Eating meat is healthier than going vegan: The provocative message in a book which argues much of the so-called evidence supporting a plant-based diet should be taken with a pinch of salt
Jayne Buxton’s son was recently working in a Central London delicatessen. A customer who had ordered a coconut-milk latte announced that she used to be a vegan. ‘It was the best diet,’ she said. ‘I felt so great on it.’
Buxton’s son asked why she was no longer vegan. ‘Oh, well my hair and nails started to fall out,’ came the reply, ‘so I had to stop.’ He asked whether this might be a sign that the diet wasn’t particularly healthy after all. ‘Oh no,’ insisted the woman. ‘It’s a really, really healthy diet. I felt incredible.’
As an example of the level at which much of the debate on this subject is conducted, it’s hard to beat. Extremes rule, and nuance can sling its hook.
The direction of travel is clear. In October 2019, the mayors of 14 cities around the world (including London’s Sadiq Khan) committed their citizens to the near-vegan Planetary Health Diet. The students of three UK universities have banned beef from their campus bars and shops. At least one company has forbidden staff to claim meals containing meat on their expenses.
Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, thinks omnivores should be treated like smokers: ‘If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant’. Meat has been taken off the menu at the Golden Globe Awards, and Joaquin Phoenix urged the world to go vegan in his 2020 Oscar acceptance speech.
Of course, as soon as you hear an actor pontificating on something you know the truth has to be far more complicated than they make out. (It’s called the Rule of Cumberbatch.) Thankfully, Jayne Buxton is here to fill us in on some of the complexities.
For a start, is meat really as bad for you as its critics claim? Buxton devotes many pages to studies on heart disease and cancer, finding the ‘evidence’ that these conditions can be linked to meat is questionable at best. Much of this analysis is, by its nature, fairly complex. But for simplicity’s sake, she also quotes a former director of medical research for the Royal Navy: ‘For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life... We’ve been eating meat since before we became humans.’
And can plants on their own supply all the nutrients we need? Some experts talk of ‘end-stage veganism’, where years of the diet lead to muscle wasting, skin conditions and other disorders.
Vegans suffer hip fractures at more than twice the rate of omnivores — indeed, the pop star Miley Cyrus cited hip pain as one of the reasons she went back to eating fish and meat, along with the feeling that she was ‘running on empty’.
Her ex-husband, the actor Liam Hemsworth, also changed his vegan diet after his morning smoothies, which included five handfuls of spinach, ‘almost certainly’ gave him kidney stones.
Then there’s the argument that animal farming is bad for the environment. Again, Buxton’s forensic examination of the evidence raises questions. The 2020 documentary Apocalypse Cow claimed that livestock farming is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector. This simply isn’t true — in the U.S., for instance, the respective figures are 3.9 per cent and 28 per cent of the total.
As I say, a lot of this book is number-heavy. But even if the details might occasionally fog your brain, Buxton is brilliant at reminding us of some basic statistical truths, ones that are usually forgotten these days. For instance, you shouldn’t confuse ‘correlation’ with ‘causation’ — just because two things happen at the same time, it doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.
If you plot the number of people who drowned in swimming pools between 1999 and 2009, the rise and fall almost perfectly matches the number of films in which Nicolas Cage appeared each year.
That is clearly a coincidence. Yet when there looks like there could be a link, we’re often too ready to believe it. If a study finds that red meat is associated with higher rates of cancer, ‘how can we be sure it’s the red meat that’s at fault, and not the bun, fries and cola consumed alongside it, or the lifestyles of the people who eat more meat?’
Another crucial mistake is focusing on relative rather than absolute risks. ‘Eating x,’ screams a headline, ‘increases your risk of cancer by 100 per cent.’ You’re terrified, and you start avoiding x. Yet your risk might just have gone from one in a million to two in a million. Still so scared?
Why are some people convinced that veganism is the only way to save themselves and the planet? The young have always loved simplistic slogans that make them feel superior, and Buxton mentions the influence of Greta Thunberg. But she also points out that three-quarters of the world’s vegans are women in the U.S., who are more likely to prioritise weight and appearance over health.
Fear of causing offence, as ever in the modern world, constrains what experts are willing to say. Buxton cites examples of media doctors refusing to criticise veganism, but muttering reminders about the need to take vitamin and other supplements. In other words, they’re admitting that a vegan diet on its own is not enough. Not unless you’ve got a very big plate — for a teenage girl to get her recommended daily intake of iron, for example, she would need to eat 2kg of beetroot.
It’s refreshing to read a book which recognises that life is complicated. Buxton clearly isn’t saying that fruit and veg are bad for you, and she thinks that ‘factory farming is abhorrent’. But equally, she knows that for the entire world population to stop eating meat tomorrow would be absurd.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-10901489/Eating-meat-healthier-going-vegan.html
**********************************************************A woman fails to have it all -- and suffers
Sheryl Sandberg released her battle-cry of a book, Lean In, nine years ago – in which she urged women to lean in to their careers
And now that Sandberg has announced that she’s quit her job as the number two at Facebook (now Meta), I have a few thoughts about the pressure she heaped on women to create a “better world”.
For one thing, it helped leave some of us depressed and medicated.
At the time of Sandberg’s book’s launch, I’d been “leaning in” to work while trying to raise my children for seven years – picture one of those clown heads at a circus side show, swivelling left and right and missing the balls being thrown at it at every turn, but with a soundtrack of howling babies. Rather than “underestimate [my] own abilities”, as Sandberg cautioned, I kept my foot “on the gas pedal”.
And I had a lot more help than many. It’s not just that I’m white and middle class, with the privileges that come with those realities. I was also born tightly wound and raised by a dad with only intermittent work and a mum who never had the luxury of having a job she actually liked. This gave me a lifelong fear of failure and a burning desire for meaningful work.
So, when I was experiencing the abdominal cramps that I knew would soon lead to a miscarriage early in a pregnancy many years ago, I carried on with that day’s assignment with a smile.
This is the price you just had to pay, I’d say to myself, for your kids to know that women’s careers are just as important as men’s careers.
When my kids would tell me, with downcast eyes, that I’d forgotten to attend another school event, I’d feel my heart in my throat, but also, secretly, the internal glow of queasy righteousness. This is the price you had to pay, I’d say to myself – backed by Sandberg’s lauded “movement” – for your kids to know that women’s careers matter as much as men’s.
Sometimes, this righteousness turned to anger – sometimes directed at my children – as I struggled with my fear about the loss of career, the meaning and status it provided, and my guilt over how often I turned my kids away.
They’re the sort of gut-punch experiences that have driven a lot of women I know to feel depressed.
Recently, a friend’s six-year-old declared that when she becomes a mother, “I’ll pay attention to my kids”. “That really hurt,” says my friend, who is writing a book after many years of rejection. “I fantasise about a life where I can just drink wine and watch cat videos, which is probably exactly what I was doing before I went on this Sheryl Sandberg-esque journey.”
Another woman I know quit her much-cherished job as a designer not long after she lashed out at one of her kids.
“I smacked her out of complete frustration,” she says of the incident, which happened in the car in the chaotic morning rush. “I hit her hard. I hit her with intention. I’ve never forgotten it.”
Now, she’s on antidepressant medication. “I should have gone on it way sooner,” she says. “We’re [expected to be] superhuman and we don’t need help, we can do it all ... [and] be like the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world.”
They’re moments that are driving more women to lean out – and find greater happiness in doing so.
“They’re having these conversations with themselves; what would be their biggest regrets on their deathbed?” says Kirsty Levin, creator of The Parents Village. “That they haven’t hit that C-level on their career, or that they don’t have a great relationship with their family?”
“They’re having these conversations with themselves; what would be their biggest regrets on their deathbed? That they haven’t hit that C-level on their career, or that they don’t have a great relationship with their family?”
Leaning out won’t be the answer for all women – and it’s an unimaginable luxury for many – but leaning in is a goal with flawed assumptions: that women gaining power and wealth is the only factor needed for a “better world”, and that professional productivity is the ultimate sign of success. (Sandberg might be a billionaire, but she’s also been labelled the Typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism for her role in helping Facebook profit from monitoring its users.)
My designer friend who has leaned out is not only calmer than ever and present for her children, but on her way to reinvigorating her career in a more joyous, and sane, form. “For the first time in 10 years, I actually can breathe,” she says.
I love my career and find more meaning in it than I ever have. But I’ve been inspired by a different manifesto.
A life of meaning is not synonymous with living an achievement-oriented existence focused on “usefulness”, wrote Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who wrote the 1946 book, Man’s Search For Meaning. Rather, it is love that is “the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire... The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
As for Sandberg? She’s announced she’s moving into philanthropy.
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We Urge Conservatives To Stand Against LGBTQI+ Pride Month
George Rasley
June has been declared LGBTQI+ “Pride Month” by the Biden administration and various arms of the homosexual and transgender lobby and their supporters in Big Business and academia. That’s "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex" for those not already indoctrinated in woke-speak.
As Ben Shapiro explained in a column for American Family News, “…we are told by the White House that we must ignore the internal contradictions of Left-wing sexual ideology, and simply pretend the incoherence away. We are told that we ought to stand for women's rights by the same people who insist that 'Lia' Thomas is a woman; we are told that one need not be a biological female to be a lesbian; we are told that biology dictates behavior, but that biology must never be used as an identifier. None of this makes one whit of sense. But we ought to be proud of it, because after all, it liberates us to celebrate our inner sense of authenticity, free of society's strictures.”
From that perspective, what “Pride Month” is really all about is normalizing the abnormal and grooming your children to become more willing victims of the predatory promoters of deviance – and your government is using your tax dollars to advance this destructive agenda.
Our friend Sara Carter reports, Biden’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it will change interpretation of Title IX prohibitions on discrimination based on sex “to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The Biden Administration rule ties billions of dollars in federal education funding to such policies. The change means “schools that accept any kind of funding, including receiving FAFSA or Pell grants or students who receive federally subsidized school lunch funding, will be subject to the new Title IX LGBT interpretation” reports The Center Square.
In a statement, the USDA stated “As a result, state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from FNS must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.”
“Those organizations must also update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
This will bring the schools of more than a dozen states with prohibitions against men participating in women’s sports into conflict with the federal government and provide an opportunity for litigation which will allow an unelected federal judge to overturn those laws passed by elected state legislatures.
And the result of this society-wide promotion of sexual deviance is a tidal wave of sexual confusion among our children.
As our friend Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association, explained in a recent email to supporters, a February Gallup poll found that 7.1% of Americans now identify as LGBTQ – a 100% increase over 2012 numbers and a 26% increase over 2021!
The general consensus among experts is that this jump among all Americans is being driven by a sharp increase among younger people. For example, last year George Barna found that among those ages 18-24, an astounding 39% self-identified as LGBTQ.
Here is the part that is tragically fascinating. Rather than claiming to be "born that way," many of these young people – for a variety of reasons – are choosing to identify as LGBTQ. In other words, identifying as LGBTQ is seen as a popular choice as much as piercings and skinny jeans.
In a recent article in World magazine, Joseph Backholm of the Family Research Council wrote this:
It is not a coincidence that the rise in LGBT identity has corresponded with the relentless promotion of LGBT characters and storylines in entertainment. Much of the world now conducts a monthlong, annual celebration of all things LGBT. … For many young people, straight is boring and the natural desire to be special is exceeded only by the ease with which one can become special through a simple declaration.
In the face of this concerted effort to normalize the abnormal conservatives must take a strong stand against what amounts to an open conspiracy to destroy our children by making them emotional cripples.
We urge conservatives to speak out should any church, organization or club in which you are involved promotes June as LGBTQI+ “Pride Month.” If you see a “Pride” commercial, change the channel, and if a corporation or business promotes “Pride Month” make a point of letting the management know you don’t patronize businesses or buy products from businesses that promote the destruction of children. And finally, call your Senators and Representative (1-866-220-0044) and tell them you demand that the federal government stop funding this campaign to normalize the abnormal by promoting sexual confusion among our children.
https://www.conservativehq.org/post/we-urge-conservatives-to-stand-against-lgbtqi-pride-month
***********************************************************Pro-Abortion Rioters Target Churches in Hate Attacks
Lots of people are attacking churches in the wake of Roe v Wade possibly being overturned by the United States Supreme Court. The thought of some states not allowing unborn baby murder has sent shockwaves through pro-abortion groups.
Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights took to the streets during an organized riot on Mother’s Day. This was in response to a leaked draft report by the Supreme Court showing that there may be enough votes to overturn Roe v Wade.
The abortion group’s website shows their calculated plans to target churches.
“Several cities will be hosting protests outside of prominent churches in their towns, these can look like a group of people holding signs wearing Handmaids Tale outfits, passing out flyers outside to church goers or doing a die-in,” their website states.
The riot grew in New York City outside the St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They then proceeded to call churches “a symbol for the enslavement of women.”
Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and other pro-abortion groups are focusing on Catholics and Christians in their places of worship as tensions rise. The groups are focusing on putting extreme pressure on the Supreme Court justices to change their votes to keep Roe v Wade. They themselves say that they want to create as much unrest as possible in an attempt to get their way.
Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights says its goal is “to create a situation where those who run this society have to fear the loss of legitimacy if they go forward with revoking abortion rights.”
“Through Rising Up 4 Abortion Rights together on the campuses, in the streets, in the arts and sciences, and everywhere else, we aim to create such political protest and resistance across this country that Supreme Court does not feel they can get away with taking away abortion rights.”
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Why men kill themselves
Bettina Arndt
Over twenty years ago, federal member of parliament Greg Wilton took his own life. The tragedy was the culmination of a series of events which highlight how poorly we deal with vulnerable men. Three weeks earlier, Wilton had been found “in a distressed state” with his children in a car in the national park, apparently rigging a hose to the exhaust. It was widely reported as an attempted murder-suicide.
He spent time in psychiatric care, but with his Labor colleagues maneuvering to force him out of parliament and relentless hounding from the press, it wasn’t long before he tried again. This time he succeeded. On June 14, 2000, the 44-year was found dead in his car, with the exhaust hose attached.
A few years earlier Wilton had given a speech to parliament pointing out that group most likely to commit suicide in this country were men like him – adult males struggling with marital separation. He mentioned extensive research that had emerged over previous years showing “men kill themselves due to an inability to cope with life events such as relationship breakups of the kind I myself have suffered.”
In the two decades since then, that research has piled up. The case is now overwhelming that men facing relationship breakdown should be a key target of Australia’s suicide prevention policies.
There’s no way our health bureaucrats are going to let that happen. The March 2022 budget allocated $2.1 billion to services for women and girls and just $1 million to “improve long term health outcomes” for men and boys. Isn’t that extraordinary? Somehow females are seen as deserving of 2000 times more investment in their health than men, despite their more robust health resulting in four extra years of life expectancy.
What a tribute to the mighty efforts of our feminist health bureaucracy which for decades has strenuously ignored the enormous elephant sitting in their room - namely, the ever-increasing male suicide rate wiping out so many younger adult males.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for people aged 25-44. Male vulnerability is at the heart of the problem. Look at these statistics:
· Men account for 3 in 4 of the lives lost to suicide.
· 7 of the 9 people who kill themselves every day are male.
· There have always been more male than female suicides.
· Over the past ten years males have become even more at risk.
· The male suicide rate is twice the annual road toll.
Men wiping themselves out is a hugely important health issue – yet there’s a very good reason why our politicians and feminist bureaucrats don’t want to go there. As Greg Wilton pointed out, the evidence is piling up that a key reason many of these young men are at risk is they are casualties of family breakup.
The consequent minefield that hits these men, who are frequently fathers, often proves unbearable. Most face some combination of stressful legal battles, false accusations, crippling child support payments; financial ruin and most importantly, the loss of their children.
Marty Grant could have been one such casualty. He had it all planned. The tough young farmer from the West Australian wheat belt had the wire around his neck.
The other end was tied to a tree and the car ready to surge into motion. But he stopped himself. “I realized I couldn’t do it to my family and friends.” Marty pulled back, drove himself home, packed a bag and set off to seek help from the local nurse.
I wrote about Marty many years ago in an article on bush suicide for the Australian Women’s Weekly, covering all the stresses these farmers were going through, including crippling drought, dropping commodity prices, succession problems. But it took some doing to persuade the magazine editors to let me tackle the major suicide research issue emerging at that time – family breakdown. It was the loss of his loved ones which pushed Marty over the edge. His partner took off because she didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife, and then the son from a previous relationship – a child Marty had cared for a decade as a single parent - went off to live with his mum. Marty’s family disappeared.
This was the type of story highlighted in research published around that time by the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University which found relationship breakdown to be the main trigger for suicide, with male risk four times that of females.
According to the researchers Drs Chris Cantor and Pierre Baume, men are most vulnerable in the period immediately after separation – with separation from children a major source of their despair.
That’s a red flag, crying out for suicide prevention intervention. Just think what usually happens when we discover one of these trigger points. Like mothers at risk of suicide due to post-partum depression. When that first made the news, support groups got to work, government funding started pouring in, and now prevention programs are everywhere.
Currently the federal government is targeting anorexic girls. Wham, the latest suicide funding promised $20 million for eating disorder treatment services. Then there’s indigenous suicide. Righty-o. They’ve come up with $79 million in the budget for that one.
Yet for the last two decades there has been absolutely no government funding to follow up Cantor and Baume’s work on vulnerable divorcing men, even though recent Griffith University research still shows relationship difficulties to be the major triggering life event, accounting for 42.5 % of suicides. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data lists relationship disruptions/problems as the key suicide psychological risk factors after self-harm, which is more a symptom of distress than a trigger.
But this key issue never features in the public narrative. Instead, we are presented with carefully constructed red herrings. Remember the lavish 2016 ABC television program, Man Up, which spent three episodes claiming we need to teach suicidal men to show their feelings. Hours of television about men having to learn to cry, but not a word about what they were crying about.
Then they announced a mental health expert, Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer, and followed up with $5.6 million from mental health funding to encourage men to seek help. Don’t they love this new diversion, focussing on encouraging men to rid themselves of their toxic masculinity and show their softer side?
But the fact is that even though many suicidal men have mental health problems, our authorities are strenuously ignoring the key event which might push them over the edge. Data from the Queensland Suicide register shows that 42% of men who die by suicide have a mental health diagnosis but 98% have experienced a recent life event, such as relationship breakdown.
Given the ongoing male suicide crisis, it is an absolute scandal that our suicide policies are still proudly “gender neutral” with up to 4 of 5 beneficiaries female, according to analysis by the Australian Men’s Health Forum. Read the case AMHF makes for a male suicide prevention strategy here.
Yet finally there are tiny green shoots appearing midst the ongoing gloom. In January this year Suicide Prevention Australia, the peak body for suicide prevention organisations, announced that “it’s time to talk about male suicide prevention.”
“Of the 3,000 lives tragically lost to suicide each year, over 75% are men. They are our husbands and fathers, our brothers and uncles, our colleagues and friends”, wrote CEO Nieves Murray, announcing they were pushing for an “ambitious male suicide prevention strategy,” guided by “the evidence” and “addressing underlying issues that might lead men to the point of crisis,” and actually mentioning support for men in family courts.
The Morrison government announced last November that some suicide prevention funding would be targeted at risk groups including men but didn’t manage to get this up before the election. No doubt the health bureaucrats have no interest in rushing this one through and it’s hard to imagine this happening if a Labor/Green government gets into power.
Look what happened after Pauline Hanson had the guts to speak out about false allegations and bias against men when appointed Deputy Chair of the recent parliamentary inquiry into family law. She was ripped apart in the media and her Labor/Green committee members stymied any hope of addressing these issues, despite hundreds of submissions documenting how men are being done over.
Tackling male suicide means highlighting the way the family law system is now weaponised against men. This will attract huge resistance from the feminist mob controlling our media, so adept at cowering politicians into inaction. But too many people now know and care about what’s driving so many men to take their lives.
The time is right for a mighty campaign to galvanise public opinion and demand real change
https://www.thinkspot.com/discourse/jMua25/post/bettina-arndt/why-men-kill-themselves/bvZtjy
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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