Vegan News 4.23.13

Vegan Celebrity Trainer: Bad Diets Partly Responsible For School Shootings  “Capitol Hill staffers gathered Monday to hear about the benefits of a plant-based diet also heard about the potential fallout of unhealthy eating. “The average child is drinking over 50 gallons of soda pop a year… and every time you eat or you drink sugar it destroys B vitamins… which are for brain function,” vegan celebrity trainer John Pierre told staffers as they munched on a spread of kale chips, grape leaves and vegan cupcakes in the Capitol Visitor Center. “Now you couple that with violent video games, pornography, violent cartoons, violent music. And then is it any wonder that children are going berserk? And going into schools and shooting one another?”

It doesn’t just color our vegan cupcakes a pretty red, drinking a cup of beetroot juice can lower blood pressure, researchers say. “Drinking 250ml (8oz) cut high blood pressure readings by 10mm of mercury (mmHg) in a study of 15 patients, bringing some into the normal range, the journal Hypertension reports.  Most marked after three to six hours, the effect was detectable a day later.”  Be warned, it also makes your pee pink.

6 living, growing, oozing pieces of art: Alive and Well.  Because, well, it’s cool.

Don’t Go Near The World’s Champion Rainbow Watcher. It’s Mean. Very Mean. “Why would an animal that lives underwater and doesn’t even gaze at the sky, why would it have the best color sense? We never found a good answer to that one, but we stopped caring once we met the shrimp. Mantis shrimps — that’s what they’re called — are staggeringly odd to look at, wonderfully fun to sing about (which we did), but no one, and I mean no one, has loved this shrimp better than Matthew Inman.”

Photo credit: Matthew T Rader via Flickr