The animal rights movement’s strongest claim promoting vegetarianism is ethical, as in “If it has a face, don’t eat it.” But that isn’t good enough. Too often they go into odious comparisons between the worst human evils and barbecuing a steak (PETA’s infamous Holocaust on Your Plate Campaign), or engage in outright distortion and propagandist manipulation. Case in point, pretending a child eating a hot dog has colon cancer. From the story:
A new TV commercial shows kids eating hot dogs in a school cafeteria and one little boy’s haunting lament: “I was dumbfounded when the doctor told me I have late-stage colon cancer.” It’s a startling revelation in an ad that vilifies one of America’s most beloved, if maligned, foods, while stoking fears about a dreaded disease.Without reading the whole story, I thought this will be the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a PETA creature, as mendacious a group as you will find. Yup:
But the boy doesn’t have cancer. Neither do two other kids in the ad who claim to be afflicted. The commercial’s pro-vegetarian sponsors say it’s a dramatization that highlights research linking processed meats, including hot dogs, with higher odds of getting colon cancer. But that connection is based on studies of adults, not children, and the increased risk is slight, even if you ate a hot dog a day
Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, called the ad “a way to raise appropriate concern about a deadly concern.” Barnard also heads The Cancer Project, an offshoot of his anti-meat advocacy group.Never believe anything the PCRM or the Cancer Project say. Less than 5% of the committee are physicians. They are quacks in this field, their assertions products of their ideology rather than objective science. If in doubt about what they claim, turn to a credible source.
