rocksteadybebop dot net

13 Mar 2008

It's really not that complicated...

I think that this article may have broken my brain. It's a discussion of how vegetarians supplement their diets to stay healthy. Admittedly, this is the UDK so a certain level of mediocrity is to be expected. However, this is insane:

Lindsey Cable, Eden Prairie, Minn., senior, hasn't gotten around to fully supplementing her diet yet. She has been a vegetarian since she was 11 years old and has taken daily vitamins at time, but has now stopped.

"I get sick every two or three weeks because I don't get enough iron or protein," Cable says. "I used to take a vitamin, but now I don't. I guess I really should but I haven't really looked into it."

Cable has seen a doctor about being vegetarian and tries to keep her diet evenly balanced. She says she tends to eat healthier than most of her friends but that it mostly stems from the natural diet of being a vegetarian.

I don't even know where to begin. I can't even imagine what she's eating that she has such an iron deficiency as to make her sick several times a month. She could eat pretty much any type of bean, spinach, tofu, tempeh, kale, green beans...even potatoes, tomato juice, almonds, and sesame seeds have fucking iron in them. Soy milk, if not regular milk? This is also ignoring the huge amount of processed foods in which calcium and iron fortification seems to be increasingly ubiquitous.

Even if she can't cook, it's not like this is Olathe. There is a huge, varied body of vegetarian-friendly restaurants in Lawrence.

If she is that iron and protein deficient, there is no way she has a balanced diet. I know that a lot of young girls use veganism and vegetarianism as a cover for eating disorders, so maybe that's what's going on here?

It pretty much blows my mind that an article devoted to maintaining a healthy veg diet makes no mention of healthy foods, just vitamin supplements. That's the hard-hitting reporting you can expect from the campus newspaper.

Posted at: 19:34

[path: /yt] permanent link


Some thoughts on future pharmacists

Walgreens had a table set up in the pharmacy department yesterday through which they were distributing bright red versions of the hideous backpack that I described here. Now that I'm boycotting Walgreens, I guess I'll have to find a new place to buy my recreational cough syrup.

I have a ridiculous amount of impotent rage for the pharmacy department at KU, for several pathetic reasons. There is a bridge that connects the biology building and the chemistry building. This is convenient because both buildings are on the side of a hill, so it's easier to cross this bridge than hike up the hill. However, all of the pharmacy classrooms and labs are on the chemistry-end of this hallway, and those students are perpetually standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the hallway. After eight months of dealing with this I've pretty much lost all reservations about just plowing through people.

I guess the main reason that I hate the pharmacy department, though, is that all of their stuff is so much nicer than ours. I look in to their labs and see austere beauty, whereas the undergraduate labs are foul and mouldering. The pharmacy hallways have giant plasma TVs that seriously display static images, acting as proxy bulletin boards. Our sister lab in Haworth had to beg for a year to get the facilities people to come and remove the plaster and plywood that was inexplicably covering the only window in their lab.

So, yeah, petty jealousy.

Also: one last midterm, and then Spring Break (woo).

Posted at: 18:04

[path: /school] permanent link






Older Posts: 2008 2007 2006 2005