Sandy Warf

     SW's article is subtitled: To balance compassion for animals with nutritional needs, so immediately we know that the false, yet popular, philosophy of "ethical veganism" is dominant over rationality.  Choosing one's diet on "ethical" grounds is totally meaningless, since ethics are absolutely idiosyncratic: that is, one just makes up one's particular set of ethics for one's own convenience.  Thus, any set of ethics is just as valid, or invalid, as any other set, since there is no objective set of ethics for a standard.  Therefore, the endless arguing between vegetarians/vegans and meat-eaters about the "ethics" of diet, clothing, or agricultural practices is, although frequently humorous, totally absurd.
     Note: text in default font are direct quotes from the referenced web page.

     SW:  My parents brought my brothers and me up to love animals and to treat them with the greatest kindness and respect. But we were not vegetarians. Of course, I knew where meat came from intellectually.
      So, from the start, SW was conditioned to live in a mindset of severe contradictions, and accept them without question.

     SW:  It wasn't until 1971 during my mid-twenties--my hippie days, when I was out walking one beautiful morning in Katmandu, Nepal--that I got this knowledge emotionally. I came upon two men who were in the act of slaughtering a water buffalo calf. With a pained, bewildered, and beseeching look, this beautiful calf looked directly into my eyes as he died. I felt I'd been hit hard in my stomach, and in my heart.
      An admission that the intellect and rationality were abandoned for emotional conditioning.

     SW:  I ran sobbing back to my hotel, ... I immediately stopped eating meat and stayed on my vegetarian diet for some months until we returned to Europe where we settled in Denmark. For 18 months we made leather goods there,
      Predictably, the emotional imprint did not affect the intellect.

     SW:  1978 found me married several years later [time warp? - ljf] to a wonderful young physician, [who have no understanding of healthy nutrition - ljf] and the lucky mom of two beautiful, healthy children. We decided the whole family needed to become vegetarians. The children were three and four, and took the change very well given the aspect of compassion for animals.
      Of course, children believe anything their parents say, including the nonsense, as they have no analytical thinking.

     SW:  Vegetarian meat substitutes were hard to find.
      The common concept of finding plant-based "substitutes" for disease-producing cultural foods is totally absurd.

     SW:  We ate lots of dairy products and eggs for several years until I realized that fish and chicken were lower in fat than most dairy products.
     Has the nonsensical compassion issue been abandoned for rationality?  Why weren't the fish, chicken, and dairy cows beneficiaries of the compassion?

     SW:  For a year or two my husband, son, and I (but not our daughter) began eating fish and chicken again until my reading on the ethics of vegetarianism prompted me to again give up all meat.
     So, the compassion/ethics non-issues were invoked, again?

     SW:  Reading further, I became a vegan ... in 1990 ... became a natural hygienist in 1991 I weighed about 105 pounds (I'm 5'4").

     SW:  after three years as a vegan, I ... had severely low vitamin B-12 levels, complete with enlarged, deformed blood cells
      This is probably indicative of previous, long-term B-12 issues, or absorption issues, since it is generally claimed that the body stores enough B-12 for several years to a couple of decades.  The implication that three years as a vegan caused this is totally unfounded.

     SW:  All around, people in my life started saying how thin, gaunt, and even [how] ill I now looked. I felt well enough...
      As apparently 65% of Americans are overweight, obese, or severely obese, the fat see others through their own porcine standards.

     SW:  until mid-1995 when I began getting colds or the flu every six weeks.
      Since, Billings-like, we are not told of the quantities of foods eaten, it is impossible to determine the cause of these (assumed) mucus discharges, however, the nuts, and seeds (the remainder cooked grains and tubers) could very well be the cause, as could poor food combinations.  Clearly, far too much 'mucus-forming foods' were being eaten.

     SW:  And I could not gain weight on my whole, natural, mostly raw-food vegan diet.
      Clearly, this fixation with conforming to the weights of an unhealthily, obese society is foolish.

     SW:  So in the fall of 1996 I added some raw goat and cow cheese to my diet, then some free-range eggs, and then even began eating fish. Finally I was able to gain some weight, about 8-10 pounds, and the colds reduced in frequency dramatically. My nails became stronger, small wounds healed more quickly, my hair grew faster, and I felt more energetic.
      This suggests that the nuts/seeds were not being digested and assimilated properly, probably due to poor combinations.  Plus, the animal protein could also have stressed the body out to a point where it could not discharge old mucus deposits, thus creating the illusion of better health by blocking cleansing.  Many people find the cleansing reactions that accompany a raw diet to be too uncomfortable, revert to the old toxic diet and find that the cleansing reactions stop.

     SW:  But there were problems. I had unremitting nightmares that I was a fish suffocating as I was being pulled from the water. I waited six months for these awful dreams to stop and they simply got worse. I stopped eating fish and the dreams stopped. I found the cheese made me feel stuffed up, plus I am all too aware of the link between dairy production and the production of veal, so I stopped eating dairy products.
      Ping-ponging between various severely different diets causes only more confusion, as we see repeatedly with these failed dieters.

     SW:  At the moment, my diet consists of raw fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and honey, some cooked whole grains and tubers, plus some lightly soft-boiled free-range eggs. I feel good, it's been months since I've had a cold,
      So, has eating less protein, and much less animal protein resulted in the basic cleansing being completed?

     SW:  ... and though I've lost some of the weight I managed to gain eating dairy, I still weigh 112 pounds and that's fine.
      Again the fixation on weight.

     SW:  It's been, and still is, an adventure discovering what diet works best for me.
      Could she be discovering that changing one's diet to a better one is a process, and that one must learn how to control cleansing reactions intelligently is part of that process?  Mindlessly fixating one one "diet" or another does not allow one to understand the process.

     SW:  I am trying to balance compassion for animals with my own nutritional needs. Ethically, I would like to return to a completely vegan diet, but am concerned it may be unnatural and nutritionally deficient.
      More evidence that there is no intellectual functioning here, just the bouncing from one foolish notion to another.

     SW:  I used to think a high-carb vegan diet was the best one for everyone. 
      And this may be the reason for the "frequent colds".  There is no way to consume excessive carbohydrates on a raw diet, except by eating mostly bananas, but it is really easy by consuming grains, grain products, and tubers.  Grains are totally unnatural creations of human culture.
     Again, we see no intelligent analysis of the source of the problems, and no attempt to resolve them; just the common practice of bouncing from one irrational diet to another.