Sunday, September 18, 2016

Health, Animals, and Ginny Messina

Noted author and commentator Sam Harris recently announced in an "ask me anything" podcast that he is no longer vegetarian. The main reason he gave was that his health suffered while vegetarian, and improved once he went back to eating animals.

Mr. Harris is a highly intelligent, well-off American who has the resources to eat anything he wants or needs. His trouble is in keeping with a Psychology Today survey a while back that found that the main reason people quit being vegetarian is because they don't feel healthy.

Contrast this with the message promoted by many animal advocates: that all animal products are deadly poison, and a vegan diet will cure all ills.

The difference between the message we often present and the reality on the ground should give us pause. It also should make us appreciate – and promote – the work of Ginny Messina, the world's leading vegan Registered Dietician. Ginny isn't out to hype veganism for veganism's sake, but is instead committed to honest and thorough information so more and more people can actually thrive on a compassionate diet.

If you don't subscribe to Ginny's blog yet, be sure to!

3 comments:

Pavonis said...

The reason why people go back to eating meat often is the same reason why people go back to smoking cigarettes : they feel better. They confound feeling better with being healthier. Many people feel fantastic until they suddenly drop dead from a heart attack.
And for some people, meat is a placebo : they think it's better for their health, so they feel better when eating it.
Also, many vegetarians eat too much dairy (they replace meat with cheese, milk...) and therefore they become iron deficient.

Matt Ball said...

This sounds like wishful thinking -- contending that people don't really mean what they say, that we actually know why they did what they did.

Unknown said...

After first 2 years of being vegetarian (close to vegan), I’ve faced so much evident troubles with health so sometimes I began to scary - maybe I should come back to eating chickens because I don’t get some essential nutrients. But when I learned (particularly from the blogs of Ginny Messina and Jack Norris) what all specific nutrients I need and from what plant sources I can get them, I realized that if I’ll run into another problems in the future, it will be my problems, but not the chicken’s.
But unfortunately a lot of people in russian (and of cause not only russian) vegan community still based their decisions about nutrition on not scientifically proofed information, ignore necessity of B12 supplements etc. So I try to share information from Ginny and Jack as much as I can now)
To be honest, I’m not sure (knowing statistics about percentage of vegan recidivism, lack of kale and natto in russian supermarkets and some other problems with health) that I’ll stay vegan for a long-term, but I’ll try)

P.S. Sorry for my English)