1. Home
  2. Vegan family opens up about being bullied over choice of lifestyle

Vegan family opens up about being bullied over choice of lifestyle

Agencies
September 15, 2019

Washington D.C., Sept 15: The argument about consuming less meat and more plant-based foods has been going on for ages now. But what happens if that argument takes an ugly shape leading to you being bullied for your choice of lifestyle?
A family of five recently opened up about losing friends and being bullied because they are vegan, reported Fox News.

Jacqui, Ryan Robins and their three children Skye (15), Skipp (14), and Cadan (5) are vegan and hog on a range of lip-smacking dishes without meat or dairy.

However, the family from Probus, Cornwall, England, admitted that the transition to a vegan lifestyle has not been an easy one. The family revealed that they have lost friends due to it, and are often met with aggression and bitterness.

Jacqui, who was 8-years-old when she decided to give up meat, shared that other parents hold back from speaking to her when she goes to her children's schools.

"Passion is misunderstood to be aggression or hatred. I have been to parent's evenings and had people turn their backs to me. They would rather do that than engage in a conversation that will make them feel uncomfortable," she said.

Meanwhile, Ryan has been a victim of online trolling for his choice of lifestyle. According to the online trolls, his dietary choices are disrespectful to his late father, who was a "highly-respected" butcher.

Whereas, Skipp confessed that he is targeted at school over his vegan lifestyle, and frequently has meat waved in his face.

However, despite all the ups and downs, the family defends their dietary choices and hopes to put an end to the misconception that vegans are "crazy".

Jacqui, a nutritionist, said that they are just "trying to raise awareness about practices" people should be aware of, noting that many "good and kind people" won't make the same choices if they "knew the reality".

"There seems to be some kind of divide where people meet vegans with aggression and resistance, when you are just trying to raise awareness about practices that people should know about," she said.

"I know there are so many good, kind people making choices that they wouldn't make if they knew the reality," she added.

Jacqui decided to turn vegetarian at the age of 8 after realising that animals were used in the preparation of her shepherd's pie. But two years ago, after watching "horrifying" documentaries and researching about dairy-farming processes, the nutritionist decided to ditch dairy, too.

"I saw a video that went into the reality of the dairy industry. I was horrified and straight away I didn't want anything to do with the dairy products," she said.

"I thought, if I couldn't cope with watching it happen, but I was buying the product, I was inadvertently funding it," she added.

Jacqui's son Skipp soon followed her footsteps, after watching the 2017 documentary 'The Land of Hope and Glory' with his mother, which showcases the UK's farming practices.

"All of the kids have made their own decisions and have recognized why they are vegan. Some parents say 'you're not having that and that', but we wanted the kids to understand why we do it, take on the information and decide for themselves," Jacqui said of her kids' lifestyle choices.

However, for Skye, the dietary transition took a little longer because she was afraid to watch the documentaries featuring the farming practices.

"Once I watched them it was easy. I now want to know where my food has come from and how," Skye said.

The youngest child Cadan was switched to vegan milk alternatives after he suffered a variety of digestive issues from consuming dairy milk.

"Even Cadan understands exactly - he knows that the baby animals suffer and are taken from their mommies and he doesn't believe in that," Jacqui said.

However, for Ryan, the journey to veganism has been very different from his family since his father was a butcher. He grew up surrounded by the farming industry and used to frequently visit slaughterhouses.

"Dad was a highly respected butcher and worked part-time on a farm and neighbours would bring animals around to be skinned and plucked. It wasn't abnormal for me to be around dead animals for much of my life," he said.

"I would help put animals on trailers and get the animals into the slaughterhouses and it was all normal to me. I witnessed chickens being killed on the farm, I worked on the turkey line just before Christmas and I always just thought 'we need animals to be healthy and strong'," Ryan added.

He initially opted for veganism due to health reasons, after his father passed away, and Jacqui's mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer.

"I wanted us and our family to live a life as healthy and as nutritiously as possible so that we could live as long as possible," Ryan noted.

The family said that a very common misconception about vegans is that they are "militant" and "crazy".

However, they claimed that they have no problem with other people's decision to eat meat, but their refusal to understand the processes behind the meat and dairy processes.

Jacqui said that she doesn't want vegans to be called crazy, but she wants to make people aware by explaining them the processes. And the family often practices this through social media but this has taken an ugly shape leading to losing friends and family.

Jacqui noted that it is "corrupt" to sell a product without "transparency".

"A lot of people don't realize, and I think we are manipulated by the industry to think everything is happy and everything is great. I think that it is corrupt to sell a product without transparency," she said.

"So when I started posting about it and raising awareness, I lost a lot of my friendships - because they were telling me to be quiet about it," the nutritionist added.

Jacqui said that she lost many friends because they wanted "to inform people" about the processes.

"If I had just gone vegan and kept quiet about it, my friends would have probably left me alone. But the breaking of friendships was mostly because we wanted to inform people," she said.

Living in Cornwall, the family is faced with increased pressure for being vegan as they are surrounded by agricultural farming. Many of the kids' classmates are from farming families.

However, the parents noted that they are not anti-farmers, but are against the "process and lack of transparency".

"We are not against farmers, they are intelligent people that we need in this world - it's the process we are against and the lack of transparency. If we are moving towards a vegan world we will need farmers and we want to work with them - because we need them," Ryan said.

Jacqui and Ryan stated that veganism is all about replacing meat and dairy options with healthier alternatives. According to the couple, it is as easy as replacing meat with chickpeas, lentils and beans now that vegan alternatives are so readily available.

"The main thing we do is swap meat for beans, lentils, and chickpeas. We eat lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. We then replace meat with legumes and swap dairy milk and cheese to plant-based alternatives," the parents said.

They also said that they don't feel like they are missing out on something due to their choice of lifestyle.

"As long as we do that we seem to be thriving. Everywhere we go to eat out we can have pretty much anything. We don't feel like we are missing out," the couple said.

The family's lifestyle choice has also encouraged Jacqui's father John and his wife Sarah to follow suit.

Comments

Add new comment

About text formats
  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
May 13,2020

California, May 13: A fasting-mimicking diet could be more effective at treating some types of cancer when combined with vitamin C, suggests a new study conducted by the scientists from USC and the IFOM Cancer Institute in Milan.

In studies on mice, researchers found that the combination delayed tumour progression in multiple mouse models of colorectal cancer; in some mice, it caused disease regression. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

"For the first time, we have demonstrated how a completely non-toxic intervention can effectively treat an aggressive cancer," said Valter Longo, the study senior author and the director of the USC Longevity Institute at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

"We have taken two treatments that are studied extensively as interventions to delay ageing-- a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C -- and combined them as a powerful treatment for cancer," added Longo.

The researchers said that while fasting remains a challenging option for cancer patients, a safer, more feasible option is a low-calorie, plant-based diet that causes cells to respond as if the body were fasting.

Their findings suggest that a low-toxicity treatment of fasting-mimicking diet plus vitamin C has the potential to replace more toxic treatments.

Results of prior research on the cancer-fighting potential of vitamin C have been mixed. Recent studies, though, are beginning to show some efficacy, especially in combination with chemotherapy.

In this new study, the research team wanted to find out whether a fasting-mimicking diet could enhance the high-dose vitamin C tumour-fighting action by creating an environment that would be unsustainable for cancer cells but still safe for normal cells.

"Our first in vitro experiment showed remarkable effects. When used alone, fasting-mimicking diet or vitamin C alone reduced cancer cell growth and caused a minor increase in cancer cell death. But when used together, they had a dramatic effect, killing almost all cancerous cells," said Longo.

Longo and his colleagues detected this strong effect only in cancer cells that had a mutation that is regarded as one of the most challenging targets in cancer research.

These mutations in the KRAS gene signal the body is resisting most cancer-fighting treatments, and they reduce a patient's survival rate. KRAS mutations occur in approximately a quarter of all human cancers and are estimated to occur in up to half of all colorectal cancers.

The study also provided clues about why previous studies of vitamin C as a potential anticancer therapy showed limited efficacy. By itself, a vitamin C treatment appears to trigger the KRAS-mutated cells to protect cancer cells by increasing levels of ferritin, a protein that binds iron.

But by reducing levels of ferritin, the scientists managed to increase vitamin C's toxicity for the cancer cells. Amid this finding, the scientists also discovered that colorectal cancer patients with high levels of the iron-binding protein have a lower chance of survival.

"In this study, we observed how fasting-mimicking diet cycles are able to increase the effect of pharmacological doses of vitamin C against KRAS-mutated cancers," said Maira Di Tano, a study co-author at the IFOM, FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy.

"This occurs through the regulation of the levels of iron and of the molecular mechanisms involved in oxidative stress. The results particularly pointed to a gene that regulates iron levels: heme-oxygenase-1," added Tano.

The research team's prior studies showed that fasting and a fasting-mimicking diet slow cancer's progression and make chemotherapy more effective in tumour cells while protecting normal cells from chemotherapy-associated side effects. The combination enhances the immune system's anti-tumour response in breast cancer and melanoma mouse models.

The scientists believe cancer will eventually be treated with low-toxicity drugs in a manner similar to how antibiotics are used to treat infections that kill particular bacteria, but which can be substituted by other drugs if the first is not effective.

To move toward that goal, they say they needed to first test two hypotheses: that their non-toxic combination interventions would work in mice, and that it would look promising for human clinical trials.

In this new study, they said that they've demonstrated both. At least five clinical trials, including one at USC on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, are now investigating the effects of the fasting-mimicking diets in combination with different cancer-fighting drugs.

Comments

Add new comment

About text formats
  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
Agencies
July 7,2020

The World Health Organization (WHO) is reviewing a report that suggested its advice on the novel coronavirus needs updating after some scientists told the New York Times there was evidence the virus could be spread by tiny particles in the air.

The WHO says the Covid-19 disease spreads primarily through small droplets, which are expelled from the nose and mouth when an infected person breaths them out in coughs, sneezes, speech or laughter and quickly sink to the ground.

In an open letter to the Geneva-based agency, 239 scientists in 32 countries outlined the evidence they say shows that smaller exhaled particles can infect people who inhale them, the newspaper said on Saturday.

Because those smaller particles can linger in the air longer, the scientists - who plan to publish their findings in a scientific journal this week - are urging WHO to update its guidance, the Times said.

"We are aware of the article and are reviewing its contents with our technical experts," WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said in an email reply on Monday to a Reuters request for comment.

The extent to which the coronavirus can be spread by the so-called airborne or aerosol route - as opposed to by larger droplets in coughs and sneezes - remains disputed.

Any change in the WHO's assessment of the risk of transmission could affect its current advice on keeping one-metre physical distancing. Governments, which also rely on the agency for guidance policy, may also have to adjust public health measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

"Especially in the last couple of months, we have been stating several times that we consider airborne transmission as possible but certainly not supported by solid or even clear evidence," Benedetta Allegranzi, the WHO's technical lead for infection prevention and control, was quoted as saying in the New York Times.

WHO guidance to health workers, dated June 29, says that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is primarily transmitted between people through respiratory droplets and on surfaces.

But airborne transmission via smaller particles is possible in some circumstances, such as when performing intubation and aerosol-generating procedures, it says.

Medical workers performing such procedures should wear heavy-duty N95 respiratory masks and other protective equipment in an adequately ventilated room, the WHO says.

Officials at South Korea's Centers for Disease Control said on Monday they were continuing to discuss various issues about Covid-19, including the possible airborne transmission. They said more investigations and evidence were needed.

Comments

Add new comment

About text formats
  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
July 10,2020

Toronto, Jul 10: Pasteurising breast milk at 62.5 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes inactivates the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19, making it safe for consumption by babies, a study claims.

According to the research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, current advice for women with Covid-19 is to continue to breastfeed their own infants.

In Canada, it is standard care to provide pasteurised breast milk to very-low-birth-weight babies in hospital until their own mother's milk supply is adequate, the researchers said.

"In the event that a woman who is Covid-19-positive donates human milk that contains SARS-CoV-2, whether by transmission through the mammary gland or by contamination through respiratory droplets, skin, breast pumps and milk containers, this method of pasteurisation renders milk safe for consumption," said Sharon Unger, a professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.

The Holder method, a technique used to pasteurise milk in all Canadian milk banks at 62.5 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, is effective at neutralising viruses such as HIV, hepatitis and others that are known to be transmitted through human milk, the researchers said.

In the latest study, the researchers spiked human breast milk with a viral load of SARS-CoV-2 and tested samples that either sat at room temperature for 30 minutes or were warmed to 62.5 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes.

They then measured for active virus, finding that the virus in the pasteurised milk was inactivated after heating.

More than 650 human breast milk banks around the world use the Holder method to ensure a safe supply of milk for vulnerable infants, the researchers said.

Comments

Add new comment

About text formats
  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.