Archives for March 2011

A Juxtaposition: The spotting of a nutritionally fraudulent counterfeit

Last evening I was contemplating yet another post on the nutritional inadequacy of a vegan diet, particularly a raw vegan diet and even more particularly: a raw, fruitarian vegan diet. As you know, there’s an upcoming debate with just such a fruitarian vegan, Harley Johnstone, AKA Durianrider, and it will be hosted by Steven Prussack of Raw Vegan Radio. While I haven’t received a firm date yet, the latest proposal was for April 7, 2011 at 6:00 pm PST.

I know that a lot of my readers wonder why I keep banging this drum. It’s simple. It’s fun, it’s pretty easy — which I guess makes me a bit of a bully — but most importantly is that for well over a year, the weekly blog stats report I get consistently shows vegetarian and vegan themes and search terms at the top, and by a large margin over any other single category. For some reason, Google keeps sending a lot of people looking for information on vegetarianism and veganism over here, so who am I to argue? I’ll just keep giving them what they probably don’t want to hear.

But what got me to thinking about doing another post in the first place was a certain juxtaposition. Someone forwarded me a link to the latest video of a NovNat nature seminar, put on by my good friends Erwan Le Corre and Vic Verdier. While I did the one in West Virginia last summer, this one was in Thailand around the time of the holidays. I had considered going and taking Beatrice along; and now, seeing this video, I sorely regret that I didn’t just make it happen. It’s been way too long since I spent time in that wonderful country (1991) and life’s just too fuckin’ short to not Just Do It, sometimes.

It’s said that the best way to spot a counterfeit, a fraud, is to become very familiar with the real thing. Here’s the real thing. Look at the impressive body composition partout. Look at the feats of strength and skilled technique. Look at the Paleo-styled nourishment that makes it not only possible, but probable — or even a sure bet. Take a good long look at this short video and sear into your mind what and how real humans ought to look like, how they ought to move over land and in the water, and what they need in terms of nutrition to accomplish all — and do make sure to select your resolution at 480p once the video starts.

So, you got that? Now, here, spot the counterfeit. I’ve blogged it before, the latest recently, but this is undoubtedly the best context in which to present it.

Now I find it interesting how Harley kicks off this video talking about how this raw fruitarian vegan diet is so "health" promoting. Really? Then how come I keep reading about the death of infants and children at the hands of their vegan parents? The latest, emailed to me by a number of readers just this morning and is what motivated me to go ahead with this post: French vegans in dock over baby’s death.

Two vegans who fed their 11-month-old daughter only mother’s milk went on trial in northern France on Tuesday charged with neglect after their baby died suffering from vitamin deficiency.

Sergine and Joel Le Moaligou, whose vegan diet forbids consuming any animal product including eggs and cow’s milk, called the emergency services in March 2008 after becoming worried about their baby Louise’s listlessness.

When the ambulance arrived at their home in Saint-Maulvis, a small village 150 kilometres (90 miles) north of Paris, the baby was already dead.

The ambulance workers called the police because the child was pale and thin, weighing 5.7 kilos (12.5 pounds) compared to an average eight kilos for her age.

The baby had only been fed on the milk of her mother, who was aged 37 at the time.

An autopsy showed that Louise was suffering from a vitamin A and B12 deficiency which experts say increases a child’s sensitivity to infection and can be due to an unbalanced diet.

What’s perhaps a bit unique and stands out about this story compared to many others I’ve seen is this, again from the article:

"The problem of vitamin B12 deficiency could be linked to the mother’s diet," said Anne-Laure Sandretto, deputy prosecutor in the city of Amiens where the trial is taking place.

Ya think? See, in other cases I’ve read about, the baby dies because it’s being fed soy milk and fruit juice, or other such nutritionally bankrupt crap. In this case, however, the parents at least had "sense enough" to understand that a new human requires animal products absolutely and exclusively, i.e., milk from its own animal mother. Now what motivates the leap in "logic" to then conclude that at some point, what made the new human grow and attain vibrant health in the first place — animal nutrition — is what will later kill them is, well, incomprehensible and I’ll just leave it at that. It’s just too stupid and ignorant to even attempt to unpack.

So what you have here is that there’s essentially little to no way to grow a baby if you’re a vegan. Not only does it have to have animal products, ideally mother’s milk, or barely satisfactory: a formula fortified with adequate nutrition; but that if the former, the mother needs to be adequately nourished, ideally with animal products or, barely satisfactory: highly supplemented with things such as vitamin A and B12.

And this is a natural human diet? This is an ideal diet for health? My God, what level of cognitive dissonance it must require to believe that. Do you need to watch that first video, again?

Here’s Nina Plank in a New York Times piece from a few years back: Death by Veganism.

WHEN Crown Shakur died of starvation, he was 6 weeks old and weighed 3.5 pounds. His vegan parents, who fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice, were convicted in Atlanta recently of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty. …

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

Indigenous cuisines offer clues about what humans, naturally omnivorous, need to survive, reproduce and grow: traditional vegetarian diets, as in India, invariably include dairy and eggs for complete protein, essential fats and vitamins. There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run.

Protein deficiency is one danger of a vegan diet for babies. Nutritionists used to speak of proteins as “first class” (from meat, fish, eggs and milk) and “second class” (from plants), but today this is considered denigrating to vegetarians.

The fact remains, though, that humans prefer animal proteins and fats to cereals and tubers, because they contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio. This is not true of plant proteins, which are inferior in quantity and quality — even soy. …

Responsible vegan parents know that breast milk is ideal. …

Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development.

This was in 2007 and clearly, the madness is still proceeding full force. Well, here’s at least one more blurb on the Internet that perhaps some future parent will stumble upon or go searching for, unsatisfied with the information being dished out by The Vegan Menace.

And just as an aside in case any of you vegans out there are going to protest that omnivore babies die too, yes, it’s true. But there are important distinctions to be made. Malnourishment among omnivores is simple neglect. The parents are just Mark 1, Mod A scum, and not out parading their nutritional superiority as virtually all vegans do — and why they feed their kids that way. Second, in the case of obese babies and children, even with fatty livers, I rail agains that all the time (search the blog). But even there, a distinction is on order: these kids aren’t necessarily malnourished — at least not to this degree — they’re over-nourished, and much of it is unnecessary. And at least they have some metabolic and physiologic headroom to work with. Simply restrict the sugar drinks (like "healthy" fruit juice) and they’ll go right back to normal, quickly. But, bottom line: I don’t excuse any mistreatment of children’s nutrition.

…You know, I have in the past also blogged about chimpanzees that hunt & eat other monkeys, if only to highlight to vegans that chimps eat meat. They also eat bugs, worms, grubs, snails and all manner of other stuff they can get their hands on. And they have enormous guts compared to us so that they can actually extract nutrition from all that plant matter they eat. And, of course, they sometimes eat their own shit for adequate B12.

But in watching that video again, of those chimps hunting, and reflecting upon the two videos above, I note that the strength and agility of those Paleo MovNat folks is far more like those chimps than are those Vegan Stick Figure folks. That’s because in the case of the former, both are eating the natural diets they evolved to eat. In raw veganism, by eliminating all animal foods, vegans are turning back the evolutionary clock to pre-primate times. What’s next, a diet of plankton?

So, from now on, I’ll not be highlighting vegans as existing on anything like a chimp diet. I think this one will be far more appropriate in the future. The Sloth.

Note the reference to a sloth being a "mobile compost heap" that barely has energy for a few "half-hearted chews," or this: "This extraordinary creature is half-blind, half-deaf, and this is just about as fast as it can move. That is what is going to happen to you… if you eat nothing but leaves."

This is an important subject. Awareness needs to be raised. The lives and well being of innocent kids is at stake and they have no choice in the matter. Imagine going hungry, being malnourished like a refugee or war orphan. Please consider Tweeting this post and sharing it with all your Facebook Friends.