by Jason on November 24, 2010
Today’s stories don’t have a whole lot to do with veganism, other than some connections to plants and animals, and I’m sure I could string something together, but folks, honestly, I’m just amazed at these articles and felt like sharing.
A British Columbia man has been charged with feeding bears. Feeding bears is a no-no, because they’ll get all domesticamicated or something, so Allan Wayne Piche is looking at potential fines of up to $100,000 or a year in prison. There’s no word on what charges he’ll be facing for the one thousand marijuana plants found on his property, which was why the cops raided his property in the first place, but hey, you go get ‘em, Ministry of the Environment!
In all, well, most, seriousness, the Ministry was able to “wean” the bears back to nature by gradually reducing the feed levels, which means they didn’t have to euthanize any of them, and kudos to them for properly cleaning up after a drug bust, but I just love how the story’s all about the bears and the drugs are an afterthought.
In other news, British Columbia has gained a new plant species: the world’s deadliest mushroom has been spotted and is likely to stay. Wanna know how deadly the mushroom is? It’s called the death cap mushroom. It’s so deadly it can kill you. It’s, like, lethally deadly.
Oh, and THEY CAN LEVITATE.
I don’t have anything to add, I just liked the picture.
OK, one more, from the same website, because I think they’re speaking to me, and this one isn’t terribly funny but it’s good news just the same: a diet rich in nutrient-dense foods might lead to stronger bones. Nutrient-dense foods are ones with high ratios of nutrients to calories, as opposed to calorie-dense foods, which have high ratios of calories to doughnuts. Plant-based foods are packed with nutrients and don’t usually have a lot of calories, so they win, and people who eat a lot of them tend to have fewer fractures.
Fish also gets mentioned, but let’s just ignore that because there’s lots of plants in the article and fish have more heavy metals which means you’ll trigger the airport detectors even more often if you eat them, or so says my science, so just stick with the plants and you’ll have a better chance of being an 80 year old pro-wrestler, body slamming and top-rope diving like the strong boned person you are.
by Jason on November 10, 2010
As a vegan, why do I feel like it's expected that I've mastered multiple books like this one? Of course, if more omnivores read these, there might be fewer omnivores out there...
Each day when I sit down to find something on the internet to write about, I usually start with a Google News search for “vegan.” It hasn’t really given me anything useful for a long time, since the internet is pretty much full and all, but it makes me nostalgic for the era where I’d set things up to get news alerts via email, and days would pass before a news item arrived containing the word vegan. And then it’d be about someone in Las Vegas.
But today, oh today, I am vindicated!
Well, if by vindicated you mean “really irritated.”
And this isn’t just a rant fuelled by the fact that VP was denied entry into Google News (apparently “it would amuse the crap out of me” isn’t sufficient justification. Huh.)
ANYway.
NewsMAX!! (capitalization and exclamation points added by me on a whim, but doesn’t it sound even more awesome?) has put out their 10 Best Diet Tips for Vegans, and I defy you to read most of them with “humans” instead of “vegans” in there and tell me if it doesn’t still sound sensible.
Well, except for the one about exposure to sunlight for 15 to 20 minutes a day for vitamin D production. It’s added to soymilk just like it’s added to cow’s milk, at least up here, and sunlight is a non-option for a surprisingly large portion of the population: if you live above the 34th parallel, you’re going to be deficient for at least some of the year if you rely on sunlight alone according to the National Institutes of Heath, who, I might add, I won’t take seriously until they rename to HealthMAX!!
OK, this is all sounding a little bitter, and the truth is, if this article was written as a series of “hey, if you’re worried about X, you can get plenty of it through Y” tips I’d be, like, thanksMAX! Instead, I’m left with the impression that veganism is hard to manage, which is crap. Where do omnivores get their monounsaturated fatty acids? Do they somehow not have to “include the adequate intake of fiber, proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins by choosing a wide selection of foods” and “include different combinations of foods and recipes to ensure that the diet doesn’t become boring and nutrient deficient”?
Basically, I’m more than a little tired of this double standard where vegans need nutrition degrees and omnivores can eat whatever they want without even knowing what a carbohydrate is, other than “evil.” Why do meat-eaters get a pass when it comes to required nutrition knowledge?
by Jason on October 26, 2010
This dude eats more broccoli - at any potency - than a whole lot of people
Oh, science, you’re adorable. Granted, it’s more science media that’s amusing me today, but I love when scientists “discover” things. More accurately, a discovery means they’ve come up with evidence for things that they’ve known but haven’t been able to prove up to that point, but when you call it a discovery it’s like those times I “discover” a city and name it Fred. Yes, I name all my discovered cities Fred to save on postcard printing fees.
Anyway, I also love it when the discovery promotes veganism, as is the case today: scientists at the University of Illinois have found that even if you overcook broccoli, your lower gut manages to find a way to use the anti-cancer properties that up until now, we thought were destroyed. How much anti-cancer power gets saved isn’t clear, but here’s “scientists are cute, part 2″: the plan now is apparently to enhance this lower gut – I love saying lower gut, because it makes me feel like my own gut is valuable on all its levels – I say again, enhance this lower gut activity to further increase this anti-cancer power.
Except… Nobody eats enough broccoli. Yes, if we make it more powerful that might make up for it, but wouldn’t it make more sense to do something we know works, like, oh, marketing the stuff better?
I see this a lot with arguments about depletion of nutrients in the soil, or genetic modification, or whatever, and they’re all largely distractions from the real problem with the standard diet: we eat too much processed crap and that means there’s no room left for actual fruits and vegetables.
So you go, science, because I am still one of you, and maybe someday you’ll be able to put broccoli on the moon, but why not go further? Shoot for Uranus, I say (I say this all the time, honest,) and try to find a way to get every human to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. By the time that happens, the stuff will be so super-efficient that we’ll all be immortal.
(Photo by Carolyn Coles)
by Jason on August 17, 2010
This has sat in my “write about this” folder for about 2 weeks now, but you know what’s awesome about writing for vegans? You don’t have to be all that timely with your advice, at least not when it’s about how to safely handle raw chicken.
The British Food Standards Agency is now advising consumers that they should not, repeat, not, wash raw chicken before cooking it. It turns out, and this sounds remarkably straightforward when you think about it, that trying to wash the deadly bacteria off the chicken before you cook it only serves to spread the stuff around the kitchen. Food safety people are fond of saying that chicken’s perfectly safe as long as it cooks thoroughly at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, but nobody has, to my knowledge, come up with a way to cook an entire kitchen to ensure it’s clean afterwards. I have a hard enough time figuring out the dishwasher, frankly.
So, as the title of this post suggests, remember to avert your eyes when in the presence of raw chicken, lest it infect your soul. Again, not something I have to tell the readers of a vegan site, because that stuff’s kinda a turnoff to begin with.
In years past, I would have jumped on this story as yet another example of why people are completely utterly insane to even contemplate eating animals, but I’ve since come to the opinion that this is just another thing that technology will solve one way or another. We’re still early in the discovery phase where we as a society are still figuring out cause and effect with food preparation, but as illnesses and deaths get linked closer to certain practices, somebody’s going to figure out a way to bypass the risk.
In fact, I believe that the future of food safety, at least when it comes to poultry preparation, has been staring most of us in the face for more than 20 years now:
I don’t know how or why the chicken will be made into glowing green cylinders but that’s what we call the price of progress for a society. For the individual, there’s always the option of taking yourself out of the insanity and eating the most healthy and compassionate foods you can, which will only increase your lungpower as you laugh at the hoops the rest of the world has to jump through to maintain a way of life that, upon inspection, might not be so awesome when it involves suiting up in full protective gear just to make a sandwich.
by Jason on April 16, 2010
Rejoice and be glad, for not only do I bring you news of reduced manboobitude, I also no longer have to resort to the list of animal serial killers that I was going to write about today. It’s still an enjoyable piece of internet literature, but I worry about being too list heavy. Much like how many men worry about becoming too top-heavy on a vegan diet, what with soy being pretty much everywhere.
As it turns out, soy consumption doesn’t seem to cause man boobs, or gynecomastia, as the book smart call it (the “book without pictures” smart, anyway.)
There’s an interesting shift happening right now with things like coconut milk and gluten replacing many of the soy products vegans of yore would tend to purchase, and I suspect that the average omnivore has a higher soy consumption than they did in the past through incidental ingredients and whatnot (soy lecithin, soy oil, soy moustache wax and so on.) Further to that, I think obesity in general is more of a factor in moobs than actual medical condition like the afore-italizized gynecomastia (though you can’t spell “gynecomastia” without “eco” so happy Earth Day everyone!)
It’s also mentioned in the article that marijuana can cause breast tissue growth, so I can see how some of the confusion may have came about, since, by flow of logic, vegans are hippies are pot smokers, or so the Triangle of ThewordthatstartswithTthatIcantthinkofrightnow goes. And the word isn’t escaping me on account of me being at all high, I promise. Though Ange brought home a ton of goodies from the vegan grocery store, so this would be a perfect time to have the munchies, if only I was less Clintonesque in my inhaling ability. But I digress. From a point I’m pretty much done with. Have a great weekend!
by Jason on February 24, 2010
OK, I mentioned this in yesterday’s porncast and I know it’s just a matter of time before I either receive a phone call from Sir Fartsalot asking why I haven’t posted these yet, or I’ll just get 40 emails with additional calendar scans. Or both. Probably both.
Rest assured, our researchers at Thrust Labs are working vigorously to verify and/or counter any and all claims contained in this post, and part of me is wondering if I missed an opportunity to add fart jokes to the latest Eazy Vegan video about pressure cookers.
First of all, it appears, under the authority of a page a day calendar, anyway, that vegans are more prone to releasing hydrogen and methane into the atmosphere:
Now, just in case you have any omnivore friends with this calendar who have taken to blaming you for global warming, let’s consider the fact that according to one recent study, the average grass-fed cow will “emit” 800 to 1000 litres of gasses, including methane, per day. That was enough to account for 30 percent of Argentina’s greenhouse gas production.
I’m only slightly ashamed to admit I just spent 30 minutes researching how much methane could fit into a standard party balloon to figure out how many balloons you’d have to fill (with your butt!) every hour to match a cow’s output. Sadly, I couldn’t find anything conclusive, though I came close to engaging the services of the reference desk of the library I’m typing this in – I happen to like this particular library though, so I refrained in an effort to not be labelled “the fart guy.” For as long as that lasts, anyway.
Now, there’s the matter of February 19:
If we were still in the business of making vegan t-shirts, you could bet that the rest of my day would be spent trying to figure out how best to represent a sphincter in a graphically pleasing way. Instead, I find myself wondering the same damned question yet again: forget larger and bulkier, how about simple frequency? Just how many times a week do omnivores poop? I’d speculate, but this seems to be a job for the BatPoop Network. (They probably have a signal that you can shine into the sky, but I’ll leave it to your imagination.)
Anyway, this concludes the calendar stuff, for this week, anyway.
I love the headline that Magic Stones sent in: Toxic products found in blood of BBQ lovers. It’s like, dude, barbecuers have poisonous blood! Veganism would be a lot harder if vampires really existed, because my friends would be all like, hey, you’d better eat these ribs so your blood will be toxic to vampires, and I’d be all, no way eh, I’m like vegan and stuff, and I’d be totally risking my life for my principles instead of living my cushy real world vegan existence where I feel awesome and have reduced risk of all kinds of health problems and oh yeah, I don’t have as many toxic products in my blood.
To be fair, while the story’s about cooking meats at high temperatures, it’s not clear if cooking other foods at high temperatures create the same compounds. All the same, the summer’s a great time to try out a raw dish or two. That goes for you too, vampire dudes. Check out the beet juice, asap.
by Jason on April 26, 2007
So… How many high fat meals do you figure it takes to, you know, get the negative momentum going, health-wise? According to a recent study, the answer is one. Catch this: a breakfast of McDonald’s food brings on a 25 percent worse response to stress as compared to some other breakfast within two hours of eating the stuff. This isn’t a case of McDonald’s versus a big bowl of bran either – the other breakfast was full of sugar via cereal, a Froot Loops cereal bar (tha wuh???), and Sunny D. We’re talking the kind of breakfast that I never could have had when I was a kid because deep down I’d know how wrong it was, even if I was in Vegas and I knew that whatever I ate there would stay there, and people who ate it were still better able to function than the folks who downed the high fat McD’s meal. If the researchers have any money left, I want to see one more iteration pitting McDonald’s against a meal made entirely with the Play Doh Meal Makin Kitchen.
by Jason on April 25, 2007
Curses notes that a group in Singapore has devised a new classification system for four degrees of erectile dysfunction, as described by foods. Men are now being asked to rate their hardness as it compares to either a cucumber, a banana, a peeled banana, or tofu, with cucumber being the desirable end of the spectrum. As Curses says, “this group sounds unaware of the sexually compelling power of tofu (which compels you sexually).” To be certain, it’s a weird mindset where thinking about the undesirable (in terms of state) can deliver you to the desirable (in terms of ooh yeah tofu baby come here), but them’s the breaks.
Oh, and the fact that the food list is vegan is not lost on me.
by Jason on April 18, 2007
anipal posted this in the forums already, but pseudoprometheus also submitted it and shouldn’t be punished by my schedule, and I’m in love with a certain phrase (which phrase? ooh, the tension!), so here we go again…
Regular consumption of cured meats like bacon may lead to damaged lung function. The lung function is an oft-overlooked but crucial Microsoft Excel macro that makes things better, as in when you’re really stressed out about your quarterly results, you apply the lung function. When you’re racing up the stairs to get to your meeting on time to make your report and start wheezing and feel like you’re going to pass out, you apply the lung function. When you need to yell at the printer, because “PC Load Letter? What the frak does that mean?” you apply the lung function. And maybe, just maybe I need a vacation, but the point of the story is that the lung function is pretty darned important, and eating bacon on the order of, say, 14 times a month, which sounds like a lot until you realize that’s every other breakfast for some people, but eating bacon on a regular basis can cause lung damage that’s similar to emphysema, which pretty much wrecks your lung function to the point where you’d have difficulty reading this incredibly long sentence out loud without gasping. So there.
