Vegans, and kwashiorkor

In the headlines: a vegan internet influencer living in Malaysia dies of malnutrition.

no I don't have a lot of sympathy for her. One wonders how many others she influenced have developed medical problems: being vegan is a cult.

but the main reason I am not sympathetic is that often these types are rich upper middle class educated women who are hoity toity to the rest of us (both deplorables and poor people). 

Dirty little secret:

Vegan diets often are lacking protein and certain vitamins.

 There are several reports out there about children in the affluent west suffering malnutrition and even dying because their crazy moms didn't feed them corectly

the  UKMail article on this lady shows photos of a severely undernourished lady. Hmm... was her real problem anorexia nervosa, where she tried to control the stresses in her life with a strict diet?

She was an influencer and like other cult leaders this lady got lots of positive feedback on how wonderful she was, never mind that she was pushing bad advice.

Ironically a lot of so called medical sites are very sympathetic to those vegan idiots and their diet. (racism? Because most seem to be upper class elite women who are intelligent, and so the docs identify with their culture). 

And of course the green idiots running the world are pushing vegetarian diets so often cite their health benefits: Ignoring that yes they don't get a lot of diabetes or obesity but ignore that malnutrition makes you vulnerable to infectious disease, osteoporosis, anemia and poor wound healing.

I did treat malnourished people when I was in training and during my time in practice.

Many of these people were usually poor from the slums or in small towns who couldn't afford meat and ate lots of bread but few veggies or fruit and not a lot of meat/milk/eggs due to poverty, (and the difficulty in buying food in poor areas aka food deserts...). 

Things have now improved since I was in medical school: food stamps and the WIC program have made these problems less acute.

  I worked mainly with the rural poor and on the Res, ... The IHS has outreach to our babies, our elders and our diabetics. For example, the WIC program helped stop malnutriton in babies (and we stressed breast feeding). 

The federal government PHS runs these hospitals, but now thanks to casinos, the tribes are taking them over... but often the staff are the same: people trained in preventive medicine and tribal customs...there is Indian preference in hiring and that helps too. 

Yes, racism is real...Yes but not race per se but ignorance or disdain by docs for people who don't think and act like upper class white elites. And the reverse is also true: patients have more trust in someone from the same background.

However, most of my expertise in nutrition was when I worked in Africa.

We had a lot of kwashiorkor and marasmus among babies when I worked in Africa. 

Marasmus was usually babies whose moms got pregnant too soon and weaned their babies early. Since the babies couldn't eat/digest adult food, they ended up thin.

 But Kwashiorkor was in older toddlers who had been weaned: Meaning they now had no breast milk and the adult diet lacked protein.

We had a nutrition village to educate moms into learning to use a proper diet; and we taught how to use cheap high protein foods and ways to care for chickens to get more eggs to add to their baby's diet.

So how do you do outreach to traditional communities to improve health and nutrition?

Andrew Webwafa has a lot of videos up on youtube about his outreach clinics, including nutritional ones, if you want to know how this outreach is done.

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a longer version of this is posted on my medical blog.