That all changed today. I think it’s time for T. [...]]]> I’d heard of the China Study which supposedly proves veganism is healthier than eating animal foods. But I hadn’t read the book, so really couldn’t have an opinion about it. I’d heard from some LC bloggers that it was bunk, but again, nothing definite.

That all changed today. I think it’s time for T. Colin Campbell to get a real job.

If you’re a numbers junkie and haven’t seen this brilliant blog post already, go NOW. You will be catatonic with delight. And she lays out Campbell’s own data in a way that even a statistics-ignorant layperson like me can somewhat understand.

Aaand… she’s very neutral in tone. She is not pushing any particular agenda. She just wanted to see if the numbers lined up.

So there you go. Have fun, kiddies. Unless you’re vegan, in which case you’ll ignore her completely and pretend there are no problems at all with the study. Good luck with that, ya hear?

In fact, if you want to do the world a favor, all of you link to her piece with those exact words. This is what an idiot looks like.

I mean, she quotes the American Dietetic Association as a legitimate source for… well, anything. Except maybe verbal [...]]]> This is what an idiot looks like.

In fact, if you want to do the world a favor, all of you link to her piece with those exact words. This is what an idiot looks like.

I mean, she quotes the American Dietetic Association as a legitimate source for… well, anything. Except maybe verbal instructions on how to pick out your bellybutton lint. They might get that right. But for fuck’s sake they advocate feeding sugar and starch to diabetics. How does that earn them any authority whatsoever?

Oh wait, one of the anti-soy activists died of a stroke. I wonder how much that has to do with the price of tea in China, since there are two kinds of strokes and neither is related to saturated fat or cholesterol consumption. Does this woman tell her audience which kind of stroke it was? Nope.

She says there is no evidence of harm done by soy but that’s a weasel argument. She would have been better served addressing the Weston A. Price Foundation’s claims about soy and the sources they cite and explaining why all of those are wrong. With actual scientific facts and statistics, not more weaseling with “everybody knows” arguments.

There’s no such thing as “no evidence.” First you have to agree on what constitutes evidence and then you have to look high and low to ensure that said evidence does not in fact exist. Now, the pro-sat-fat side is just as weaselly sometimes about their arguments. Thing is, if you look closely at the “evidence” that saturated fat does cause harm, what you actually find are some really shoddy studies with poorly collected pseudo-information (seriously, when was the last time you were able to remember what you ate a year ago down to the last ounce or teaspoon? Entire research studies rely on such questions–especially amusing when they ask people of post-retirement age) that has way too many variables in it to accurately point to this factor or that factor as a cause of anything.

I mean, shit, I could make the claim that pickles cause heart attacks since they put pickles on Big Macs, and people who eat five Big Mac meals a day–full meal, bun and all, fries, full-sugar soda–supposedly often get heart attacks. Yep, it’s gotta be the goddamn pickle. Why? Because it’s in the food of people who get heart attacks. I knew there was a reason I hated those fuckers.

Can these dipshits ever explain how saturated fat or cholesterol cause heart disease? Not without inventing a lot of crazy shit that they, themselves, have never actually seen in action. The few times somebody’s tried analyzing those clots that wind up in people’s arteries, know what they’ve found? Inflammatory debris and POLYunsaturated fats. Not saturated. Give me a break. Speaking of flawed animal studies, while we are on the subject, guess what first gave people the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease? They fed it to rabbits. RABBITS. Herbivores. Can you believe that shit?

I got told, in another instance, when I was a kid, that saturated fat’s bad for you because it’s solid at room temperature. Well shit… If you are at room temperature, my misguided friend, saturated fat is the last thing you have to worry about. God, the stupid shit they will come up with to discourage us from eating things that somehow mysteriously were not killing us 100 years ago.

Oh right, I’m making claims. Well, tough tooties. I don’t feel like citing sources right now. It’s 3:25am and I need to be in bed. But I’m getting a little tired of all this sloppy writing from so-called “authoritative, knowledgeable journalists,” and it’s time people call them on their shit.

If there’s NO EVIDENCE that soy damages health… prove it. Show us the money, or issue a retraction.

God, what a piece of work. If you want to commit slow suicide, lady, knock yourself out. Don’t encourage the rest of us in that direction. You don’t even have an original argument to your name.

Probably another stupid goddamn vegan… the preachy kind. So predictable. I’ll be shocked–shocked, I tell you–if she doesn’t send any of her fellow/sister vegan-bots over here to yell at me. We’ve already had the “don’t test on cute little bunnies,” the “we feed soy to cows so cows are the real problem,” the “we would be healthier eating plant-based diets,” God, it gets so damn old. I wouldn’t care if they weren’t convincing people.

My little girl’s dad said something in this vein the other night that got my mental gears a-turnin’. I’m fatigued from the brouhaha around the attack on Lierre Keith and all the hype about the ecological virtues of veganism and the solution to poverty and hunger being the eating of five servings of [...]]]>

My little girl’s dad said something in this vein the other night that got my mental gears a-turnin’. I’m fatigued from the brouhaha around the attack on Lierre Keith and all the hype about the ecological virtues of veganism and the solution to poverty and hunger being the eating of five servings of veggies a day (“Ate plants. A big heap. Still hungry.”) and all that mess. I thought that addressing my frustration through humor for once might be therapeutic. And I’m still being my good ol’ lovable grouchy self. Or something like that.

The reason the prices seem all jacked up is that Cafe Press is now charging three dollars extra for back printing, so every item that allows for a back design is three dollars more than it should have been. I’m not thrilled about that, but at the same time, I want people to know how to find their way here, should any of these products sell. All the items have been priced at one dollar over CP’s imposed cost, though, so I’m not making much off of this. I may look at Zazzle later and see if they’re more reasonable but I’m more familiar with CP at the moment, so that’s what I went with.

Have fun, kiddies. Let me know how it turns out. I understand CP’s T-shirt printing has become a lot better quality since I last ordered from them.

Too bad the textbook Speshul Genotype Vegan had to [...]]]>
“Meat Pieces” by Suat Eman, courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

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.