Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer and he tried all kinds of crazy diet schemes. In fact, well before he was ever diagnosed, he was going weeks at a time eating just one type of food excessively and avoiding foods that could have kept him healthier.
Vegetarianism and it's offshoots annoy me the most. Show me one example of a person who lived a healthier life because they were a vegetarian. Yet they get all preachy and superior about it.
I retired after spending 25 years working for a large urban fire department. Nearly 90% of our calls were Emergency Medical. A lot of the food fads are stupid but relatively harmless because most people have short attention spans and do not stick with them for very long.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s we had neighbors who were vegetarians. After a while their hair started falling out and they began losing teeth... They were both college professors (liberal idiots according to my father) and they still could not figure out how to get enough essential nutrients in their diets to keep them healthy. They both had to eventually give up on vegetarianism.
Ironically, the people who I saw while working as a Firefighter who were most damaged by diet fads were my co-workers many of whom constantly were on various low carb, high protein, high fat unbalanced diets. As a supervisor it puts one in a very difficult position when you witness someone making bad nutrition choices that are affecting both their job performance and their physical well being, yet when you try to bring it up you get served a major ration of crap. We literally had people collapsing on the job when they would have to perform strenuous duties. It put us all at risk. My subordinate who was the most knowledgeable person on the hazmat team had to be transferred to communications because after years of following the “Atkins diet” he became morbidly obese and could no longer walk up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath.
One would think that in a profession where you are performing CPR almost daily on dead middle aged men who have not taken good care of themselves, that one would be more cognitive of the risks involved in choosing a poor diet. But it seems that most of us prefer to find excuses to continue behaving and eating the way we like. And their is nothing that a group of firefighters enjoy more than eating large quantities of meat and saturated fat at nearly every meal. I believe that this along with a lack of sleep more than working in hazardous atmospheres explains why professional firefighters have a shorter life expectancy than the general public.
Protein powder, high protein snacks, high protein frozen dinners and high protein nutritional supplements are found in abundance at pretty much any fire station in the country. We had all sorts of guys in their 30s, 40s and 50s that were overweight and having all sorts of health related problems that were related to their diets. I am skeptical of high protein, high fat, low carb diets because I have seen the toll it took on my friends who I lived with 24 hours a day year after year, some of whom went to an early grave because of poor dietary choices.
I’m with you; I believe animal fat and protein are important to our health. But when you say a vegan or vegetarian is never healthy, I’d have to say that someone who chose clean vegetables, fruits, and other plant foods, focusing on tubers and beans, would be living more healthy than someone eating processed, packaged foods only. The person eating the processed foods is the more likely to get cancer.
He immediately put me at ease and said that if you had to have pancreatic cancer this was the type to have. They found it early and it was just shy of the size these type tumors start producing islet cells and spread. I was scheduled for surgery (robot assisted laparoscopic). He said that it should take about 5 hours and if everything went as expected, after the Friday surgery, I should be back to work on Wednesday.
It ended up not going too well because of way my blood vessels were. Instead of taking just the tumor as planned they had to take almost 40% of my pancreas and my spleen. It took over 10 hours and my wife said when the surgeon came to see her he looked totally exhausted. But, the surgery was a success. Prior to this he had told me that he wouldn't really know until he got inside me and looked around if they'd be able to operate. If not they would close me up and I might have 7 years because of how slow these tumors grow and spread. There would be no chemo or radiation either way. It was 7 years in January and my last MRI was clean.
I did have some issues. The day after the surgery I came down with a very serious case of pneumonia in both lungs and went into full respiratory arrest. I spent 12 days in the hospital, 5 in the ICU.
My point is that Steve Jobs could have easily survived his cancer if he had relied on modern medicine instead of new age voodoo. Sorry for the long post.