How dodgy is soy?

It's not healthy to have to spend an excessive amount of your day thinking about your next meal and planning your time around what you'll be eating.

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didn't read every response so others (massrock) may have already said this in different words, but

i would totally agree with this, if we were not born into a horrible food culture and its set of proscribed and fucked up patterns of consumption. Not thinking about the various issues surrounding what we eat is what most people do, unconsciously stuffing their pavlovian selves of whatever is available and made tantalizing by ad campaigns.

in theory our bodies are super computers, like pregnant women, wanting what it needs. but the problem is that our system is loaded with so much garbage and toxins that the signals of our internal dietary mechanism are scrambled, and overridden, by artificial external messages. it's like putting mud into the engine of a race car.

i have heard first person accounts of people who become vegan for a period of time, during which their bodies are more or less cleansed of toxins, who become more attuned to their own needs, beginning to once again want what their bodies are lacking.

it makes sense, right? when you are thirsty, you crave water. so when you lack iron, you should crave foods which contain iron.

so the point becomes not rules of what one should or should not eat, but allowing our bodies to readjust to itself.

We all know the food industry does not have our best interest in mind, but the problem is of course much deeper rooted in history... agriculture... but no i don't want to get into that again right now.

OK so I asked my friend (a vegan) whose dad (psychologist) originally told me that veganism is considered an eating disorder by some clinicians WHY this is the case.

Here's why: it meets five of the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa. This puts it on the "borderline". So doctors who see vegan patients watch for symptoms because this is a deadly disease.

massrock said:

I mean society's unhealthy norms don't really need further defending or privileging (against the vegan menace no less!) do they? It seems a bit weird to me that someone should want to do that.

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Nobody did this. Wtf. It's like talking to two year olds. This is the most inane bunch of crap I've ever read in a single thread. Almost.

zhao said:

in theory our bodies are super computers, like pregnant women, wanting what it needs. but the problem is that our system is loaded with so much garbage and toxins that the signals of our internal dietary mechanism are scrambled, and overridden, by artificial external messages. it's like putting mud into the engine of a race car..

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Agree with this. Eating foods that are very high in sodium and saturated fat replaces all cravings for healthy food you would normally have, because we're so hardwired to go for these foods (because originally they were very scarce in nature, so the point was, if you see it, run for it).

As for worrying about going back to a pre-agricultural society--there's a value, of course, in asking the "big questions", and I even agree with you on this point, but that is not part of the medical approach to mental illness. Most psychologists are trained in trying to help people function in the world as it exists. They can't make an ideal world for their patients to live in, they have to equip them to live in the one that's there. Unfortunately, this means teaching anorexics to be OK with sometimes breaking down and eating at Burger King, because you're on the road and don't have time and blah blah, without having a panic attack, self-mutilating, having obsessive thoughts, and compulsing on the treadmill for the next six hours. This means teaching people who are fat and food phobic that, in this world, it's more important to balance your life and see yourself as a whole person than it is to measure your worth according to fat grams or your body weight. Plus, we're all going to die. There's an argument to be made for the fact that our culture, the junk food industry notwithstanding, is far more obsessed with physical perfection and achieving immortality-through-lifestyle than any other before it, and that this is in fact unhealthy. We're all going to die. Getting too caught up in what you eat while you're here--unless it's a matter of saving others or making life better for more people--could be seen as a sort of vanity project.

nomadthethird said:

No, you didn't say it outright, but you implied that psychologists somehow billed outrageously high while other doctors did not.

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nah, you extrapolated that all on your own.

nomadthethird said:

because you had perceived me to be somehow dissing your veganism.

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nah I've heard stuff that was far far worse. further I could give a f**k what you, or anybody else, thinks about veganism. tho all of GdP's points, aside the disorder bit, were well considered, agree or not.

let's be honest tho, it doesn't really matter what the topic is. it could be literally anything & you'd still be here whinging on about how great science & scientists are (which no one disagrees w/you about, btw) & how fucking stupid & terrible everyone else is. I'm done having this argument w/you. the irony of you accusing other people of sticking to Party Lines...

nomadthethird said:

but then the Nobel prize winning neurologists I've worked with...

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clearly your science cock is enormous.

nomadthethird said:

I'll talk to you...

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nah you won't, actually. thanks tho, for your insufferable arrogance - another little bit of added inspiration to stick up on the proverbial locker room bulletin board.

& best of luck with your studies.

massrock said:

You have been repeatedly advocating for what in my view is the rather arse-about-face position that because something might be seen as 'hard' to do or not so convenient because of circumstances, which largely comprise, as you acknowledge, very unhealthy societal norms, it is a problem, 'not healthy', a disorder. I think instead of concurring with and tacitly defending this kind of defeatist, status quo affirming, freedom denying, bigoted nonsense it would be better to applaud and support those people in their principled efforts to live a better life as they see it despite the difficulties and ideological opposition such efforts might incur.

Also the idea or implication that there might be some kind of hypocrisy involved in someone having criticisms of certain aspects of the psychological and psychiatric professions while still having use for and belief in other parts of western medicine is bizarre and disingenuous.

It's such a cliche but this type of attitude really does behave as if the whole imagined edifice of Established Orthodox Medical Science is some kind of jealous religion (which I suppose it can seem like, if you are angling for approval...) and you have to buy into the whole thing as defined by some posited authority at the total exclusion of all other modalities and points of view or you're just not doing it right.

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Massrock, nothing you're accusing me of here bears any resemblance to anything I've actually said. FOR THE LAST TIME: I NEVER SAID THAT VEGANISM IS BAD, OR THAT IT IS A DISORDER. I said that SOME shrinks categorize it that way.

What in the hell is hard to understand about that? Are you some kind of idiot troll that likes to go into easy to read threads and just pretend that you're retarded?

For the record, veganism is not necessarily a healthier diet than lacto-ovo vegetarianism, or even a balanced carnivorous diet. It can be practiced healthily, of course and often is. I was a vegetarian myself for the vast majority of my life. I was simply explaining that norms do have something to do with how we decide what a "disorder" looks like, whether you like that or not is not particularly interesting to me--the fact that this is problematic is something that is widely recognized, discussed, and debated WITHIN the medical establishment. The goalposts are always shifting. I NEVER, not ONCE, stated that veganism should be outside of norms, or that veganism should be considered a disorder. I simply stated that some people, in the past, have listed it under a category with other eating disorders, and that this categorization has always been controversial within the medical profession. Jesus. H. Christ. Can you read?

Anyway, if you knew anything about eating disorders, you'd know that a very common mode for anorexics and bulimics is to hide behind an extreme diet (veganism, South Beach, whatever) that they consider "healthy" in order to mask their symptoms. You'd realize that it is in fact very difficult (not impossible) to avoid certain deficiencies as a vegan. I never said it's wrong to be a vegan. I never said the psychiatric profession as a whole says it's wrong to be a vegan. But re-explaining all of this, when I've already made it very clear what I personally think, is just tedious in the extreme.

And yes, there are abundant criticisms that can be leveled at the psychiatric and psychological professions, but none of them have been so much as briefly touched upon in this thread. Most of them are situated within a larger discussion of capitalism--i.e., it is cheaper for companies to continue to manufacture a drug that has been outmoded by research than it is for them to develop a new one, therefore new drug development, even when the technology improves, is often stalled. In fact, having worked in the industry, I could talk about how I would work to reform it all day. But all I've seen here are a bunch of knee jerk new ageisms with no substance masquerading as critique. "Average Americans don't have much faith in psychology", is not only a bogus claim (Americans visit psychologists, psychiatrists, and ingest psychiatric medications to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars per year), but a flailing, nonsensical stab in the dark at no one and nothing. Oh, except maybe a lame attempt to passive-aggressively get all defensive because someone mentioned a fact about a specialty without endorsing it or even tacitly agreeing with it.

Thanks for all of your insightful "criticisms" of the current state of pharmacological treatment modalities, Padraig. They've been truly enlightening.

I've never thought of such a great argument against them--"the average American doesn't have much faith in psychology"...I'll have to pass that on to some post-docs so they can scrap their dissertations.

And for all the people out there whose lives have been saved or greatly improved by psychiatric meds--all of the schizophrenics, the obsessive-compulsives, the borderline personality cases, the anorexics and bulimics, the compulsive eaters, the compulsive gamblers, the bipolars, the clinically depressed, the dementia patients, the drug addicts:

Fuck you and your "skepticism".

padraig (u.s.) said:

let's be honest tho, it doesn't really matter what the topic is. it could be literally anything & .

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it could be literally anything & you'd come into the thread, pick out one sentence of someone's post, miss the point entirely, add a dimension to what was expressed that could never logically be inferred from the words actually typed there, and then proceed to rant inexplicably about something that the original poster not only didn't say, but never even dreamed of implying. Then, after the original poster was dragged into the tedium that is correcting the Padraig Police, you would again proceed to take each and every post and do a line-by-line nitpick, I mean "response", to each individual sentence in that post, completely missing the greater point that was being made in favor of a bunch of fantasmic conflations and projected "Others"...

It's really the height of tedium, I'm not the only person whose fallen prey to it, and it makes Dissensus fucking insufferable.

padraig (u.s.) said:

further I could give a f**k what you, or anybody else, thinks about veganism.

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Riiiight. You don't care at about what people think. That must be why you've spent so much time and energy on Dissensus alone arguing the pros of a vegan diet. That must be why you took an offhand statement of fact I wrote and took it deeply personally--personally enough to plot a passive-aggressive jab about "psych" and then point out later that you'd done this, saying that I'd be "touchy" about "psych" because I planned to go into this. That's it, Padraig, you just don't care.

Of course, it couldn't have escaped your attention that I am-- and others on this board are also--on psychiatric medications, since it's been the topic of many threads, and so I'm sure you realized that it would be deeply offensive for you to say this, knowing it would further stigmatize a group already plagued by stigma and prejudice at every turn.

People who make the kind of stupid, ignorant remarks you have made in this thread disgust me. And yes, the last thing the world needs is a doctor who thinks psychiatric disorders aren't "real" and don't need to be treated with the same care as any other type because they are "shamanic experiences" (RD Laing)...

If someone came into the ER with acid reflux, instead of giving them Prevacid and telling them which foods to avoid in the future (the treatment modalities that research supports) maybe we should tell them to just feel the burn, it's the flames of hellfire on their throats, a shamanic manifestation. The spirit guides would want it that way. Yeah. Right. But suicidal depression, with a death rate thousands of times higher than acid reflux, can't be treated with the SSRIs that have been proven through research to successfully inhibit seratonin reuptake and rebalance neurotransmitters (serotonin specifically, but there are also dual-action SSRIs that work on dopamine channels as well), thus improving mood and decreasing suicidal ideation in the vast majority of patients who fit the criteria for treatment? It would be malpractice to deny them this treatment.

I'm not the world's friendliest person, and I don't pretend to be. I don't want to be anybody's best internet buddy. I'd rather argue than have a boring conversation. I don't mind if people find my online persona arrogant.

But there's no arrogance quite like the arrogance that is advising, "critiquing" and sanctimoniously dismissing entire swathes of people for doing things you know nothing about, don't understand, and seem unwilling to inform yourself about.

padraig (u.s.) said:

didn't say this. I could go on about the irony, having seen many gay & transsexual mates deal w/all kinds of viciousness, but what's the point.

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Oh, the irony! I bet you have a black friend, too! (Oh, excuse me, a black "mate"--I keep forgetting, we're all Brits here.) That means you know about racism.

And because my tolerance for sub-sophomoric 'discussion' has once again gone up in smoke...

nomadthethird said:

the SSRIs that have been proven through research to successfully inhibit seratonin reuptake and rebalance neurotransmitters (serotonin specifically, but there are also dual-action SSRIs that work on dopamine channels as well), thus improving mood and decreasing suicidal ideation in the vast majority of patients who fit the criteria for treatment? It would be malpractice to deny them this treatment.

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Very off-topic Nomad, but my 21yr old bf told me today that his doctor has prescribed him the SSRI citalopram (20mg) for his depression / lethargy / anxiety etc. He's picking up the tablets on Monday. I'd appreciate your opinion 'cos neither of us have any experience of anti-depressant drugs, although he's been at the docs for depression & anorexica since he was about 16 so it's hardly a surprise that they'd eventually prescribe him something ...

Any advice would be appreciated!

just saw all this. only on here, and i guess a veg forum.

anyway, padraig and nomad, how about you guys take a few days off and when you come back, just ignore each other. there's even a button that will do it for you automatically. clearly you don't get on and these indulgent marathon arguments ruin threads for other people that might be involved. it's selfish and it's getting really fucking boring, tbh.

(ps - if anyone wants to continue the soy discussion just start a new thread)