Ok, so vegetarianism is a “fad?”  I think christianity is a fad…  capitalism is a fad…  Those are things people love for no logical reason.  I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like killing animals and it’s good for me.

For one thing, many young “vegetarians” continue to eat the white meat of defenseless chickens (25% in the current study) as well as the flesh of those adorable animals known as fish (46%)

Any article that is so facetious about such a serious subject deserves have it’s serious errors laughed at and then swiftly fall into forgotten oblivion.

It doesn’t help, I imagine, that parts of our society are genuinely insane when it comes to matters of weight.  When David Alan Grier was eliminated from Dancing with the Stars this week, the story on the morning shows the next day was “did his fat partner slow him down?” or some such rubbish.  Said partner, Kym Johnson, is a size 4.

Back when that book “Skinny Bitch” (premise: get thin through veganism) came out I wasn’t familiar with the vegetarian/anorexic connection, but apparently it’s fairly common, so I don’t think the basis of the article is unfounded. I mean, how many anorexics *aren’t* vegetarian, particularly if you include eating chicken and fish under that definition? Which is not to say that the problem is with vegetarianism itself. But people with eating disorders frequently cut out high calorie foods and things considered “unhealthy” and red meat meets both of those requirements.

I think that if your child embarks on any kind of new diet you should at least keep in mind that such changes are linked to eating disorders. And that goes, like, times 100 if they are trying to lose weight.

amen akheloisos! so patronizing to teens! I couldn’t believe the writer was so openly dismissive and sarcastic! Peope love to act like all teens are morons with no ability to think.  I love too how it completely glosses over the fact that they are less likely to be overweight, considering what an enormous (pun intended) problem childhood obesity is with its host of potential lifelong consequences. I think they are conflating vegetarianism with eating disorders deliberately due to most people’s discomfort with vegetarianism.

ok, right after i posted wanted to take back my pun intended line. sorry, don’t want to be insensitive.

RacyT, I think you and Elle are saying the exact same thing. Professed veganism can be a cover for anorexia, not that veganism=anorexia.

I wonder if it would be possible for this thread to be free of ZOMG OBESITY CRISIS garbage.

Oh, wait, too late.

And since when do teenage girls, at least, experience “immense pressure” to eat MORE than is healthy?

RacyT, yeah, we are totally saying the same thing.

Also what kristin said (both things), but I’m not up for fighting about that now.

Elle, it’s not unfounded, but the problem is that the article is all over the place, because they clearly intend for parents to harangue healthy vegetarian kids.  They both insinuate that all attempts to restrict calorie intake should be red alert eating disorder situations, but then they also think that being of your ideal weight is a sign of health.  Well, these two things are in direct conflict.  Even naturally thin people are at a high risk of developing heart disease and diabetes if they don’t watch it.  It’s not “dieting”—-it’s about resisting the pressure to overeat and learning healthy eating habits that you stick to.  Now, some people will be fat no matter what they do, but fat or thin, big-boned or not, everyone needs to be conscientious about what they eat. And their own evidence showed that vegetarians are doing a better job.

I wish that our culture made basic health easy.  But it doesn’t.  It encourages over-consumption (especially of meat) and sedentary lifestyles.  If you don’t want to get sick, you have to learn health resistance to these norms.

Eating disorders are a different thing entirely, and yes, many people with them use vegetarianism as a shield.  And animal rights nuts exploit eating disorders.  That said, eating disorders are not just taking a healthy approach to eating “too far”.  They are a neurotic reaction to a complex set of factors, and our culture’s fascination with thinness is just a small part of it.

Amanda you are what a buck 15? Are you really tell us fatsos to watch our carb intake? Come on girl you are going to get that hate mail. As a dirty fucking hippies we should love ourselves no matter the size of our pot belly or thunder thighs. I know I love a lady with thunder thighs and she loves my pot belly!

Now Amanda my sweet sweet Amanda I love you dearly so don’t get your panties in a twist but self love is more healthy then starvation unhappiness and divorce. Because a person on a diet is a person that hates themselves… And if you hate your self how can you accept that someone loves you for you.

I could leave out the obesity crisis and just simply address the logical fallacy of an article trying to define vegetarianism as an eating disorder because of a few kids WITH eating disorders misidentify themselves are vegetarians.

however, the obesity crisis is real and vegetarianism is a valid option for reducing your risk of being overweight and developing type two diabetes which has numerous and real consequences including amputation, renal failure and early death,  and by, the way, bankrupting the health care system. That’s all.

that’s misidentify themselves AS vegetarians, sorry.

I called bullshit on this article as soon as the author invoked “candy-flipping” as a teenage fad.

Sincere attempt at sounding hip and in the know, but really.

I concur with Amanda that this is a BS maneuver to help parents bully teens who are experimenting with their social and political decisions. Unfortunately, this is not a new occurrence.

amanda says it best in her response to elle I think.

I really liked the idea of candy flipping as harmless teenage fun, compared to the shocking dangers of OMG VEGETARIANISM. But yeah, I imagine that if it’s still popular, whatever teenagers are calling it now is not the same thing I called it in the mid-nineties.

Haha some of the things said in that article are kind of funny.

(It could also be that vegetarians are hungrier in general and somewhat more prone to bouts of binge eating.)

As a vegetarian my whole life (i’m 26) I’m used to hearing all kinds of horrible things that are going to happen to me because of it. But being “hungrier” is a new one to me.

Being a teenager means experimenting with foolish things like dyeing your hair purple

Dyeing your hair purple is foolish? No one seems to think that about mine… or maybe no one wants to tell me. Is it dangerous or something?

If the author of the article was really oh-so-concerned that teens eat healthy, shouldn’t he be encouraging parents to take their newly vegetarian or vegan kid to a registered dietitian so they learn how to eat well and get the extra nutrients (like calcium) that they need at their age?  Teenagers can get overly enthusiastic about new things, so I can see some teens not eating enough just because they’re not quite sure what to eat, where to find that information, and how to figure out which books and websites are giving sensible advice and which ones are giving bogus, unscientific advice. 

(By the way, Skinny Bitch?  Filled with bogus advice.  Keep your teens away from it.)

And since when do teenage girls, at least, experience “immense pressure” to eat MORE than is healthy?

Pretty much whenever I eat out with people I get asked four or five times if I’ve gotten enough to eat.  It’s leveled off a lot since I’ve become an adult, but it was particularly bad as a teen.  It seems odd, but that’s what happens when you only eat small portions (not because you think large portions will make you fat, but just because you’re not hungry after eating about half your meal).  Really this pressure starts when we’re kids.  How many people here know what the clean plate club is?  How many couldn’t get desert unless they’d eaten everything else on their plate?  These are pressures to eat even if you’ve past the point of being hungry.

Amanda you are what a buck 15?

Not since I was a fetus.

Seriously, self love is important, and a great incentive not to develop an eating disorder.  Healthy eating is not an eating disorder.  It seems to me that most eating disorders are a sign of self-destructive tendencies, and that means both over-eating and anorexia.

And since when do teenage girls, at least, experience “immense pressure” to eat MORE than is healthy?

The freshman 15 is a result of this pressure, in my experience.  Most teenage social occasions center around junk food, and girls are torn between social pressure to remain thin and social pressure to fit in by eating.  The ideal woman is someone who eats heartily without a care but never gains an ounce.  In other words, the ideal woman doesn’t exist.  This is true of many social standards—-you’re to be sexually available and virginal, independent but also eager to enter into traditional marriage, smart but not ambitious, pretty but not vain, etc.

This article (like so many in “news"weeklies) does indeed seem to aim to scare the hell out of parents—OMG your child may have an eating disorder!!! But I didn’t see that perspective in the piece at first because I felt that it was pointing, however awkwardly, toward a phenomenon that was genuine in my case. My flirtation with vegetarianism during high school (late 1970s) was directly related to the fact that not eating meat allowed me to camouflage my anorexia and refuse to eat the food the other members of my family were eating. (And to sit at the table not eating and feeling superior—a feeling that was overdetermined by both the anorexia and being a teenager, or at least being the kind of teenager I was. Not to diss all teens, but for me, “I don’t eat” felt a little crazy, but “I don’t eat meat” felt super-righteous and had essentially the same outcome.)

So my reaction to the article was more “yeah, duh, kids sometimes use ‘vegetarian’ as a synonym for ‘refusing to eat what my parents want/expect me to eat’” and less “they’re trying to get parents to bully their kids into cutting out that vegetarian crap.” I can see the anti-vegetarian bias or at least the unconcern about overeating/unhealthy eating in the article too (er, now that it’s been pointed out to me), but I still can’t see vegetarianism as necessarily synonymous with “healthy eating.” At 17, I was basically a corn-chip-and-cupcake vegetarian.

(And now I just try not to impose the food weirdnesses on my own daughter that were imposed on me. Though I’m not a vegetarian, I eat a mostly veg diet—and if my kid decides to become a vegetarian, we’ll cook even more vegetarian meals at home and that will be that. Or so I hope.)

P.S. The image links for this article are hilarious. “See pictures of fruit”—as if those reading and panicking would not otherwise know what fruit looks like! Don’t know about you, but I *had* to click through.

I couldn’t even read that pile of crap. I saw that first line about dying your hair purple and “candy flipping” (something I’ve never even HEARD of before!) and I just knew… Yep, Amanda’s right. I should just take her word for it this time.

Anti-vegetarian propaganda gets me angrier than almost anything else. As if I don’t already get asked a billion and one questions whenever someone finds out I’m vegan. Last thing I need is more ill-informed (but well-wishing) people that barely know me trying to tell me that I must be unhealthy and there’s no way I can be doing so well even though I’ve been vegan for around 6 years and don’t take ANY vitamin supplements. The funny thing is, I’m almost never sick (especially compared to my meat-eating friends), I never EVER get digestive problems (which I actually thought was normal until I read an article about them a few months ago. I was shocked!), my hair, skin, eyes, etc- All with clear signs of health! Hell, if I pack on a few more pounds I could be overweight. So no one’s scared I’m about to wither away to nothing!

It breaks people’s stereotypical perception about vegetarians when they meet me, for sure, but that’s only those that give a chance to get to know me. All the people who keep up the borders and think they’re clever or think they’re going to make me cry (at least, I THINK that’s their sadistic motive?) by saying shit like, “Yum, meat!” when they’re eating or making a really lame joke, are going to totally absorb articles like this. After all, who cares what the facts say, you must secretly be anorexic!!!

Oops. Sorry for the little tangent there. By the way, I’ve been reading this site for a couple months now, but I’m new to posting. So… Hi?

And since when do teenage girls, at least, experience “immense pressure” to eat MORE than is healthy?

I did, all the time. I was super skinny as a kid.

Vegetarians face widespread bullying for a number of reasons; one being it is subversive, if only as a usually unintended, but beautiful, side effect.

If parents aren’t bullying teens with accusations of eating disorders they needn’t look far for another anti-vegetarian bludgeon.  Any schmoe on the street could name five, and probably believes four of em.

Also, my partner is a vegetarian (mostly vegan) and is a healthy size 00. 

I’ve always suspected that all these vegan cupcakes and veggie sushi nights were a sign of something.  I used to think that it was just that we liked to eat well, but now I know better.

Marvin Harris said in “Cannibals and Kings” that our culture is so successful that thinness can be seen as a sign of status. The history of civilization has been centered around producing and distributing high-calorie foods. The Greek hecatombs and Hebrew temple sacrifice were a way to redistribute fat to the poor to keep them healthy enough to work and content enough not to rebel.

But now industrial-scale food production makes it easy to be fat if one is genetically inclined. There’s too much food in some economies, and the way food producers can increase profits is to foster overeating.

What we need is a new redistributive ethic, the Greek hecatomb on a worldwide scale. Something like Peter Singer’s utilitarian tithe would be a good option.

There *are* women who can eat virtually unlimited foodstuffs without gaining. I have a friend who has been trying for years to gain 15 pounds so she can get hip surgery. Now that she’s over 30, there’s starting to be a trace of slowing of her metabolism so she can slowly become non-underweight. But every gain diet she was put on made her run a fever, be insomniac, even—I think—tachycardia (rapid heartbeat) as her body turned all the calories into motive and heat energy instead of storing it.

I’m sure it’s as much of a metabolic disorder as low thyroid. Also, she and the other woman I knew who seemed to be the same are not Hollywood dream girls, having bony faces, and figures that tended towards prepubescent. So, can we *not* insult people with genuinely unusual metabolisms when discussing anorexia? They don’t win the no-win conundrums of female sexiness anymore than the rest of us do.

“And since when do teenage girls, at least, experience “immense pressure” to eat MORE than is healthy?”

You seriously never got, or heard any other girl getting, teased in the “What are you, on a diet?” vein in high school?  And that’s on top of the already-mentioned family pressures.  Don’t forget that just because a girl’s getting told she shouldn’t or can’t eat ice cream lest she get fat and no man ever want her, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t also routinely getting badgered into eating more than she wanted of something else.  Given that most families aren’t composed of nutrition-experts or completely consistent people, a lot of that pressure isn’t going to track with what’s really healthy so much as what’s convenient and/or perceived as healthy.

For a fair number of teenagers, if they’re trying to strike out on their own with vegetarianism and the family isn’t supportive (not necessarily actively against, just “I’m not going to cook a separate meal for you”), the only thing that occurs to them as vegetarian that’s a “meal” is packaged foods like Mac n’ Cheese and Spaghetti-Os. So they end up eating that every meal until they give up on vegetarianism.

Pamphlet cookbooks that offer a handful of recipes that are quick, EASY, nutritious (esp offering replacement protein that new vegs go into withdrawal over), and using mostly ingredients that the parents would keep in the larder already would be a good thing to guerrilla-drop in a high school commons, this way they only have to get a few items from the store that are specialized. Fried rice with tofu and frozen vegetables, red beans and rice, linguine with canellini and frozen spinach, veggie pot pies, fritatas, etc.

Yeah, because what the world is really lacking is studies that stigmatize fat people.

I get that this is a flawed study, but “progressive flavor” fat bashing is wrong, too. The truth is, some fat people overeat and so do some thin people. Only the fat people suffer moral panic over it, as do all fat people who DON’T overeat. The notion that the problem with fatness is that we’re going too easy on fat people rings enormously false to me. I say that as a fat person, AND as a fat vegetarian. (albeit of the pesco-lacto-ovo variety)

I was a vegetarian at an early age and I definitely saw a lot of people adopt vegetarianism as a cover for an eating disorder. I don’t think that’s a reason to target or stigmatize people for simply being a vegetarian, though. I don’t think much good comes from stigmatizing personal eating choices. IF its disordering eating, there will be more useful distinctions than just being a vegetarian. Scare tactics over veggies is just as poorly founded as the scare tactics used against fat people.

That said, the sad truth is that much of the blame for the misrepresentation of vegetarian eating lies with groups like PETA who explicitly promote vegetarianism using the fear of fat and the promise of thinness. The kind of fat stigmatization actively and aggressively promoted by PETA is marketing vegetarianism and veganism as weight loss plans to a vulnerable audience. The meat lobby is no hero here, but sadly neither is the vegetarian lobby. I wish the lot of them would stop trying to stigmatize eating to serve a political or economic agenda. I say the answer isn’t one or the other, its neither.

Even now as a woman in my 20s I get pressured to eat more.  It can be very hard, especially with people who I don’t know well, because I don’t want to air out my illness to everyone.  Also harder because recently I’ve had a lot of people notice that I lost a bit of weight, so not eating + losing weight = OF COURSE SHE’S ANOREXIC.  And I even sound like one—“Why don’t you eat at work?  I never see you eat at work!”  “Ohh, I eat when I get home/I’m not really hungry/I had a big lunch.”  As a teen I was always being shamed for eating and being told to eat less.  What a difference 40 pounds can make. 

Anyway.

I knew some of those “vegetarians” in high school.  They were usually the ones who became vegetarians for “health reasons,” which is not to knock anyone who thinks their body works better when there’s no meat in it, but just to say ... they didn’t even wrap it in “oh the poor animals.”  And who constantly talked about how much weight they lost since becoming vegetarians.

Of course, that’s just my experience.  YMMV.  But I can totally believe that kids play at vegetarianism as an excuse to be picky to cover up for a disorder.

the only thing that occurs to them as vegetarian that’s a “meal” is packaged foods like Mac n’ Cheese and Spaghetti-Os.

Some, obviously not all, people become vegetarians for the cruelty reasons, but still hate the taste of vegetables. So if you don’t like veggies and you don’t eat meat, Mac and Cheese is what you have left. And not even then, if you go full-vegan.

To be fair, some teenagers can be insufferable and some vegan/vegetarians can be insufferable, so a vegan/vegetarian teenager could be a particularly rancid combo in some people. (The same can, of course, be true for ALL age and ideology combinations, so YMMV.) I took particularly delight in trimming down a particularly nasty OMG-IS-THAT-A-BURGER-YOU-NAZI fellow teen in college. In a moment of candor, she sniffed that OF COURSE she drank milk, and she didn’t understand those stupid vegans who didn’t because cows NEED to be milked, so we might as well drink it. I pointed out that the “stupid vegans” didn’t object to milk because milk was bad but because milk collection methods were largely inhumane (this was before the stores sold organic, cruelty-free alternatives), that the cows were pumped full of artificial hormones and additives, and that their quality of life was pretty much nill.

The look of sheer hatred she shot at me as I stripped off her (genuine) innocence and she saw her milk and cheese slipping away (or her moral high ground, which she WOULD not cede) was one of the higher points of my college life.

So I see where this guy is coming from, with the condescending tone (“You’re a vegetarian, but you eat any animal that isn’t beef? Riiiiiiight.”) but that doesn’t make it right (just fun) and it doesn’t mean this is a good study, because it isn’t. Just amusing.

I cannot recall an obnoxious vegetarian or vegan since leaving high school.  I lay it squarely at the feet of being a teenager and feeling passionately about something that makes you a bit fringe and wanting to mine that for all of the angsty cred you can, and not at all at some culture of vegetarianism or veganism that requires assholishness.

You can hate the taste of vegetables and still be a vegetarian and not have to just eat prepackaged crap. You can do a lot with rice and beans and egg and pasta that doesn’t resort to a recipe that requires half a stick of butter for every package. I think that a lot of highschoolers lack the resources and knowledge when they first become a vegetarian to create balanced, healthy meals using the stuff they have on-hand in the household, and so they lapse into bad eating habits.

...But it’s not like teenagers are some sort of dietary wunderkind who would eat nothing but healthy and balanced meals if it weren’t for the diabolical vegetarianism creeping into their lives and making them reach for the Kraft. So yeah—the article gets a FAIL for being disingenuous and double-standard-ous. (Yay, new word)

I cannot recall an obnoxious vegetarian or vegan since leaving high school.

You need to live here in LA if you think only teenagers are obnoxious with their food choices.  Of course, most of the industry out here runs as though it were high school writ large, so that may have something to do with it.  I would shop at Whole Foods more if it weren’t for the customers.

Though I have to admit, it’s pretty funny to watch a macrobiotic and a vegan try to out-righteous each other.

Though I have to admit, it’s pretty funny to watch a macrobiotic and a vegan try to out-righteous each other.

This summer’s exciting new rom com!

Mnemosyne—from the sounds of it, I *don’t* need to live in LA.

Food is the new sin.

The moderately interesting thing, though, is that while vegetarianism has long been considered a cover for anorexia (I imagine especially in populations that are having their meals monitored [in parents house, hospitals, etc.]) so there is an excuse for undereating, what is the cause with bulimia? Is it anorexics that are now being monitored so they turn to bulimia in order to avoid the dreaded weight gain? Bulimics tend to be normal weight or even overweight. And what exactly defined more “binge eating more often than their peers” - the study included those who ate chicken and fish as vegetarians, and doesn’t specify how they measured binge eating - eating to a feeling of over-fullness >1/week? A day? Until vomiting and then eating again? What?

Basically, I agree that the entire article centered around scaring parents into thinking their vegetarian teens are not only deficient in calcium, protein, iron and going to explode from the estrogenoid compounds in soy, they’re also ZOMG!Purging!!

As to the ‘who pressures girls to eat more??’ question, I think it is definitely present and agree it is yet another impossible bind - the woman who is dieting makes her date uncomfortable (especially if she’s trying to serve him healthy food) but if she is fat she overeats and is gross. Although it is usually more by family than dates, I’ve definitely frequently felt pressured to eat more than comfortable.

You seriously never got, or heard any other girl getting, teased in the “What are you, on a diet?” vein in high school?

No, never.

And I know what people are referring to with individual family pressure to “make sure you’ve gotten enough to eat!” but I seriously think that the larger culture has been for a long time, and is still, about limiting what women feel entitled to eat.

Take a look at the diet section of any teen magazine and its pathetically low calorie recommendations for active teenage girls. Take a look at Weight Watchers and other “lifestyle changes” and their insistence that eating less is better. Take a look at the flogging of ZOMG PORTION CONTROL where a reasonable portion is something ridiculous like “only portions the size of your fist”. All of this shit is mainstream.

Thank you, Kristin.

The fat hysteria on this post is disgusting.

But every gain diet she was put on made her run a fever, be insomniac, even—I think—tachycardia (rapid heartbeat) as her body turned all the calories into motive and heat energy instead of storing it.

Interesting, Samantha. Reading your description, I seem to have a similar reaction when I eat a large meal. I can’t gain weight, either, and I don’t have the stomach capacity, appetite, or money to just eat eat eat all the time. I eat three meals a day and snack a lot as it is. I don’t think I’ve received the proper looking-into of my metabolism by doctors; I’m just naturally like this and I’ve never, like, not had my period because of too-low bodyweight or anything. I’m 30 and I hope my metabolism slows down. I haven’t seen an endocrinologist yet but plan to once my insurance kicks in.

But yeah, girls and food are definitely considered public domain whether it’s “You’re eating too much” or “Why are you so skinny? Eat more.”

I don’t see vegetarianism or veganism as the problem, though they’re not for me.  Being a vegetarian is not a gateway to an eating disorder, nor is it a symptom.  Perhaps instead of freaking out because your child became a vegetarian and assuming they must be some freak, take them to a dietician and show them how to eat right as a vegetarian.  I know I could benefit from that too, getting more of what I need in my diet.

BTW, why do vegans always say they don’t take vitamins?  What’s wrong with vitamins?