Free Republic

--snip-- Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has never made any bones, if you will, about her culinary preferences. She's a carnivore, a hunter and proud of both. So it's not really a surprise that her book, "Going Rogue," published today, extols the virtues of eating meat. "If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore," she wrote. "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” But the former Republican vice presidential candidate did not stop there. “I...

'Vegetarians Make Better Lovers,' Says Sexy Couple For Immediate Release: June 22, 2007 Contact: Mike Brazell 757-622-7382 Atlanta -- Wearing nothing but boxer shorts during a display of passion that's bound to raise a few eyebrows and turn lots of heads, PETA's Mike Brazell and his partner, Jonathan Frank, will passionately make out in a bed set up outside the main entrance to the Peachtree Center Mall. While the not-so-discreet couple is getting it on beneath a banner that reads, "Vegetarians Make Better Lovers," PETA members will hand out leaflets and vegetarian starter kits to gaping passersby. Brazell and Frank...

Veganism dates back to 1944, when British Vegan Society co-founder Donald Watson coined the term to mean “non-dairy vegetarian.” The Society expanded the definition in 1951 to state that “man should live without exploiting animals.” Vegans eschew animal products in food, clothing, household products, or for any other reason. There are a variety of reasons why people “go vegan.” Some simply don’t like the taste of meat. Some claim veganism is “green,” and that a vegan lifestyle minimizes impact on the environment. In 1997, a survey revealed three percent of the people in the U.S. claimed that they had not...

Forget all that indecorous talk of animal flatulence, cow burps, vegetarianism and global warming. Welcome to Cowgate. Lower consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming — despite persistent claims that link such diets to more greenhouse gases. So says a report presented Monday before the American Chemical Society. It is the bovine version of Climategate, complete with faulty science and noisy activists with big agendas.

ATLANTA (CBS ATLANTA) – Vegetarians may have a lower BMI and drink alcohol sparingly, but vegetarian diets are tied to generally poorer health, poorer quality of life and a higher need for health care than their meat-eating counterparts. A new study from the Medical University of Graz in Austria finds that vegetarians are more physically active, drink less alcohol and smoke less tobacco than those who consume meat in their diets. Vegetarians also have a higher socioeconomic status and a lower body mass index. But the vegetarian diet — characterized by a low consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol that...

Passing gas: Everybody does it – and no one wants to admit it. This embarrassing habit may seem foul, but breaking wind is simply an unavoidable byproduct of our daily digestion. In fact, the average individual can pass gas anywhere from 13 to 21 times a day. But your gaseous patterns can actually speak volumes about your health, especially in regards to your eating habits, and they may even serve as an indication of larger digestive health issues. “People who produce excessive amounts of gas and particularly foul smelling gas – if you’re eating a super high fiber diet, that...

Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It’s all pseudoscience—so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others? If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings. But you don’t...

Today's average American hamburger comes from a cow – but it may not be long before it comes straight from a lab in Silicon Valley. A growing number of companies are using high tech to create meat and animal product replacements that look like the real thing – but are made with anything but. And their target market isn’t vegans -- it’s true blue carnivores. ***SNIP**** The process itself is high tech. “We’re taking proteins and running them through a heating, cooling and pressure process that realigns them so that they substantially mimic the fiber structure that you find in...

Oslo — The Norwegian military said Tuesday it plans to put its troops on a vegetarian diet once a week in a bid to fight a new kind of enemy -- climate change. The army said its new meatless Mondays are meant to cut its consumption of ecologically unfriendly foods whose production contributes heavily to global warming. "It's a step to protect our climate. The idea is to serve food that's respectful of the environment," spokesman Eystein Kvarving told AFP. The diet has already been introduced at one of Norway's main bases and will soon be rolled out to all...

Baby Boomers might not be aware of the harm to their health that could come from high levels of copper and iron in the blood stream. Of course, that's because you haven't seen any public health messages and probably haven't been warned by your doctor that you could be ingesting either of the two from unknown sources that can put you at risk for a variety of common health problems that we shrug off as inevitable with aging. Iron is necessary to carry oxygen throughout the body. Copper helps our body use iron, protects our nerve cells and is important...

STANFORD, Calif. -- Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow. They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer's side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod's vibrations. The cow at the end was led toward a slaughterhouse. Participants then recorded what they ate for the next week. The study sought to uncover whether temporarily...

Matt Miller, an Idaho-based science writer with The Nature Conservancy, says rodents and other small livestock represent a low-impact meat alternative to carbon-costly beef. Miller, who is writing a book about the ecological benefits of eating unconventional meats, visited Colombia several years ago. At the time, he says, conservation groups were expressing concern about local ranchers clearing forest to provide pasture for their cattle — activity that was causing erosion and water pollution. "They were encouraging people to switch from cattle to guinea pigs," Miller says. "Guinea pigs don't require the land that cattle do. They can be kept in...

<p>Michael Clarke Duncan, the hulking, prolific character actor whose dozens of films included an Oscar-nominated performance as a death row inmate in "The Green Mile" and such other box office hits as "Armageddon," "Planet of the Apes" and "Kung Fu Panda," is dead at age 54.</p>

A new children’s book is taking some heat for its controversial message aimed at kids, which says that eating vegan is the loving thing to do. The book is called “Vegan is Love: Having Heart and Taking Action,” and its author and illustrator, Ruby Roth – a young, enthusiastic vegan activist – hopes to teach young readers not only about veganism as a diet choice, but also as a moral choice. Roth explains that Vegan is Love expands upon the message of her popular first book “That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals,” in which she describes how our daily diet...

Anthony Bourdain stalked around the stage, sipping every once in a while from his beer bottle and describing why he couldn’t respect the vegetarian lifestyle. Hey, he said, I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home. But when you travel the world, it’s not right--in fact, it’s an insult!--to forgo eating the delicacies of the country you’re visiting. If you’re in Spain, he said, you eat ham. If you’re in Argentina, you eat beef. If you’re in Vietnam, you eat, um, the local cuisine. His opinion is pretty much what you'd expect from a guy...

Gandhi. Leftists have embraced him as their Jesus figure. Gore is an admirer. They can keep him. He was the vegetarian Neville Chamberlain of his day. From Andrew Roberts in The Wall Street Journal: Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive -intellectual,...

From Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter (h/t Hitchens): Nowadays, a clergyman who wants to keep his congregation has only two courses open to him. Either it must be Anglo-Catholicism pure and simple – or rather, pure and not simple; or he must be daringly modern and broad-minded and preach comforting sermons providing there is no Hell and all good religions are the same. Incidentally, Jesus would agree. While poking fun at effeminate religious types in robes, he would also have little time for dumb men absolutely opposed to absolutes (a contradiction in terms). But I digress. In his book review for...

Obesity affects many aspects of our society, and the military is no exception. But the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a solution to slimming down potential recruits: promote vegetarianism. The committee recently wrote a letter to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offering free copies of its "Vegetarian Starter Kit." The group supports "compassionate and effective medical practice, research and health promotion," according to its website, and is against animal research and testing. A news release included part of the letter from the group's nutrition education director Susan Levin: "It is not too late for...

Pamela Anderson's risqué advertisement promoting vegetarianism has proven just a tad too sexy — even for the famously sultry City of Montreal. The former Baywatch star, an outspoken animal-rights activist, has been denied a permit to hold an event launching her newest animal-rights campaign. In the advertisement, Anderson's bikini-clad body is covered in marks that mimic a butcher's diagram — with parts of her flesh marked up with words like "breast," "round," and "rump." The caption reads: "All animals have the same parts. Have a heart — Go vegetarian." In a statement, Anderson called the move surprisingly puritanical for a...