채식의 배신

코치.D ‏@dcoachd 코치D 오늘의 도서추천. "리에키스-채식의 배신 http://bit.ly/XtBbdL " 다이어트, 특히 팔레오 다이어트를 이야기하면 어김없이 비건들과 갈등을 빚게됩니다. 때마다 인용하지만 번역되지 않아 난감했던 책이 드디어 국내에 소개됐습니다.

저 책이 제대로 된 책이 아니라는 이유가 궁금해요.
과학적 근거를 중시하던 분들은 오히려 평이 좋거든요.

우선 저자는 비건이 아니었습니다. 그런데 거의 모든 인터뷰에서 자긴 20년 동안 비건이었다고 말하고 다니죠.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ssv14RZoa-M
06:30초부터 보시면 될 거예요. 기회가 될 때마다 계란과 유제품을 쓸어먹었다고. 그런데 소고기는 절대 안 먹었으니까 비건이라고 주장합니다. 그리고 책을 보면 채소는 거의 먹지 않고 빵 위주의 식사를 했다고 하네요. 이건 편식이지 채식은 아니거든요.

이건 뭐라고 할 말이 없네요...

으하하 이 사람 앞에선 저도 비건이라고 주장해도 되겠군요.

다음은 amazon과 goodreads에서 각각 추천수를 제일 많이 받은 리뷰입니다.


[goodreads]

I'm reading this book because I am a seeker of knowledge and I appreciate Truth, even in painful forms. That having been said, this book was not logical at all, and contained twisted truths at best. The examples given are highly emotional, yet utterly ridiculous anecdotal evidence that the author was a non-educated vegan, and instead of eating healthy, whole foods, she admittedly ate bread for every meal (pg. 69), and had very poor health overall (she mentions alcoholism and mental illness in addition to reproductive and skin disorders, which she apparantly did not seek medical treatment for). She uses this as evidence that humans are meant to eat meat, when in truth, she had been a vegetarian who never ate vegetables. Admittedly, there are vegetarians and vegans out there who share her mistake, but the vast majority have made the decision to go vegetarian because they are highly educated about being conscious consumers and advocates of their own health. She attempts to make vegetarians looks like bumbling idiots, by making arguments like vegetarians think "Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey." (pg. 7) This is a ridiculous concept, and I the vast majority of vegans would be highly offended at being villianized to the extreme of libel.
Instead of argueing the compelling arguments of Dr. Neal Barnard(Physicaians Council of Responsible Medicine) or T. Colin Campbell (The China Study), she instead makes fun of a charicature of the idiot vegan. Her arguments include such concepts as we exploit and kill trees by not eating and pooping out the seeds, as trees intended by making fruit, so we are really raping and killing plant life, therefore, what is the difference if it is a tree or a cow? You can not kill and rape a tree and say that I may not use a cow. She says that deforestation to produce grain is killing our planet and the topsoil, which is the truth, but she doesn't address the fact that 90% of the grain produced goes to feed livestock. She says that if we all ate vegetables, we would have to clear the planet to farm, but the fact is, we already produce more food than could feed twice the people on our planet, we just use it to feed our meat, and the rest sits in the supermarket until it spoils and must be thrown out. Surely you've heard the statistic that it takes 15 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of beef. She does not address that at all. She mentions it in her introduction, but does not address it.
Anyway, I could write an entire book refuting her uneducated arguments, but the fact is, hundreds of those books are already published. If you are curious, read her viewpoint, but I beg of you, don't abandon logic because you want her to be right. Her arguments just don't stand up. At times they even made me laugh out loud.(less)


[amazon]

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2,485 of 2,651 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing May 30, 2010
By A. Perri
Format:Paperback
I want to be clear about a few things:

1) I am a female.
2) I give the idea of this book 5 stars, but its execution 1.
3) I have been a radical vegan, a rabid meat-eater and everything in between (currently in the in-between)
4) I am working on an archaeological PhD on hunter-gatherer diets, subsistence, hunting and transition to agriculture.

I picked this book up after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals". I thought it would be interesting to read a different perspective on the vegetarian debate. I found Safran Foer's book to be much more geared towards the inhumane practices of meat while Keith's book is geared more towards diet/health.

I admit that it took a very long time for me to get through this book, for several reasons. I purchased this book hoping to get something out of it. I am not an upset vegan who wants to hate it and I am not someone who bought it knowing Id love it. I was just neutral. There were two main reasons for my disappointment with the book. One minor, one major. First, I found the second agendas (specifically the radical feminism) distracting and unnecessary. I have nothing against the feminist agenda, but this wasnt the place to put it. Second, I found the book absolutely riddled with bad information, faulty facts and just plain lazy research (if you can call it 'research'). As someone who intensively researches these issues on a daily basis, I found myself underlining items on nearly every page that I knew were just plain untrue or were 'cherry-picked' facts slanted to give a certain perception. This is such a disappointment as a really great case could be made for the author's view if she had only put the real work into researching the book properly. Once you lose the reader's trust that you are providing factual information what do you have? Ill provide examples:

1) pg. 140: The author states that "Carbon-13 is a stable isotope present in two places: grasses and the bodies of animals that eat grasses". She goes on to suggest that since there is no evidence of grass "scratch marks" on the human teeth found, that they must have been eating animals. There are many flaws in this thought process. First, I cant even begin to explain the preservation and degradation issues present in examining three million year old teeth for 'scratch marks'. Second, carbon-13 is an isotope found in ALL terrestrial and marine plants, not just grass. Finding high levels of C3 or C4 (which are what carbon-13 breaks down into) in human teeth only means that that human was eating large amounts of SOME plant, seed, nut, etc. (not JUST grass) or the animal that ate those. It is not as simple as GRASS OR COW.

2) pg. 142: The author states that there are no bacteria in the human stomach. This is simply untrue. In 2005 Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a stomach bacteria that causes gastritis and ulcer disease. There are currently over 130 known stomach bacteria.

3) pg. 146: The author states a "rumor" authored by RB Lee about hunter-gatherers getting 65% of their calories from plants and 35% from meat. She states that this "simply isnt true". First, this rumor-spreader is one of the most well-respected anthropological/archaeological researchers in hunter-gatherer studies who edited what is considered THE tome on hunter-gatherer theory, 'Man the Hunter'. He isnt some random hack. Second, saying those numbers 'simply arent true' is simply not true. Hunter-gatherers did and do inhabit a huge range of environments and likewise their diets cover a wide range. Some do follow the 65/35% number. Some eat much more meat. Some eat much less.

These are only three examples from a span of six pages. This pattern continues throughout the entire book. Fact is the authors 'facts' just arent believable (which, again, is a shame because a factual book on this topic could be powerful). She writes as if the anthropological and archaeological evidence she quotes is written in stone, when in fact many of these topics are constantly under revision or not well understood yet. Most importantly, I just believe that writing a book and promoting it as a factual, scientific account of a subject when it is not is doing a great disservice to your (mostly) unknowing readers. If you are not willing to put in the real research effort, write a book that is touted as a personal account and nothing more. Selling flubbed facts to people who are truly searching for answers, inspiration or (insert what you are looking for here) is just bad journalism.

Ill end this review with some facts and encourage any readers (whether you liked the book, hated the book or havent read the book) to always question whether what you are reading is true and to do some research of your own.

The author cites 207 references in this book.
62 of those references are websites (~30%)
18 are newspapers and magazines (~7%)
32 are journals (~15%)
95 are other books (~46%)

First of all, think about that. 30% of the references in this book come from website information. Five of those 62 website references were Wikipedia. Wikipedia! One was Google Answers. I wont let my freshmen students use Wikipedia as a reference in their papers, why would it be acceptable for a book? Like websites, newspaper and magazine information needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Of the 32 journals less than half come from well known, peer-reviewed sources. The remaining 46% are books, which can truly say anything the author cares to print (as this one does) and only show that the author is getting her information from another source (and another opinion) aside from the primary one. The point of this is to make clear that this is a book that is sold as (and which many positive reviews hype as) providing scientific, factual, intellectual knowledge on the vegetarian/diet/health debate. In reality less than 8% of the book is coming from peer-reviewed, fact-checked sources which can provide unbiased, neutral information.

If anything I hope this review encourages people to get away from the bias on either side, find factual scientific sources instead of second-third-fourth hand knowledge, check information for yourself instead of blindly believing an author, and to question published material and push for it to actually be factual if it presented as such.

http://blog.aladin.co.kr/765284143/6181890#C2264989

http://blog.naver.com/synup/10161200852

내성세균에게 감염되지 않는 이상 항생제 덩어리 닭이 문제될게 있나요? 독이라고 표현할 필요 있어요?

또 채식을 하게 되면 곡물로 육류에서 먹어야 할 칼로리를 대신 섭취할 수밖에 없죠.

그런데 저자도 수십년간 비건이었다는군요.

책을 읽진 않고 이 소개글만 봤을때요. 채식주의자도 그 종류와 의도가 다양하다고 알고 있거든요. 저 공격의 대상에 들기 위해서는 채식주의자란 단어 앞에 좀 더 많은 수식이 붙어야겠죠

모든 우파가 아닌 특정 우파를 공격하기 위해서 책 쓰려면 "우파의 진실" 이렇게 책 쓰면 안되나요?

"언뜻 봐서는 자유를 지향하는 것 같지만 실제로는 재벌 등의 이익에 충실해서 시장을 교란시키고 오히려 국방의 질서를 어지럽히는
우파의 진실" 이렇게 쓸 순 없잖아요?

본문에라도 그렇게 썼어야죠. 그렇게 써놨나요? 소개글만봐선 아닌듯하네요