I’m down on the organized skeptical community, because I think they practice skepticism selectively. But here’s a good example of healthy skepticism on nutrition science, prompted by this ‘documentary’, What the Health. I like that the position is put right up front.
As a vegan health professional, I am sometimes mortified to be associated with the junk science that permeates our community. And as an animal rights activist, I’m disheartened by advocacy efforts that can make us look scientifically illiterate, dishonest, and occasionally like a cult of conspiracy theorists.
I’m not a vegan, but I sympathize with the movement; I’m not an animal rights activist, because I agree that there is way too much scientific illiteracy in that movement…but I do support improving care and minimizing suffering in animals. I can never support the kind of dishonesty rampant in these quack nutrition stories, like those credulously promoted in What the Health.
The exaggerated and misleading statements about animal foods and health are meant to build the case that you must be vegan if you want to be healthy. We hear, for example, that there is no evidence that consuming animal foods in moderation can turn heart disease around. Yes, there is. There is at least as much evidence that plant-based (but not vegan) diets can reverse heart disease as there is evidence indicating vegan diets can reverse heart disease.
And finally, there are the miraculous healings. The film tells us that a plant-based diet can treat lupus, multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis. (I’d love to see actual evidence for any of this.) Then we’re shown real-life examples of astonishing recoveries from illness. One woman has been diagnosed with bilateral osteoarthritis and is scheduled for two hip replacements because, as she describes it, bone is rubbing on bone. This means that the cartilage that cushions the hip joints has worn away. You can’t just grow back a bunch of cartilage in two weeks by changing your diet. Nor is there evidence that a healthy vegan diet will reverse thyroid cancer as is claimed in the film. And I hope that the woman who stopped taking antidepressants in just two weeks did so under strict medical supervision. That is not enough time to taper off of these drugs (which kind of makes me doubt her story). And to imply that people can abruptly stop taking their antidepressants when they go vegan is irresponsible and dangerous.
Kip himself says that after he changed his diet, “within a few days I could feel my blood running through my veins with a new vitality.” It immediately brought to mind Lierre Keith, ex-vegan and author of The Vegetarian Myth. She says this when she eats a bite of tuna fish after many years of veganism: “I could feel every cell in my body—literally every cell—pulsing. And finally, finally being fed.”
I’ve personally made changes in my diet to reduce animal protein, because the arguments make sense: it’s generally good to exercise moderation in your diet. I’ve been exercising more. But I don’t believe in magical rejuvenations or that I can feel my veins or cells or that eating more carrots will prevent cancer.
I think I’ll skip the movie. But I’m willing to listen to what Virginia Messina has to say about vegan diets.
It’s silly, I know, but I worry one day our edible animals will evolve the same awareness as humans. How would we know? We’d still be killing them, it would just be a living nightmare for then (maybe when animals start committing suicide it will be a sign of awareness?). I’ve heard pigs go insane if they are locked up? Do we have the right to alter another species’s evolution into food product for humans, for the next 6 million years? Will there be consequences? What would an alien race think of us for doing this? Could we be seen as food stock one day? We are so closely related to other animals, would an Alien race see it as a form of cannibalism? I dunno, it’s silly, but it keeps nagging my mind when ever I eat meat. :P
I can believe they felt this way. Once on date night with my spouse, we decided to try a new restaurant. We got the chile verde, with freshly made tortillas and frijoles refritos made generously with lard instead of a token amount of vegetable oil like the last place we went to. By the end of that meal, I was just about melting out of my chair in bliss. But I didn’t romanticize that response as my body awakening to the splendor of pork products, because I recognized my brain was releasing endogenous opioids in response to a combination of fat, salt, and carbs that I was deeply fond of.
Just because something makes you feel good doesn’t mean it’s a revelation of some deeper meaning, yet people want so badly to believe it is. Whether we’re talking religion or diet, they want those feelings to mean something and reveal a greater truth than simply “this makes me feel good.”
Just cutting out the vast amount of crap that most Americans eat will make you feel immensely better. That is the chief benefit — and quite often, the only benefit — of taking on a fad diet.
I get really annoyed at the extreme-purity-motivated vegans who use lines like that or “no one ever needs to kill an animal to live”.
I know people with inflammatory bowel disease that prevents their intestines from absorbing non-heme iron. They can either eat meat, take oral iron supplements made from animal blood, take injected iron supplements with lots of adverse effects, or die from anemia.
And for me to survive the first two weeks of my life, a cow had to die (I was a preemie in the 1980s. At the time, replacement pulmonary surfactant was made by macerating cow lungs, extracting the surfactant from them, and cleaning up the result before spraying it into preemies’ lungs to keep the alveoli open).
Any sort of intensive farming is going to cause the death of animals at some point, even it’s only mice or other rodents not being able to get out of the way of farm equipment. Such farming is how a lot of vegans are going to get the food they eat, even if they grow some of their own food. I assume some organic forms of pest control cause the death of the pests they’re targeted against.
The key thing here is: “As a XYZ, […]”. If the “As a XYZ” is the first thing they pull out, then it’s basically a sympathy ploy. (… and from that point on you might as well just /ignore. It’s not going to get better.)
Classics: “As a MOTHER”. “As a CHRISTIAN”. “As a LIBERAL”. “As a DEMOCRAT”.
You get the idea. The “As a […]” thing is argument from authority distilled to three words.
(Flubbed that last one a bit: “sympathy ploy and/or argument from authority”, but you get the point, I’m sure.)
Watch the average driver for five minutes and you’ll realize they already have.