Lierre Keith, small farmer, author of The Vegetarian Myth, was interviewed on the Anxiety Summit by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.
Anxiety, Depression, and the Vegetarian Diet
- How young girls are being targeted by vegan groups
- Lierre’s story and the health challenges she faced: hypoglycemia, anxiety, bone pain, fatigue
- Moral vegetarianism or veganism and factory farming
- The importance of topsoil and how it’s disappearing
- The nutritional deficiencies of a vegetarian or vegan diet: B12, fats, amino acids like tryptophan, iron, vitamin D
- The mood benefits of grass-fed red meat
- The problems with processed soy
Lierre shares some of her story and why she wrote her book:
I get a lot of emails from people who have joint problems on this vegan diet, and I can explain to them what they’re doing and why they have to stop. And I have this sort of cautionary tale: “This is how bad it can get, and the damage can be permanent.” So there was that.
Of course, I had the depression and anxiety. It was this terrible sense of apathy, pointlessness, you know, that terrible gray fog that you get when you are experiencing that level of nutritional deprivation. There’s just no way to keep a steady mood when your brain is that deprived. So I really lost 20 years of my life just to depression. And I would say that’s probably the number one reason that I had vegans reach out to me because they’re so exhausted and they’ve got this terrible depression and anxiety, and they don’t understand why.
She shares about the horrors of factory farming:
we can start with factory farming, and I think everyone with a pulse can agree that this is a horror on every level. It’s a terrible waste of all our resources, all this ridiculous amounts of grain that goes to feed them, and the lives that they lead are absolutely miserable, it makes them sick. If you’re eating factory farm beef, you’re eating an animal that probably had liver disease, probably had holes in its stomach, was absolutely miserable for the last two months of its life, and was toxic through and through from all the horrible stuff that leaked out when their livers aren’t functioning and they’ve got holes in their stomach. Their whole system just goes septic; and that’s what you’re eating.
And a lot of the vegetarians and vegans have this strange idea – it’s just an ignorant idea – that somehow this is inevitable in the raising of meat, and it’s not. It’s actually a very bizarre moment in history.
Here is Lierre’s wonderful book – The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
Leirre also shares this author and book as another resource:
Denise Minger, is a wonderful young woman who’s a recovering vegan. She’s written a fabulous book about her experience, and the USDA food pyramid, and what this kind of diet has done to public health; that’s what happened to her.
Here is Denise Minger’s book Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health
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