CAROLE R. DAVIS NEEDS TO SHUT THE FUCK UP

Doubtless there are some among you who are already mad at me for being so rude to this innocent woman in my title.  First of all, it’s paraphrased from the atrocious article on which I based this post, and secondly, get over it.  She deserves it.  You’ll see. Earlier this week, a friend of mine sent me a link on Facebook with the caption “holy shit this article.”  I read it.  It’s really bad.  It’s written by Carole R. Davis, a self-described author, animal rights activist, actress, and singer-songwriter.  From her description and photo alone, she looks and sounds absolutely insufferable.

Fortunately for her, I’m not the type of person to immediately dismiss someone’s opinions just because her first impression is slightly less favorable than the first time I saw a “Real Housewives” clip on the internet.  Unfortunately for her, she then wrote this article, cementing all my worst suspicions about the kind of person she probably is.  Let’s jump right in.

My husband is an insulin-dependent diabetic. I married a handsome, sexy, funny, brilliant and successful comedy writer. He shot up on our first date right at the dinner table. I allowed myself to fall in love with him knowing he had an incurable disease. I thought his illness could be “managed” with insulin. Well, maybe it can be managed if you know how to manage a serial killer, because that’s what diabetes is—a mass murderer.

Already with the fucking drama.  First of all, diabetes can be “managed” with insulin.  It’s really quite straightforward.  Most people’s bodies produce insulin when they eat, which allows them to absorb glucose into their cells.  If you have Type 1 diabetes, your body doesn’t produce insulin, so you inject insulin to compensate.  You have to monitor the amount of sugar in your blood to make sure you inject the right amount at the right time, because too much insulin can kill you.  The point is that diabetes is a relatively stable and fairly well-understood disease, not some freak occurrence that will strangle you in your sleep.  Your body is bad at doing something automatically, so you do it manually instead.

Secondly, enough with the mass murderer shit.  According to the ADA, “diabetes contributed to a total of 231,404 deaths” in 2007.  That may sound like a lot, but remember that we live in a country with over 300 million people, roughly 26 million of whom have diabetes.  That means that 0.8% of diabetics die from their disease every year.  Again, you probably don’t have much perspective for that number, but as it turns out, that’s exactly the same rate at which everyone else dies.  Seriously.  The mortality rate for the U.S. last year was 799.5 per 100,000 people, which is also 0.8%.  This means that diabetes makes you, on the whole, zero percent more likely to die than just being a human person.  If you have a disease that could kill you in days, but then your doctor gives you a drug that allows you the exact same life expectancy as everyone else in the damn country, I’d call that pretty well “managed.”

Right now the man I love looks like he crawled out of a pile of bodies at Auschwitz and my heart is breaking. He is six feet tall and weighs 138 lbs. He’s one of 15% of diabetics called “normal weight” diabetics. He used to be big and strong. He used to take care of everything and he made me feel safe and secure. Now it’s all different.

Well fuck you very much.  There are few ways to lose sympathy for your problems faster than by comparing those problems to THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST.  Nine million people died because they thought different, and you think the fact that your big strong husband isn’t big and strong any more is on a similar level?  People who actually have the disease wouldn’t dare go there.  And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that 6’0″ and 138 pounds is an 18.7 on the BMI scale, which is on the low end of “normal weight.”  Not “normal” for people who have incurable diseases that render them less capable of metabolizing food, just plain normal.  He’s not a skeleton.

It’s hard to even comprehend how sickeningly selfish you’re coming off in this.  Your heart is breaking because your husband isn’t hot any more?  He’s not big and strong any more?  He doesn’t make you feel safe and secure?  FUCK YOU RIGHT IN YOUR STUPID SMIRKY SOFT-FOCUSED FACE.

Can you imagine how crushing that would be if she said it to his face?  “Honey, when I met you, you were a big, strong, handsome, sexy man.  You made me feel safe and secure and you took care of everything.  Now you look like an actual corpse.”  Call me hot-blooded, but I would use every ounce of strength in my 138-pound, once-sexy body to strangle you to death.  That’s a terrible thing to say to any person at all, let alone a person whose body has been emaciated by disease and who doubtless already feels horribly self-conscious about his decaying looks and increasing dependence on others.  There are no words for how much I hate this woman.  But she’s far from finished.

I now lead this weak, pale, quasi-ghost by the hand from specialist to specialist while he trips over curbs, muttering, angry at what has become of his life.  I can’t stop crying. I can’t sleep. I watch him all night to make sure he is breathing. I’m scared. I don’t want to be a widow.

NO ONE GIVES THE TINIEST SLIVER OF A FUCK WHAT YOU WANT, YOU INSUFFERABLE CUNT.  STOP INSULTING YOUR GODDAMN HUSBAND.

Diabetes is not just a disease. It’s a soul-crushing, heart-wrenching, body-wasting, mind-fuck that will send you to Hell way before it mercy-kills you. It’s scarier than a Grimm’s fairy tale, more graphic than any horror movie. Before it kills you, it will take your eyes. It will take your toes, then your feet. It will take your kidneys, too, and hook you up to a dialysis machine for the rest of your rotted life. You’ll get sores that don’t heal and you’ll look like the lepers creeping around in the movie Ben Hur. It will take your will to live and it will take your heart. It’ll not only take your heart, it will break the heart of everyone who loves you.

She really is determined to tell us how gross her husband is, as anyone who thinks that regular injections and hypoglycemia are more graphic than horror movies is clearly delusional.  She’s also determined to vastly overblow the risk to your body parts as a result of diabetes. For example, lower limb amputations occur among diabetics at a rate of roughly three per thousand, so it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that it “will” take your toes and feet.

But read those last two sentences again.  For one brief second, she jumps into the viewpoint of the person who actually has the disease, rather than the person who’s sad that her hubby’s muscles are gone.  She says that diabetes will take your will to live.  Does she quote her husband?  No.  Does she even imply that it’s taken his will to live?  No.  She assumes, without any indication that he or any other similarly-afflicted person has actually told her this — that it has taken his will to live.  And then once sentence later, she jumps back into how sad she is that he has a disease.

I decided, since I am a normal person and not a selfish attention whore, to look into some studies on quality of life with diabetes.  According to Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews, “People with diabetes have a worse quality of life than people with no chronic illness, but a better quality of life than people with most other serious chronic diseases. Duration and type of diabetes are not consistently associated with quality of life. Intensive treatment does not impair quality of life, and having better glycemic control is associated with better quality of life.”  Translation: not that big a deal.  The treatment isn’t bad, and if you manage it well, your quality of life improves.  Certainly a far cry from “it will take your will to live.”

If all of us touched by this disease could cry in one place, our tears would rival the ocean.

I am holding the food industry and Big AG personally responsible for doing this to my husband and 28 million other American diabetics. If you are diabetic or even prediabetic, ignore 80% of clueless endocrinologists and bullshit dieticians and nutritionists because they are either stupid, willfully ignorant or paid off by a corrupt and broken health care system. Sugar, animal fats and animal proteins will harm your organs, all of them. The food you eat is going to KILL YOU.

Thank you for that extremely helpful tip.  Ignore 80% of the health professionals who have dedicated years of study and research into finding out how to treat and prevent this disease — you’ll notice she offers no guidance as to which 80% to ignore, or how to tell if your doctor is a kind and caring person or a soulless corporate puppet — and listen to Carole instead.  Why?  What qualifications does Carole bring to the table that should make her advice more valuable than that of an ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL SCIENTIST?  I’m glad you asked.

• She was in a movie called “Piranha II: The Spawning.” 33 years ago.
• She was in Playboy.
• She’s been in Pepsi Commercials.
• She had a number one hit song on BET.
• She has degrees in Chinese Studies and Political Science from CUNY.
• That’s it.

I’m not making any of that up.  This woman has no training or education in anything remotely related to medicine or health, and yet is confident that she’s cracked this disease better than the thousands of actually-qualified researchers who have poured years into it.  She’s like Jenny McCarthy, only older and less famous.  There is genuinely no reason whatsoever to listen to her. But of course, Carole knows that everyone who disagrees with her is just part of a giant, corrupt conspiracy.  Doctors want you to be sick so they can rake in those sweet insulin profits.  And sugar, animal fat, and animal proteins will harm ALL OF YOUR ORGANS and KILL YOU.  Never mind that humans have been eating sugar, animal fat, and animal proteins for literally forever, they are poison and you will die if you listen to people whose job is to be right about these things.  Listen to washed-up D-list actresses instead.

Don’t take my word for it. Kaiser Permanente, the largest health care system in America, is advising all of its physicians to advise all of their patients, regardless of their health issues, to go on a vegan diet. From the Kaiser Permanente 2013 Nutritional Update for Physicians: “Healthy eating may be best achieved with a plant-based diet, which we define as a regimen that encourages whole, plant-based foods and discourages meats, dairy products, and eggs as well as all refined and processed foods.”

This, as it turns out, is an abject lie.  The document she is quoting is an article published in Kaiser’s in-house journal, entitled “Nutritional Update for Physicians: Plant-Based Diets.”  It is not, nor does it anywhere claim to be, the official position of Kaiser Permanente.  It is merely an article, authored by four people and using one single solitary case study, suggesting that physicians “should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients.”  I’ll also point out, in passing, the irony of ranting about the “corrupt and broken health care system” and then, mere paragraphs later, supporting your position with “the largest health care system in America.”  But honestly, irony is the least of Carole’s problems at this point.

You see, this article wasn’t really about the emotional toll of diabetes, or of watching your husband become less attractive.  It was about veganism.  Carole has determined, after roughly no seconds of research, that veganism will solve all the health problems of everyone, specifically diabetes.  She even asks us to “Imagine preventing diabetes by simply exchanging your Big Mac, fries, milk shake and cheese cake desert for kale, tempeh, quinoa and a desert of fresh berries.” Surely the professionals agree with her, right? Not even close.  The Mayo Clinic says that “a vegetarian diet probably won’t cure your diabetes.”  And the American Diabetes Association explicitly recommends meat — even red meat — in its food guidelines, going so far as to say that you should eat fish 2-3 times a week, that a balanced meal includes 2-5 ounces of meat, and that you don’t have to worry about counting carbs or glycemic index because meat doesn’t have any carbohydrates in it.  From a health point of view, meat is not affecting your diabetes at all.

Yes, we all have a choice to go Vegan (I’m a vegan and an animal rights professional) but with the ads everywhere and the culture of animals as food that we all grew up in, it is a difficult idea to grasp for many people. I tried for YEARS to get my husband to listen. I threw all animal products into the garbage as soon as they were brought in to my kitchen. I showed my husband undercover videos of animals being kicked and punched and murdered in slaughter houses.

“Animal rights professional” is probably the most sanctimonious thing anyone’s ever called themselves, but that’s not the point here.  The point is that you’re moving the goalposts.  You started off by saying that you should be vegan because it’s better for your diabetes (a lie, as it turns out) and now you’re saying that we should be vegans because it’s MEAN to eat animals.  And also because apparently you’ll immediately throw anything else away, instead of talking about it like a fucking adult.  I should also point out that the authors of that same Kaiser article that you so egregiously misrepresented say that “Vegetarian or vegan diets adopted for ethical or religious reasons may or may not be healthy. It is thus important to know the specific definitions of related diets and to ascertain the details of a patient’s diet rather than making assumptions about how healthy it is.”  But I’d bet good money that you didn’t read that far.

The enemy is not Al Qeida. The enemies are the food industry, big AG and the pharmaceutical industry, which are very HAPPY you are sick. 

Do you even hear yourself speak?

If you can prevent, reverse and arrest diabetes complications with diet and exercise, and they know this, then why is the medical establishment allowed to get away with putting millions of Americans on drugs with dangerous side effects, turning patients into impoverished prescription junkies? Isn’t it fraud? High blood pressure, high bad cholesterol, clogged arteries—these symptoms can all be reduced drastically by eating food that didn’t scream while he or she was incarcerated, tortured and killed.

There’s a whole lot to parse through here, but on we go.

1. You can’t prevent, reverse, or arrest diabetes with veganism any more than you can with non-vegan diet and exercise.
2. Insulin isn’t a drug “with dangerous side effects,” it is the exact same chemical that your body naturally produces.
3. Insulin isn’t addictive except in the sense that you need it to live.  You can’t be an insulin “junkie” any more than you can be an oxygen “junkie.”
4. The legal definition of fraud is “intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim.”  The statement “insulin will mitigate diabetes” is an important fact.  The statement “kale salad and fresh berries will cure your diabetes because magic” is not a fact, and it would be harmful to a patient to represent it as such.
5. Again, veganism is not inherently healthier than non-veganism, and even if it were, the experience of the animals I eat is not relevant to their subsequent health.

Diabetes is not my area of expertise but animal cruelty IS. Take note: there is no such thing as happy meat. All those animals, including fish, wanted to love, to enjoy friends, to feel the sun on their face—each one wanted to live just like we do. Each one feels pain just like we do.

YOU DON’T HAVE AN AREA OF EXPERTISE.  You’re a shitty actor from a long time ago who wrote a book from the point of view of a dog.  Your education has nothing whatsoever to do with animal cruelty or diet or health or animal psychology or anything remotely related to any of those fields.  HOW THE FUCK COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW THAT COWS CRAVE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP?  Oh, and it must really suck for those fish to spend their entire lives underwater, yearning for the sweet kiss of sun on their faces.  Maybe that’s why they jump sometimes.

Go Vegan. Save your life, save the animals, save the planet.

If you want to take your dietary and ethical advice from someone with approximately as much experience in the field as that fish up there has with sunlight, be my guest.  But seriously, fuck this woman.