Hi! My name is Anna, "You'd really like me if you got to know me. I've known me for years and I love me."
"You are eating high blood pressure, stress, and adrenaline. You are eating fear, grief, and rage. You are eating suffering, horror, and murder. You are eating cruelty. You are what you eat. You cannot be thin, beautiful with a glowing complexion when you eat fear, grief and rage"
*I'm mentally slapping the shallow, selfish author so hard*
Ok, I took a break from my crazy life to read this annoying piece of shit. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for vegan diets. It's an interesting concept and I'll gladly learn something about it. If you like that too, do yourself a favour and stay the fuck away from the 'skinny bitch'. Stick with Dr. Neal Barnard or Dr John McDougall or whoever tickles your noodle.
See something interesting about those guys? Yes, they're actual doctors who have spend decades on research. Who's Rory Freedman? Fuck me if I know. She's not even on wikipedia (that's low). That's just the tip of the iceberg. A small, inconsequential thing. After all, one can possess knowledge without having a degree, so I won't write you off just yet. But having no qualifications on top of, well, EVERYTHING makes me even more pissed. It made me so pissed I've felt the need to review a book even though I barely have time to sleep and eat.
What's the phenomenon of this little atrocity? I'll never understand.
In short:
- it's annoying
- the science is wrong (or incomplete) far too often
- there's little substantial content (half a book is a filler, really. Just a list of vegan products. Half. A. Book.)
There, if you don't feel like reading my long-ass rant, that's all you have to know.
THE TONE:
Rory, "your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!". Fuck you!
This book tries to be sassy and bad-ass. Instead it comes off assy and just bad. It's insulting, boring and enraging at the same time. Congratulations!
I guess the bitch wanted to be cool, like Larry Winget cool. She failed. Miserably. Do you know why, Rory? Because he was careless, aloof, sarcastic but generally laid-back. Whereas you are prissy, pestering, whiny, overconfident, disrespectful, 'superior' and ignorant.
It's the combination of superiority and disregard for others combined with ignorance that gives you that special 'dumb, self absorbed bimbo at the mall' effect. It doesn't make you sound cool and sassy. It makes you sound obnoxious.
When you speak with such sense of superiority and self-righteousness AND manage to get the facts wrong... I've almost quit on the first few pages. Insufferable.
THE FACTS:
I'm not an expert. I poses only 'an approximate knowledge of many things'. However, sometimes I go a bit nutty and start digging.
Some of the facts were just... wrong. Or only half right. Now, I've noticed it at parts concerning topics I'm more familiar with. The rest seemed to make some sense, BUT (!) this is what scares me. Cause if I knew less I might have just bought into some of this... this shit. There's no other way to put it.
She knows nothing, she quotes nothing (no studies, no authorities), and she says things even I know to be incorrect.
THE CONTENT:
Is nothing. Half of the book is some shitty product list. HALF. Like I can't go to a store and have a looksie. You've made me pay for shitty content. And I know why you've done it. You got paid for every single worthless word. Yes, why not list a product, a brand, a particular name and a store. Now repeat 800 times? With all the respect, go fuck yourself with a sharp stick.
THE ETHICS:
This I think she gets quite right. Not totally, but hey. History and morality and politics part is decent. It's even interesting.
However, even that is spoiled with inappropriate remarks. You just can't go from describing inhumanities of a slaughterhouse, diseased animals, cannibalism, mutilation, torture, puss, hormones and pesticides to something as shallow as 'your skinny ass'. There's time and place for everything. And this bitch misses the mark so hard she could be a stormtrooper.
How can you write about the transport conditions, about how (apparently) US has no regulations, so animals travel in trucks full of their own shit and piss. And when it's cold their feet freeze to the floor and then they are just violently ripped off, often resulting in injury. Sometimes even a leg will be torn off. And after something like that you speak about glowing complexion?! WTF is wrong with you?!
No, it doesn't make you sassy and cool. It makes you a self-obsessed piece of shit. I read this, and in my mind I see a blond, bleached woman with fake tan, fake nails, fake boobs, heavy make up, wearing a slutty outfit, chewing gum and rolling her eyes as she proceeds to ponder complexities of life. Such as 'OMG, I don't care my boyfriend's mother had an accident. I mean, she's not dead! And we were supposed to go to this expensive restaurant. How can he be so selfish and, like, not take me! We've been waiting for 2 months!'
*Bonus round! Factual fallacies I've noticed and still remember!
essential amino-acids (aka protein)
This is so basic I can't even... EVERY SINGLE PLANT CONTAINS ALL ESSENTIAL AMINO ACIDS! There. I've said it. Don't believe me? Go to wikipedia, check the 9 acids. Go to any site about nutrition and start checking. Any plants. I've spend hours looking for a plan that wouldn't have them all and couldn't do it. Even fucking lettuce, damn it.
So, variety is covered. Quantity? Bitch, there's no such thing as protein deficiency. It just doesn't fucking exist (apart from people who are starving) If you eat enough calories, you get enough protein. We need very little. Think about it, have you EVER heard a bout someone getting sick or being taken to a hospital upon which they were diagnosed with a protein deficiency? Eating vegan you will, by default, consume more than you need.
If you don't know that, you're not qualified to talk about nutrition. EVER. Not even with your friends during brunch. Much less write a book about food and eating. Fuck off.
*Read a story about where currently popular standards for protein consumption came. You'll be amazed by the power of bullshit.
Sugar = fat.
No, it doesn't. Fat = fat. Have you EVER read a paper on how fat, sugar and protein are dealt with in our bodies? What differences there are?
Let me tell you, your body does NOT readily turn sugar into fat. The process is not efficient. The loss of energy is about 40% if I remember correctly. And that's a last resort, because first it's simply stored as glycogen in liver and muscles (yes, you can carry a few pounds of sugar on you before your body starts to turn excess into fat)
Fat to fat conversion, on the other hand, is unbelievably easy. And since sugar is the preferred fuel of cells... It gets used up and fat gets stored. This is why high-carb low-fat vegan diet is a thing. Low-fat being a pretty important factor.
Unlike the author I'm willing to link one article (McDougall is solid) and one study.
http://fanaticcook.com/2014/03/24/exc...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10...
(Yes, I actually do read research itself. Not just articles written by unqualified, pathetic, confused 'health experts' on some silly website or in a stupid magazine)
The thing is what sugar?
So
- natural sugar in food (fruit etc.) is good. (yes, fruit is good. No, you won't get crazy insulin spikes)
- refined, processed sugar (the word processed should be enough) is bad
What does the author do? Put fruit in the same category as white sugar! Now, how can ANYONE with a shrivel of knowledge take this bitch seriously.
The rest of shit she had to say about sugar was also inaccurate (not completely wrong, unfortunately. If you know little about nutrition you may even believe it. Do NOT!)
There's no point in explaining all of that here, just believe me she has very little fucking factual knowledge. She says 'sugar is the devil'. Personally, I think self absorbed, ignorant bitches writing about nutrition are the devil here.
whole wheat is good
Die in fire! This one is less obvious, but trust me. No, it's not better for you. No, you actually can't absorb the minerals from it any more than you can get iron by licking a car door. Your body just doesn't utilize it.
The kind of flour doesn't matter. What does is if it was made with SOUR DOUGH (or however the fuck you call it in English).
Have you ever wondered why humans through the history never simply ate grains, but instead had those complex processes of utilizing it? Fermentation, brewing alcohol... Nobody eats it straight.
Oh, wait, a cows do...
Because cow has 4 fucking stomachs (or was it 3?)! We have one, and grain contains something I can't name in English (sorry). It's bad for us. We don't digest it well (no, I'm not talking bout gluten). We have one stomach so we have to destroy it before ingesting food. This is what sour-dough does.
No, yeast is not the same. No, you can't speed up the process. Properly made bread is healthy. Most of what you get in stores is shit. But white/whole wheat makes no difference. Well, whole wheat puts more strain on your stomach, so there's that.
I could go on, and on, and on. Just trust me, don't use this book as a source of reliable information. Go, read something else.