Malnutrition-ists: individuals who hold fast to the ideology that the revolution begins in the mouth and ends with the colon. Malnutrition-ists are a more extremist branch of the wholistic health movement that espouses a complicated belief system which centers around and ends with food consumption. Among their many assertions are that any type of edible meat is evil; cooking vegetables is wrong; mixing foods of various colors or types is an abomination; liquid-food diets are best; somewhere in India there are humans who live off only the breathing of air.

Pros: are aware that dietary nutrition is important; stress the need for healthy living for longer life; great weight loss plan.

Cons: filled with factual errors about biology, health and diet (i.e., think non-meat eating is a big African trend, when it’s really more so Asian; claims humans aren’t meant to eat meat, despite the fact that we have canines and the small stomach of an omnivore rather than the large one of a herbivore, etc.); can’t eat as much as a single French fry in their presence without enduring a graphic digestive lecture; the more extreme live such rigid dietary codes that they are unable to adapt to a rigorous lifestyle (took one of them with me on a trip to Africa once; his refusal to eat anything made him so weak he had to leave early and fly back home); no good in physical combat as they weigh about a pocket-full of loose change and might pass out from the first blow; often forget the exercise part of diet; Child Protective Services will come and take your kids away and stuff a cheeseburger down their throats if you have them living off is grain pasted onto a stick.

Suggestions: Eat to live and be healthy, not to adhere to some idealistic non-reality based standard.