Hypoglycemic episodes (especially repeated) are likely harmful to “mindspan”. Yet you seem to ignore this apparently.
As for Estep’s premature claim of higher dietary iron intake having a causative role for a range of neurodegenerative diseases based on pretty much weak and circumstantial evidence that does not establish casuality - an iron chelator recently in larger follow up human trials has failed based on his predictions at least for newly diagnosed Parkinson’s not on levodopa:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2209254
In fact, contrary to his predictions, which seem to be partly based on the first small sample size iteration of this trial and a few others, this iron chelator made things worse by accelerating the progression of neurodegenerative disease for these newly diagnosed PD patients and caused harm beyond the typical expected adverse effects, despite decreasing nigrostriatal iron content. Kind of throws a wrench at the hypothesis, but I can’t say it completely rules it out yet.
But one should accept it could be possible that he is just plain wrong and dysregulated iron leading to accumulation is merely an epiphenomenon because all the trials with very modest positive effects as suggestive evidence were pretty tiny in the first place. There really wasn’t much evidence in the first place and at best even if it was true - it would be a modest effect with some tradeoffs.
Have you considered that you’re actually potentially increasing the risk of dementia and accelerating the progression of neurodegenerative disease with some of your claims and interventions?
BTW, I actually take in ~8-9 mg iron personally - even before his claims - and rarely eat red meat in the first place. It’s not because I believe dietary iron has any definitive casual role, as it is quite premature, it’s much more I don’t see any particular reason to take many times the RDA in iron or pretty much almost any other micronutrient either in principle from most fortified foods or any supplement - unless the evidence is particularly compelling.
It also seems you are ignoring high calcium fortification/supplementation common particularly in certain vegan products as well, despite evidence for potentially increased risk. So do you focus at people touting risks particularly regarding meat (which in this case specifically applies to high intakes of red meat) as opposed to risks in veganism?
I’ll also mention a few points regarding Estep and his recommendation on canola oil and a few of his “Mindspan Elite” diet claims.
He claims that it is important to avoid trans fat including not being fooled by <0.5g of trans fat on the label, but touts canola oil. High quality cold pressed canola oil is difficult to find and impractically expensive for most people. You might as well just go with carefully selected true EVOO, so the canola oil recommendation seems largely not particularly applicable for most people.
He also describes a moderate to high intake of fish in the diet of his proclaimed “Mindspan Elite” diet, not veganism. He seems to differentiate meat and fish as inherently different categories (although one can actually selectively breed animals for way more oleic acid and stearic acid as a large majority of the fat content - both of which are LDL-lowering, so there’s a lot more caveats than often assumed to get close to vegetable oils on top of a potential benefit of several specific fatty acids found either only in animals or impractical in plant only, such as CLA), but note he doesn’t recommend specifically eliminating meat, but replacing most “meat” with fish. A bit of a weird category split since it’s not that clear cur, but okay fine I suppose for communication and typical situation purposes that’s acceptable.
He seems to be touting that whole grains and avoidance of refined grains is not the answer and “some” refined grains are good, partly because Asian countries and specifically Okinawa was a big reference. But that’s actually not as true he makes it. The traditional Okinawan staple was the purple sweet potato, not refined grains such as white rice. He claims that Okinawans shifted post WW2 to white rice - but not everyone actually did this. The ones that made shifts (he does mention Westenization and Western diets) eventually ended up closer to the Japanese average life expectancy. He doesn’t seem to have caught this or he might be subtly overlooking data in favor of his conclusion on dietary iron without enough evidence.
I do get his concern on the oxidation of oils. There is a simpler answer - consider avoiding canola oil and eat mixed nuts and fish with some real EVOO for cooking (don’t buy bulk, only small batch) if you wish, and put nuts and fish in the fridge, preferably sealed to slow oxidative processes. Nuts and fish are convenient to put in the fridge, but vegetable oils aren’t if you ever tried his recommendations you’ll see it takes a fairly long time to become liquid again (fat oxidation isn’t particularly a new issue either even before his claims). The canola oil recommendation just seems pretty impractical when you actually try it with all the factors considered. He also seems to be pretty broad in the negatives towards saturated fat recommendations due to LDL, but he isn’t precise and appears to be overgeneralizing - i.e. stearic acid isn’t significantly LDL increasing and potentially slightly LDL lowering, but coconut oil, which he says is a healthful fat without any supportive evidence isn’t necessary the case with much, much more palmitic acid, lauric acid, and myrisitic acid that constitute near 90% that goes against at least his stated reasoning which is firmly based on the LDL hypothesis. He doesn’t seem to be particularly exceptional at rigor in some of his dietary conclusions based on the reasoning presented. That’s below my expectations for any book that is literally a diet book
