It’s been a long time since I posted something not related to nutrition. And as exciting as nutrition is, once in awhile I can use a break!

There is an animal advocacy-related issue that has been sticking in my craw for the last few years. I listen to a number of NPR shows on my iPod while exercising, driving, and doing house chores, and for the most part I really enjoy them – that is, except for the lack of sensitivity and sophistication with which they treat animal issues.

On the one hand, you have Terry Gross on Fresh Air who does stories on how intelligent some animals are, and then doesn’t blink when a researcher talks about invasive research on them. Similar experiences can be had listening to Radiolab and This American Life. But they are much better than the Planet Money crew who consider farmed animals inanimate objects at best and worthy of contempt at worst.

These are programs that show a great deal of sensitivity to most progressive issues. And while I have a pretty high tolerance for our meat-centered, animal-unfriendly culture, it really burns me to hear these otherwise-enlightened people talk so insensitively. At the very least, they could care about offending their audience, which has many animal advocates.

Much worse than being personally offended, I am concerned that millions and millions of progressive listeners who might otherwise care about animal issues are listening to intelligent, sophisticated radio show hosts and guests dismiss animals’ suffering as unworthy of concern on a daily basis. It cannot be good for what we are trying to accomplish.

After hearing This American Life’s episode “Animal Sacrifice” I reached the tipping point and decided to write them. Below is my email. I am posting it here in hopes that it will help bring some awareness to what I think is a significant, though very subtle problem for our promotion of animal liberation.

This American Life:

I am a longtime listener to This American Life and an occasional donor. I absolutely love the show and am amazed at how you can produce such interesting content week after week.

I know you probably get a lot of feedback any time you mention animals and so I hesitate to write you about this, but your website says that you pass the email around and take comments seriously, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

I have been disappointed in how NPR shows, in general, treat the subject of animals. I realize that NPR is not made up of animal rights advocates, but for a network of people who are so progressive and forward-thinking on so many other issues, the views on animals are not enlightened. The Animal Sacrifice episode (which I listened to weeks ago and have been contemplating writing about ever since then) underlined this point for me. The way animal issues are dealt with on NPR must offend a large portion of the audience in ways that NPR would never be willing to do with any other issue.

I would like to give the entire network a sensitivity training on the subject, but, obviously, that is not realistic. What might be realistic would be for TAL to do a program with some serious thinkers on the issue, such as Peter Singer of Princeton University or Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States. I hope you will consider it.

And thank you again for all the great stories you continue to provide!

Sincerely,

Jack Norris
Davis, CA

Support JackNorrisRd.com

I greatly appreciate direct donations – you can enter any amount:

If button doesn’t work, please click through to website. Thank you!

If you buy anything from Pangea through this link, you not only support me, but also the good people at Pangea who painstakingly research their products to minimize any impact on animals, the earth, and workers.

Amazon.com Gift Cards – E-mail Delivery

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet from Amazon.com

Question:

Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SMOS) is a genetic mutation that impairs the body’s ability to produce its own cholesterol. This very small group of people (1 in 20,000) would need cholesterol in their diet. Any suggestions on how to answer this? Are there any vegan cholesterol sources?

Answer:

The listing for Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome Treatment & Management at Medscape says, “Currently, no treatment has proven effective for patients with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome (SLOS). Potentially, cholesterol supplementation is a logical treatment because it may be expected to raise plasma and tissue cholesterol levels…. Therapeutic trials are underway.”

Someone with SMOS should be under the care of a physician who is probably instructing them (or their parents) as to whether they need cholesterol supplementation and how much they need in their diet.

I am not aware of any vegan sources of cholesterol with which someone could supplement. My understanding is that some plants contain cholesterol, but only in miniscule amounts. For committed vegans, obtaining eggs from someone with companion chickens would be a way to get cholesterol in the diet while causing minimal or no harm to animals. Oysters, clams, or mussels might be another option.

You can support JackNorrisRd.com by purchasing anything through these links

Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet from Amazon.com

Amazon.com Gift Cards – E-mail Delivery

Pangea: The On-Line Vegan Store

Speaking of B12, I just updated Can a Natural Diet Require Supplements? The changes are so extensive that I decided to just link to the article rather than reproduce the changes here. I hope people who get, or have, this question about a vegan diet will find it helpful.

And please remember that you can support JackNorrisRD.com by buying things through the site’s links to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Pangea – the Vegan Store! This does make a difference for me and I am most grateful to those of you who continue to do this. Sharing my posts on Facebook and Twitter also makes a big difference and gets the word out about healthy vegan eating.

Thank you!

Your Daily Dose of Vegan Outreach has reported that, “In 2009, 2010, and 2011, hundreds of millions fewer land animals were raised and slaughtered for food in the U.S. than at the peak in 2008.”

Looks like our efforts are having an impact!

Interesting post by PaleoVeganology arguing that the efficiency of carrying adipose tissue by way of bipedalism, and not meat-eating, is what allowed human brains to grow larger than other primates:

It’s Curtains For The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis

Cooking food has also been argued to be what allowed humans to grow their brains larger than other primates.

I’m not sure how long its been this way, but I just saw that the PaleoVeganology blog is now available by email. I highly recommend it. I am very rarely interested in reading anything about nutrition that isn’t published in scientific journals (Ginny’s articles excepted, of course), but this blog is fascinating.

Check it out: paleovegan.blogspot.com

Ryan Henn, organizer of Vegans in Vegas, put together a 16 minute video of interviews he did with myself, Robert Lucius, Joe Connelly, Nathan Runkle, Dan Mims, Jason Wyrick, and others who attended the event. The emphasis was on men and veganism. Link

Interesting article:

The Carpe Credo: All Birthday Cake and Alcohol is Vegan

Let Them Eat Meat has an excellent interview with Robert of PaleoVeganology. Link

I received a ping back from an ex-vegan and ex-animal rights activist, Paleosister. She writes:

> “Jack Norris, who I remember seeing speak at AR 2003 and greatly admired, writes that we should try to consume as little animal flesh (and other animal products) as possible. Quite frankly, you’re missing the point, Jack. The world is being destroyed due to agriculture; entire ecosystems are ruined—the habitats’ of animal populations destroyed—because of the foods vegans and the left are promoting.”

Some background: Paleosister is another person who failed to thrive on a vegan diet. She writes about that:

> Another common response is simply disbelief that it’s really possible to experience a physiological change with just a bite of meat….the first time I sat down to eat meat, I thought, “that is the strangest thing. I actually do feel better!” Then, for the first time in nearly a decade, I didn’t have suicidal thoughts for an entire hour!

First of all, I want to say that I feel bad that Paleosister had poor health and suicidal thoughts as a vegan. It is a serious problem that some people don’t thrive on the vegan diet, and we should not blame the victim.

I suspect that part of the problem is that vegan propaganda often includes the message that “diets based on whole grains, legumes, nuts, fruits and vegetables provide all the necessary nutrients.” For one thing, they don’t – they don’t contain vitamin B12. But the mantra also simplifies the situation regarding a lot of other nutrients.

For too many years, groups promoted such an idea. Instead of making sure that vegans were getting enough protein, we talked about how it was impossible not to get enough protein. Instead of telling vegans to get enough calcium, we told vegans that calcium isn’t important. Instead of telling people to get a regular source of vitamin B12, we downplayed the need. Instead of telling vegans to get a normal amount of fat, we have promoted very low-fat diets.

In fairness, much of the vegan community has changed its tune since the 1990s and now many urge vegans to make sure they get enough of these nutrients. Also in fairness, some research has indicated that low-fat vegan diets can help effectively treat heart disease and diabetes. And since studies have shown vegetarians (vegans and lacto-ovo) to have good health over time, and many of us feel just fine, we didn’t think there was a problem.

Paleosister apparently did not find any help for her health problems when she looked. I do not know what she tried, nutrition-wise, and what she didn’t. She says:

➢ It’s not the placebo effect. It’s most likely not even the effect of any nutrient we know of.

It is highly unlikely that there are any essential nutrients required by a large portion of the human population that are not currently known – the success of soy infant formulas and tube-feedings indicate this. However, there are a variety of non-essential nutrients that some people might not make enough of when following a vegan diet, especially if their bodies have been dependent on those substances from animal products up until the point of going vegan.

The fact that many children whose mother’s were vegan from conception and who are vegan from birth (except breast-milk), grow and thrive, is proof that meat, dairy, and eggs are not needed to produce healthy human bodies (at least in many cases).

I am becoming more and more concerned about promoting “healthy eating” along with veganism. So often, when someone goes vegan, they make other changes that they think are for the better – no more junk food or very low fat. It seems safer, from the perspective of animal protection, that new vegans eat as closely as they were to the way they previously had eaten so that they feel similarly; that is, unless they were previously feeling badly due to poor diet.

We should also not view ex-vegans who failed to thrive as our enemies. Who can blame someone for eating meat if they felt terrible as a vegan? I understand that we believe animals have a right not to be killed, but there would be a very strong incentive to reshape such views if we felt miserable if we didn’t eat animal flesh. It would be nice to be able to work with such people who still care about animals but cannot be vegan, rather than vilifying them; or their vilifying us for that matter.

Our message needs to become more nuanced if we want to minimize the problems we see with failure to thrive.

Now back to the point that Paleosister says I don’t get:

> The world is being destroyed due to agriculture; entire ecosystems are ruined—the habitats’ of animal populations destroyed—because of the foods vegans and the left are promoting.

No matter what humans eat, there is going to be environmental harm. I do understand that monocrops are generally bad for the environment, but I do not agree that vegan foods, in general, are significantly worse than grass-fed animal foods.

In the U.S., most animal foods are made using monocrop feeds. It does not seem realistic to feed 300 million people (or six-billion), grass-fed animal products as the bulk of their calories.

If most people switched to a vegan diet, an enormous amount of land currently grown for feed crops could be turned back into natural ecosystems, and that would be a huge gain. And at the same time it promotes an ethic of respecting the lives of animals.