Why I don't trust Dr. Michael Greger
By Jonathan Roseland |
In this interview, he reveals two very curious things…
- Apparently, he doesn't make any money from his books which have sold millions of copies. He demands that the publisher gives all his royalties to charity.
- He worked obsessively and was so myopically focused on his most recent book that it cost him a 13-year relationship. I'm pretty sure he has a family and kids, so it's fair to assume that he got divorced or split up with his long-term partner.
So he didn't make any money AND he lost an invaluable relationship?
How disappointing! What is the point of working so damn hard if you're sacrificing your most important relationships? This is what we call on the internet an #epicfail.
The plant-based diet he so strongly recommends does not seem to have helped him make wise decisions about his personal life - another reason to be suspicious of veganism.
It's yet another example of the "pathological altruism" that our society suffers from. So many of the most competent and hardest working feel so guilty about how the free market rewards them.
Also, I'm suspicious of these gurus who brag about giving ALL their money to charity. Charity fraud is endemic and terribly common. Often, charities are just covers for laundering money or avoiding taxes. Charities often actually make the problems worse that they are supposed to be helping. Read up on charity fraud and you'll find that at least half of them are total scams.
Dr. Greger is probably NOT using charities to avoid paying taxes but think of how he could use the millions his books have made to change the world and create good jobs (or at least take his family on a very well-deserved vacation!) Instead, this money may just go to paying the salaries of 501(c) apparatchiks.
I might read his book because he sounds like a dedicated researcher BUT I will be downloading it from a torrent site. I won't be buying it to support the publisher's corporate share price and his disastrous pathological altruism!
Is it just me?
Or does it also seem to you that with every passing year, we're advancing a chapter further into the dystopian future predicted in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? Where society becomes completely inverted and dysfunctional because the resources and capital of the most competent are looted and redistributed to the least competent.
Update: I got into an interesting exchange here in the comment section of this article on Medium. A lady objected:
I'm puzzled by this line of reasoning. Distrust veganism by all means, but not because of the poor choices, priorities, or sad family life of someone who promotes it.
Have a read of The China Study, and pick it apart. Eat a whole food, plant based diet yourself for 3 months and tell us how you feel.
Those are much better ways of testing this way of eating than the life story and supposed financial affairs of Dr Gregor.
And I responded
I make judgments about gurus and their philosophies based on the holistic effects apparent in their lives. I believe that…
You will know them by their fruits.
For the same reason, on the other end of the diet spectrum, I don’t trust pseudo-conservative, self-help guru
Jordan Peterson. He almost killed himself with dangerous pharmaceuticals that anyone with any common sense would know to avoid.
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