Jeff Nelson Just Can't Stop Lying

Normally I don’t write about the few conflicts I have with animal rights activists here, but Jeff Nelson and VegSource.Com offer such a case study of animal rights group think that this time I’m making an exception.

Back on July 12 I posted an article about on ongoing debate over at an Animal Rights 2002 Memory board hosted by VegSource.Com (see http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2002/000244.html for the details of that).

Anytime animal rights activists disagree in public, somebody chimes in that this is just helping their enemies, and at least one person pointed out my article. On July 14, Adam Weissman posted the entire text of the article in a post called “An Article About this Discussion Board by an Animal Rights Foe.”

Another activist responded to that by attacking my web site. In order to prove a point, I posted a reply noting that the main difference between AnimalRights.Net and VegSource.Com is I don’t spend most of my day banning people who disagree with me. In fact I give free reign to animal rights activists who want to come to the site and criticize me. I’ve always felt that allowing such unfettered communication, regardless of how uncomfortable or heated it may get, is the best way to ensure that my claims are as strong and accurate as possible.

Of course within an hour or two, Nelson deleted my post and banned the computer I was using from even accessing his site. This is what VegSource.Com’s tagline that “All Are Welcome” really means.

Nelson followed that up with “Note regarding banning and post removals from this board in which he writes,

VegSource provides this board to FARM for their use. VegSource moderators do not remove posts from this board and don’t have the password to do so, nor do I remove posts from this board (with one exception having to do with a disreputable anti-animal rights site attempting to get traffic from us, a site which is supposed to be blocked from our full site).

That is as hilarious as it is pathetic. Apparently some VegSource.Com visitors actually fall for this lame explanation that I am “attempting to get traffic from” VegSource.Com. Yeah, that’s right, Adam Weissman and I are such buddies that he’s now doing my marketing for me by posting my articles to VegSource.Com.

The reality is that Jeff Nelson doesn’t want anyone linking to or discussing any of the articles I’ve written pointing out that he is just as factually challenged as his current nemesis Robert Cohen (see http://www.animalrights.net/faq/people/pro_ar/jeff_nelson.html for a rundown). VegSource.Com promotes the worst sort of groupthink by not only banning its critics but even animal rights activists who disagree in some way with VegSource.Com’s agenda.

The funny thing is that I rarely visit VegSource.Com — there are too many ads and it is impossible to find anything there with the convoluted web design. Still, it’s gratifying to know that little old me is apparently public enemy number one in Nelson’s book.

And just a note to people who do post to VegSource.Com. Do you really think it is just a good idea to let Nelson publicly display your IP addresses? I have run across some boneheaded practices at web sites before, but this takes the cake. I’ve seen posts, for example, where people clearly posted from work or at universities where the IP address and the name would make it extremely easy to track down the people posting.

This sort of information is collected by every web server — only Nelson is stupid enough to make it publicly available to anyone who happens across his site.

Jeff Nelson vs. Robert Cohen: A Battle of Wits Between Disarmed Opponents

A few months ago Jeff Nelson of VegSource.Com and Robert Cohen, the anti-dairy activist who calls himself the Not Milk Man, had a public falling out which led Nelson to abruptly cease hosting Cohen’s web site. This month VegSource traded barbs online over who was more dishonest/deceitful. The answer, of course, is both of them.

Nelson tries to sell visitors to his site a bill of goods as slick and deceitful as any nonsense put out by Cohen. According to an essay posted to the VegSource.Com web site, Beware of Robert Cohen aka the NotMilk Man, Nelson and company have long knew that Cohen was full of it and have a duty to warn people away from Cohen,

No matter what reason brings a person to vegetarianism, ethics play a role. We do it because it’s the right thing to do for our health, our environment, or the animals we use for food.

. . .

Honesty and integrity — a respect for truth — has motivated numerous top vegetarian and vegan experts, scientists, MDs, authors and activists to arrive at the same conclusion: Robert Cohen is a fraud.

Cohen, who sometimes calls himself the “notmilk man,” is abusive and dishonest. He also has a propensity for fabricating scientific data which has time and again been shown to be not only worthless, but potentially dangerous.

. . .

VegSource has run numerous articles over time documenting Cohen’s unscrupulous excesses.

Oh yeah, the VegSource crowd have been really diligent about Cohen.

Jeff Nelson was so concerned about Cohen’s lies, that until February 2002, VegSource hosted Cohen’s web site, NotMilk.Com.

Nelson knew all along that Cohen was a fraud which is why Nelson invited to VegSource.Com’s Sept. 2001 E-Vent. Nelson addressed that E-Vent on Sept. 28, 2001 mentioning the speakers who would be featured, including this bit about Cohen,

Robert Cohen? WeÂ’ve got your case of White Wave Chocolate Silk out in the van. It was delivered this morning by a group of slaves. But seriously, weÂ’re thrilled to have Robert here, this is the first time IÂ’ve ever met him in person, and IÂ’m really looking forward to his talk tomorrow.

Nelson was just thrilled to have Cohen there.

Of course, Nelson has a newfound integrity and truth telling, so what was the first thing VegSource did after the falling out with Cohen? Why, with the sort of integrity we’ve come to expect from the animal rights movement, VegSource removed from its web site incriminating evidence of its prior support for Cohen.

This VegSource.Com web page is a full of photos from that 2001 E-vent at which Cohen was a speaker. The odd thing is if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, the last image is that of John Robbins. That’s odd, because back when it was first created, the page ended with three pictures of Robert Cohen speaking along with complimentary text.

You can see for yourself the Google cached version of the page, but in case that goes away, here is how the page looked earlier this year:


Batting in the
clean-up position was the NotMilkMan himself — Robert Cohen.

Jeff’s mom described
Rob as a “great speaker” — and Jeff’s mom is always right!

Said Jeff and Sabrina: “I think Rob Cohen just got us off dairy!”
🙂

I’m surprised Jeff and Sabrina let Jeff’s mom (not to mention others in attendance) get taken in by such a fraud. And if they knew Cohen was prone to citing faulty studies, distorting evidence and, apparently, outright lying, why did they find his talk so convincing?

The issue here is not whether or not Cohen was a fraud — that was obvious years ago to anyone who cared to actually look at the nonsense he was spewing. The problem with Cohen was that his nonsense was suddenly turned against people within the animal rights movement.

For example, on March 26, 2002, Nelson wrote an article about what he thinks is Cohen’s unfair attacks on White Wave, which makes Silk soy milk. Nelson claims that,

This charge is only the most recent in a long line of failed attempts by Cohen to damage White Wave. We’ve already responded to some of Cohen’s earlier attacks on White Wave with the article, “Does Silk Bilk?” At the time I wrote that article (September of 2001) and when I spoke to Cohen before publishing it, he told me he was making it his personal mission to try to “destroy” White Wave. He said the company had not been personally respectful to him. When I pointed out that he had made a number of unfair and untrue statements in his articles on White Wave, he told me he didn’t care whether his criticisms of the company were accurate or not, because any attack was justified because they were a “bad company.”

But look at the kid glove treatment Cohen got for unjustified attacks on White Wave:

1. Nelson’s September 2001 article does not even mention Robert Cohen by name.

2. Nelson’s article was written on Sept. 18, 2001 — more than a week before VegSource.Com had Cohen speak and sang his praises.

Ah, integrity at work.

Although Nelson apparently wants to recast VegSource.Com as willing to expose falsehoods within the animal rights movement, in fact VegSource.Com has actively nurtured a “hear no evil” policy in its discussion boards. VegSource.Com now claims that,

We have people who come onto our discussion board from time to time and state confidently that vegetarianism is a religion (we correct them).

In fact what VegSource.Com routinely done is delete posts and ban users of anyone who criticizes the animal rights movement, regardless of merit. Last June, for example, I wrote an article pointing out that VegSource.Com was using a faked photograph to illustrate a medical research story. I posted the URL on the VegSource.Com discussion group. Not only was all of the discussion about this deleted, but the discussion group was configured to reject any articles that linked to AnimalRights.Net (see VegSource “Censorship”).

VegSource.Com extolling its own integrity is a bit like Cohen recommending a good ice cream store.

As for Cohen, what can I say about Cohen. The guy is a nut case. But he’s a nut case who the animal rights movement welcomed into the fold for years despite his blatant distortions and inaccuracies. That it took Nelson until February 2002 to criticize Cohen says volumes about the alleged integrity of the animal rights movement.

Sources:

Beware of Robert Cohen aka the NotMilkMan. VegSource.Com, June 20, 2002.

The Notmilk Newsletter. Robert Cohen, June 22, 2002.

Jeff Nelson Finally Gets Something Right

I did not think I’d ever find any sort of common ground with VegSource.Com’s Jeff Nelson, but then I stumbled across an article he wrote early last year that forced me to change my mind.

Nelson goes on and on about how many gallons of water it takes to produce a pound of beef (he claims 2,500 gallons; cattlemen claim 441 gallons) when he finally has some insight saying,

So what’s the beef with beef, when it comes to water?

Simply put: it’s wasteful and irresponsible to squander our precious resources on a luxury item like meat.

Hmmm… meat a luxury? Turning to my dictionary I find luxury defined as “sumptuous living or equipment : great ease or comfort : rich surroundings.” That definitely describes meat.

Is it really irresponsible to use so much water to produce such luxurious beef? Don’t we, after millions of years of evolution, finally deserve to bask in such luxuries? If Nelson wants to deprive himself of life’s pleasures that is his business, but I think I’ll still occasionally partake of a sumptuous, luxurious steak.

BTW, just as an example of how separated from reality Nelson is, he goes on about all the water used in producing beef and then adds,

How, as a vegetarian, do you feel about paying astronomical water rates when your lifestyle choices mean you’re likely consuming a fraction of the water each month that your meat-eating friends are guzzling each day?

I would like to know where in the United States Nelson is that he is paying “astronomical water rates.” The major problem with water in the United States is that it is almost always subsidized by federal, state and local officials and is far too cheap (because the subsidized price discourages conservation efforts). Regardless, water is hardly allocated in any sort of functioning market, so the idea that the amount of water that cattlemen use drives up the price of water is absurd.

(To get an idea of just how low the price of water is, the average price for water in the United State is just over 52 centers per cubic meter, or about one cent for every five gallons used.)

Source:

How much water to make one pound of beef? Jeff Nelson, VegSource.Com, March 1, 2001.

Jeff Nelson is Either "Stupid or Intellectually Dishonest"

A study by researchers at the University of Minnesota made headlines this week because it found that teenagers who were vegetarians were actually less healthy than teenager who were meat eaters. Jeff Nelson of VegSource.Com wrote a reply arguing that this claim was contradicted by very data collected by the researchers and that, therefore, “the researchers conducting the study are either stupid or intellectually dishonest.” As usual, though, it is Nelson who is village idiot.

Nelson complains that the researchers relied on self-identified vegetarians who do not meet his definition of what a vegetarian is. Nelson write,

A mere 78 of the 215 “vegetarians” reported on in the study are actually vegetarians. Looking at the data of actual vegetarian kids against the rest of the group, there are little or no statistically significant differences in most categories, except that the vegetarian kids score better than the non-veg kids in a few — the opposite of what the researchers are trying to argue with the data.

Not surprisingly, given VegSource.Com’s track record, this is mostly a lie. The study did include 215 teenagers who self-described themselves as vegetarians. Of those 215 teenagers, researchers divided them into two groups: 78 restricted vegetarians, which included vegans and lacto- and lacto-ovo vegetarians); and 137 semi-vegetarians, who self-describe themselves as vegetarians but also indicated they ate chicken or fish.

Where Nelson outright lies, however, is in his claim that “there are little or no statistically significant differences in most categories.” In fact, the semi-vegetarians were more likely to engage in both healthy and unhealthy behaviors. But the research also found that the restricted vegetarian teenagers were twice as likely to be at risk for being overweight (and with a 95% confidence interval which is typically the bar set for statistical significance).

It is a little absurd for Nelson to whine that some of the “vegetarians” were still eating fish or chicken, since as the researchers note, people who move from meat eating to vegetarianism are likely to go through a transitional period where they gradually give up meat,

It may also be that semi-vegetarianism, for some, is the first step toward a more stable, restricted vegetarianism, and that once the transition is made or the vegetarianism is maintained for over 2 years, there might be fewer health-compromising weight control behaviors exhibited.

Nelson’s attack on the research is also a bit odd considering that the researchers are anything but hostile to vegetarianism. They do suggest that one approach might be to intervene with adolescent females who are using vegetarianism as an unhealthy weight loss technique, but they also add that,

Another approach may be to consider the choice of vegetarianism as an opportunity, and recruit adolescents to programs focussing on how to become a healthy vegetarian. Since adult vegetarians appear to be leaner and healthier than their nonvegetarian counterparts, learning how to become a “healthy” adolescent vegetarian may be one avenue for long-term and healthful changes in dietary patterns for adolescents.

Apparently, that’s Nelson’s idea of dishonest research. Pretty typical for VegSource.Com.

Source:

Characteristics of vegetarian adolescents in a multiethnic urban population. Cheryl L. Perry, Maureen T. Mcguire, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer and Mary Story, Journal of Adolescent Health, December 2001.

VegSource.Com Lies, Part II

My article last week about the fake photo at VegSource.Com generated quite a bit of discussion and a flurry of e-mails sent to yours truly. But for the record it is important to note that the sloppiness with the truth extends beyond Photoshop antics — the VegSource article that accompanied that fake photo contains the most basic of errors.

If a group is going to accuse the pharmaceutical industry of lying about medical research, you would think that such a group would want to do a minimum of research on the subject. Instead VegSource seems to have relied on the standard cutting and pasting from animal rights fact sheets for their information.

How else to explain this obvious falsehood in the VegSource article,

But they won’t talk to a credible researcher who might point to information like the fact that the combination of fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine (or “phen-fen”), prescribed by thousands of doctors to combat obesity, was tested on animals for years, and deemed safe for humans.

Only someone who has done no research at all about phen-fen could possibly write such an absurd sentence.

First of all, “phen-fen” was not “a combination of fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine.” Rather it was a combination of phentermine with either fenfluramine or dexfenfluramine (a small percentage of patients were on all three drugs.) It was the combination of phentermine with one of the two fenfluramine drugs that caused dramatic weight loss. You’d think VegSource could at least get something as straightforward as that correct.

Second, phen-fen was not tested extensively on animals. Both drugs had been separately approved and used in the United States as appetite suppressants for decades. The combination therapy, however, was an off-label prescription that didn’t require animal testing and became widespread only a few years before both drugs were pulled from the market.

Finally, the animal testing done on both drugs indicated, in fact, that there were risks to the way in which the drugs were prescribed in combination. Specifically, both drugs were only approved for relatively short term uses. Fenfluramine especially was approved only for very short-term use not to last beyond several weeks. When phentermine was approved, the FDA indicated that there was no data available on how safe the drug would be after periods of use longer than 1 year.

One FDA study of phen-fen users found that the study group had been on the combination therapy an average of 9 months, meaning most of those patients had been taking fenfluramine far past the recommended safe time period and a significant number of people had been taking phentermine for more than a year.

It is a little absurd to blame animal safety data for hazards encountered from off-label prescribing. But that’s par for the course from a group that can’t even accurately report what drug compounds were involved.

Source:

“Animal Experimentation Is Good!”
How Industry Front Organizations: Try to Twist Public Perceptions
. VegSource.Com, June 4, 2001.

How Animal Rights Activists Try to Twist Public Perceptions

An observant reader directed me to a fascinating article illustrating how some animal rights groups are more than willing to distort reality to serve their cause. The article, Animal Experimentation Is Good!” How Industry Front Organizations Try to Twist Public Perceptions is published on the VegSource.Com web site and is devoted to discussing how medical researchers, pharmaceutical companies and others involved in animal research supposedly distort the truth and try to deceive the public.

Which is interesting, because there is an example of a very sloppy form of animal rights deception within this article itself. If you scroll down to the bottom half of the article, you will see the picture below of three people wearing what appear to be some sort of biochemical protective suits.

The only problem is that this photo is completely fake. The dog has been inserted using Photoshop or some other image editing program. Whoever inserted the job did a very lousy job at it. Below is a blow-up of the right hand of the middle figure which overlaps with the dog’s head. Where we should be able to see a pixilated version of the man’s thumb and rest of his glove, instead we instead see an opaque series of white and light colored pixels that are an artifact of pasting the dog into the picture.

The pixilation around the right side of the dog’s jaw is also a giveaway that this picture has been modified. The odd pixel pattern results when mathematical algorithms are used to blend the colors between the original image and the image which is pasted into it.

Now tell me again who is trying to twist public perceptions by practicing deception?

Source:

Animal Experimentation Is Good!” How Industry Front Organizations Try to Twist Public Perceptions. VegSource.Com, June 4, 2001.