Diets without animal products can be very complicated

I’d be nervous about having a doctor with “Dr. Bill”’s outlook on diet. In this article, Dr. Shockey challenges another article titled “Vegan teens: They can give up meat, dairy and stay healthy” but rather than providing any truly sound reasoning, he instead insults the vegan lifestyle with meaningless attacks.

“For calcium, Kelln recommends dark leafy vegetables, broccoli and fortified orange juice,” Dr. Bill starts. “A cup of raw chopped spinach contains 56 mg and a cup of raw chopped broccoli contains 42 mg of calcium. So my teen-ager would only have to consume 21.5 cups of raw spinach or 28.5 cups of raw broccoli to meet their calcium requirement. Hope they’re hungry.” Of course, this is assuming that spinach and broccoli are the only source of calcium. Notice how he left out the fortified orange juice? It contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 mg of calcium. The vitamin D required to absorb calcium can be obtained via fortified soy milk or sunlight (vegansociety.com).

He goes on to make similar comparisons with beans, bread (choose white bread rather than whole wheat bread, no doubt so he can inflate his numbers even more), and takes another shot at dark, leafy vegetables. It leads me to think that he’s rather averse to eating his veggies. Of course from a doctor that coldly declares, “Personally, I believe that meat animals are alive for the sole purpose of consumption by humans, and I am pleased to contribute my fair share,” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at his anti-vegetarian rhetoric.