Over a year ago we noticed Children’s Health Defense was promoting a carnivorous diet and speaking out against vegan “processed” foods. First of all, unless we eat only raw fruits, grains, legumes, and vegetables and squeeze our own juices, all food is processed one way or another. Furthermore, we are extremely grateful that food that we’ve loved since childhood, especially our comfort food, is available as plant-based now. This means that people who would not ordinarily become vegans because of the foods they missed have now become vegans and miss out on nothing!
Most of the people we know are vegans because they love animals and they choose compassion over cruelty. To them, the health issue is secondary even though the health issue is extremely important. An overwhelming number of reliable clinical studies have been done by now that show a plant-based diet is the most healthy and that eating animal flesh and animal byproducts causes a plethora of health problems. If carnivores don’t believe that then they are in denial.
But the horrific cruelty of factory farming is something even the most dedicated carnivores cannot deny. The evidence is overwhelming. Slaughterhouses are horrific houses of panic, terror, and gruesome mass murder. Protesting outside slaughterhouses and oberving the terrified crated animals on trucks smell death a few feet away and listening to the screams of animals inside is heartbreaking.
We read an article recently about a few celebrities who have given up on eating plant-based – Miley Cryrus, Liam Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway, Samuel L. Jackson, Ellen DeGeneres, Channing Tatum, Zooey Deschanel – all of them maintaining they just didn’t feel healthy as vegans – Anne Hathaway said she “dabbled” in a vegan diet for awhile. Ellen DeGeneres is the only one who mentioned the cruelty of factory farming but still went back to eating meat. For the rest of these celebrities, having compassion for the animals as opposed to supporting cruelty was a non issue. Our observation has been that people who become vegan for moral reasons and a deep love of animals do not “dabble” in veganism. They stay vegan, because how in God’s name do you decide that for a short time you care about animals and then you turn your back on them and wipe out of your mind the pictures and videos of the horrendous suffering of factory farmed animals? It’s impossible. But for many celebrities veganism is just a fad and animal suffering irrelevant. We recommend that all of them visit this site https://tamerlaine.org/factory-farming-in-pictures We wonder if looking at these pictures would make the slightest difference to these people or are they just too jaded to care?
When it comes to groups that support health freedom but also support meat eating, like Children’s Health Defense, we cannot fathom why they are doing this. We saw one of their spokespeople, Jillian Michaels, on Fox News promoting carnivorous eating. In her opinion, frying food in animal putrescence is so much heathier than frying in plant-based options. It took decades for us to convince restaurants not to fry their food in lard and eliminate the lard sandwiched between Oreo cookies. Now Jillian, CHD, and others want to take us back to the bad old days?! It makes our blood boil.
RFK, Jr. claims to be an environmentalist, but he is promoting an industry responsible for massive animal death, human death through heart disease and cancer, and mass clearing of the Amazon rainforest. If everyone lived like Americans do currently, we would need 5.1 of earth’s resources to sustain ourselves, and most Americans aren’t even carnivores at the moment. Imagine how many earths would be required if everyone followed RFK, Jr.’s “ideal diet.” There is not enough room on earth for all the cattle farming that would be required if everyone became carnivores.
We and many other health non profits have written extensively on the environmental damage caused by factory farming – to our soil, water, and air. So why is CHD and RFK, Jr., the environmentalist, promoting meat eating and attacking veganism? We’ve written to Mary Hollard at CHD and asked her why, but have received no answer.
While doctors may not get a passing grade when it comes to health, they rarely promote full-carnivore diets and nonsense like all seed oils are bad. It’s sad to say, but many people would be better off just listening to their doctors now instead of listening to people like Jillian Michaels and RFK Jr. peddling diets that cause heart disease and environmental destruction. After all, what’s the point of being “health woke” if it just means you’re going to promote eating animals?
It’s almost as if some “alternative health” groups have become another arm of the meat industry. Maybe they saw that veganism was becoming popular so they needed a way to make the promotion of meat-eating look like it was coming from the grassroots. Or maybe they’re just rationalizing their own carnivorous diet. Insecure people like the celebrities above, who fall victim to fads, may think resuming eating animals makes them special somehow, or maybe they really have been convinced it’s healthier, but really they’re just falling into step with one of the biggest and most destructive industries in the world.
Recommended reading – The World Peace Diet, Food for Freedom, and The World Peace Way by Will Tuttle Ph.D.