Why Our Family Eats Animal Products: Part One from Nourishing Days is a breath of fresh air. It’s not often you see someone lay out the reasons they eat animal foods without supplication, mitigation, or apology.
Too bad the textbook Speshul Genotype Vegan had to show up in the comments. I have to admit, she was nice about it. But that kind of talk is still horseshit, for the reasons I lay out in my comment:
Chandelle, there is a huge difference between having a normal variation in one’s genetic makeup, and having a health problem. You are not an herbivore. If you can’t consume animal foods without negative health response then there is something wrong with your body.
I don’t know how to put it any plainer than that. I applaud everyone here who has been polite about this but I don’t want you convincing some impressionable young mind out there that they’re just a normal variation going in an evolutionary direction that will eventually separate from the rest of the species, so why not adopt a diet that ultimately will destroy their health.
I can’t be sanguine about this. For three years I suffered from menstrual problems that would have sent any woman with health insurance running screaming for the phone to get an appointment with their GYN. I didn’t have health insurance and none was forthcoming. It was so bad the first day or three of the cycle that I often had to stay home and use rags from the rag bags to supplement my usual period repertoire.
Last year I read something at the WAPF website about vitamin A and how people with certain health conditions can’t convert beta carotene (and healthy people can’t convert it *efficiently*). I decided to find a natural source of A to supplement with and found one that was from fish liver oil.
Lo and behold, suddenly my period problems improved dramatically. I used to get this weird cramping on one side before all heck would break loose. If I have kept up my A supplementation for the previous month, I no longer have that pain. The flow has lightened to the point that I can go out in public on the first day again and not have to go to the bathroom every half hour to make sure I’m not leaking.
It’s a miracle. It makes me wonder how many women have gotten hysterectomies or been put on weird, damaging drugs because their doctors never figured out what was going on.
And I’m angry. Furious. Because the government allows food sellers to record the presence of vitamin A content on the labels of plant foods, even though not a single plant food in the entire world contains the vitamin. Beta carotene is no more vitamin A than a lump of clay is a brick. Nutritionists are no better, routinely lying to us about the best sources of vitamin A, informing us that they are plant foods such as carrots.
That kind of crap encourages the militant vegan groups. I’m furious. I despise them. If I could shut every one of them down, I would. I’m not a violent person, but I’d love to disgrace them all into oblivion. They should be ashamed of themselves.
How many more nutrients do we have to find this stuff out about before it shuts those groups down? Fats? B12? Minerals, which half the time aren’t bioavailable in plant foods unless you cook the hell out of them, but we’re told it’s “healthier” to eat them raw?
Do me a favor? Whatever is going on with you, quit telling people it’s “just a natural variation” (not a direct quote from you I don’t think, but that’s the idea you are trying to get across). If you’re really curious about why you’re so different–and you ARE different–then go find out. It’s entirely possible no doctor will be able to help you. They don’t want to hear about health problems unless those can be cured with some fancy new drug. But you never know. You might get lucky.
Whatever the case. I know that some vegans who try to eat meat again have problems digesting it because their bodies have stopped making the necessary enzymes. Maybe that was your problem and maybe not. Maybe you didn’t really try every type of animal food you could–maybe you didn’t know about pasture-raised. You’re reading this blog, so I doubt that’s the case, but I have been wrong many times before and will be again.
But whatever it is, you’re not normal. I have no problem with you adjusting to your health situation as you feel moved to do. But don’t go around misleading people who don’t know any better. We suffer too much from that in this culture as it is.
And if by some unlikely chance you are some kind of a mole from PETA or wherever, you can take this to heart: If I ever get the chance to shut PETA down, nonviolently of course, I will jump to it. And I am not by far the only one. Know this: Some of us have been hurt by believing in the vegan ideology–not just the diet part, the *ideology* part–and we are NOT happy about the outcome.
I’m just glad I wasn’t trying to have another child. I have reason to believe my daughter’s kidneys were damaged by my lack of natural vitamin A intake during my pregnancy with her, as it is. She’s lucky she’s not blind too. Think about that next time you want to reassure someone that vitamin-starving their bodies is a fab idea. If you don’t care about the adults, the kids have no say in the matter.
I can’t blame the blogger at all if that pisses her off. The commenter, I don’t care so much. I’m just tired of everybody being polite about this. I actually tried being a vegan for a few weeks in 2005. I was already suffering from postpartum depression and social alienation and having been dumped by my baby’s father. The change in nutrition to outright malnutrition pushed me over the edge for a while.
Thea’s not just lucky to be sighted. She’s lucky to be alive. In retrospect I don’t think I would have hurt her in the state I was in at the time, but had I gotten much worse, who can say?
Just because a hearing-impaired person needs hearing aids, doesn’t mean any old person ought to start wearing hearing aids on a lark. So if you see another example of Speshul Genotype Vegan out in the blogosphere someplace, take what they have to say with a very large grain of salt.
If you take said grain of salt perched on top of a sixteen-ounce Porterhouse, all the better.
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Dana, thanks for making this statement without mincing words or trying to be nice-nice. I swear, the vegan/vegetarian/Raw Foodists make you feel like a greasy leper sometimes. My stint as a vegan, many years ago, made me really sick and probably helped accelerate some of issues I was fighting. It was my love of pepperoni and any kind of cheese that got me to see the error of my vegan ways.
Having celiac disease, my first thought when I read her comments was that the damage from gluten was causing malabsorption. In my own experience with this (advising a sister-in-law) it was the damage from high legume/sugar intake that made her so sick and unable to stomach meat. She has lupus/RA and I know in my heart she’s gluten intolerant just like most people, and she was living on cheap peanut butter and white bread. I sometimes think that the lectins in legumes cause a worse response than wheat protein. So she finally agreed to make up whey protein isolate shakes with 4 oz heavy cream and 4 oz water, for her meals. When she felt better, she started eating small bits of ground beef – maybe 2 ounces per meal.
It took a lot of persuasion to get her to momentarily forget what she thought she knew about cream and butter, though. I wish I could say that she stuck with it and sought out more information, but she didn’t. She has health insurance. I don’t. I have often said that one of the most fortunate aspects of low wage jobs followed by unemployment was the fact that I couldn’t afford health insurance. It forced me to figure it out myself. And I am pretty sure I came up with a better diagnosis.
Same here. I don’t object to health insurance and I think if we had a single-payer system it’d save lives. So many people put off medical care because they can’t pay for it, then an illness progresses beyond help. But on the other hand, not having the constant access to a doctor, therefore not being conditioned to take the doctor’s word as gospel, does force you to figure things out on your own. God, if I’d left all this up to a doctor, I’d be full on sick by now.
I have access to health insurance now but I want to use it as easy access to labs. I want them to test me and see if I’m gluten-intolerant, if I’m hypothyroid, etc. They can tell me whatever they want, nobody says I have to listen to it if it doesn’t seem to be backed by anything empirical. I just need the numbers.
That’s interesting about malabsorption possibly being related to poor meat digestion. I wonder if someone could fix the problem by consuming bone broth on a regular basis. The WAPF folks seem to think that helps. Dr. Pottenger used to recommend bone broth as a gut healer, too.
Oh yes! Bone broth. Such good stuff. We eat mostly venison and beef from a friend’s dairy farm. In the fall, they ask how much we want to buy of this pastured meat, when they butcher ($2.00 per pound, no less). And I have requested marrow bones this time, along with the meat.
I would be willing to bet that sipping on a bone broth would heal so many ills. I agree with WAPF. I have the Nourishing Traditions cookbook and use it a lot, omitting only those recipes that call for ingredients I do better without.
Richard Bernstein devoted a full chapter on gastroparesis in his book on diabetes, which seems to be on the rise (my own opinion). Damage to the vagus nerve from blood glucose over 140? So someone with gastroparesis, undiagnosed celiac and eating lots of fiber may just overload their poor stomach when they dump some protein on top of it all.
Oh, and one more thing…
I listened to a podcast this weekend where the guest speaker was this hyper sounding woman who was hard core vegan. She made her two young sons eat this way too. The word soy popped up constantly. I felt sad for those boys. They need some saturated fat and heme iron. She’s going to really screw them up, physically and probably mentally too.
I posted a comment about it (though it hasn’t been approved yet) and mentioned that it should be the choice of an adult to eat that way, but never should be forced on kids. Stay with an ancestral type diet until the person is old enough to make up their own mind.
I have mixed feelings about all that. I feel sorry for the boys and I don’t think anyone has a right to cause physical damage to their children. On the other hand, I also believe people have a right to their own beliefs, and that in the long run we’re more likely to give up on veganism as a society if there is hard evidence that it does damage. I wonder if it’s possible to find a middle ground there.
I agree about wanting to find middle ground and not impose beliefs on other people. But kids have the right to grow up strong and healthy and then make their own choices. I have thought about it a lot, and I hate to be on a soapbox to anyone, now that I am paleo. But if we could look back to ancestral eating guidelines and try to interpret that in a way that would allow us to nourish our young until they came of age, I would feel a lot better about it. Then they can go out and try all manner of diets until they find one that they like.
I feel the same way about religion though. I didn’t think it should be forced on my daughter, despite the pressure from my family. I did not have her baptized when she was born. I wanted her to grow up and decide what would be her own truth. It caused my parents a lot of heartache but I didn’t regret my decision. And as an adult, my daughter tells me this was beneficial to her.
Oh, I don’t have any problem with raising a child in a religion. I kind of wish my parents had done that for me. But to me it’s another form of culture. I have no culture, it seems like, other than that of a good little consumer. It bothers me a lot.
I’d rather see people adopt religious views that encourage adaptation to place and healthy interaction with other people… but Christianity at its best at least does the latter.
I guess I’m getting a little bit Darwinist about the whole raising kids as vegan thing. Don’t get me wrong, I will guilt-trip the parents about it any chance I get–that’s one of the acceptable (to me) forms of pressure, the peer-group guilt-trip. But sometimes the only way people will learn is by doing. And given the already-strained-to-the-limits foster care system and the fact that so many kids age out of that system without finding a new permanent family, since so few adopters will bother with older kids, if the child’s not in danger of immediate damage, maiming or death I’m inclined to leave them with their parents, even mediocre or dietarily-deluded ones. I have to realize that I cannot save everyone… and that government-run efforts to do that have on the whole failed miserably. I’m not as allergic to government as a lot of low-carbers are, but I still have to acknowledge the obvious.
Other Dana, I’ve sent the link to this post to Lierre Keith, who wrote The Vegetarian Myth. I’m sure she’ll love it.
Sweet! And I think the post is even more valuable now that Issy’s weighed in about gluten-related gut damage. If someone out there really really wants to re-introduce animal foods but is running into digestive trouble, they need to know this stuff.
Oh, and my biggest worry for those boys? Their mother is loading them up with estrogen. I agree that people have a right to their beliefs. OTOH, pretty sure if that mother was having her boys swallow a few birth control pills every day, CPS would have something to say about it. It’s a complicated issue, and I don’t have an answer.
Even little girls shouldn’t be loaded up with estrogen that early. That’s part of why girls reach puberty earlier now than they would have otherwise. (Puberty ages do differ depending on where you live in the world–but we’ve got girls hitting it earlier than they should for *this* area of the world. Scary stuff.)
I know of someone who’s vegetarian (I don’t think she’s vegan but I can’t remember now) and has three boys. Amazingly, two of them have ADHD. No, it’s not their diet, it’s that they have a Ritalin deficiency disease. God that makes me crazy.