Acharya Prashant: You might be an MBBS, or an MD, or a DM, but you could still be quite illiterate; you might still not have basic knowledge regarding the nutritional value of various food products. You could have a quack graduating even from the best medical college.
And you are right. So many doctors just do not know that milk or meat are, as you said, nowhere close to being the best sources of protein or vitamins or iron or calcium—anything. In fact, there is a lot of misinformation even on vitamin B12. So, just as everybody else needs to be educated, doctors, too, need to be educated, because the public believes the doctors. So, go to the doctors and tell them.
Otherwise, yes, it is very, very common that you go to a doctor, and if you are a vegetarian, he kind of scoffs at you. It’s a very disdainful glance that he throws at you: “Vegetarian?” And that too, you see, is a relic of the fifties, sixties, seventies. It has gotten into the popular culture that to be big and strong you have to have meat, whereas this is so foolish. Have you never looked at an elephant? When you say that to be big and strong you need to have meat, then surely you have never seen what an elephant looks like. Neither have you seen a horse. Not a rhinoceros, not a gorilla or a chimpanzee, if you believe that meat-eaters are all… Ridiculous!
There are two categories of professionals who are adept at turning even the staunchest non-meat-eater to a meat-eater. One: the ill-read doctors. Two: the totally illiterate fitness instructors. Young people like to have some mass on their body, or they might just want to keep basic fitness. The moment they show up at a gym, and if they go to a trainer and seek advice, the first thing the trainer would ask is, “What is it that you eat? You’re not having chicken? How will you build mass without chicken?”—which is such a fallacy. Such a fallacy! And it is not coming so much out of ill intention, but out of the fact that the fellow is ill-read. He simply does not know the facts. So, he needs to be educated.
