Center for Consumer Freedom

PCRM: 'Animal-Rights Advocate,' Not 'Pro-Vegetarian'

At least one editor gets it. Yesterday Washington Post "Lean Plate Club" columnist Sally Squires wrote a defense of "good" carbohydrates, including the mention of a study co-authored by "Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a pro-vegetarian group." The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reprinted the Squires column this morning, but not quite verbatim. Where the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) was originally identified as "a pro-vegetarian group," the edited Star-Tribune version identifies the carb-study co-author as "an animal-rights advocate" (emphasis added). PCRM and Barnard indeed devote their energies to pushing a radical animal-rights agenda, not "responsible" medicine, so hats off to whoever wrote the more accurate version.

Speaking of labeling PCRM for what it is, this weekend the Center for Consumer Freedom served up a little diesel-powered truth to attendees of a cancer and nutrition symposium hosted by The Cancer Project, a PCRM affiliate. We put up a mobile billboard pointing out that The "Cancer" Project is less about fighting cancer than it is about providing another way to push animal rights through dubious dietary research. The symposium we targeted was, of course, led by PCRM president Neal Barnard, the aforementioned animal-rights advocate. Barnard is a psychiatrist -- not a nutritionist or oncologist -- but why let that get in the way of a good agenda?