Anti-Cheese Group Unveils "Fat" New Ad Campaign

Good grief! This is such a stupid ad.  Fat shaming and dishonesty all wrapped into one mean, nasty ad.  It does nothing for veganism.  I'm a vegan and I'm not skinny, although I think I am somewhat healthy.  You can be just as healthy (or unhealthy) eating an omni diet as a vegan diet; it just depends what and how much you put in your body!  There are plenty of skinny people who are unhealthy, too.  

There are way better ways to introduce a plant-based lifestyle to people. I wish these organizations would go away.  It makes people hate us, which sucks since all the vegans I know are loving, caring, conscientious people who aim to do the least harm possible in this life (people and animals!).

problems is fat fucks have no shame.  They don't care about animals, about the planet, about the children starving and even about their own bodies and heath.

In case anyone isn't aware of it PCRM is a front organization for PETA, they have been skewing medical science to advance their vegan agenda for many years.

Wrong, they are Physicians who aren't in the pockets of corporate america that fatten your up and then make money of your sickness as well.  Unfortunately, others have to subsidize your unhealthy choices.

Better to be in the pocket of corporate America than in the pocket of domestic terrorists.

"Look, Gromit - CHEEEEEEEEESE!!!!"

I like cheese but it should def be eaten in moderation, you don't have to be vegan or an asshole to think that.

Vegans are so self-righteous? Sounds like many of you are exactly that.  Cheese tastes good, sure, but cow's milk is for calves, just as human breast milk is for human babies.  If you can understand vegetarians because they don't want to kill animals, what do you think happens to the cows when they stop lactating? Retirement community in Florida? Or the calves that are taken from their mothers so the milk isn't "wasted" on them?  They're called veal.  Vegetarians are just deluding themselves. Vegan is where it's at.  A clear conscience feels better than cheese tastes. Try it.

Actually humans evolved lactose tolerance so we could consume and process milk.

This omnivores conscience is quite clear I assure you.

As level5vegan already explained (you must have trouble reading), there is no dispute about humanity's ability to process dairy.  However, humans are specifically evolved to consume human breast-milk, not cow udder-milk.  Furthermore, we're only designed to consume it as babies.

In addition, the term omnivore is misleading and doesn't have any real categorical weight in biology.  The truth is, animals are either carnivores, or herbivores.  Over the millions of years of evolution, for each different species, times of scarcity have forced the adaptation to feed on what they had not, during the majority of their evolution, been accustomed to eating.  Therefore, everything is an omnivore, hence it's superfluous existence as a defining category in the scientific community.

Yes, our bodies can consume meat and animal-dairy, but is it good for us? No.  Is it ideal? No.  Will it be the root cause of serious health problems over the course of our shortened lives? Yes.  Does meat and dairy consumption exist (in an industrial society) at the expense of our ethical standards? Yes.  Does meat and dairy consumption (in our industrial society) also exist almost completely for the profits of big agribusiness? Yes.

Actually no, previously (>~7000 years ago) people could not process lactose past infancy, as humans started herding livestock the ability to process lactose became an advantage during times when hunting/gathering wasn't being so successful.

As for omnivores, eating meat and dairy is ABSOLUTELY good for you, meat is jam packed with protein and dairy is an important source of calcium.  Like everything else if you don't consume these foods in moderation you can have health problems but the problem is how much they are eating not what they are eating.

I'll grant you there aren't a lot of overweight vegetarians but there aren't a lot of healthy weight vegetarians either.  Vegetarians or vegans can choose to be vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons all they want (personally I have zero ethical qualms about eating meat but that's just me and the overwhelming majority of all humans who have ever lived) but to claim that a vegetarian diet is actually healthier for modern homo sapiens than a balanced diet including meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables & grains in moderation is nothing short of laughable.

BTW, a truly vegan lifestyle wouldn't even be possible without a highly industrial society.

Did I not say that humanity's omnivorous capacity was something gained over the course of our evolution?

Anyhow, i can't just explain to everyone why they are wrong when they make blanket statements like "meat is jam packed with protein and dairy is an important source of calcium."

What you have to do is explain why you are right.  And, since this is a comment section on an article, you have to explain your point in the terms framed by the doctors whom the article is about.  Failing the ability to frame your argument on their terms, you must demonstrate why their terms are wrong. You can't just say "you're wrong" and be done with it.  That's just spamming the comment section (and anyway, they have a 'like' and 'dislike' section for that sort of thing).

If you would like to see an explanation of why dairy is NOT a good source of calcium, please refer to a comment i made above.

Amusing that you tell me I have to explain why I am right when you make blanket statements without any explanation yourself.

In any case, I don't think you really understand how the comments section on a site like this works, Anyone is free to make whatever "comments" they want with as much or as little explanation as they want and the readers of those comments can decide what they want about the content of those comments.  Obviously I'm not going to convince you that I'm right just like you aren't going to convince me that you're right, so our statements are for the benefit (or not) of others who read them.  I'm perfectly comfortable with the content and level of explanation in my comments.

Regarding your calcium based statements as above:

"That is a misleading statement.  there are higher levels of
calcium in dairy products than there are in plant-based foods.  However,
the acids contained in dairy products eat away at the soft tissues of
your body that cannot be combated by the calcium in the dairy you've
consumed.  Your body, in response, draws calcium out of your bones to
help the calcium already present in the dairy to combat the effects of
the acids.  As a result, populations with higher levels of Dairy
consumption have correlative levels of osteoporosis, the disease of bone
decomposition."

(quoted entire paragraph to ensure nothing is out of context)

It's an interesting (unsubstantiated) position but I'm not buying into it.

I would like to point out that before consumption of dairy products was commonplace that lifespans were MUCH MUCH shorter.  The effects of osteoporosis were unlikely to manifest themselves in a 30-40 year lifetime.   If we are working under correlation=causation (as you appear to be) one could argue that increased dairy consumption helped to increase life spans (FTR I don't actually believe that to be true but it's a good illustration IMO)

Adults in western society generally don't consume much dairy anyways, nor do they eat enough vegetables so they really don't make great data points for either of our arguments.

one else asked me to substantiate my claim above, so i did.  refresh for mor answer.

Also, as a vegan who is associated almost entirely with non-vegans, i can assure you that the average adult in western society consumes huge amounts of dairy.

As far as correlation not being equal to causation, you are absolutely right.  However, if you believe that cigarettes cause cancer, then you yourself subscribe to the strength of correlative evidence.  because the truth is that nobody knows whether or not cigarettes cause cancer, but the correlative evidence is so compelling, that every scientist, save for those employed by the tobacco industry, believe cigarettes to cause cancer.  (funny tid-bit for a vegan, though - i don't actually believe cigarettes cause cancer, i believe it is meat consumption - funny, eh?)

Indeed, but SIR...does meat taste delicious? 

Yes.

Your argument has been rendered invalid.

There are many possible reasons, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, to explain the taste of meat.  But consider that raw meat, which is likely the way it was consumed when our ancestors were developing an omnivorous capacity, does not taste too good.  Raw vegetables, on the other hand, taste very good.

furthermore, the fact that cooked meat, covered in salt, pepper, sautéed vegetables, sauces, etc., tastes good is no challenge to the very real, very well backed-up (through years and varieties of studies by doctors and scientists who are smarter than either of us) evidence that demonstrates the health problems associated with meat and dairy products.

"A clear conscience feels better than cheese tastes"

Typical of someone who's never had a piece of Brie de Meaux.

Hope you enjoy your Gazpacho with extra carrots you Chump.

Please. The Dutch eat a lot of cheese. Eat good cheese not crappy processed cheese.

Many people H A T E milk & yogurt limiting their calcium intake. CHEESE is where it's at.

That is a misleading statement.  there are higher levels of calcium in dairy products than there are in plant-based foods.  However, the acids contained in dairy products eat away at the soft tissues of your body that cannot be combated by the calcium in the dairy you've consumed.  Your body, in response, draws calcium out of your bones to help the calcium already present in the dairy to combat the effects of the acids.  As a result, populations with higher levels of Dairy consumption have correlative levels of osteoporosis, the disease of bone decomposition.

So vegetables may contain less calcium, but they do contain calcium, and they don't inflict the kind of damage on your body that will require your body to deplete it's own calcium resources for accommodation.

What acids, exactly, are you referring to?  And what hormones are responsible for this homeostasis?

refer to The China Study by Dr. C. Campbell.  It's a catalogue of the research of Campbell, and others, that show consistent, correlative evidence that establishes the link between Meat/Dairy and a huge array of degenerative diseases.

The condition i was referring to concerning the acidity of dairy consumption, and the homeostasis achieved by some hormone (as you clarified), was discovered by some Australian scientists (who can be found in the reference section of The China Study) who were conducting research to find explanations for the evidence Dr. Campbell, and others, had discovered.

To find the actual study, see the chapter on bone development and osteoporosis in The China Study, as i recall they list the name of the Doctor who published the results of the Australian study.

That's the best explanation i can give as i am not a scientist, and i did not conduct the study myself.  And, in the even that you should see fit to challenge my position based on my lack of scientific qualifications, I would like to offer a preemptive response by highlighting everyone's ability to refer to the existence of gravity, despite not being Newtonian physicists who participated in the studies that furnished their results.

Cheese. It's whats for dinner.

These campaigns are about as effective as abstinence-only std prevention. You slipped and had a little gorgonzola at the office wine-and-cheese; you're a failure; so you pick up a pint of Ben and Jerry's on the way home and eat the whole thing in front of the t.v. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

So true. We shouldn't villainize food. Even cheeseburgers have a purpose. Just encourage people to pay attention to how much they're eating. I will say the ads telling you 2000 calories is what you're supposed to eat on a daily basis actually make sense.

I wonder if those 2 people in the pictures are the same person. Hmmmm.

For a moment my eyes deceived me and I thought that Tipper Gore was behind this.

Parental Advisory: Contains Extra Cheese

Saying cheese causes childhood obesity and citing pizza is like saying reading causes ignorance and citing the NY Post.

the evidence those doctors refer to in their claim goes more like this:

the correlation of children who eat cheese and get diabetes is at the same rate of correlation for stupid people that read the Post, and cancer-ridden people that smoke cigarettes.

Dispute that if you like, but it is true.

I hate to play the French card, but their obesity rate has nothing on ours, and cheese without a mean is unacceptable...Portion control, people...

Europeans eat "good" because they don't get paid as well as Americans (whether it's salary or foodstamps) limiting their grocery list & MANY are hardcore CIG SMOKERS. They are also more fashion forward making every piece of fabric yardage work its mileage, which means fabric tends to be more expensive there because they are trend followers. ALSO, in many Euro countries they get paid once a month! So, they have no choice but to budget. Have you ever used a European toilet? If you had to on a daily basis you would eat less as well! Articles tend to NEVER mention this. It's an OVERALL culture difference. There are more millions of people here which is why we have "more" obesity, but there are fat people in EVERY nation.

wow.  really?  not a singly thing you said is even remotely true.  Get paid less than us?  where did you come up with that bullshit?  let me enlighten you, Soledad.  this is the way statistics works (mind you i'm giving you the benefit of assuming you looked up something to back up your claims): there are two rooms, each with twenty people, and in one room all the people get paid $50/hr.  In the other room, 19 of the people get paid $7.50/hr while 1 person gets paid $5,000/hr.  which room will have the higher, average income?  that's right, the later of the two.  the one with the greatest gap of income levels statistically shows a higher rate of average income.  the comparison between US average income and France's average income is comparable.  There is nobody in France anywhere near the lowest levels of poverty we have in the United States.  EVERYBODY there has plenty of food.

The rest of your examples can be similarly proven to be ridiculous.

Culture difference it is. But obese people tend to be on the lower-income end because fatty food in bulk is more cost-efficient, so I'm not sure if I can buy into the income comparison. Europeans still manage to cook for themselves rather than eat out/order seamless on a daily basis, and I imagine this has a lot to do with it. While people in the US claim to love cooking, it's more of a habit/novelty rather than an everyday part of life. Although, Europeans are getting fatter/American. I never really notice the difference in toilets when I'm there aside from the flushers...

Yeah, but we're American, we like things BIG....and we saved their asses in WWII!

what an ignorant pendejo.

We also like shitty cheese. I mean I'll never turn down Kraft American grilled on white with tomato soup, but nearly all chain restaurants throw 2 lbs of cheese on everything, even when it's unnecessary.  It's like marketing directors assume people won't order entrees from TGI Fridays unless they have a mountain of cheese on them...and they're probably right

Another group seeking to suck all the fun out of life.  Vegans have to be the most self-righteous fun-hating group of people next to religion fundamentalists on the planet.  Go ahead and suck on grass but you'll have to pry my cheese from my cold dead fingers, and if it's death from a heart attack by cheese, I'll have lived a richer life for it.

My favorite thing about vegans is how they completely fail to recognize that they're basically veggie bigots. So it's okay to kill one form of life (plants) for your consumption, but not another form (animals)? It's not okay to keep a happy cow in your barn to make cheese from, but it's okay to massacre insects in order to get your veggies? I can understand vegetarianism - it's healthier if you do it right, and if you're squeamish about killing animals, whatever. But vegans have some serious cognitive dissonance going on.

To add to dd7's comment, you are making (at least) two utterly incorrect assumptions:
1 - that vegans somehow inherently approve of industrial farming practices that are based on pesticides, GMOs, and petroleum-based fertilizer.  If you can't see the obvious commonalities between vegans and environmentalists, then you probably don't know what either of those categories of people actually are.2 - allowing you the first, idiotic assumption, producing animal calories and proteins takes something like twice the amount of work (in terms of biophysics) than it does to produce the same amount of calories and proteins directly from plants.  That means that calories, proteins, vitamins and other nutrients that it take to sustain a person using meats, could sustain twice the number of people if directly using vegetables, grains, and legumes.  To make this more clear, that means that TWICE the amount of industrial farm production (hence bug killing - as you put it) must be done to produce the same amount of nutritional substance in meat than that needed for plant products.

Not all dairy eaters get food from factory farms. There happen to be some good, locally-sourced small-batch milk and cheese producers that I seek out when I make food purchases. When it comes to making the world a better place, eating locally is far more important than eating vegan. If your kale comes from Brazil, your cashews shipped in from India, and your garbanzo beans from Turkey, you are in part killing animals too, however less directly. If you ask me, Vegans dont have a self-righteous leg to stand on unless they are eating locally.

careful, you're trying to connect ethics with economics; our (vegans') ethical 'leg to stand on' comes from our choice not to participate in the industries that profit off of uncivilized behavior; that does not mean that we are not forced to submit to overreaching economic patterns.

Eating locally has more to do with access rather than choice.  It is significantly more expensive to eat locally than it is to eat otherwise.  What you're saying is that it takes money to act ethically.  And if you don't recognize this as you read what i am writing, i will clarify the issue for you: wealth does not equal ethics.  The fact that i want to eat chickpeas, instead of steak, has nothing to do with the fact that chickpeas (as well as steak - i remind you) are produced in an undesirable way.  CAPITALISM forces the unethical production and distribution of chickpeas. VEGANISM mitigates (in whatever small way) unethical treatment of animals. PERIOD (again)

Seriously????  Surely you can't be that dense.  You really suggest slaughtering a terrified, suffering cow or pig is the same as harvesting corn?  Oh, and most milking cows these days are not "happy cows in barns" -- they are usually chained 24/7 to milking machines and die at around age 5 from exhaustion, when their poor bodies are packed off to make hamburger meat. Another really good reason to avoid dairy. Go visit a factory farm - hopefully that will cure your own "cognitive dissonance."

Not all dairy eaters get food from factory farms. There happen to be some good, locally-sourced small-batch milk and cheese producers that I seek out when I make food purchases. When it comes to making the world a better place, eating locally is far more important than eating vegan. If your kale comes from Brazil, your cashews shipped in from India, and your garbanzo beans from Turkey, you are in part killing animals too, however less directly. If you ask me, Vegans dont have a self-righteous leg to stand on unless they are eating locally.

.j

Well said although you have to include the PETA lunatics as well.
These people need to die of a heart attack and leave everyone alone.

And then there are the ones who are both vegans and PETA lunatics.

*cough* felixthecat *cough*

everyone in PETA is vegan, genius.

Why, thank you for the compliment. Sorry I can't return it since you don't seem to notice that the reverse is not true. Not all vegans are PETA fanatics.

A vegan diet's good for alleviating constipation as well as a nice gateway to anorexia and nothing else...

I can understand vegetarians- ok, you don't want to kill animals.  Nice sentiment although I agree with Homer Simpson that if gawd didn't want us to eat meat, he wouldn't have made it so tasty.  But whatever.  But no milk, eggs, etc?  Madness.

I'd rather everyone stopped eating eggs than stopped eating meat, if I had to choose one food to magically take from our diets. The animals suffering alleviated would be greater ditching eggs than meat.

For each hen who ends up on a farm (battery or "cage free") one male chick is killed at the hatchery. Male "egg breed" chicks aren't needed for breeding, can't lay eggs and aren't fast growing enough for meat production. They are disposed of, typically via chipper or suffocation. The United Egg Producer's spokesman is even quoted in a few places verifying this is industry standard. There are videos of hatcheries online, too.

Vegans don't eat eggs (or dairy - veal calves are a by-product of the dairy industry) because they still contribute to animal death and suffering. It's just not as obvious as the ones who die for meat production.  So, method to our madness. ;)

cheese is truly one of my favorite things to eat, but it does add a lot of fat and calories.  That's why there is such a thing as moderation.  

A little tip, you also tend to enjoy it more when you don't have it as much.  Can you imagine enjoying cheese more????  mmmm....cheese :)

I'm eating cheese right now and it is fucking glorious.

Cheese Glorious Cheese!
Tastes mighty inviting
Cheese glorious cheese!
its so tantalizing!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

man, I forgot about that. Apparently sex sells cheese, but I think cheese sells itself. An awesome stilton or Kefalgraviera or leaf wrapped colombian cheese, and I'm in cheese heaven.

Wow. I remember that. Great marketing campaign that I suppose stuck in my subconscious?!

I think its one of the greatest commercials of all time!

I really love cheese, however it creates inflammation in all my joints to the point where I can barely walk, so I can no longer eat it.  The alternatives aren't so bad.

Daiya cheese and Dr. Cows

you could always just not walk...

For being fat, that man has an impressive waist line

Thank Gothamist, now I want pizza.

I am a tolerant person - until you attack cheese. Screw these assholes. EAT CHEESE!

FUCK YOU VEGANS

no it is animals and children that you fuck when you eat meat.  
http://www.forksoverknives.com...

Felix, how many times have I told you that it is inappropriate to fuck animals and children?  Its illegal and its wrong. :)