Korean Job Discussion Forums

[cosmo]

Why does vegan cheese taste bad?
It hasn't been tested on mice.

What do you call a militant vegan?
Lactose intolerant.

[Bramble]

[cosmo]

I took Bramble's advice and researched the matter.

The more you look into this matter, the creepier it gets.

Here are excerpts from a story about a vegan couple who literally got away with murder in the death of one of their children.

They almost killed their three other children.

There are photos attached that show skin draped over the bones of their extremely malnourished children.

Diet From Hell
A valley vegan couple's fear of obesity was no picnic for their kids
By Ray Stern
Published: May 10, 2007
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2007-05-10/news/diet-from-hell/1
Hospital workers and police bore a heartbreaking sight when they laid eyes on Zion, who weighed 13 pounds.

Doctors at Phoenix Children's Hospital compared her condition with that of a starving Third World child. Her skin was loose on her bones, with hardly any fat or muscle to make it taut. Nearly every tendon and bone was visible. Her heartbeat could be seen in her scrawny chest.

The outraged medical staff at PCH demanded that police bring in the other two children. As expected, doctors found Caleb and Michaela malnourished as well. The boy weighed just 31 pounds. His older sister was barely seven pounds heavier.

Kimu Parker's trial ended April 9: The jury took 95 minutes to convict her of three counts of child abuse. She faces a mandatory prison term of 30 to 51 years at her sentencing, scheduled for June 13.

And jury members hadn't even been told about Lily.

She was the Parkers' second daughter. She died at 3 after a series of seizures in 2001, three months before Zion was born.

On a warm day in September six years ago, little Aaliyah "Lily" Parker was coming down with something. She was whiny. She felt hot, then cold. She didn't want to play with her older siblings.

Then she had a seizure. The toddler went silent and seemed frozen for a few moments.

Most parents, if they had not already called a doctor, certainly would have done so by that point
The Parkers didn't even take the kids' temperatures; thermometers contain mercury, and mercury is dangerous.

The Parkers didn't call for help after Lily's first seizure. Or the second. Or the fifth.

The seizures seemed to escalate in strength. The Parkers tried massaging the little girl. The self-fashioned experts on herbal medicines gave her one-sixth of an adult dose of valerian and passion flower in an attempt to relax her muscles.

Lily vomited as they tried to feed her apple juice through her clenched teeth. The Parkers let her lie down in their bed, and they prayed.

Then came what Blair Parker would later call a grand mal seizure. Every muscle in her little body seemed to tighten.

Her breathing became "like a frog, raspy," a cop later recorded Blair as saying.

She stopped breathing about 10:30 p.m. The Parkers shut off every appliance in the apartment, hoping her breath would be audible in the silence. It wasn't.

That's when they called 911.

[Callan]

Need a licence to drive a car...any twit with the gear can have children.

[Bramble]

Another article where the word "vegan" made the headlines when it had no relevance to the case. I doubt the parents were really vegan, for that matter.

[cosmo]

Kimu switched to a vegan diet in her teen years, hoping that avoiding dairy products would help her allergies and asthma.

Kimu met her future husband, Blair, at church, according to Holiday. The couple lived with Holiday before moving to Montana.

But the Parkers strayed far from typical Seventh Day Adventist teachings, which do not call for the withholding of medical care from children. Dozens of hospitals in the United States are affiliated with the church.

Donald McElvain, a local elder in a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Ronan, Montana, near where the Parkers once lived, says neither he nor other church members remember the family.

"It's embarrassing" to have the Parkers linked to his faith, McElvain says.

Although the Parker children apparently are recovered, they may still have health problems later in life stemming from malnourishment.

Jeff Hampl, an associate professor of nutrition at Arizona State University, says that if the body doesn't get the proper nutrients during a childhood growth spurt, it may never recover. The growing brain is particularly vulnerable to nutritional deficiencies.

Hampl, who hasn't examined the children, says that if their intelligence hasn't been affected by now, it probably won't be. But behavior problems and attention deficit disorder symptoms could manifest themselves. Sometimes, there is a deficiency in iron in malnutrition cases; iron is needed in the right quantity to carry oxygen to the brain. It's also probable that the kids will be underweight their whole lives, he says.

[jinju]

Only sick people put an agenda over their children's health.

Ergo, vegans are sick bastards.

[Rteacher]

Don't you think that's a sweeping generalization to make from the example of just one couple?

There's much more evidence indicating that people who support the slaughter of millions of animals daily to satisfy their lust for animal flesh and blood are really sick bastards ...

[Bramble]

[Bramble]

[cosmo]

[Corky]

I found this from an article on rotten.com. The article runs through three common eating disorders, the third one being veganism.



Veronica Vegan
"...our saddest personal account of living with an eating disorder comes to us from Veronica Vegan, whose deterioration first began when she was a teenager. Just like that fabled cobblestone road to Hell, her descent into madness was paved with good intentions.

Veronica was a high school freshman looking to distinguish herself from the overgrown landscape of gangly, indistinguishable clods passing themselves off as her immediate peer group. She found herself at that tender, impressionable age where overexposure to lukewarm bumper sticker propaganda likening meat to murder is somehow capable of communicating a higher spiritual purpose. Put four AA batteries into your Sony Walkman and sing along: The flesh you so fancifully fry / The meat in your mouth / As you savor the flavor / Of murder. What could Morrisey of The Smiths possibly be singing about if not being kinder to animals? Certainly not anonymous blowjobs in the train stations near Piccadilly Circus or the looming AIDS crisis of working-class Manchester circa 1980. Fascinated by the sheer whimsy of choosing to eat some things but not others, fourteen-year-old Veronica asked her mom for a ride to the public library in order to seek out further enlightenment.

What she found in the Young Adult section was nothing short of horrific. Poorly-bound volumes of black and white photographs published by PETA and dated no later than 1974 flew in the face of everything Veronica had ever known. Awkwardly printed pamphlets banged out on cheap typewriters (a font choice she incorrectly assumed to be fashioned after punk rock) all showcased disturbing visuals of what honestly, truly happens to cows, chickens, and pigs as they pass through the slaughterhouse. Oh, what filthy, inexcusable conditions! The flies and the feces! The blood and entrails! The snips and tails and snouts every which way! And human beings eat that slop? Good lord, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. It's practically the twenty-second century after all! Who even knows which is worse: the risk factors to our health or the fat factors to our expanding waistlines! Hasn't anybody ever heard of disease? Why doesn't the news ever report stuff like this?

It never really occurred to Veronica that -- like fine French cheeses or healthy American stem cells -- farm animals are born and bred in isolated captivity for one exclusive purpose, and their thoughts and feelings are of little consequence. The grainy images on cheap Xeroxed paper comfortably insinuated themselves into her eager, receptive adolescent brain right then and there. With a single tear sliding down her face, Veronica vowed never again to eat anything with eyeballs. As easily as she might come out and declare herself a lesbian, Veronica announced to her parents and friends that she was now -- and had always been, and would forever be -- a vegetarian.

Orthorexia Nervosa is a fixation on righteous eating, first diagnosed by Colorado physician Dr. Steven Bratman in 1997. The term is derived from the Greek word "ortho" meaning straight and correct, and refers to a psychological syndrome where one's food choices grow progressively narrower over time under the auspices of health. When vegetarians learn there's an even more restrictive diet plan available -- the way of the vegan -- dairy products like milk or cheese, subclasses of poultry products such as eggs, and refined bread ingredients involving yeast or white flour are summarily stricken from their diets as well. Nothing is allowed inside the body of a devout vegan which might be psychologically interpreted as a toxin. Veronica's daily struggle to keep the "poisons" out and remain uncontaminated by the "wrong" food results in a total reliance upon what other vegans are doing to keep themselves alive, since they're the only ones who can ever be trusted. Like an oil painter who arbitrarily refuses to use yellow, a vegan diet is an attempt to gain control over at least one simple aspect of a person's otherwise ordinary life -- a "less is more" aesthetic taken to conceited extremes.

Extremes like vegan dog food, completely free of meat or animal derivatives, composed of only organic vegetarian ingredients like soy, peas, carrots, and sunflower oil. Is there nothing a dog loves more than the wild, hearty grains of a rolled oatcake? And woe to the meat-eater who tries dating a vegan -- even for a single evening. Dr. Bratman's treatise on orthorexia cautions that an excessive vegan lifestyle is socially restricting -- eventually coming to rule a person's life to the point where all thoughts and activities revolve around what is and what isn't "allowed". Where people with anorexia and bulimia focus on quantities, people with orthorexia focus obsessively on the psychological qualities, the purities, of their food.

The decision to become a vegan has perilous side effects, not the least of which is a near-constant struggle to prepare meals which fool the body into thinking it's getting what it really wants. Veronica forces herself to go through a great deal of labor and preparation just to make her food taste more like meat, with weird-ass spices from around the world sprinkled atop "exotic" (and mandatory) sauces, curries, fungus, Boca burgers, textured vegetable paste, Tofurkey, and other processed blends of soy and gluten. Livejournaled any vegetarian recipes lately? There's a lot of disgusting shit out there -- and if you thought fat people were ugly, take a goggle-eyed gander at vitamin-deficient vegans. The universal hallmarks of a long-term vegan diet absent in proteins are pallid gray skin, stringy straw-like hair, knobbled witchy finger knuckles, cracked lips, diminished muscle mass, protruding bones, yellowed teeth, a smug sense of self-satisfaction, and enough lanugo peach fuzz to carpet the moon.

In January of 2006, a Miami jury convicted Lamoy and Joseph Andressohn of felony child neglect for enforcing a strict diet of raw fruits, vegetables and wheatgrass. Their baby weighed less than seven pounds when she died of malnourishment, too weak to lift her head or sit without help. In the last three days of her life, she could only roll back her eyes. The autopsy reported that at the time of death, the child had "a grassy odor" and a bloated, distended abdomen.

Other children in the Andressohn family never saw a doctor, but received wheat grass enemas in lieu of traditional Western medicine, and testified they were taught that cooked foods were "evil." Shortly after the children were removed from their home by authorities, they discovered a new love for tacos. The mother and father, meanwhile, were ordered to abandon their extreme diet and keep their children on meals approved by a nutritionist."




Warning: if you choose to go to the link below and view the whole article, you will see very graphic images that you may find disgusting.

http://www.rotten.com/library/medicine/eating-disorders/

[Bramble]

What an aptly named Web site - then again, moronic.com or idiot.com would have worked too. I wonder if that's where Jayson Blair works now?

[Rteacher]

"Veganism" is not necessarily an eating disorder for adults, but it has to be practiced intelligently.

For babies, if mother's milk isn't available then cow's milk-based formula is the only healthy substitute (as far as I know...)

And cow's milk provides complete nutrition for growing kids (which is why cows are considered one of our mothers in Vedic culture...)

Of course, vested interests - mainly the meat industry and radical vegan groups - put out a lot of propaganda to support their own cause. I'm sure that there are many "nutritionists" who are vegetarian (including some vegans) as well as the majority who are omniivores ...

The justice system needs to protect children from extreme (and unnatural) diets that jeopardize their well-being, but it shouldn't unnecessarily make judgments on the relative merits of various diets for adults...

[Bramble]

One issue I have with the way the media handles these cases is that the coverage is always grossly uninformative. In the Swinton case a few years ago, one report said the mother had decided not to breastfeed because she'd smoked pot, once, months before ever getting pregnant, and was afraid her milk might not be good enough for the baby. The papers could have used the case as an opportunity to educate the public about the importance of breastfeeding, and the fact that many supposed contraindications to nursing really aren't. No nutritionist, vegan or otherwise, condones using homemade infant formula - meat-eating parents who gave a child that age a concoction from a blender would also be guilty of neglect, but it wouldn't make headlines. The media chose to exploit the baby's illness to sensationalize the issue of veganism, just as it did more recently with Crown Shakur. (It's highly questionable whether the Swintons were vegan at all. Some of the articles said they used cod liver oil as part of the concoction they fed their daughter.)

In the Shakur case, the news articles don't really shed any light on the reason for the child's death. Some reports stated that the mother breastfed him, but she obviously wasn't doing it often enough and she never should have given him any other foods at that age - except formula if she really couldn't make enough milk. Maybe the mother was lying about having tried to breastfeed, maybe she didn't have a lactation consultant around to show her how to do it properly, or maybe she was ignorant about how often she was supposed to feed him. That's the real story here - not the couple's supposed veganism, if they were vegans at all. (I'm always skeptical about these things.) It's also possible that they killed him on purpose and lied about their reasons afterward - who knows?

BTW, I've heard that there are "milk banks" where babies can get donated human milk if they need it - but I'm not sure how common they are. I think if the medical industry wasn't so pro-formula, this alternative would become more accessible to adoptive parents and other families that really need it.