Today’s post will just be some musings of personal observation.
If you follow any online “health influencers,” you will notice that they often attract a rather passionate set of followers and detractors. For example, you will commonly find influencers in the low-carb community (and their followers) denigrating anybody who disagrees with them as not just wrong, but as stupid or corrupt. I commonly see commentary around such influencers that doctors have “lied to” the public about sugar; that the data linking high cholesterol to heart disease is based on only a few flawed studies from the 1950s; and that Ancel Keys (one of the early leading proponents of reducing saturated fat and cholesterol) made up his research results – none of which is true.
On the vegan side of things, one can find the same tendencies. I’ve seen interview clips of Michael Gregor (a prominent vegan physician and author) for example promoting the idea that a vegan diet is the “only” diet shown to reverse heart disease (it isn’t). And as a resident I once took care of a patient in the hospital who refused to believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – that she had had a heart attack, because she was a vegan and “if you don’t eat animal products, you can’t get heart disease.” (In fact, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of all Americans – vegans included).
