning to the doctor, her multiple sclerosis was cured.
This raises the question; Are carrots just that darn amazing?
Yes, they are!
But that isn't the whole and complete truth. Raw vegetables are that darn amazing. It's entirely possible that she would have experienced the same results had she eaten the same amount in raw broccoli, or fresh raw bell peppers, or fresh raw dandelions.
Delicious salad with heirloom tomatoes and garlic seasoning.
This evidence is far from scientific. However, both of these stories are true and incredible to those who experienced them. As I've said before, my mother reversed her diabetes. If you spend the time to do the research, you'll find thousands of stories of people who were cured without chemicals, harmful prescription drugs, without chemo-therapy, and so forth. You'll find that thousands of people have been cured with food. Just like the ancient Chinese saying says: food is medicine. That is, fresh raw food is medicine. Hamburgers and milkshakes are not food, (they're poison!)
A friend of this friend of my aunt brought her a huge sack of carrots. She ate carrots three or more times a day. She said (jokingly), "I ate carrots until they were coming out of my ears!" And upon returning to the doctor, her multiple sclerosis was cured.
Carrots
This raises the question; Are carrots just that darn amazing?
Yes, they are!
But that isn't the whole and complete truth. Raw vegetables are that darn amazing. It's entirely possible that she would have experienced the same results had she eaten the same amount in raw broccoli, or fresh raw bell peppers, or fresh raw dandelions.
Delicious salad with heirloom tomatoes and garlic seasoning.
The Scientific Method
This evidence is far from scientific. However, both of these stories are true and incredible to those who experienced them. As I've said before, my mother reversed her diabetes. If you spend the time to do the research, you'll find thousands of stories of people who were cured without chemicals, harmful prescription drugs, without chemo-therapy, and so forth. You'll find that thousands of people have been cured with food. Just like the ancient Chinese saying says: food is medicine. That is, fresh raw food is medicine. Hamburgers and milkshakes are not food, (they're poison!)
PS: The FDA is full of shit.
Good luck getting to tolerate vegetables better. I like kale and cabbage, but (apart from white cabbage) find them pretty much inedible raw.
ReplyDeleteCould you marinade them to make them more palatable and digestible? Not sure whether that would work or not.
There's a saying in evidence-based medicine: "the plural of anecdote is not data." It's a bit glib and not strictly true, but it's a useful thing to keep in mind. There's a big cause and effect problem here. Thousands of people may have stories of getting better after changing their diet. This does not prove a link between the change in diet and the recovery.
For example, many thousands of people have got better after taking SSRI anti-depressants. That was backed up by trial data. However trials have continued to be carried out, and the evidence has been challenged. Now I think there's a serious split in the scientific establishment over whether SSRIs are effective or not.
If not, where does that leave all those people who thought they were "cured" by the drugs?
One of the problems with SSRI trials is publication bias. Trials which don't get positive results have a tendency not to get published. That is an even greater problem with anecdotal evidence. Those people who didn't reverse their diabetes, or still developed cancer? Generally they don't write about it.
Mental health is quite a hard area to research effectively. Diet is another. In In Defense of Food Michael Pollan talks to lots of nutritional scientists to try and find a consensus. The only thing they can agree on is that people should eat more plants (and one thoughtful veteran isn't even sure about that). There are lots of correlational studies showing various diets are associated with lower risk of things or greater life expectancy, but little causal evidence, and some contradictory things (eg. eskimos hardly eat any plants, the italians eat a lot of highly processed flour).
When comparing populations with different diets, there are usually a huge host of confounding variables. When performing experiments it's very hard to get people to stick to diets (it's hard enough to reliably get people to take a full course of antibiotics).
Curative interventions maybe be easier to study, though they run into the same problem of getting people to stick to a diet, particularly when they're facing other disturbing changes to their life. Coming up with an appropriate placebo is a challenge. It also may be the case that dietary changes are effective for some groups but not for others, further complicating things. (This is a favourite argument of SSRI producers.)
Hello, Alex here,
ReplyDeleteI have MS and I was looking at your site and wanted to know more about your experience after, as you said "I gave up meats, dairies, breads and sugars a few years ago (2007)....".
What estrategy did you follow to accomplished this? What did you started eliminating first?
Thank you very much,
Alex