Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I've mentioned it before here, but since it's still being shown to me by quite a few people I thought I should comment again on this new fraudulent study being used to back the claim that “bringing up children as vegans is unethical”. The study takes a very small sample group of Kenyan children subsisting on a diet of not much more than corn and beans (without even dairy products), gives some of them meat and dairy diets, and then compares their progress. First, it should be obvious to anyone that they did not have a complete vegan diet — they suffered from malnutrition and starvation, and if you read the study itself they admit freely that these kids are known to have radically incomplete diets, and many were severely underweight and living in abject poverty.

Now, the folks promoting the study make some extreme statements for their meat industry sponsors, going so far as to essentially call veganism child abuse and “unethical”. But if you look at their results (from sample groups of only about a hundred kids per group), you'll note that in most areas the differences between the sample groups were negligible (a few percent), with some tests (verbal skills for example) showing effectively zero difference between the malnutrition control group and those who were given meat and dairy. Other tests (Raven's Progressive Matrices) actually showed kids who were given supplements and dairy products getting worse in comparison to the kids with malnutrition!

If the difference between full-on malnutrition and a meat/dairy eater is negligible (or even decreases in some cases), I'd like to see a study that includes a complete vegan diet, not something that incorrectly equates “malnutrition” with “vegan”. I would wager that you'd see the most dramatic increases in that group due to having a complete diet, and without all the contaminants, you'd see huge health and lifespan improvements as well. Excluding such a group is extreme ignorance, if not fraud.

This study — and its subsequent misinterpretations — were sponsored in part by Global Livestock CRSP, Land O'Lakes (a factory farming corporation), Heifer International (a pro-meat organization, but one with good ethics), and others so it's pretty clearly biased financially. As is all too common in these types of studies, the results are almost meaningless, and the conclusions are politically motivated. The fact is that a complete diet can be gained from any type of food — attention just has to be paid to what's being consumed if one isn't eating incredibly rich (too rich!) food like meat.

It's pretty obvious that if you don't get all your nutrients you're going to suffer, and there are a few that you have to pay attention to in a vegan diet (B12 most obviously), so you have to either take supplements or expand your dietary intake to include foods like dulse (a sea vegetable that I love). However, if you're eating in North America or Europe, many soy products are already supplemented for you. Using a bunch of poor Kenyan kids that are starving to death and eating an incredibly incomplete diet as “proof” that a vegan diet is unhealthy is laughable at best… and given that a vast majority of the deaths in North America are linked to a high-calorie high-meat (hello cancer) diet (and both animal and human studies show marked increases in both lifespan, health, and even performance and intelligence on a vegan diet), it's criminal to make such allegations, especially when sponsored by pro-meat organizations.

I really dislike mercenary scientists that alter their findings in order to please their sponsors.