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High IQ link to being vegetarian

High IQ link to being vegetarian


Vegetarianism has been linked to better heart health
Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says. A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.

Researchers said it could explain why people with higher IQ were healthier as a vegetarian diet was linked to lower heart disease and obesity rates.

The study of 8,179 was reported in the British Medical Journal.

Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian - although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken.

Men who were vegetarian had an IQ score of 106, compared with 101 for non-vegetarians; while female vegetarians averaged 104, compared with 99 for non-vegetarians.

We've always known that vegetarianism is an intelligent, compassionate choice benefiting animals, people and the environment

Liz O'Neill, of The Vegetarian Society

There was no difference in IQ score between strict vegetarians and those who said they were vegetarian but who reported eating fish or chicken.

Researchers said the findings were partly related to better education and higher occupational social class, but it remained statistically significant after adjusting for these factors.

Vegetarians were more likely to be female, to be of higher occupational social class and to have higher academic or vocational qualifications than non-vegetarians.

However, these differences were not reflected in their annual income, which was similar to that of non-vegetarians.

Lead researcher Catharine Gale said: "The finding that children with greater intelligence are more likely to report being vegetarian as adults, together with the evidence on the potential benefits of a vegetarian diet on heart health, may help to explain why higher IQ in childhood or adolescence is linked with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease in adult life."

Intelligence

However, she added the link may be merely an example of many other lifestyle preferences that might be expected to vary with intelligence, such as choice of newspaper, but which may or may not have implications for health.

Liz O'Neill, of the Vegetarian Society, said: "We've always known that vegetarianism is an intelligent, compassionate choice benefiting animals, people and the environment.

"Now we've got the scientific evidence to prove it. Maybe that explains why many meat-reducers are keen to call themselves vegetarians when even they must know that vegetarians don't eat chicken, turkey or fish."

But Dr Frankie Phillips, of the British Dietetic Association, said: "It is like the chicken and the egg. Do people become vegetarian because they have a very high IQ or is it just that they tend to be more aware of health issues?"

Resource Allocation For the Poor - The Manmohanomics Algorithm!

Resource Allocation For the Poor
The Manmohanomics Algorithm!
by Naagesh Padmanaban

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent remarks at the National Development Council do not come as a surprise. Apparently, he wants the Muslims of India to have the first claim on the country's resources. This is the latest in UPA’s appeasement politics. To contain the fall out, his spin doctors have gotten into action. They have made sincere efforts to inform fellow countrymen that it is the opposition BJP that is twisting his statements out of context!

Manmohan Singh is apparently so far removed from the ground reality in India that I guess he is either oblivious or no longer concerned about his sinking image. Such a remark from the Prime Minister and the subsequent face-saving efforts are indeed so amateurish that now even Indians are beginning to ignore this high political office. Fellow academia has long given up on the good doctor. Nevertheless, such a statement from an economist and a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, only adds to the agony of the nation.

Resource allocation, if I may respectfully remind the Prime Minister, must be prioritized to reach the neediest segments of society. In a country which houses most of the world’s poor, it should automatically begin at the bottom of the economic spectrum. Poverty in India, like elsewhere, does not favor religion, caste or place of birth. Muslims are not the only have-nots in India. It has afflicted whole regions and generations of Indians. The sufferings among the poor in India is uniform be it the Muslims or Hindus or any other religion.

Mr. Singh informs India that he wants to ”devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development”. The learned economist pompously declares that “they must have the first claim on resources”. That grandiloquence is naked word smithy to tier India’s pathetic poor by religion and thus polarize the nation. He has however, with great gumption, not informed us why the Muslim poor need the ”first claim on resources”. In India, the Prime Minister, by force of precedent, is not obliged to tell the nation why.

If you stop to reflect on his statement, it shows how callous and nonchalant he is towards the Hindu or a non-Muslim poor. The reality as we all know, is that most of India’s poor - in absolute numbers - are Hindus. Secondly, he has in effect proclaimed to the world outside India that the Hindu poor do not need urgent resource allocation. This must indeed be a new variety of Nehruvian economics with an Oxford flavor. See the subtle shift and value additions in Manmohanomics version 2.0 that is geared for minority compatibility.

The Manmohanomics algorithm still does not tell us how a Hindu poor mitigates his hardships and hence deserves less attention while the Muslim poor cannot and so requires priority. Probably, it must be the Hindu’s past karma that makes him less eligible for ”resource allocation”, whatever that means. But is it not the constitutional obligation, moral responsibility and the country’s minimum expectation of the government to seek the holistic implementation of anti poverty programs to all needy sections of India? It now appears that if you are born a non-Muslim and poor in Manmohan’s India, then the government stands relieved of such aforesaid obligations and responsibilities whatsoever. The legal pundits can quibble over the breach of the Prime Minister’s solemn oath to uphold the constitution and serve all people of India. This is but one more addition to their list.

India’s polity today is all topsy-turvy. Unthinkables have happened and continue to happen. The root cause, as many distinguished Indians have noted, is the continued erosion of the people’s faith in the political class and a consequent fragile polity. Every election fetches the political parties less and less of popular support and a wafer thin edge over their rivals. To keep the diminishing constituents happy, the gambles are getting more desperate. Hence you find an otherwise reputed economist turned PM devising an allocation methodology that would appear to defy logic. Yet, that does not give him the excuse to abdicate his responsibility to ensure equal treatment and unity of the country.

This new resource allocation priority is yet another vehicle cunningly drafted to circumvent and subvert the Constitution and the unalienable right to equality. Of course, the constitution clearly seeks to prohibit any discrimination based on sex, caste, class or religion. The Supreme Court of India has clearly spelt out on multiple occasions that reservation per se is unconstitutional and strikes at the very heart of the principles of equality and natural justice. That progressive judges have played no small part to undo this right guaranteed to each and every Indian has been well documented by Arun Shourie in his book - Falling Over Backwards and is beyond the scope of this essay.

Some may dismiss this as a ploy born out of political expediency. But it is noteworthy to remind the Prime Minister that it nevertheless amounts to playing with fire. In his quest to stay on in power, another weak predecessor had set the country on fire over reservations. V.P Singh is living to see that the people have not forgotten his attempts to undo India in his desperate clutches at power. But more dangerous, as many have pointed out, is the fact that this is an ominous reminder of the tragic religious polarization that led to India’s partition in 1947. India’s destiny is above the immediacy of staying in office for a full term. It would be far more honorable to resign than destroy India in the long term. Manmohanomics ver 2.0 may have passed the expediency test, but still fails to impress the nation.

Not many know the Indian past he had discovered!

Not many know the Indian past he had discovered!
Thursday November 16 2006 09:31 IST
S Gurumurthy

"What is it that keeps the country down", asked the speaker. A young man in the audience replied unhesitatingly: "Undoubtedly the institution of caste that kept the majority low castes and the society backward" and added "it continues".

The speaker replied, "May be". But, pausing for a moment, he added, "May not be". Shocked, the young man angrily asked him to explain his "may-not-be" theory.

The speaker calmly mentioned just one fact that clinched the debate. He said, "Before the British rule in India, over two-thirds - yes, two-thirds - of the Indian kings belonged to what is today known as the Other Backward Castes (OBCs).

"It is the British," he said, "who robbed the OBCs - the ruling class running all socio-economic institutions - of their power, wealth and status." So it was not the upper caste which usurped the OBCs of their due position in the society?

The speaker’s assertion that it was not so was founded on his study - unbelievably painstaking study for years and decades in the archives in India, England and Germany. He could not be maligned as a ‘saffron’ ideologue and what he said could not be dismissed thus. He was Dharampal, a Gandhian in ceaseless search of truth like his preceptor Gandhi himself was, but a Gandhian with a difference. He ran no ashram on state aid to do ‘Gandhigiri’.

Admitting that "he and those like him do not know much about our own society", the young man who questioned Dharampal - Banwari is his name - became his student. By meticulous research of the British sources over decades, Dharampal demolished the myth that India was backward educationally or economically when the British entered. Citing the Christian missionary William Adam’s report on indigenous education in Bengal and Bihar in 1835 and 1838, Dharampal established that at that time there were 100,000 schools in Bengal, one school for about 500 boys; that the indigenous medical system that included inoculation against small-pox.

He also proved by reference to other materials that Adam’s record was ‘no legend’. He relied on Sir Thomas Munroe’s report to the Governor at about the same time to prove similar statistics about schools in Madras. He also found that the education system in the Punjab during the Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule was equally extensive. He estimated that the literary rate in India before the British was higher than that in England.

Citing British public records he established, on the contrary, that ‘British had no tradition of education or scholarship or philosophy from 16th to early 18th century, despite Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton, etc’. Till then education and scholarship in the UK was limited to select elite. He cited Alexander Walker’s Note on Indian education to assert that it was the monitorial system of education borrowed from India that helped Britain to improve, in later years, school attendance which was just 40, 000, yes just that, in 1792. He then compared the educated people’s levels in India and England around 1800. The population of Madras Presidency then was 125 lakhs and that of England in 1811 was 95 lakhs. Dharampal found that during 1822-25 the number of those in ordinary schools in Madras Presidency was around 1.5 lakhs and this was after great decay under a century of British intervention.

As against this, the number attending schools in England was half - yes just half - of Madras Presidency’s, namely a mere 75,000. And here to with more than half of it attending only Sunday schools for 2-3 hours! Dharampal also established that in Britain ‘elementary system of education at people’s level remained unknown commodity’ till about 1800! Again he exploded the popularly held belief that most of those attending schools must have belonged to the upper castes particularly Brahmins and, again with reference to the British records, proved that the truth was the other way round.

During 1822-25 the share of the Brahmin students in the indigenous schools in Tamil-speaking areas accounted for 13 per cent in South Arcot to some 23 per cent in Madras while the backward castes accounted for 70 per cent in Salem and Tirunelveli and 84 per cent in South Arcot.

The situation was almost similar in Malayalam, Oriya and Kannada-speaking areas, with the backward castes dominating the schools in absolute numbers. Only in the Telugu-speaking areas the share of the Brahmins was higher and varied from 24 to 46 per cent. Dharampal’s work proved Mahatma Gandhi’s statement at Chatham House in London on October 20, 1931 that "India today is more illiterate than it was fifty or hundred years ago" completely right.

Not many know of Dharampal or of his work because they have still not heard of the Indian past he had discovered. After, long after, Dharampal had established that pre-British India was not backward a Harvard University Research in the year 2005 (India’s Deindustrialisation in the 18th and 19th Centuries by David Clingingsmith and Jeffrey G Williamson) among others affirmed that "while India produced about 25 percent of world industrial output in 1750, this figure had fallen to only 2 percent by 1900." The Harvard University Economic Research also established that the Industrial employment in India also declined from about 30 to 8.5 per cent between 1809-13 and 1900, thus turning the Indian society backward.

PS: This great warrior who established the truth - the truth that was least known - that India was not backward when the British came, but became backward only after they came, is no more. He passed away two weeks ago on October 26, 2006, at Sevagram at Warda.

Separation of Powers : The Myth and the Reality

Separation of Powers : The Myth and the Reality
Excellent speech by Bimal Jalan on why the Indian Judiciary should have the last word on the law of the land; I found this speech important for 2 reasons;
a) It is a well researched, timely and thoughtful article/speech. From its data content / academic views it is a must read.
b) In the current political climate in India, we are witness to a progressively fractured polity. Each party has a smaller and smaller size of the electorate. Given wafer thin backing of constituents, the parties are indulging in absurd and anti-India gambles. For example, the UPA now wants reservations on religious basis. The Constitution clearly prohibits reservation even on caste basis. This is a dangerous trend ; India was partitioned in 1947 because of such narrow religious demands. I think it is time for every nationalist Indian to stand up and speak against a polity that seeks to inflict long term damage to India. Bimal Jalan is one such pioneer in current India to speak up against a diseased political class. More and more Indians should speak up an stand up for a united India.