by Lorette C. Luzajic

The propaganda cheerfully floating around about the dangers of meat may protect animals while shamelessly promoting false or misleading information. But it won’t protect human health.

There is no shortage of wheat and soy salesmanship- it seems many vegetarians are incapable of objectively accepting factual science. Without regard to whose health is destroyed, so long as the moo moos aren’t hurt, misinformation is willfully propagated. Look up any illness and you’ll find endless meat demonizing – meat is the apparent cause of the past century’s diseases, even as we eat less meat and animal fat and more vegetable fat and grain foods than ever before.

It is these blatant lies or quietly misguided theories that make me into the anti-vegan monster I’m accused of being. I’ll reiterate it over and over again- I am not against anyone’s personal compassion choices. But I sure as hell am against the endless falsehoods about the evils of the diet we were  born to eat.

Seeking my nutritional birthright is not evil. But the sheer disregard for human health, herding millions into a brainwashed belief system that isn’t true? Evil. The national obsession with fibre, for example, continues unabated. This obsession was born with the Natural Hygiene Movement’s Freudian fixation on all things bowel. Lust and masturbation were blamed on animal foods, and so was constipation, meaning cereal doctors Kellogg and Graham promoted grains to alleviate fecal “pressure” on the sex organs, as being backed up apparently ignited arousal. Yeah.

Unfortunately, we hear over and over how dairy “leeches” calcium from bones, causing osteoporosis. I have yet to see a vegetarian write truthfully about mineral loss- it is excess fibre that flushes crucial vitamins and minerals out of the body. It is also phytic acid, which literally binds itself to iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, manganese, and other vital nutrients, removing what we already have from our bodies. Where do these phytates come from? Largely, from grains and soy “foods.”

More, arthritics and lupus sufferers are asked to give up meat to cure their chronic illness. Kristine Napier, member of the Lupus Foundation of America, says in Rodale’s Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies for Women, “If you have lupus, a healthy diet, built on the principles of the Food Guide Pyramid, will strengthen the disease-fighting abilities of your immune system.”…a nutritional plan calling for 6 to 11 servings of bread, pasta, cereal and other grain foods per day; 2 to 4 servings of fruit; 3 to 5 servings of vegetables; 2 to 3 servings of meat, fish, poultry or other protein foods; 2 servings of dairy products and a bare minimum of fats and sweets…Shun fat, seek carbs. “Make sure that your diet is low in fat–no more than 20 to 30 percent of your caloric intake–and high in complex carbohydrates,” says Napier. That means concentrating on bread, pasta, cereal and other grain foods, plus potatoes and starchy vegetables like carrots.”

Excuse me? Seek carbs? What the hell is this mythology doing to people? What kind of advice is “concentrating on bread, pasta, cereal and grain foods…?” In addition to the immune system demanding its full heritage of fat, protein, B12, riboflavin, DHA, bla bla bla, whatever else you do if you have lupus or any other autoimmune disorders, you should ditch all grains.

Grains, especially gluten grains like “bread, pasta, cereal and other grain foods” do not “strengthen” the immune system. They remove vital minerals from your body. Worse, they damage the intestinal villi, meaning absorption of nutrients in other foods is diminished. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that autoimmune disorders like Multiple Sclerosis, arthritis, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia, among other “modern” diseases can be managed beautifully for many sufferers by nixing dietary grains completely.

Indeed, some people have been “cured” by gluten avoidance. Lectin proteins like gluten create havoc in the body by permeating the intestinal wall, removing the natural and necessary barrier. Other things in the gut then leak into the system, causing the body to attack itself. (This is a simplistic explanation for brevity’s sake.) When the body’s myelin sheath is destroyed, extreme pain and paralysis occurs- this is called Multiple Sclerosis. This “mystery” disease has “unknown” causes, and while not all MS sufferers are helped by avoiding wheat, glutens are directly implicated in the destruction of the nerve’s myelin.

Other mystery illnesses like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, psoriasis, ankylosing spondylitis, and arthritis all thrive on grains. Avoiding carbs relieves their symptoms exponentially. Yet vegetarian sources continually push sufferers to avoid nutrient dense fat and protein, and consume inflammatory grains. Scorned authors James Braly and Ron Hoggan of Dangerous Grains explain how revolutionary and easy treatment- avoiding grain- is helping thousands of hopeless sick. Pick it up and give it to anyone you know with any of the “untreatable” illnesses.

Diabetics are told to ditch the meat to “balance blood sugar” in favour of “whole grains.” That fat and protein are not implicated in the breakdown of the insulin system is completely ignored by sinister animal rights extremists like the “Physicians Committee for ‘Responsible’ Medicine.”

This same faction will relentlessly follow their animal-friendly agenda at any price in  human life by pushing vegetarianism as the best diet for cancer patients, or cancer prevention. Religious vegetarians Seventh Day Adventists are continually held up as the paragons of healthy longevity. But Adventists don’t drink or smoke, either. There is a group that offers a parallel lifestyle, but eats meat. Who wins? The meat eating Mormons.

The truth is, cancer grows on sugar. It requires sugar to thrive. Starving tumours can quell their advance. And yes, grains are sugars. It’s an oft-touted stat that vegetarians suffer half the cancer rates of meat eaters, but this is garbage. The endless “studies” that show decreased cancer risk among vegetarians compare the Standard American Diet to the Vegetarian Diet. The SAD is clearly sad. Heritage eaters want studies that compare health conscious meat eaters to health conscious vegetarian eaters. But we aren’t waiting for the studies to come in, because the whole of history has been a study. And the healthiest cultures in the world use meat and seafood liberally and grains and other sugars sparingly. Tribal cultures that eat meat have terrific teeth and bones and low rates of disease as compared with groups that subsist on grains. The whole of anthropology can attest to this fact.

It will take too long to get into the whole soy thing, which is the other Big Business lie from monocrop mythology. So, briefly: Aside from the fact that most unfermented soy foods are made from industrial waste called “soy protein isolate,” there are the endocrine disruptors and thyroid damaging goitrogens that are promoted as “healthy.” Web sites like Vegfamily.com take great pride in “correcting” soy “misinformation” by telling us, “For people who have a thyroid disorder, and/or are taking medication for one, some research has suggested a relationship between soy and thyroid function. Fortunately, Mark Messina, soy expert, recently co-authored a review article that evaluated several studies on this subject and concluded: “…collectively the findings provide little evidence that in euthyroid [having a normal thyroid gland], iodine-replete [no iodine deficiency] individuals, soy foods, or isoflavones adversely affect thyroid function. In contrast, some evidence suggests that soy foods, by inhibiting absorption, may increase the dose of thyroid hormone required by hypothyroid patients. However, hypothyroid adults need not avoid soy foods.” (Thyroid. 2006 Mar;16(3):249-58.)” (quoting Dina Aronson, M.S. R.D.)

I’m sure Mark Messina, “soy expert” DID conclude we need not give up soy. Just take more pills and keep eating garbage. After all, soy earns him untold riches. Aronson neglects to mention that Messina is not a soy expert but a soy salesman. As a United Soybean Board’s head, he plays with millions of grant dollars promoting soy to cancer and health institutes. Most have been as gullible as we have, choking back the tasteless gunk in hopes of lowering cholesterol and solving hormone problems, while helping boys grow breasts instead. But some, like the American Heart Association, have disbanded, rejecting Messina’s claims.

Curiously, vegetarianism is promoted as a peaceful, nutritious choice to cure depression and other behavioral or mental disorders. We’re encouraged to forego the “toxic” fats in meat and replace them with healthy vegetables. I’m all for healthy vegetables, but the ever demonized cholesterol is indeed implicated in psychiatric and suicide disorders. The LACK of it contributes to them!

Low fat and cholesterol diets high in carbs increase aggression, homicide, and violence, as well as depression. Why? Cholesterol lubricates the brain’s neurotransmissions. The nutrients in animal fats and proteins are imperative to brain cell growth. DHA is nonexistent in vegan diets, and the brain needs DHA for cognitive functions. Vitamin D is also a necessary component of emotional and cognitive health. People go crazy and die without sunlight. But vegans can’t even make good use of the sun for Vitamin D- because you need cholesterol to make it. And don’t tell me that EPAs turn into DHA in the body. Because I know flax can make DHA. But the conversion rate is one percent. I’ll take the 100 percent option, thank you. And oh, yeah, there’s virtually no tryptophan sources in veg foods, and we need tryptophan to make good old serotonin.

Anyone who has had a digestive or bowel disease knows that more grains will cure it. At least, that’s been a major sales pitch and responsible for punctured intestines and damaged bowels the world over. Colitis or irritable bowel syndrome sufferers have long been told to give up meat in favour of more fibre, especially grain, but some doctors have started to hang their heads over the pain this grave error has caused. Brave thinkers like Elaine Gottschall have broken this vicious cycle with books like Breaking the Vicious Cycle, which removed grains from the diet to heal the intestines. A grain free, low fibre diet has helped untold number of victims of Crohn’s Disease and colitis. It’s shameful that the party line to decrease fat and protein and increase starches is still being forcefed to the sick.

I shudder to think I was once among these hucksters, parroting the “compassionate” lies. But these lies aren’t just about hating humans and being nice to animals. They’re about money. While I cringe to hear myself mumbling about the “beef board” and the “poultry industry” I had zero comprehension of the real moneymakers. Somehow, idyllic grains and peaceful vegetable food industries existed outside of immorality’s temptations. Meanwhile, the monocrops have devastated more than ninety percent of the topsoil. Those gentle waves of grain blowing across the prairie skies have meant the destruction of forests and lakes, where millions of animal species once lived and are now dead. It is better to eat a dead animal and accept its nutrition than to destroy habitats for zero human benefit except cold hard cash.

Oh, I know, I hear you. I hear you puppeting the things you‘ve learned- I said them, too. “But, but, sixteen people can be fed with grain on the resources needed for one person’s meat, bla bla bla.” Depends how you define “fed.” Plus, most of the world’s landscape cannot grow plants, but could sustain animal husbandry. But more importantly, we need to know that monocrops are guilty parties, getting away with it because of these very beliefs in their moral superiority to evil carnivores. Really? It’s not meat that is destroying the planet, but wheat, soy and corn.

Case in point, in the past two decades, some hundred thousand new food products have been invented. Guess what? There is no such thing as a new food product. There are traditional foods- animals, and the few plants that aren’t poisonous. And then there is unfood- boxes, bags and cans of soy oily garbage, of popped and puffed wheat, of cookies and fake syrupy junk. Sure, maybe you, unlike the weak, avoid the convenience store. But look around your health food store- if it comes in a bag, box, or can, it almost certainly shouldn’t be there.

This unholy trinity of wheat, soy, and corn is destroying animal habitats, human health, and planet earth. In Lierre Keith’s brilliant and viciously targeted book, The Vegetarian Myth, she points out that this trilogy forms some 80 percent of the world’s calories. Considering the density of calories from fat and protein as compared to grains, that’s a lot. Considering those are empty calories barely keeping people alive, that’s a tragedy.

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net

by Lorette C. Luzajic

Anyone who has ever received hate mail from a vegetarian won’t be surprised that the bloodthirsty vegans have skewered and barbecued Lierre Keith for her brave new world. In her book, The Vegetarian Myth, she dares to speak the things that many other ex-veg’ns like myself avoid for fear of being skinned alive by the compassionate mafia. Recently, at a reading of her book, she was physically assaulted and showered with cayenne-laced pies by militant vegan ***holes. Real mature.

Lierre Keith has written the book I would have written if I’d been braver and smarter. Lierre writes eloquently and honestly without mincing her fury and indignation. She risked, and has since endured, great wrath to expose the immature denial of death- the denial, which has ironically, killed everything.

Everything? Yes. Because the world’s reliance on grains has clear cut the rainforest, damaged the topsoil beyond repair, created overpopulation, created disease, and destroyed more animals than animal husbandry can. It is a sick and devastating lie that a plant-based diet is good for humans- or for other animals. Rejecting death as food disrupts our life cycle.

How? In a million ways. Lierre exposes the myths, peeling them away one by one. “What separates me from vegetarians isn’t ethics or commitment,” she writes. “It’s information.”

For example, the biggest one is that grains and soy crops are a healthy, natural alternative to meat that can feed the whole world. Nope. I had no idea that monocrop farming has destroyed nearly all of the earth’s topsoil, and that forests and meadows and dales and ravines had to be razed to grow the unholy trilogy- corn, soy, and wheat.

What of the millions of animals in that ecosystem before the golden wands of wheat waved idyllically in the wind? Dead. Worse, said grains offer meagre sustenance and empty calories compared to the nutritional density of meat. Which means we reproduce more and more and our offspring is sickly. And we are rife with diabetes and heart disease- not caused by meat, as we’ve been led to believe. If meat caused disease, cancer and diabetes would not be new epidemics, because we have always eaten meat. Diseases are caused by carbohydrates- sugar, grains, and soy. As soon as they are introduced into hunting societies, disease appears- rotten teeth, diabetes, cancer.

Lierre takes the three main prongs of the vegetarian myth to task. There are the moral vegetarians, the nutritional vegetarians, and the political vegetarians. Herself a vegan for eighteen years and suffering from irreversible physical damage and disease caused by her diet, she chronicles her journey back to real food, interspersing hard facts with personal philosophical growth.

“This was not an easy book to write,” she opens. “For many of you, it won’t be an way book to read.” She says she was vegan for reasons like “justice, compassion, a desperate…longing to set the world right…To protect the vulnerable, the voiceless. To feed the hungry.” She says she wants her body to be a place “where the earth is cherished, not devoured.” Her book, she says, “is not an attempt to mock the concept of animal rights or to sneer at the people who want a gentler world.”

It would take a whole book to elucidate on all the brilliant points made, and there is no way I could be as insightful and elegant a writer as Lierre. But two points stand out for me: one, the myth that a vegan diet does not cause death to animals. Eat whatever you want, but there is no life without death. Growing carrots and potatoes results in the destruction of habitat where countless creatures grow. (Much of the world is non-farmable terrain that could support poultry or goats.) Soil fertilizer is made of dead animals, and if it’s not, the soil dies, which then causes all of the life in that soil to die. Soil, in fact, is alive itself. Ridiculous vegans won’t use horse manure on crops because it’s an animal product, thereby trying to improve on Mother Nature. This is incredibly naïve. The worst part is that I seldom see vegetarians who are militant about composting. They should be- plant crops have destroyed most of the world’s soil, and compost and manure and dead animals are desperately needed to nourish that soil so that it can grow things again.

The other point is the ridiculous sentimentalization of nature. Nature is hardly a fluffy meadow with happy, healthy butterflies and sheep frolicking. It’s brutal, from a lion devouring its prey, to a storm nullifying entire villages overnight. The other day I saw an add in Veg News, featuring a cat saying, “Where do I get my taurine? Yawn, That’s like asking humans where they get their protein.” If vegans can’t see what is wrong with forcing their so-called ethical lifestyle on their cats, that says it all, doesn’t it? Lierre talks about a message board online where some vegans wanted to make a fence through the Serengeti to protect prey from predator animals. Say what? This demonstrates absolutely no understanding of the ecosystem, which is, of course, dependent on predator and prey.

“Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals,” Lierre writes. But the kind of simplistic morality that vegans want to impose idealistically is indeed naïve. “The paradigm that asks us to reject death certainly provides a simple ethical code, a code that can rally the righteous, but it is the black and white thinking of a child,” she states. She mentions a book called Dominion to illustrate her point, where author Matthew Scully describes the carnivorous behaviour of cats and foxes as moral degradation.

Finally, Lierre successfully defends our heritage diet against one of the biggest myths of all. Anyone who was once a vegetarian and returned is familiar with it: I can still hear myself crowing about the damned “beef board” and “meat industry” controlling everything and selling us what we don’t need. Well, before the beef board, there was the farm, and the forest or plains. It would be lovely if we could revive the forests and plains again, and get rid of the needless suffering from within factory farms. But meat is not new food. The meat boards battle desperately to keep meat as safe as possible in a mass culture, and it’s a tough job. Indeed, they have blood on their hands, and we should do all we can to support them to do their job well. On the other hand, there are 100 thousand new food products on the market. Beef or eggs or turkey are not new food products. We’re talking about cereals, crisps, packaged cookies and oats and soy-stuffed bologna. Trillions of dollars worth of garbage. There is no such thing as new food, but all of the new un-food is from the “monocrop board.” It is, in fact, plants that mercilessly grab your money and fill the shelves with crap and lie to you.

It took tremendous courage to write this book. Lierre is far more compassionate than I could be on this topic matter. She is patient, but condemned as condescending. She loves animals, but is condemned as a hypocrite. I don’t think we can retrieve what Lierre hopes we can, a sustainable society with repaired rivers and a reciprocal relationship with the earth and our food, including meat. I don’t believe that people will stop breeding because we have to in order to save ourselves. But offering this book was an act of hope, a courageous hope of bridging understanding between rival groups. That one of those groups has done nothing but trash talk and assault her, sadly illustrates Lierre’s points exactly.

Learn more:

http://www.lierrekeith.com/vegmyth.htm

Check out Lorette’s popular series, “A Matter of Life or Myth”, and other articles here in The Paleo Garden.  You can also check out here her Fascinating People, gossip for smart people.