This is my belief too and a reason I'm vegetarian. In my mind the chance of us eventually beginning to see animals as more and more people like are VERY good. I don't want to look back over the last 20 years and realize that I killed and ate so many people especially since it is unnecessary.
Part of my chain of reasoning is seeing how black people were referred to as animals and their intelligence and general ability was VERY much underestimated since we are in fact all human beings. Then seeing all of the research we've done with dolphins. They have their own language and social structure. Even bees have a language that we're just now beginning to understand.
In fact, the more research we do, the more evidence we seem to find that we've sold "animals" short.
I am a vegan for moral reasons, and I have no objection to people eating animals. What I do object to is the horrifying daily torture that animals must suffer in the meat, dairy and eggs industry. I am guessing this is where some of your food comes from.
In my experience, people who have no qualms about using animal-based products are ignorant of the realities of how these products are made. I encourage you to watch Earthlings [1] -- free to watch on their site -- and see if you feel the same way once you've seen some evidence.
As a fellow vegan, I have to ask -- why be vegan if you have no objection to people eating animals, if they are raised/slaughtered "humanely"? Why not just buy local meat/dairy/eggs? At least where I live, it's pretty easy to meet farmers at a farmer's market and talk to them about how their animals are treated.
First, I doubt we would be able to agree on a viable definition of "humane"
commercial farming. But even if we did, I would not take the farmer's word for
how the animals are treated. What I have heard from a former farmhand, who
worked on several small farms, is that abuse of animals is simply the norm.
It sounds reasonable to me that this is the situation, except perhaps in very
small farms. History has taught me this: whenever humans have physical control
over other humans, they tend to abuse their subjects in terrible ways.
Slavery. The Holocaust. Gulags. North Korean concentration camps. It seems to
me that the way we are treating animals is simply a manifestation of this
tendency toward sadism. It is not difficult to find recorded evidence of pure sadism playing out both in small and large farms. Since I have no way to verify a given farmer's claims, I will not take the risk.
Second, a well-balanced, strictly vegetarian diet is far more healthy than a
diet that is based on animal products [1,2]. I know that many people do not
believe this, and they base their views on the vast amount of disinformation
that is out there. To get to the truth you have to listen to the experts. The
book [1] I am citing was written by Dr. Walter Willett, one of the leading
researchers on the relation between nutrition and disease. His recommendation
is basically to eat as I suggested above. More precisely, he recommends (based
on decades of research) to reduce animal-based foods as much as possible, and to
reduce processed foods in favor of whole foods. There are of course additional
recommendations that I will not go into.
Vegetarian diet more healthy? In what criterion? Lean body mass? Sprint speed? Hint: vegetarians are known to be slow [1]. I think whether vegetarian diet is more healthy depends on personal traits: gut flora, genetics, even climate one lives. Basically there is no such one-fits-all scenario for a diet.
You're less likely to have numerous health problems by following a vegetarian diet. As a vegetarian you are, for example, less likely to have heart disease, the number one killer in the United States. [1] Interestingly, some of the oldest people in the world eat a primarily plant-based diet (though not exclusively). [2]
The issue is that you need a well planned veg diet. You can't just eat french fries and white bread and expect to maintain your health, obviously. For me, after a couple months of tracking my food and learning the calories/fat/protein of a lot of plant foods, I don't really have to think hard about creating well-balanced meals. It's a learning process.
I'm sure it's possible to have a healthy diet that includes a very small amount of non-red meat. That small amount is probably not going to hurt you that much. [3] However, you can get every vital nutrient you would get from meat from a plant source without the tacked-on fat and cholesterol.
Not from plants, but from micro-organisms and bacteria! Yum! Many of my foods are fortified with B12.
50% DV in my soy/almond milk, 40% in a single tbsp of nutritional yeast. I have a cup with cereal in the morning and a cup with dinner at night and I'm set. It's quite easy.
Are you kidding? Nutritional yeast is delicious! You can put it on popcorn, include it in any recipe that calls for Parmesan (like risotto or cheesy pastas), use it for breading tofu, use it to make vegan mac n cheese. I love nutritional yeast...in case you can't tell. :) It just has an awful name.
I fail to see how sprint speed, or indeed any other sports-based metric, is related to health. A strictly vegetarian diet is more healthy in the sense that it dramatically reduces the chances of getting various diseases. These include some of the top killers in developed countries, like heart disease and stroke. Vegans are also far less likely to be obese, and obesity is an important risk factor of many diseases.
The three main factors that influence health (in the sense above) are smoking habits, diet, and exercise. The factors you mention are secondary. I refer you to the sources I cited above for more details and evidence.
> Basically there is no such one-fits-all scenario for a diet.
That's a bit like saying that not everyone should avoid arsenic... There are of course personal variations, but the fact that meat, dairy and eggs are bad for you is not one of them. The basic mechanisms that cause animal-based food to be harmful, like the fact that saturated fats increase bad cholesterol, are well-studied and do not vary greatly from person to person.
On the other hand, a vegan diet is not one-size; it's not like we just eat lettuce all day. In fact, when you go vegan you discover that you do not lose any diversity, because there are many plant foods that non-vegans usully don't consider eating (for no good reason).
Sprinter speed is mostly determined by genetics and training (and often, PEDs). Diet is largely irrelevant - Usain Bolt's "power food" is mcnuggets, Yohan Blake's is a 16 banana smoothie.
Exactly. If you reason for avoiding meat is only because of shitty meat producers, then why not vote with your dollar instead and support the non-shitty meat producers?
Here's a thought experiment: Imagine that I breed gorillas. Soon after reaching adulthood each gorilla is killed and made into dog food. One day I discover a gorilla whose mental abilities are similar to a 6-year old human child. That is, the gorilla can reason, communicate, be creative and show empathy just like a child. Is it OK to kill that gorilla? If so, how about an '8-year-old child' gorilla? Or 10-year-old?
Yes, but not all animals eat one another. And we are not, like tigers and lions, obligate carnivores. We can survive and thrive without meat. Our bodies are capable of surprising dietary adaptation.
If you don't need to kill/keep captive animals for food to live healthily, why do it? That's just my personal philosophy.
I agree that it's the only actual "reason." I just don't think it's a good reason. I think it presumes that the value of "taste" for us is greater than the value of "life" to an animal. And there's a lot of evidence that most meat is very unhealthy for you, anyways.
As an interesting (perhaps?) side note, I tasted meat recently for the first time in 2+ years and it was really lame and underwhelming. :/
I don't think it's the same at all. I don't think it requires a history of meat-eating in order to determine whether or not something tastes good to you or not. I tried steak, chicken, and fish. I don't think that most people would call meat "an acquired taste"?
My personal theory is that vegans put in way more effort to make their food taste good than non-vegans, and we eat an extremely wide variety of foods, so eating things like "steak" or "chicken" is generally a very boring flavor experience. I had a bite of "good steak" and thought...this is alright, but I could make better-tasting seitan!
That does not seem much better. You may as well say "I don't like alcohol, I tried 'good beer', wine, and liquor".
There are particular animals that I like or do not like (salmon for instance I have never been a fan of with any preparation I have tried) and various preparations/cuts that I do not like (lamb chops, most preparations of steak besides rare (preferably Pittsburgh rare, which is sadly difficult to find or prepare yourself at home) and most baked/broiled preparations of poultry). These classifications are again only scratching the surface of course, basically just breaking the question down to "ale or lager? white wine or red? Dark liquor, or clear?"
Regardless if it isn't your thing, then knock yourself out, but you should be sure that you don't fall into the trap of being confused why others don't share your personal preferences. (Or worse, trying to suggest that people who don't share your personal preferences are deluding themselves; lying to themselves about their own tastes.) I don't find myself annoyed by veganism/vegetariansim until I really get one of those vibes coming across.
Yeah, I just tasted it because I'd forgotten what it tasted like. Obviously taste isn't a reason to stop eating meat for everyone, and it's certainly not as compelling as animal welfare/personal health/environmental concerns.
Hi. I've tried alcohol a couple of times, and I don't understand what the big deal is. Intellectually, sure, I'm aware that it decreases social inhibitions, but it didn't do much of anything for me, and it tasted pretty bad, so I haven't bothered with it any further.
I disagree. There are a lot of nutrients (mostly protein) that, without meat, require us to rely heavily on nuts and beans. A dependency on those requires a large amount of additional effort for the consumer. Nut allergies are intensely common besides, having to depend your entire muscular structure on the number of beans you eat would be both very ineffective and would have a number of negative results.
Point being, meat is the most efficient way to get a lot of nutrients, and you can't declare that everyone can't eat it because you may someday discover that it's intelligent. The future is broad, we might find out that plants are actually the intelligent beings on this planet. Does that mean we should all starve ourselves now on the fear that that may happen in the future?
Everything has protein in it. I've gotten over 100g in a day without trying and little to no nuts. Your body will naturally combine different types of amino acids to form complete proteins. You just need to eat a variety of foods and you'll be good to go. The issue with a vegan diet is eating enough calories, not getting enough protein. In fact, many people in the US eat too much protein which is very bad for you! It's easy to undereat accidentally on a vegan diet because you have to physically eat more. Hard to complain about that though.
And effort, in my opinion, isn't enough to justify eating animals. Think about the specific efforts you go through to prepare raw chicken: you have to wash your hands in between handling it and your other foods so you don't risk contaminating them with salmonella. Way more effort than my dinner, where everything can safely touch!
Getting sufficient nutrients on a vegetarian diet is not difficult. It requires no particular thought unless you're doing a lot of exercise and need a huge amount of protein, but even then, it's pretty easy to get unless you want to avoid eggs, milk, soya, tempeh, nuts, mycoprotein, beans, lentils, protein supplements, etc.
Iron is more difficult in theory, but no other vegetarians I know have actually had a problem with it.
As a vegetarian, iron is something I haven't had a problem with (I know this from the blood iron levels they measure when you give blood). I cook with cast iron, which apparently increases the amount of iron in cooked foods [1].
I believe you may be misinformed: Calorie for calorie, broccoli has more protein than a sirloin steak. As stated in the other responses pretty much everything has protein in it.
Additionally, the only vital nutrients in meat are b12 and iron, both of which are available elsewhere (lentils are great for iron & supplement is available for b12)
Actually, calorie for calorie is not a valid counter. Per wolfram alpha, you'd have to eat 4.0kg of broccoli per .41kg of steak (average steak size).
Apart from that, I would cede to your points about the b12 and iron, but if you want calories to sustain you, meat is definitively the most efficient way to go about it.
Yeah, you have to eat more quantity-wise (but really, not that much more). Personally, I love eating, so I don't complain about it :) Eating many times during the day is healthier for your body anyways.
I make a vegan sandwich with 30g of protein and about 700 calories. Add a protein shake and a side of chickpeas and you're pushing 90g. It's shockingly easy (and healthy) to load up on vegan calories if that's your goal!
This sounds like you're saying "We've always done it so it is ok by me." It's flawed reasoning. Following that reasoning why'd we let women start to vote?
As mlent points out we have a choice today. In the past there were times when it was necessary to travel and survive. Why do it if it's unnecessary?
Read pretty much all the unbiased scientific literature that looks at the long term effects of a vegan diet, from nutritional studies to surveys of practicing populations. I won't bother to cite them. I'm assuming google isn't blocked in your country? (tip: papers published by vegan and vegetarian promoting organizations do not count).
Don't think I'm defending modern diets either. Most people eat a woefully unhealthy diet regardless of what they eat.
It's just that for most people who go to great lengths to adopt a highly specialized and unbalanced diet, it becomes religion, and they think it makes them immune to the fact of being an omnivore.
Being an omnivore doesn't mean you can choose to eat plants OR animals, it means you must eat a bit of both. But you can certainly go for long spells on just one or the other, but long term, you'll most certainly end up with a case of malnutrition on some area. Most of the studies I've read show that 80-90% of Vegans suffer some malnutrition of some form (despite having fantastic health in many other areas).
Put another way, if you have to take supplements to make up for dietary shortfalls (a number which approaches 100% in long term vegan population studies), you're doing it wrong.
"It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. ... This position paper reviews the current scientific data related to key nutrients for vegetarians including protein, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin D, riboflavin, vitamin B-12, vitamin A, n-3 fatty acids, and iodine. A vegetarian, including vegan, diet can meet current recommendations for all of these nutrients. In some cases, use of fortified foods or supplements can be helpful in meeting recommendations for individual nutrients. Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life-cycle including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fibre, magnesium, potassium, folate, antioxidants such as vitamins C and E, and phytochemicals."
Notice that your citation completely agrees with my statement above but includes lots of wiggle words like "can", "appropriately planned", "well planned", "supplements" and focuses on vegetarian diets without specifying type of diet and doesn't focus on veganism as a dietary habit.
It also doesn't discuss long term dietary issues of vegan practitioners, percentage of practitioners with health deficits (ones who don't practice an "appropriately/well planned diet" and live without the use of "supplements").
Cite me some long term studies with randomly sampled population surveys and we can start having a real conversation.
I don't see anything that agrees with your original statement: "Non-animal sourced diets are hopelessly unhealthy in the long term no matter how many supplements you take to try and take to make up for it." You have yet to cite anything supporting that.
The only supplement that is strictly required on a vegan diet is B12. I'm not sure what's so inherently bad about taking a supplement anyway? Most people, regardless of diet, should be supplementing vitamin D in winter, for example.
I wouldn't want to be following any diet that isn't appropriately planned, so I don't understand your repeated scare quotes. You can be vegan eating nothing but potato chips and coca-cola, but that wouldn't exactly be well planned. Is it possible to be unhealthy on a vegan diet? You bet. Is it possible to be unhealthy on an omnivorous diet? Look at the average American.
"Is it possible to be unhealthy on an omnivorous diet? Look at the average American."
I'm not arguing that point, and I already conceded it earlier, don't misdirect.
If you think a little B12 every once in a while is the only supplement required on a vegan diet, with a little D in the winter, I hope that you aren't observing such a diet, or you've already failed in understanding even the basics of the nutritional and biological science required to even have a chance at making it work long term.
Who's misdirecting? You still haven't cited anything. I'll play along though; which nutrient(s) can only be obtained from animal sources? Even B12 is only accumulated in animal tissue, it's not produced by animals.
Anecdotally, I've been following a thoughtful vegan diet with B12 supplementation for 8 years. The results of my last blood test (including tests for various likely deficiencies) were exemplary. Could you post something other than your opinion? Otherwise, I'm done here.
I don't need to cite anything, 10 seconds on google scholar looking for long term studies will suffice for your needs.
Good luck with it and be careful.
tl;dr
Here's your 100 day challenge, get 100% of your dietary requirements from your diet (without fortification of key ingredients or supplements, just from pure foodstuffs), and prove to me that you aren't eating a poor diet.
here's the tl part:
You're overfocusing on B12, because the literature on vegan nutrition overfocuses on B12 as neurological damage caused by B12 deficiencies are generally irreversible. Dietary B12 doesn't come from many non-animal sources, but you don't need much anyway, and effects of B12 deficiencies aren't symptomatic for several years. Your pre-vegan intake of B12 would have been sufficient for a few years until you figured out non-animal sources of it. It's also unclear to date if the form of B12 found in non-animal sources (synthetic eukaryotic sources, etc.) functions identically to animal sourced (from prokaryotic sources) B12. There are almost no studies on it because you have to try and be deficient in B12 on a normal diet without large-scale intestinal disorders.
"Even B12 is only accumulated in animal tissue, it's not produced by animals."
I don't think you understand where B12 comes from, I'm sure your understanding came from some vegan promotional literature which seems woefully full of cherry picked misunderstandings and absurd apologetics.
I'm sure you're getting it through some supplement. Now get it through dietary means. Or if you actually care about the environment, get it from locally produced dietary sources alone and don't have to have some heavily processed fermented foodstuff shipped a thousand miles to your fridge. I don't need to cite anything for you to know you simply can't.
α-linolenic acid is where you'll probably have the biggest long-term health issues, as metabolism into EPA and DHA is very inefficient with most of the issues in DHA production. Multiple studies show deficiencies in vegan diets w/r to DHA. Synthesis, requires several dietary co-factors in careful balance and long term studies suggest possible liver damage in humans (but not conclusively) vs. simply ingesting animal sources of long-chain n–3 fatty acids. Most vegans eat sources of ALA thinking it will makeup for their dietary deficiencies EPA and DHA, but multiple studies show that DHA levels remain deficient in these cases.
I'm sure you take supplements to make up for this inadequacy in your diet. Now do it without them. And if you think that your non-animal sourced Omega-3 supplement is complete, think again. There is no such thing as one kind of ω−3. You need them all, but in particular you need EPA and DHA.
Oh and DHA supplements also have a nasty side effect of preventing blood clotting, damaging immune response and increasing LDL levels. In other words, don't take them, they will hurt you.
Vitamin D should also be a no-supplement required vitamin. You make it in your skin for goodness sakes! It's not really essential, but it's plentiful in animal sources, and just stepping out in the sun for a bit everyday is more than sufficient to produce all the D secosteroid you could ever possibly need. If you feel the need to take D supplements, for all that is holy, take D3 and not D2 as the bio-availability of D3 is several times higher than D2. But of course, if you're taking "vegan-friendly" D supplements, it's almost always a fungal source which of course is the deficient D2 ergocalciferol form. I would suggest UV lamps at your desk instead of supplements.
I'm sure you already know about Iron and Zinc deficiencies in your diet. Every vegan I know is acutely aware of it and tries to eat lots of iron and zinc rich food stuffs and takes yet again more supplements to make up for their shitty diet.
But look, the point is this: the definition of a poor diet is a diet that doesn't provide for all of the necessary nutrients as part of the diet. If you have to take supplements to make up for dietary shortfalls, your diet is a poor one...period. Waiving away the handful of supplements you take everyday is madness and a serious problem.
Vegans are among the only otherwise healthy population group in the developed world that routinely suffers from illnesses seen only in the most decrepit poverty stricken parts of the undeveloped world. Most vegans source their information from highly biased vegan promotional material and don't understand the basic science.
I get it, you want to help the animals out of some sort of moral obligation. And I'm sure you only eat food produced on farms with no field kills, and use the parts of the internet only on a machine powered by sources that have no animal impact. And that somehow you live in a vegan mecca where somehow all of the various plants that produce 100% of your dietary requirements don't have to be shipped from halfway around the planet killing goodness knows how many animals in the process and that you believe in a world where everybody else goes vegan and the billions of domesticated farm animals somehow continue to find sponsorship for their care and maintenance in perpetuity. I think that's great.
Just be careful, and proceed with the understanding that long-term, you won't be able to sustain this diet without compromises to your health.
"But look, the point is this: the definition of a poor diet is a diet that doesn't provide for all of the necessary nutrients as part of the diet. If you have to take supplements to make up for dietary shortfalls, your diet is a poor one...period. Waiving away the handful of supplements you take everyday is madness and a serious problem."
That's simply your opinion. You're obsessed with the evils of supplements. Who cares if you need a couple of supplements to make up for some known shortfalls? It's a trivial part of my day, and it's hardly a "handful of supplements". Besides, consuming animal products has its own set of drawbacks.
I'm not sure why the vegans you know are so concerned about iron and zinc. I'm deficient in neither and don't go out of my way to supplement them. They're readily available in many plant foods. I'm also well aware that vitamin D is produced in skin, but you might want to double check your latitude if you're relying on that in the winter.
My goal is not to get 100% of my dietary requirements from food. That's apparently your objective. I never claimed a vegan diet can provide all the nutrients you need without supplementation. I readily admit you have to take B12. Some other things might be good to supplement too, depending on the actual make up of your diet. This is true even if you are omnivorous.
This whole thread started because you made this claim: "Non-animal sourced diets are hopelessly unhealthy in the long term no matter how many supplements you take to try and take to make up for it"
And now you've added:
"Vegans are among the only otherwise healthy population group in the developed world that routinely suffers from illnesses seen only in the most decrepit poverty stricken parts of the undeveloped world."
Please cite something specific to support either of those claims. "Google it" is not a citation. I know a lot of long term vegans (multiple decades; some lifelong) who are doing just fine.
If anyone else is still following this thread, this is a good source of information for vegans who want to be healthy: http://veganhealth.org
Yes, if anybody is still on this thread, and you want to go vegan, or are currently practicing, please please please, read the relevant appropriate scientific literature and don't just rely on vegan promotional sites like veganhealth.org (which makes several of the dietary mistakes I noted earlier in the thread).
Don't rely on opinion, tips at Whole Foods, friends, the internet, vegan pamphlets, support groups or only promotional websites. For example, veganhealth.org (run by dietition Jack Norris) makes an good effort at being a good guide - Jack does a pretty good job of distilling lots of the hard stuff into digestible chunks (forgive the pun). But it's subject to the exact same pitfalls and hopeful thinking (a bit of ground flaxseed on toast will solve all your omega problems!) I've seen in dozens upon dozens of vegan promotional dietary guides.
Once you've decided to go vegan, you've made the jump to accepting that you will be eating an inadequate diet to start with. (Simple logic dictates that if you need supplements to fix gaps in your diet, it's inadequate in those areas). Maintaining proper nutrition and health is unbelievably complicated when you're starting at such a disadvantage.
See a doctor regularly and demand the appropriate blood tests that test for the specific dietary deficiencies that are normal on a vegan diet. Don't rely on a typical blood panel...which is designed for people on omnivorous diets -- diets for which almost all of the vegan dietary deficiencies simply don't occur. If you don't know what the tests are, it's time to start your research!
And many of the animals humans eat are not. They are treated well, given ample amounts of the types of food their species was intended to eat, and slaughtered respectfully.
Instead of simply opting out of the horrendous conditions you don't agree with, what about voting with your dollar to support the ethical alternatives?
The vast, vast majority of the animals that Americans and Western Europeans eat are treated cruelly from birth until premature death. Some estimates have it as high as 99% in the US [1]. If you go to your average grocery store, like most people do, that's kind of meat you'll find. I've yet to personally meet a meat-eater who actually buys local, grass-fed, truly free-range meat. In some ways, it's more ethical, in my opinion, to eat local, "humane" meat than it is to eat factory-farm produced eggs and dairy.
I can't speak for michaelvanham, but a lot of veg*ns do vote with their dollars... It's pretty easy to find locally grown produce, plant-based non-animal-tested cleaning and hygiene products, etc. No way to be perfect, but easy to try :)
So "many" means "a large number". In the US we're talking 3% - that's not a large number. Additionally, by not supporting any meat, we are fighting a system that is polluting the earth & unnecessarily abusing animals.
Part of my chain of reasoning is seeing how black people were referred to as animals and their intelligence and general ability was VERY much underestimated since we are in fact all human beings. Then seeing all of the research we've done with dolphins. They have their own language and social structure. Even bees have a language that we're just now beginning to understand.
In fact, the more research we do, the more evidence we seem to find that we've sold "animals" short.