a vegan influencer living in Malaysia dies of malnutrition.
no I don't have a lot of sympathy for her. One wonders how many others she influenced have developed medical problems: being vegan is a cult. Remove organized religions (That have 2000 years experience in what is good and bad) and all sorts of crazy ideas proliferate: but the main reason I am not sympathetic is that these types are rich upper class types who are hoity toity to the rest of us (both deplorables and poor people). And quick: How many vegans work with the homeless etc. When PETA was out in Manila demonstrating, I didn't see them giving food to the poor street kids nearby. In contrast, most churches do outreach to the poor here.
Dirty little secret:
Vegan diets are lacking protein and certain vitamins. There are several reports out there about children in the affluent west suffering malnutrition and even dying because their crazy moms didn't feed them corectly
the UKMail article shows photos of a severely undernourished lady. She was an influencer and like other cult learders this lady got lots of positive feedback on how wonderful she was, never mind that she was pushing bad advice.
Or is it a variation of anorexia nervoxa?
Ironically a lot of so called medical sites are very sympathetic to those idiots and their diet. Because too many fat people fill up the clinics. (Is it gluttony, or Plastics?)
And of course the green idiots running the world are pushing vegetarian diets so often cite their health benefits: Ignoring that yes they don't get diabetes or obesity but ignore that malnutrition makes you vulnerable to infectious disease.
In medical school, we used to call such malnourished people as having "PPP" i.e. P=ss Poor Protoplasm....
Many of these people were usually poor from the slums who couldn't afford meat and ate lots of bread but few veggies or fruit and not a lot of meat/milk/eggs due to poverty, (and the difficulty in buying food in slums aka food deserts...). Things have now improved since I was in medical school: food stamps and the WIC program have made these problems less acute.
but I left the USA before the big homeless social epidemic hit and I suspect docs are seeing a lot more malnutrition....
I worked mainly with the rural poor and on the Res, and we had a lot of alcoholics who got most of their calories from alcohol.
Nowadays, meth would do this, but ironically when I worked on the res, we didn't have meth and only a little cocaine: mainly marijuana and alcohol. So I know a lot about nutrition but not much about vegans or drugs.
and we had outreach to our diabetics, and WIC that helped stop malnutriton in babies (and we stressed breast feeding). There is a reason the Public Health Service staffs these hospitals: outreach...and now the tribes are taking them over but often the staff are trained in preventive medicine and tribal customs and there is Indian preference in hiring and that helps too.
Racism is real...Yes but not race per se but ignorance or disdain for people who don't think and act like upper class white elites.
However, most of my expertise in nutrition was when I worked in Africa.
We had a lot of kwashiorkor and marasmus among babies when I worked in Africa.
Marasmus was usually babies whose moms got pregnant too soon and the babies couldn't eat/digest adult food. But Kwashiorkor was in older toddlers who had been weaned: Meaning they now had no breast milk and the adult diet lacked protein.
We had a nutrition village to educate moms into learning to use a proper diet; Stressing chickens in cages (hybrid high egg-laying European chickens cross bred with local chickens who had resistance to local diseases) We kept them in cages because of feral dogs and also so when they laid eggs the eggs could be gathered. Part of the training was to give the egg to the kid, not the father.
This might be seen as male privlege, but the reason the father gets the protein and food first is because if the father dies, the entire family could die, since it requires a man to plant maize etc with an oxen (women planted what we would call kitchen gardens, veggies and grain but not enough to feed everyone, but often sold for money to buy other things).
That is also the reason that the custom was that if the father died, the wife would marry his brother, to care for her and his brother's kids.
globalization pushed men and women to work in cities or overseas and send money home to keep the family going...And of course now China got rich using the same idea (bring peasants to work in factories let wifey at home with the kids to care for grandmom).
Sigh. Both good and bad in this: but that's anothe discussion.
So how do you do outreach to traditional communities to improve health and nutrition?
Andrew Webwafa has a lot of videos up on youtube about his outreach clinics, including nutritional ones, if you want to know how this outreach is done.
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