Excluding meat or dairy from a diet in no way ensures anemia, nor does it guarantee osteoporis. Statements to the effect that they do reflect a bias just as strong as that of the original offending press release.

I didn’t like the way he was suggesting that women avoid dairy either (among other things).

Thanks for stopping by! And please if I post something here again that you think isn’t good science - let me know!

Trisha

On top of all of this is the fine print in this recently published study. Most of his vegan mother data come from the Farm (hippy commune in Tennessee) and are reported through “personal communications” with the Farm’s head of midwifery. This one person reported more than 800 births from 1970 to 1983 as being to vegan women, with only three sets of twins in the bunch. So basically, Steinman’s study looks at some numbers other studies have generated and compares them with the number an old hippy midwife tells him and this is reported as scientific evidence. Clearly it’s not. The figure that says vegans have 13% less IGF in their bodies than others does not come from the Farm sample. The truth is that there were no measurements taken or reported for the Farm sample.

Furthermore, Steinman fails to explain that the human body produces as much IGF in ONE DAY as you can find in 3,000 quarts of milk. The IGF in milk is digestible. For a few servings of dairy a day create a difference of 13% in IGF levels is mathematically impossible. What is known is that people who have lower nutritional intake have less IGF because their bodies don’t produce it.

All Steinman has is a hypothesis and a poor one at that, because much of what he cites in his own bibliography points to all the factors that are known to cause higher rates of twins–age, nutrition, race, fertility treatments, etc. People in the U.S. eat plenty, the demongraphic makeup continues to change and women wait later in life to have families. On top of all this, an increasing number of women use fertility treatment.

Based on this hypothesis, Steinman publishes comments telling womenb to forego dairy and meat (two entire food groups) because he says but cannot prove they are more likely to have twins. He obviously isn’t too worried about osteoporosis or anemia . . .