Fat is where it's at: an interesting comment on Lierre Keith's Vegetarian Myth book

So I'm at Lierre Keith's site and head on over to Amazon to look at the comments and what do I find but this:

By Joan Howe "joanhello" (Northampton MA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (Paperback)

The author interweaves her deepening political and environmental understanding - looking at the whole picture and realizing that pretty much everything in the supermarket, not just the meat, is produced by methods that make the world a crueler, more polluted and, worst of all, less sustainable place, and that to avoid contributing to the problem calls for much more radical solutions than merely leaving the animal products out of your diet - with her own story of worsening health on a vegan diet followed by recovery when she began to eat meat again. This is where my first caveat comes up: she implies, without coming right out and saying, that her vegan diet was also a low-fat diet. I have also been vegan for long periods of my life (although never the decades that she logged) and it was only during the last one, from 2004-2006, that I experienced the slight beginnings of the back problems she describes. No coincidence: that was the one where I went low-fat as well as vegan and actually lost my ability to digest fat. Fortunately I got an accurate diagnosis promptly, got nutritional therapy to regain my ability to digest fat, and lost the back pain within a year. In the latter half of her Nutritional Vegetarianism chapter, she devotes several pages to challenging the demonization of dietary fat by the mainstream medical community. Nevertheless, she continues to attribute her health problems mainly to lack of meat rather than lack of fat.

It's amazing that such a simple thing such as fat in your otherwise balanced and colorful vegan diet could prevent such an avalanche of health issues. If you eat low fat vegan, you ARE doing it wrong! You don't have to go crazy with the fats, but you need to add it to your salads and greens to get the optimal absorption of nutrients. Plus, add a little to your green smoothie. If you recall the page of healthy vegan kids and their families a few posts back one child loves coconut milk!

Read this whole site or search for "fat" or "fats" in the search bar, when I have time to organize, hopefully I'll have a ton of links on why some fat is good for you, even a little or a little bit more than a little. You have to discern for yourself.

If you are a heart patient see a doc. This site is intended for otherwise healthy people who are not experiencing "hardening of the arteries" as my Momma says. Please visit VeganHealth.org for healthy vegan diets.