Washington, DC – Today the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) criticized the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s (PCRM) latest media stunt: petitioning the White House to forbid pictures of the Obamas or other members of the President’s staff eating hot dogs, pizza, hamburgers, or other quintessential American foods.
PCRM is a “physicians committee” in name only: Only 10 percent of its members graduated from medical school, and not all of those even have degrees relevant to nutrition. As the Associated Press points out, the organization has a vegan agenda stemming from PCRM’s stealth animal-rights agenda: Its largest donor is a wealthy animal-rights activist, and PCRM President Neal Barnard is a former science advisor for PETA and used to run The PETA Foundation (now the so-called Foundation to Support Animal Protection).
“PCRM is just another animal-rights group created to spread fear about perfectly safe food that’s not PETA-approved,” said J. Justin Wilson, CCF’s Senior Research Analyst. “PCRM’s Petition for Executive Action should be laughed right out of the White House.”
In its increasingly cheesy attempts to promote veganism, the group has ludicrously compared bacon to cigarettes and its president has claimed that giving a kid cheese amounts to child abuse. “Cherry-picking data, a common PCRM practice, does not mesh with the scientific method,” writes McGill University’s Joe Schwarcz.
“The real reason PCRM created this petition is not to send a healthy message to Americans, but to push their own PETA-like vegan agenda,” Wilson continued. “When it comes to the First Family’s dinner choices, the Center for Consumer Freedom suggests that they trust experts, not evangelical vegetarians who don lab coats to assume credibility.”