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The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., which promotes a vegan diet, preventive medicine, alternatives to animal research, and encourages what it describes as "higher standards of ethics and effectiveness in research."[1] Its primary activities include outreach and education about nutrition and compassionate choices to healthcare professionals and the public; ending the use of animals in medical school curricula; and advocating for legislative changes on the local and national levels.
PCRM was founded in 1985 by [1]
PCRM has a paid staff of 35, with a membership of approximately 10,000 physicians and 150,000 supporting members, including dietitians, psychologists, nurses, other science and health professionals, and laypeople.[2] Its board of directors consists of Neal Barnard, a psychiatrist; Russell Bunai, a pediatrician; Mindy Kursban, its chief legal counsel; Mark Sklar, an endocrinologist; and Barbara Wassermann, an internist.[3] Its director of research is Chad B. Sandusky, formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency.[4] Elizabeth Kucinich is the group's director of public affairs.[5]
As of January 2011, its advisory board consists of:[3]
PCRM promotes a vegetarian or vegan diet, together with aerobic and weight-bearing exercises and exposure to sufficient sunlight for vitamin D production. It writes that vegetarian diets are low in saturated fat, high in dietary fiber, contain phytochemicals that PCRM argues help prevent cancer, and contain no cholesterol. Its website cites several studies that it says show that vegetarians are less likely than meat eaters to develop cancer. It argues that a vegetarian diet can help prevent heart disease, lower blood pressure, can prevent and may reverse diabetes, and that it may improve the symptoms of a number of other conditions.[6] PCRM runs the Cancer Project, which suggests a vegan diet will help with cancer prevention, and that offers nutritional assistance to cancer patients.[7]
PCRM argues for the health benefits of avoiding dairy products—Barnard has called cheese "dairy crack"[8]—and campaigns for vegetarian meals in schools.[9] It also runs a website that collects reports of adverse health effects experienced by people on the Atkins diet. The New York Times writes that it was PCRM who in 2004 passed Dr Robert Atkins's medical report to the Wall Street Journal. The report, obtained by Dr. Richard Fleming of the Fleming Heart and Health Institute, showed that Atkins himself had experienced heart attack, congestive heart failure, and weight problems. Atkins supporters countered that there was no reason to think that his heart problem (cardiomyopathy) was diet related, and that his weight at death was higher due to fluids pumped into him in the hospital.[10]
The organization's founder, Neal Barnard, M.D., has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers on nutrition in journals such as The American Journal of Cardiology, The Lancet Oncology, and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.[11] Nature wrote in 2006 that PCRM had become "an endless source of vexation for federal nutrition-policymakers," but that Barnard's position had some support within the medical community. William Roberts, a PCRM adviser, executive director of the Baylor Cardiovascular Institute, and editor of the American Journal of Cardiology said of Barnard. "He's a superb man. Anybody who devotes their life like he has done to getting us all on the right dietary track, I admire."[8]
The organization's nutrition director, Amy Lanou, Ph.D., has criticized the U.S. Department of Agriculture for promoting high-fat, high-calorie products, such as certain brands of cookies and fast-food products.[12] Susan Levin, PCRM's staff dietitian, sent a letter in March 2009 to the minor league baseball team the West Michigan Whitecaps to complain about a 4-pound, 4,800-calorie hamburger on the team's concession stand menu, and to ask that the team put a label on the burger indicating that it was a "dietary disaster".[13]
PCRM has also spoken out against the Las Vegas restaurant Heart Attack Grill, whose menu offers burgers with over 9,000 calories, after a customer was hospitalized and an unofficial spokesman died of a heart attack.[14][15]
The PCRM advertising campaign "I was lovin' it" is a spoof of the McDonald's advertising slogan "I'm lovin' it" used in an advertising campaign launched in September 2010 that encourages consumers to adopt a vegetarian diet in order to avoid the increased health risks of hypertension, heart attacks, strokes and obesity associated with the consumption of the high levels of dietary fat, cholesterol and sodium in McDonald's menu offerings.
The campaign launched in the Washington, D.C. area shows a grieving woman in a morgue as the camera circles around a middle-aged man draped in a white sheet clutching a partially eaten hamburger in his right hand. As the camera reaches the man's feet protruding from underneath the sheet, the familiar Golden Arches logo is displayed and the screen fades to a red background with the catchphrase "I was lovin' it" as a narrator intones: "High cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks. Tonight, make it vegetarian."[16] In a press release associated with the ad, the PCRM stated that "McDonald's, the world's largest fast-food chain, serves a long list of high-fat, high-cholesterol items and offers almost no healthful choices."[17]
The statement released by the PCRM announced that the advertisement would be broadcast on Chicago, Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles.[18] PCRM chose Washington, D.C. as the first city for the campaign as it has the second-highest rate of deaths associated with heart disease, with 1,500 deaths annually attributed to cardiovascular conditions. PCRM plans to lobby Washington mayor Adrian Fenty to impose a ban on the construction of new fast-food dining establishments in the city.[20]
McDonald's called the ad "outrageous, misleading and unfair" and encouraged "customers to put such outlandish propaganda in perspective, and to make food and lifestyle choices that are right for them." The National Restaurant Association, an industry business association representing more than 380,000 restaurant locations in the United States, called such ads misleading, saying that they unnecessarily focus on a single item to "distort the reality that the nation's restaurants are serving an increasing array of healthful menu choices."[17]
PCRM sees the prescription of unnecessary drugs—drugs that may have toxic side effects—to adults and children as unethical, seeing it as human experimentation; it cites its opposition, for example, to giving children growth hormones to make them taller.[21]
It also opposes animal testing. The group has helped to oppose research by the U.S. military that involved shooting cats, narcotics experiments conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and experiments that involved monkeys mutilating themselves. Its research department promotes alternatives to the use of animals, including their use in experiments in medical schools.[21] PCRM argues that animal experiments are ineffective because inter alia the pain and stress animals experience in laboratories—isolation, confinement, noise, and lack of exercise—contaminate the results of the experiments. They argue that research into "immune function, endocrine and cardiovascular disorders, neoplasms, developmental defects, and psychological phenomena are particularly vulnerable to stress effects."[22]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the foundation that manages it—the Foundation to Support Animal Protection, also known as the PETA Foundation—donated over $850,000 to PCRM between 1988 and 2000, and Barnard sat on the Foundation's board until 2005. Barnard also writes a medical column for Animal Times, PETA's magazine.[8]
In 2004, Newsweek explained PCRM's ties to animal rights group:
PCRM has responded to criticism about this from groups it says are funded by the meat, dairy, or chemical industries by stating it has no corporate affiliation with any animal protection group, and that PETA's contribution to PCRM was small.[24]
PCRM—along with PETA and groups such as the Centers for Disease Control, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Mothers Against Drunk Driving—has been the subject of public criticism for several years by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a non-profit lobby group representing the food and beverage industry.[25] The New York Times reported CCF's and PCRM's criticism of each other in 2004. CCF called PCRM a front for PETA, arguing that when PCRM offers health advice, they "do a very slick job of obscuring their real intentions," which is simply to oppose the use of meat, dairy products and alcohol. PCRM responded that, "If you are in the business of putting veal or beef on the tables of America, and slaughtering more than a million animals per hour, and making an awful lot of money at it, you are going to try to neutralize PETA or other animal-rights groups."[26]
The American Medical Association (AMA) has criticized PCRM’s positions. In 1990, the AMA adopted a resolution condemning PCRM’s activism on the use of animals in research, objecting to PCRM "implying that physicians who support the use of animals in biomedical research are irresponsible, for misrepresenting the critical role animals play in research and teaching, and for obscuring the overwhelming support for such research which exists among practicing physicians in the United States."[27] PCRM notes that the AMA rescinded their resolution in 2006.[28]
Neal Barnard objected in the Journal of the American Medical Association to the use of the term "censure" to describe the resolution, clarifying, “Censure is used by the American Medical Association (AMA) for specific purposes, and PCRM has never been the subject of any such proceeding.”[29] AMA vice president Jarod Loeb replied to Barnard by stating that "[t]he term 'officially censured' refers to a resolution adopted by the AMA House of Delegates in June 1990" and that the resolution "was passed without dissenting vote."[30]
In a 1991 news release, the AMA called PCRM a "pseudo-physicians group" and said that PCRM’s dietary advice promoting vegetarianism "could be dangerous to the health and well-being of Americans."[31] Dr. Roy Schwartz, then a senior vice president of the AMA, told ABC News, "I think they're neither physician nor responsible."[32] Schwartz later responded to PCRM criticism of consuming cow’s milk by asserting that the group was "made up of vegetarians with a vegetarian agenda."[33]
PCRM has responded by acknowledging that it had disagreements with the AMA in the early 1990s over animal testing and vegetarian diets, but that the AMA stated in 2004 that its criticisms of PCRM's stance on vegetarianism did not reflect current AMA opinion.[34]
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