I’ve gotten a few emotionalized, angry e-mails from veggie readers on the story about how meat-eaters are by far much healthier in every respect than vegetarians. They insist that their nutrition is superior and that the University of Graz study is “bullshit”. It’s bought and paid for by the bacon industry!
Yet, nothing better illustrates the fallacy of vegetarianism than looking at the children of vegetarians. The vegetarians, you will recall, like to make it a moral issue in that they blame climate change and animal abuse on meat-eating. They claim it’s the healthiest diet.
But vegetarianism for kids is turning out to be even worse than smoking for adults. One example of the impacts that vegetarianism has on children is vividly illustrated in an article appearing in the Daily Mail here. (There are many on this subject).
Rotting teeth, bone wasting…some excerpts:
…”‘I couldn’t work out what was going on,’ says Holly, who lives in Totnes, Devon. ‘We all ate exceptionally healthily, with plenty of vegetables, nuts and seeds.'”
…”I was assured by the people who devised the diet that we would get all the protein we needed from nuts and seeds, and we also took a daily supplement to replace the nutrients found in animal foods.”
…’But then I started noticing that something wasn’t right. … Bertie and Lizzie’s muscles seemed weak and they had problems seeing at night. … I couldn’t understand why this well-fed child was behaving like this. I was so brainwashed that the fact our bodies were craving dairy products had passed me by.’
…”Her parents, ‘well-known figures in Glasgow’s vegan community’, had unwittingly starved her of necessary nutrients found in fish and meat, causing her to develop the bone-wasting disease usually associated with 19th century slums.”
…'”is mother’s mistake was to follow a fad diet, hyped up by magazines and endorsed by celebrities, to a growing child.”
Sound familiar?
Thankfully, the mothers of the children realized they had been duped by junk science peddled by fashionable fanatics, and eventually brought a responsible diet back to their kids.
Yet, there are many tree-hugging vegetarians out there who insist their way of life has to be imposed on others and demand we stop eating meat. These happen to be the very people who want to tell us what’s best for the climate and the planet…based on, as is the case with vegetarianism, crackpot science peddled by charlatans experts.
If you want the entire human civilization to end up with rotting teeth, brittle bones, weak muscles and blind, then let the nutjob alarmist environmentalists run the show.
It’s clear: Bad science leads to bad results. Example: Greenpeace and golden rice.
The problem with climate science is that it is even worse than vegetarian science! And even scarier, the two are merging.
The calls for a shift away from meat because “it is bad for health and climate” are growing louder by the day.
“The calls for a shift away from meat because “it is bad for health and climate” are growing louder by the day.”
Ah well. You know what. I get around. There are quite a few adult vegans in Hamburg and Berlin. But as you move away from the centres of the few megacities their number quickly drops to zero. Even their mainstay pressure group PETA has become nearly invisible, as Femen has improved on their naked body advertisement tactics and taken the according media traffic with them.
History has already marched over them.
A friend told me that a couple in her family raised their children in the seventies on a strictly vegetarian diet (no fish allowed). It became a huge conflict in the family when everybody noticed that their children got crooked legs (rachitis or English disease) obviously from malnutrition. I am told that a vegetarian diet can be balanced if you invest a lot of time in collecting and making your meals. Funny observation by an acquaintance whose parents had vegetarian friends. If they visited us, we had to make a vegetarian meal. If we visited them in return, we did not get meat but had to eat vegetarian again.
Night blindness is the first symptom of vitamin A deficiency.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/the-big-green-killing-machine-what-is-vad/
Pointman
Just a week ago I talked to a taxi driver; who, like nearly all Germans, railed against GMO. So I told him about Golden Rice and Greenpeace’s fight against it. Like nearly all Germans he’d never heard of that. Disinformation campaign by our state media to keep the cult members controlled. To his honor, he wasn’t some Greenpeace arse kisser, and accepted my argument.
Resistance against GMO is just another luddite movement, like the movements against nuclear, against electricity and against railroads before them. History tells us that they all vanish, but mostly as described by Planck, one funeral at a time.
I offer an interesting article* that provides insight into the whole realm of such fads: “Pseudoscience.” The overall takeaway: “Pseudoscience is a “claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific… but lacks supporting evidence or cannot be reliably tested.”
The seven characteristics listed fit the vegetarian craze and others:
“1. The use of psychobabble – words that sound scientific and professional but are used incorrectly, or in a misleading manner.
2. A substantial reliance on anecdotal evidence.
3. Extraordinary claims in the absence of extraordinary evidence.
4. Claims which cannot be proven false.
5. Claims that counter established scientific fact.
6. Absence of adequate peer review.
7. Claims that are repeated despite being refuted.”
So – what in the world is happening???
*Source: http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/04/its_time_to_teach_pseudoscience_in_science_class.html
Does the diet cause mental disorders or do those with mental disorders . . .?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22676203#
“The (present) study investigated associations between vegetarian diet and mental disorders.”
And the post with interesting comments (52, some long) where that link can be found:
http://www.dietdoctor.com/can-vegetarian-diets-cause-mental-disorders
Confused at 3:23 (#14) mentions B12 deficiency and info on WebMD. I did not search for that.
As Pierre says, “(There are many on this subject).”
Thanks for the links. Indeed it’s emerging to me that vegetarianism is a farce of grand proportions promoted by mentally impaired kooks.
One Hamburg vegan I asked about what he does against B12 deficiency answered, he makes sure he eats lots of fungi, which apparently helps. A vegan who doesn’t know or care about these things will necessarily have a deteriorating central nervous system.
Humans are omnivorous by nature and so is our closest cousin the chimp.
If vegans want to feel morally superior then they should be fruitarians. They claim they don’t destroy plants to eat. However, it has landed some in hospital.
I have a relative (female, 40-ish) who is a vegetarian. She looks healthy enough; cycles to work, etc., and insists that her diet is a wholly natural one, eating mostly what is provided by vegetation and what can be picked from trees and bushes, like stone-age people. When questioned closely she admits to “taking” a whole range of “supplements” – so I asked her which bushes stone-age people picked their “supplements” from ………..
Evolution at work. If your chosen lifestyle makes your children less fit, you can compensate for their disadvantage to make everybody less fit. It is not really a compassionate approach, so direct the compassion to poor animals.
it is typical with green people, if something has one bad side, ban it whaterver good sides are ..life is balance… they would ban fire because it burns or causes cancers…
they eat nuts, they become nuts.
Our completely lunatic, dysfunctional social democrat – “conservative” pretend government wants to prohibit the killing of male chicken hatchlings.
http://www.rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/minister-toetung-von-eintageskueken-soll-bundesweit-gestoppt-werden-aid-1.4153248
The race is optimized for laying eggs, not for building up flesh, so that the roosters will not be able to achieve good prices for their meat. This will drive up the cost of eggs. Venezuela here we come!
Whenever I hear the call for us all to become vegetarians, I think that’s good news, it means the price of meat will come down for the rest of the carnivores.
But, then I pause, because the climate change vegetarians is like a pernicious cancer, and they are likely to ban the slaughtering of livestock and the selling of meat. They are not happy to eat their greens and shut-up, but want to impose their warped lifeview on all that are unfortunate enough to share the planet with them.
I object to some fool telling me how to live my life and are constantly amazed at the great number of people who are quite happy to listen to those who are closet dictators and interfering busybodies.
The origins of the ban on pork in the Middle East and on meat in general in greater India goes back some 2700 years (possibly several hundred years earlier) with the cataclysms leading to the formation of the great deserts (Sahara, Rajasthan, Gobi, etc.) Many of these animals were naturally forest-dwellers, and when domesticated were still fed mostly from the forest. With the collapae of the forests, they had to be fed from the results of agriculture. The religious bans would have simply enshrined the pragmatic decisions to use the output from agriculture to feed people directly.
In today’s societies, so long as the productivity of the land can continue to increase, I see no reason why should restrict our consumption of meat so that we can purify ourselves as if we were all Brahmins living in a caste society.
When I was in the fifth grade the Teacher was asking each
member of the class what they ate for breakfast that day.
When she ask me what I had for breakfast I said, Teacher
I ‘et’ six eggs for breakfast. She said “don’t you mean ate”?
I said, maybe it was eight eggs I ‘et’.
I kinow, I know,50k people who tell jokes for a living are
out of work and you have to put up whith me. </;?….
Before a discussion could even occur — or proper reasoning in general — one should make clear the rather big difference between a vegan and a vegetarian. Becoming vegetarian for me personally, ten years ago, was a great thing, healthwise, but yes omega-3 and B12 should be thought about but there are lots of sources for that. And I’d still eat meat when visiting others, it’s not some kind of “sin”. And I still eat fish now and again too. Although I do oppose the mass meat industry to some degree, my main reason for vegetarism was simply that I felt better with the easier to digest food. And after a while I just lost my interest in meat flavors alltogether, not sure why that was. Nothing like tree-hugging involved. Just letting you know also with this subject there’s hype and fact. Don’t get carried away too much by anecdotal evidence gift wrapped as journalism!
Omega 3 is no problem at all, it’s in rape oil. B12 is more complicated. Vitamin A is a big problem, it occurs in some plants but not in high dosage – but you fixed that with the fish I think.
I’ve no problem with vegetarian, they need a good marinade and slow cooking but otherwise they’re OK if a little boring.
😉
Curious study reminds me – growing up, we had a box of old kitchen items in the attic. One tool was a meat press – two pieces of wood (~3″ X 12″) connected by a hinge. One side was hollowed out with slots; the other was carved to fit into the hollowed out section.
“Dad,” I asked, “what’s that for?”
“Oh,” he said, “when I was a boy and got sick [early 1900s], Mother would cook some raw beef just enough for the juice to run, and then use that press to get beef juice. That helped me get better!”
Now I know why!