Welcome to my world of parents with special needs kids. I have a coworker whose kid was hospitalized for not gaining any weight due to gastroparesis and they wanted to go with solving it by different foods and not meds. Um? gastroparesis means the food isn't working!

I saw an article a little while ago written by the dad of a vegan family, whose son has autism. He was saying that he gets criticism from every direction -- people telling him that his kid might "get better" if they fed him non-vegan food, and vegans who imply that they must be doing veganism wrong, somehow, because vegan kids are healthy. (I've gotten that "you must be doing veganism wrong" stuff -- that veganism makes you healthy, so if you're vegan and not healthy, then you're doing something wrong. One well-known vegan doctor even wrote an article a few years ago about how all the fat and unhealthy vegans should stop telling people that we're vegan, because we're giving veganism a bad name by being all fat and unhealthy.)

I can see running off to Hawaii for clean air and good food

We have vog from the volcano. And are sorely lacking in several genres of food.

not as an alternative treatment strategy

And for any specialized treatment at all, you have to go to Oahu, which is...basically a west coast city on a rock in the middle of the ocean, so not particularly great on the clean air thing.

Also, skin cancer.

Margarita in Hawaii.

-t, I'm happy to host.

Sophia, I have wondered about such things (as well as how many women just had UTIs all the time), but I don't have any answers.

I wasn't aware of the strong religious overtones in veganism. Definite strains of heresy and apostasy wandering around.

I would vote for watching Jane the Virgin from the start. There are a lot of fun little moments that also pay off later.

strong religious overtones in veganism.

This just took me to a Monty Python "This is HIS GOURD! We will carry it for you, Master!" place.

I totally vote for both jumping in AND going back and catching up on Jane the Virgin. It's awesome.

And I too have wondered about fetal alcohol syndrome in places where everybody drank wine or cider or beer all the time. Except the studies I've seen say that even women who admitted drinking like, five drinks a day still only had a fairly small change of getting FAS (I mean, iirc it was double digit but much less than 50?)

I wasn't aware of the strong religious overtones in veganism. Definite strains of heresy and apostasy wandering around.

It's gotten a lot worse in the past few years. There have been a whole bunch of books and websites and stuff about how veganism will cure all sorts of diseases, and will make you totally healthy, and they tend to equate veganism with no processed food, no sugar, etc. I'm in a facebook group called What Fat Vegans Eat, and that name was chosen specifically to ward off people like that, and still, any time someone posts something about vegan junk food, there will be a bunch of "Veganism is about being healthy, so that cupcake isn't REALLY vegan" replies.

I suspect, based on very little knowledge, that women got fewer UTIs and vaginal infections in the before times because they didn't wear pants or underwear. No cloth right against the warm moist bits means less opportunity for bacteria/fungi to grow.

I predict that jumping directly into Jane the Virgin woul (a) be fine [eta: the Narrator will say "there, now you're all caught up" so you'll know you have what you need] and (b) make you want to start at the beginning and see it all.

I have thoughts about medieval incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome but I can't get them into communicable form.

Even with the possibility of FAS, it was almost certainly healthier to drink mildly alcoholic beverages in the Olden Tymes because even a small amount of alcohol helps kill bad germs. Juices don't keep, so you brewed hard cider, tossing in the wormy apples because alcohol.

I expect that most of the beer etc was in the low-proof area. It wasn't until the innovation of distilling, which for instance brought The Sorrows of Gin, that you had really obvious alcoholics in the public eye/mind.