Regarding Cyndi Norwitz's site:

With all due respect, does it really matter what/how Cyndi personally eats?
Although she lost her weight following Protein Power, making vegetarian, mainly vegan choices with occasional use of seafood, and is now maintaining and eating maintenance levels of carbs, none of that makes her vegetarian or vegan recipes, analysis lists, sources and references inherently less vegetarian or vegan...does it?

Or does someone have to ethically and culturally fit your personal standards of vegetarianism in order to have otherwise intelligent information be taken seriously?

The bottom line is that vegan, and even vegetarian low carb is a tiny niche area of low carbing. A smart person who wants to eat vegan or vegetarian and low carb is going to get as much information and get food and menu ideas from as many sources as possible...whether the sources are as vegetarian or vegan as you personally are, or not--for that matter, whether the sources are overall as low carb as you personally are, or not. Why? Because frankly, there is no single source of vegetarian or vegan low carbing that fits every person's idea of how those things should be accomplished.

As people who want to apply specially restricted choices to low carbing, the best bet is to pick a low carb plan, and then try to follow it within the limits of your personal menu choices...whether those are vegetarian, or vegan, kosher, or you're just a picky eater who only likes prime rib and SF cheesecake and doesn't like eating green food and refuses all vegetables. Life is all about choices...

IMO, it's a waste of time and energy to get caught up in whether someone eats seafood and therefore isn't in your opinion a 'true vegetarian' who has eliminated all meat from his/her dietary experience. It takes the focus off whether that person has any valuable vegetarian/vegan recipes and perspectives to contribute and broaden your own resource list and recipe box. Just because a person may eat some amount of things you wouldn't eat doesn't mean that the veg/vegan things they enjoy and recommend might not also fit into your menus. To do this in reverse, I know that Cyndi deals with food sensitivities and multiple chemical sensitivities, and avoids things like onion and garlic, but does eat a lot of prepared soy foods. My personal kitchen would cease to exist without onions and garlic, and I only use a limited amount of prepared 'fake meats.' Those differences haven't stopped us sharing recipes for the last six years that I've been low carbing--we just make substitutions where needed. If our interaction had stopped because we have some minor food preference differences, that would be the equivalent of tossing out a perfectly good vegetarian cookbook because some part of the book uses grains and legumes outside of the limits of low carbing. That seems at best foolish and wasteful, and at worst, narrow-minded. It's certainly not the way any decent kitchen operates.

I have a half-dozen Moosewood cookbooks, and probably three of Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks...all wonderful vegetarian references that I've used for years. Some of the stuff is vegan, some ovo-lacto vegetarian, and one of my favorites ('Sundays at Moosewood') actually includes some recipes that use fish. All of them have chapters about using grains, legumes, making bread, making desserts that include sugar. Oh dear. Should I ignore all of the recipes that I *can* fit into my menus because some (by no means all) of the recipes are things I can't use? If that were the case, nobody would ever buy a cookbook...most people never make half the recipes in any given cookbook. Getting rid of cookbooks because they contain more recipes I haven't made than ones I have is tossing the baby out with the bathwater...why ignore all of the good information because there are a few things in the same package that you can't personally figure out how to use?

How Cyndi eats shouldn't make any difference at all if the information she presents about being vegetarian or vegan low carb is accurate and helpful--and it is. Her recipes are still tested and excellent, her charts of nutrition counts of grains and legumes are still dead on accurate and combine a lot of information in one place, and her resource links all still work. Seems a little narrow to discount using her site because she may eat things you choose not to eat...but I guess YMMV.