Once again the press has been duped by those animal-rights nuts in lab coats, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). This time around they’re criticizing high-protein diets — armed with “complaints” from visitors to a PCRM website. Although the site has been up since August 2002, PCRM reported fewer than 200 complaints. To call this attack on meat consumption unscientific would be gross understatement. But neither their vegan agenda nor their admittedly shoddy evidence prevented the CBS “Early Show” from hosting PCRM president Neal Barnard for an interview, without mentioning his animal-rights credentials even once.
On the show, Barnard stated that vegetarians “live longer than everybody else.” Which may be true, but only because they also tend to exercise more and smoke less. Hold those variables constant, and even Michael Greger — a doctor who doesn’t try to hide his animal-rights philosophy and is perhaps best known for over-hyping mad cow disease — admits that vegetarians don’t live any longer than the rest of us. Greger wrote in his October 2003 newsletter:
In 2002, an update on the Oxford Vegetarian Study was published which had been following 8,000 vegetarians for 18 years. And sadly they found [that] those that didn’t eat meat didn’t live any longer than those that did eat meat (after all the other variables were taken into account). What’s going on? And finally, just last month the mortality results from the single biggest study on vegetarians in human history was published, following almost 18,000 vegetarians. I had been waiting years to get my hands on it. And it shows … no survival advantage.
For any media outlet to take PCRM seriously is first-degree negligence. This is a group that shares cash and staff with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It works with the animal-rights militants at SHAC. It has been condemned repeatedly by the American Medical Association for “perverting medical science.” Wake up and smell the tofu, guys.
