It’s no longer about food and nutrition – “nutrition science” is about global warming and climate change, animal rights and welfare and human labor abuses:
In the past few years the interests of my research group [Nutrition Science] have shifted to include three additional areas of inquiry. One of these is Stealth Nutrition. The central hypothesis driving this is that in order for more effective and impactful dietary improvements to be realized, health professionals need to consider adding non-health related approaches to their toolbox of strategies. Examples would be connections between food and 1) global warming and climate change, 2) animal rights and welfare, and 3) human labor abuses (e.g., slaughterhouses
Christopher Gardner is a practicing vegan for over 25 years, is funded by Beyond Meat, and is a climate change activist.
Gardner, with his conflicts of interest, sits on the USDA Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee – which as of early 2025, was proposing that everyone adopt, basically, the “planetary” plant-based diet.
He promotes “plant-based” eating, which as I learned the hard way, led to a vitamin B-12 deficiency and a dozen serious health problems – lasting for years. After spending $6000 out of pocket on medical tests (due to sky high ACA deductibles), the vitamin B-12 deficiency was discovered by accident and all health problems corrected within days to weeks of going on B-12 supplements.
Many people – perhaps most – and especially older adults – will develop B-12 deficiency problems if they stop eating meat, which is the primary source of B-12 in the diet. Proponents say, “you should just know you need to take manufactured B-12 supplements”. Really? The overwhelming majority of news articles about plant-based eating make no mention of this. 3 of the 4 vegetarian cookbooks I relied on made no mention of vitamin B-12. The 4th only mentioned it in 2 sentences on page 276 and 277, and then only in the context of “vegan” eating, not vegetarian. Yet true fanatics blame me for having tried to adopt their recommendations – which I tried to do but found their communications/messaging to have failed. It is my fault that they failed to accurately communicate the risks, per them.
Indeed, you should just know the answers to these questions – duh!
- What dose of B-12 should you take?
- How often?
- What form of B-12 should you take?
- Should you take oral tablets or sublingual tablets?
- Do you suffer absorption issues and need to take B-12 injections?
- Are you taking medications that interfere with B-12 absorption?
- Do you have a disease such as celiac that may limit your B-12 absorption?
- Why haven’t you consulted with your doctor?
- Why haven’t you consulted with a dietitian?
- Why are you not using an app or spreadsheet to track your nutrients?
You should just know these things obviously!
A recent RCT put the “planetary diet” to a test and found after just 12 weeks, participants saw an average drop in their B-12 levels of about 35%, plus drops in other critical nutrients. It is reckless to promote this dietary scheme without long term testing in the real world and to understand its impact on ending dietary cultural practices. A complaint made about the Mediterranean Diet is it promotes everyone in the world eating like males in southern Europe – and thus, much of local culture throughout the world is ignored.
