This chapter of ‘Make a Veggie Cry’ is pretty hilarious really, if only from the point of how many hours I wasted researching it for my veggie friend, Harvey.
Type into Google ‘The original vegan diet’ and at the top of the first page, you’ll find this joker; Professor Spira.
Now, my good friend Harvey, has only gone out and ‘purchased’ no less, this dude’s book, and sent me a copy, asking my opinion.
For Harvey, the prefix of Professor or Dr, or the suffix of PhD after your name, grants you a status beyond belief, and a blow job behind the bike sheds!
Although over 60, he’d probably sit around a dinner table with any of these academics, like a schoolgirl with her first crush.
So he reads the book, visits the vegan website, and he’s sold.
Hook, line and sinker!
Why oh why, did Jesus Christ see fit to blight this poor man with a friend like me?
So I took a closer look at it for him, and maybe this’ll prepare you one day too.
Now, just as the low-fat proponents think fat is the root of all our troubles, and the P.H boneheads think it’s acidity that’s killing us, this bell end Spira believes mucus is the villain, and hence we should strive for a mucus-less lifestyle.
Let’s start with ‘Professor’. Spira.
Mr Spira is currently a Ph. D. candidate, in ethnomusicology, at the Ohio State University.
Basically, he has a PhD in the fucking trombone and jazz music!
But he does say he’s an expert in mucus free living, and one of his cohorts on the lose weight campaign describes him as;
‘The most prominent mucus- less diet healing system coach in the World’
He offers a one-hour skype consultation for just $95… so that’s all good then.
I wonder though, just how many ‘prominent mucus-less diet healing system coaches’ there are in the World?
One would be my guess!
A once upon a time fat boy who lost 110lbs on a veggie and fruit diet, and now looks like he needs a meat pie, his diet prior to going vegan was so atrocious it’s laughable.
Whatever diet he’d have switched to, it would’ve shown impressive results by comparison.
He’s also someone who’s found a way of making money as a guru, based on someone else’s (a Professor Ehret) 70-year-old research.
In the first few lines of the book, Professor Piano (I know, I’m taking the piss now), talks as if the old, long dead Prof Ehret, knows about or understands our modern times, for example on page 8; (Book exerts are in italics and quotations)
“From Ehret's perspective, fasting for humans in our current pathological conditions is a relative proposition.”
Prof Ehret knew fuck all of our current pathological conditions since he died in 1922 aged ………. wait for it………………….56!!!!
We should also know that Professor Ehret’s PhD was in ‘design’, which if I’m not mistaken is ‘ART’ to you and me, and probably the easiest doss for any student back then, as it still is today.
Among old Prof Ehret’s beliefs, were that his diet would provide ‘Absolute Communion with God’, and while I can’t argue against that, I can with some of his other beliefs;
1/ Ehret maintained new tissue was built primarily from simple sugars in fruits, not metabolised from protein and fat-rich foods…..Are you fucking kidding me?
2/ "no animals eat fats" and "all fats are acid forming, even those of vegetable origin, and are not used by the body"…. Seriously?
He must have seen some vegetarian lions at the zoo, plus fat is at worst PH neutral.
In fact, many experts claim fat is one of the body's best alkaline buffers, because of its ability to take on extra acids or hydrogen ions, on its carbon chain.
Not that this matters, because the whole PH thing is bollocks anyhow.
3/ Ehret specifically renounced meat, eggs, milk, fats, cereals, legumes, potatoes and rice, whilst recognizing the transitional value in some of these…. No surprise he snuffed it at 56 then, not to me at least.
4/ Ehret asserted that the body was an air-gas engine, not dependent on food for energy. Errr Warning, Danger; Nutter Alert!
Although, I have met many vegans who do appear to run on gas and air!
5/ Unlike medical practitioners today, who believe white blood cells are important components of the immune system, Ehret believed that white blood cells are caused by consuming mucus-forming foods, and as waste materials, poison the blood…..I’m not due to start studying Haematology till 2019, but from what I do understand of immunology, Ehret was barking up the wrong tree here.
The above crap alone makes me not want to give more than 30 minutes of my life to studying this material, and as soon as I hear mention of ‘Alkaline foods’ I switch off a little bit more mate.
This from their website mucusfreeliving; Them in italics again.
CEREALS (MODERATELY MUCUS-FORMING)
Well toasted 100% grain bread (toasting helps neutralize the sticky properties. Toast should always be combined with a raw salad to promote a broom-like effect within the intestines.) Are they fucking serious?
Another myth that’s gone around the vegetarian World and back.
Can you imagine what Hydrochloric acid would do to a slice of toast after 20 minutes?
It would hardly be in any fit state to act as a broom to push anything along anywhere.
If our designers hadn’t engineered us to exercise and squat every day, we might have evolved with a spine that doesn’t place 5 times as much pressure on its base when we sit on it and instead been given a plunger system to move the shit out of our lazy arses.
Sadly, we're just left with peristalsis to do that job, and not bloody TOAST!
Your God’s a bit thick I reckon if you need to eat toast to stop from getting bowel cancer!
Especially since bread wasn’t even around for our first 2 million years of design modifications (or evolution if you prefer), and has been with us for just 12,000 yrs. max.
The website continues;
“100% wheat or quinoa pasta (this is mucus-forming, but I found 100% wheat spaghetti combined with steamed vegetables and a large raw salad to be very helpful in the early stages of the…….. Again, I think Professor Philharmonic doesn’t know the first fucking thing about nutrition, nor the dangers of wheat, and even to suggest its ingestion in small amounts is irresponsible, to a reader gagging for good health, weight loss, a longer lifespan, vigour and vitality.
What about mucus?
Dictionary definition; “Mucus; a slimy substance, typically not miscible with water, secreted by the mucous membranes and glands of animals for lubrication, protection, etc”.
Ok, for starters, your mouth, nose, throat, sinuses and lungs are lined with mucus membranes.
These membranes contain mucus glands that produce—big surprise—mucus.
Mucus-producing membranes line specific passages in your body, like the respiratory and digestive tracts, for protection and support.
Again dear friend, as with the cholesterol myth, be very careful of eliminating anything that your body makes a shit load of, all by itself.
The body has a wisdom far in advance of Professor Piccolo, or you and me.
More from the book;
“Oils (Fatty and mildly mucus forming)
My favorite and most used oils include Olive oil.”
Another massive myth. Olive oil oxidizes, (goes rancid), and I can back that up some other time (see my article ‘where does bullshit come from). Coconut oil, grass-fed butter and lard, are the way to go if you need a cooking oil.
Where can this bullshit be coming from?
Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that spread from person to person through microscopic droplets released into the air. This can happen when someone with the untreated, active form of TB coughs, speaks, sneezes, spits, laughs or sings.
Although tuberculosis is contagious, it's not easy to catch. Poor Prof Ehret watched both his dad and brother die from TB, so perhaps that’s where he decided there was an ungodly amount of mucus in the world.
I don’t know, I’m just guessing.
Any illness that ends in ‘isis’ or ‘osis’ is an inflammation problem.
As a response to the inflammation in the lungs, and in an attempt to clear the pathogen, the body produces shit loads of mucus.
Again it’s a case of idiots thinking the firemen are causing all the fire’s because fire trucks are always around when fires are blazing.
Cholesterol’s always at the scene of the crime in heart disease, and as you can imagine, mucus, in someone with TB, must be quiet awful.
Here’s another taster from the book;
“Texturized Vegetable Protein (‘mock’ meats including soy, etc.;
Ehret discusses the use of protose–meat substitute made out of wheat gluten, in early versions of the Mucusless Diet in the “vegetarian options” section. Such items are not ‘forbidden,’ but should only be used for short periods of time. It should never be thought that such foods can be a long-term staple for a Mucusless Diet practitioner. The key is always combining such items with raw salads that help it to eliminate/digest.) “
Here Professor Percussion is referring to Professor (Painter) Arnold Ehret, who did the original research.
In fairness to him (Ehret), wheat wasn’t half as bad back then, since it wasn’t genetically modified till the 1950’s, but the gluten in it was every bit as bad.
Again, you find here an intelligent and caring scientist (Ehret) struggling to make sure the proponents of his diet have a decent protein source.
I doubt he knew that humans can’t break down the cellulose in veg to get at the protein, which is already lacking vital amino acids, like tryptophan to name but one.
Suggesting a protein source from ‘Gluten’, tells me that he didn’t quite understand in 1920 how these ‘long chain’ proteins were quite literally ‘glued’ together, and no matter how many raw salads or slices of toast you ate, nothing would unravel them enough for the body to absorb them anywhere near as well as it might from an egg, for example.
Prof Panpipe, on the other hand, should know all this since I have for 15 years, but I guess he’s just too busy with his ethnic music to bother updating Prof Ehret’s work.
Book; “Plant milks (soy milk; I used soy milks with cereal for about a year and a half. As bad as my previous diet was, it was an improvement. But it did not take long for soy milk and cereal to start irritating my stomach causing me to get rid of it)”. – Again he knows nothing about the dreadful dangers of soy.
Let’s leave it there since that’s the end of my email to my friend.
If one of the veggies in your life ever starts banging on about mucus, pretend it sounds amazing, and encourage your compliant friend to buy Prof Spira’s $430 coaching programme, before you deliver the bad news.
You’ll certainly have enough to bring them to tears, and maybe, just maybe, get them to shut the fuck up, or better yet, snap out of their idiotic, plant-based trance, and join you for a barbeque!
Cry bye.
Blunt Coach Andy
