On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Tom wrote:

> Todd Moody wrote:
>
> > I think I agree with this.  There are people all around us, with
> > normal-sized brains and great intelligence who are the products
> > of a diet in which om-3 fats are quite scarce.  They don't eat
> > fish; they don't eat veggies; they don't eat flax oil; etc.
> > Whatever om-3 fat they get must come from the tiny amounts in
> > grain-fed meats and grain-based foods.  I'm not arguing, of
> > course, that this is a good thing, but it suggests that our
> > bodies greedily harvest every bit of om-3 from our food and
> > utilize it pretty well.
>
> I agree to a certain extent with this statement. Not to be
> rude to Amadeus the Vegetarian, but in my experience
> vegetarians are easy to pick out of a crowd. Nervous, angry,
> emotionally unbalanced, intolerant. Besides, I believe there
> is some evidence linking lifelong vegetarianism (children of
> strictly veg parents) to reduced intelligence. Amadeus hints
> at such in his article. It does not take much O-3, but it
> does take some.

I can't agree with your characterization of vegetarians.  As
vegetarianism increases in popularity, I think it is recruiting
people less from the "fringe" of society, and thus perhaps less
unbalanced to begin with.  I have a number of vegetarian
colleagues now at the university where I work, and I can't say
that your description is typical of them.  Also, when I was a kid
in the Seventh Day Adventist religion, I was surrounded by
vegetarians, most of whom seemed to me to be lovely people.

I don't know many vegans, however, and the one or two that I do
know *do* fit your description.  This is a small sample, of
course, but it's okay to speculate, I guess.  Does veganism cause
the personality disorders, or are people with the personality
disorders more like to "act out" by choosing veganism?  Both may
be true.  It's possible that a vegan's (but not a
lacto-vegetarian's) low cholesterol intake causes or aggravates
problems in the nervous system -- which would explain the
correlation between very low serum cholesterol (< 160) and
violent death.

But there are social factors too.  Until recently, vegetarians
were pariahs.  Diet has an important social bonding role, and
people who defy the dietary conventions of their culture
stigmatize themselves socially (But this would not be true within
a segregated subculture, such as the Seventh Day Adventists).
I'm not a psychologist, but I would venture to say that people
with personality disorders are over-represented in the set of
people willing to stigmatize themselves in this way.

This applies equally to paleodiet, incidentally.  In fact, at the
current time I'd say that paleo is *more* stigmatizing than
vegetarianism, since the latter is now almost (but not quite)
mainstream (It is now standard, for example, for American
colleges to offer vegetarian meal plan options to students.  A
few years ago this was not the case.).  I would expect that a
psychological survey would find more people with personality
disorders among paleodieters than in the general population for
this reason -- but I doubt that a study will ever be done.  Ward
Nicholson's reflections on "idealistic diets" at beyondveg.com
are relevant.

It takes a certain amount of fanaticism to be willing to become a
dietary pariah in the first place -- fanaticism that may be the
result of desperation.  And once the move has been made,
defensiveness tends to increase it, as one is subjected to
various subtle and not-so-subtle judgments and criticisms.  I
have, at various times, identified this fanaticism in myself, in
the form of a kind of messianic urge to convert others to my way
of thinking, including those who are not interested.  Unchecked,
others surely would (and probably did) perceive this as a sign of
my being unbalanced, etc. -- fixated.

As for vegetarianism and intelligence, I think the evidence is
equivocal (and I don't think there's much evidence either way
available for veganism).  Another confounding factor is that some
modern vegetarians (especially the younger ones, it seems) are
more likely to be "junk-food vegetarians" who think that any crap
they eat is healthy, as long as it isn't meat.  I see a lot of
this among my students and my daughter's teen-age vegetarian
friends.

> Herbivoures get their O-3 from the vast numbers of bugs they
> ingest along with their fodder, I suspect. We silly moderns
> fastidiously wash these nutritious parts off.

Moreover, they get om-3 from eating large quantities of greens,
which is where om-3s originate in the food chain.  The om-3s
accumulate, in short-chain and long-chain form, in various
tissues of the herbivores, and omnivores take advantage of this
by eating herbivores.

This message is too long.  A sign of fanaticism.

Todd Moody
[log in to unmask]