People are free to choose their own diets (if they're lucky enough to live in a place of abundance). If you wanna be vegan/veggie that's fine by me. People should always be free to eat what they want. I eat meat.
This is my response to an article published by @apolymask --
Are those who kill and eat animals more manly and are those who choose not to do that more feminine
The problem is there's an awful lot of misleading info out there, encouraging people to go vegan. I'm not saying @apolymask is trying to mislead anyone but if, like the old me, they bought into the vegan agenda, they are passing on information they believe is true. The article references another piece which makes lots of claims that are based either on dodgy scientific studies or just pulled out of thin air.
The Vegan Machine is tweaking your vanity, health-consciousness, morality, ethics, even your sex life! It's attacking at every angle. I hope my response will help to even the balance a bit.
I was vegan/veggie for 17 years and it seriously damaged my health.
Humans are not herbivores. We may have empathy for sentient beings but our bodies require the nutrients contained in their bodies, just as plants rely on the decaying flesh and bacteria of animals.
are those who kill and eat animals more manly? And... those who choose not … more feminine?
I'm not more manly because I eat meat (I'm a woman).
… they think our Paleo ancestors … lived … off of hunting when the fossil evidence actually shows they ate almost entirely plants and rarely ever ate animal products.
That's inaccurate. The timing is a bit off. The precursors to humans ate veggie, but around 2.3 million years ago our human ancestors started eating meat. We evolved. Eating meat caused us to:
- grow larger brains
- evolve teeth better suited for eating meat and less efficient for chewing hard nuts/tubers
- shrink our gut size
The fossil record is packed with evidence of meat-eating. Whenever they find human remains, they always find animal bones that show signs of butchery or chew marks nearby. If you look at cultures living in ways their ancestors did, you will see they subsist on mostly animal products because these are abundant, year round. They're not seasonal, like fruits and veg.
not hunting or killing sentient beings unless you absolutely have to for survival
We do need to eat animals for survival. Studies show that vegans are more likely to be infertile – not good for the future of the species. Nobody has ever discovered a vegan culture on this planet. If they ever existed, they're long gone and so are their genes. All primitive cultures, living as their ancestors did, rely on animal products to survive and thrive.
The massive food industry has a lot to answer for in its treatment of animals. You'd have to be a total psychopath to condone their methods. Proper farms (being squeezed out of existence by Big Food in collusion with Government) treat their animals well.
It's not exploitation. It's a symbiotic arrangement. The animal is fed its natural diet, given shelter and healthcare, and provided a safe area to roam. In the wild, prey animals nearly always die painful, long-drawn-out deaths as a result of predator attacks (predators have no empathy for their prey in nature). Farm animals are humanely killed. Most animals are rendered unconscious first or the death takes a couple of seconds – a better death than many humans can ever hope for.
why kill another sentient being if you don't "need" to?
This rubs both ways. More animals are 'needlessly' killed in agriculture, where they grow veggie crops. They spray the fields with chemicals, which decimates the insect population, and small animals (mice, rabbits, moles, etc.) are chewed up in their combine harvesters as they reap the crop. Not only this, but the large fields destroy ecosystems and cause mighty damage to the soil -- an environmental disaster looming. Also, these veggie-friendly crop farmers pay the evil factory farms (where they torture and slaughter these animals) for tonnes of animal shit to fertilise the soil. So, the veggies you eat aren't exactly cruelty-free.
find another alternative with overwhelming plant options
Unfortunately, there are no alternative options. Essential nutrients are found in abundance in animal products. Essential is essential. Plants contain only some of these. And they're difficult to assimilate because our bodies are not designed to process them. We need other animals to process the plant matter into something we can efficiently digest and utilise. Our bodies are not designed for it. If you feed any species an unnatural diet, its health, and the health of the species, will deteriorate.
Improving our health and the health of our families is manly.
In Italy, they're in the process of passing a law that will make it illegal to feed a child a vegan-only diet because the evidence shows it endangers their life. Kids have died!
Vegan Men Have a More Attractive Scent
Lol. I used to hang around with vegans. I can testify that they sometimes smell terrible, fart too much, and tend to block the toilet.
Vegan men have higher … testosterone
Not true. In order to maintain good hormone balance, you need saturated fatty acids which are found primarily in animal fats. Cholesterol is an important factor in testosterone production. Cholesterol – it's not the bad guy. Vegan diets are woefully low in good quality fats, consequently inhibiting the availability of testosterone (and other manly hormones). Link to study on steroids and sex hormone-binding globulin levels in adult men – veggie vs omnivore.
Plant foods such as soy, tofu, fake veggie meats, certain beans, beers... contain high levels of phytoestrogens which lower testosterone and boost estradiol. The more of these products you consume, the more likely it is that your male body will exhibit signs like man boobs (MOOBS), reduced sperm quality/quantity and testicle shrinkage. It's especially dangerous for boys to overload their diet with phytoestrogens while they're still developing.
Vegan Men Live Longer
No. The study your guy is probably sourcing was done on Seventh-Day Adventists. This is a skewed study because these guys also exercise more than the general population, avoid smoking and drinking and are usually more health conscious. All these other factors play into their slightly longer lifespan.
An Australian study (done properly – adjusting for factors like smoking, BMI, lifestyle, etc.) of over a quarter of a million people found that vegans and vegetarians do not live longer than anyone else. There was another study done here in the UK on about 60K people with the same outcome.
Vegan Men Have Less Erectile Dysfunction
I don't know about erectile dysfunction -- I never tested all of my friends -- but lower testosterone negatively affects the sex drive.
Skin: again, I've seen evidence of poor skin in vegans and vegetarians too. You only have to look at YouTube and scour a few vegan channels to see they are often emaciated, with dark circles under their eyes, aged, and looking a bit off-colour.
Vitamin A and D affect skin hormones – eat more liver (Vitamin A) and get more sun. You also need a good balance of essential fatty acids to overcome problems with inflamed, dry or itchy skin. Our omega-3/omega-6 ratios are out of balance in the west. In primitive cultures, eating their natural diet, there's no acne.
Studies show that vegans are usually deficient in Vitamin B12 (OMG where to start with the negatives of this – brain shrinkage, depression, cardiovascular problems, blood clotting disorders), calcium, iron, zinc, carnitine, carnosine.
Look younger. FUN FACT Did you know – red meat is high in compounds such as carsonine and carnitine that inhibit glycation (damage to proteins including skin proteins). These compounds slow the ageing process. Actually, they do a lot more but I'm already getting wordy.
I'm not saying I don't care about animals. I do. I like animals. I want them to be happy and healthy and live a good life, free from fear and pain. But I also need to eat them. Please be careful with information you find published by vegan or vegetarian societies. They are very liberal with statistics and the truth.
You can find lots of useful information about nutrition here. Thanks for the link @sift666
Large stools = gut damage and anyone with gut damage isn't absorbing nutrients properly from difficult to digest foods such as nuts, beans, vegetables. That's basically the whole vegan diet. Worse still most vegan diets are what causes the damage in the first place!
I say most because it is possible to be a healthy vegan, but it involves juicing much of what you eat in order to remove the hard to digest fibres and leave space for more food. This healthy, vegan diet is extremely expensive; a luxury that few can afford, especially those in the northern hemisphere.
The trouble with most vegan thinking is that it quotes one example of a healthy vegan and puts the rest automatically in that camp; then it quotes the data from meat-eaters, which includes people who live off junk food, and applies that to every meat-eater.
These days it's hard to be healthy whichever diet you choose unless you avoid 90% of manufactured food like the plague. (I'm being generous, it's probably more like 99%)
Yes, I agree. Some people seem to get by ok on a vegan diet. I just wasn't one of them.
Thanks for your comment. You added lots of really good, useful info.
Cheers
Anj x
Large stools don't cause gut damage. Where's your evidence for that? Large, fibrous stools are easier for your bowels to push, and reduce strain on your gut and therefore reduce gut damage. The stomach can expand to many times its original size. Whole plant foods contain water, reducing dehydration and hydrating the bowels during digestion.
Animal products contain no fibre, causing your bowels to do more work and thus increase the likelihood of bowel diseases. Whole plant foods are not 'difficult' to digest, they are slower to digest, thus providing your gut flora with a much healthier environment to proliferate and persist. Slower digestion also reduces strain on our organs, which can have difficulty coping with concentrated nutrient intake.
Furthermore the gut flora that help with digestion of plant foods will become more abundant, and the ones that break down animal proteins (you yourself are an animal, and those animal-protein eating bacteria live inside you) less abundant.
All the plant food vegans typically choose to replace meat with are much cheaper than meat around the world. How are beans more expensive than steak? Such an argument is truly absurd. I save money by being vegan and never go hungry.
Do your own research on why large stools are a sign of gut damage because it's a well documented fact. So is the fact that grains and beans are difficult to digest and can cause gut damage. I personally know people who can't eat popcorn because the outer shell causes tiny tears all through their guts. By the way, I was talking specifically about grains, beans and nuts not "whole plant foods," so you went off at a tangent. Every healthy meat-eater makes a habit of enjoying their fruit and veg.
Much of what you say is true but irrelevant to the issue of gut damage. Everything needs to be in balance, including the amount of fibre consumed; too much is as bad as too little.
If you used the daily recommended amounts of all vitamins and minerals, as guidance, to calculate the food an average size person would need to eat as a healthy vegan, there would be more food than you could physically eat, unless you juiced a good deal of it to remove the fibrous bulk, or are willing to eat and shit all day like a typical herbivore.
So, when you went off on explaining why fibre is so beneficial, you completely missed the point, although, I will concede that I didn't explain it fully. You also missed the point that a healthy vegan diet is expensive, not the poor diet that the average vegan eats , which fills them up with bulk, but more often than not leads to leaky gut syndrome.
And, btw, if you make assumptions about what someone is saying, in lieu of asking for clarification, and your limited information leads you to the absurd, the fact that you walk away feeling satisfied says much about you.
Are you under the assumption that jelly beans are cheaper than spam?
Thanks for going out of your way to explain many of the points in the article. Many of those vegan benefit claims sound pseudosciency, if you want to try veganism you are free to do so, but there's no need to try and spread lies about it! the secret to being healthy is actually having a balanced diet and not going to hard on any type of foods.....
I agree. It's all about balance.
Thanks for popping by Luna.
Anj x
Yea there are some of my veganfriends who are actually pressuring others to go vegan as well. I think they shouldn't do that as people are free to choose their own diets as you said.
Just tell them that vegetables have feelings too!
You just told him to go full retard.
Losing your sense of humour is sign of malnutrition.
Thanks Neup.
Resist the pressure! Yes, eat what you want.
Thanks for popping by
:D
If I could give this a 1000000% upvote I would. Animal products are SO IMPORTANT for optimum health.
You rule <3<3<3
thanks Amymya
Really appreciate your comment. Yes, I agree. Animal products are ultra important.
Cheers
Anj x
I wonder... I thought vegetarian cultures existed, and people turn out just fine also. I'm more measured, in that I'll eat some meat but try to reduce the amount for what I think are sustainability reasons.
I'm curious to hear what happened in your diet that caused problems? Maybe for another post. Or have you written about it already?
Thanks Evan.
Even the so-called vegetarian cultures supplement their plant-based diets with seafood.
What's your worry about sustainability? I'm glad you're getting some animal products. They're not as bad as the mainstream media paints them to be. You only have to look at the real scientific papers to see this.
I did a post about the vegan situation. It got wordy (as usual), so I've cut it into 3. One vegan came in, upvoted, must've seen I'm not a vegan any more, then removed her vote. Bless! XD
Thanks
Anj x
Re: Sustainability, in terms of the energy efficiency, and being able to feed the world, all that jazz. Though honestly, perhaps the causation is reverse. The population is exploding because of all these crazy ways we can sustain the meat and veggie production. If we stopped finding such methods, perhaps the population would start to show it's trend towards carrying capacity already.
Population growth in most developed countries has stabilised or is even declining. The biggest population growth areas are not Western countries, but countries that are relatively impoverished and/or have a strong religious/cultural basis for big families.
The population is exploding because some people still want to have lots of children, and because sanitation is much better than it was before, with industrialised farming playing a role but rural communities in developing nations still producing much of their own food.
The very worse thing to accompany a rise in population is an increase in demand for meat, as it is the most inefficient and resource-demanding of all agriculture. And fishing is destroying our oceans to the extent that fishless oceans have been predicted by 2048.
I love veggies and meat so this isn't really a problem to me. ^^
Good to know you've got a balanced diet Dawn :D
Cheers
Anj x
"I was vegan/veggie for 17 years and it seriously damaged my health." No evidence whatsoever that you were or that it did.
I'm a vegan. My blood test results are fantastic; no deficiencies whatsoever, and actually it's better than when I ate animal products. (I ate what I believed to be a balanced diet when I was not a vegan, having a meat dinner most or all nights of the week.) My testosterone levels are also good, being well within the healthy range for my age. I have little to no belly fat, and a very good BMI.
And your counter-arguments are so badly informed. Who is it meant to convince? Informed vegans know (and it is very easy for a vegan to be well-informed nowadays) that the majority of crops go to feeding animals, and meat eating diets require more water and land than vegans do. The biggest cause of deforestation is animal agriculture. The desertification of Mongolia is due to animal agriculture.
And also vegans know that some animals die unintentionally in food production, and their goal is to reduce that by not eating animal products which cause even more animals to unintentionally and intentionally suffer and die.
Dairy and most meats (being from female animals) contain actual mammalian estrogen.
The OP asked you how long you had been vegan and you avoided the question and then your argument became riddled with ad hominem nonsense. That would suggest that you haven't been vegan for very long and your blood tests reflect, to some degree, on your past diet. Give it 20 years and you're likely to have leaky gut, leathery skin and bad gums.
Form follows function which is why herbivores and carnivores have different "looks" Herbivores are generally heavy boned with big stomachs (bovines, gorillas) or small boned with proportionally small limbs and huge bodies (guinea pigs). Carnivores are sleek and omnivores are somewhere in between.
I'm confident that neither you nor the OP resemble a gorilla, which, despite being, on average, far shorter than a human, eats considerably more food. Do some research on what captive gorillas are fed per day, and you will find that what you eat falls far short, meaning that you are failing to consume all the vitamins and minerals that you require to be healthy long term. That doesn't even factor in that your mineral requirements are higher than a gorillas because you are a more complex creature with a bigger brain!
The main difference between you and the OP is that she is listening to her body, and you are listening to an agenda.
Brilliant!
Hahaha you haven't seen me on a Sunday morning :P
cheers
Anj :D
How long have you been vegan? Can you produce blood test results from 20 years ago plus daily menu plans dating back this far? I'm in the UK. We tend not to get our results printed out unless we make a special request. That wasn't something I did.
Where are your counter facts to refute them then? My counter arguments are informed by reading properly-executed scientific studies. Actually reading them from start to finish rather than relying on a biased overview in some club to which I subscribe. What evidence do you have to back up what you say here?
You think you're well informed. Good luck with that. And congratulations on your blood tests and belly fat.
My goal wasn't to convince anyone of anything. I shared my experience with veganism in case -- in case -- any vegans were feeling ill and wondered whether it could be caused by their diet. That's my motivation. It was done with the best intentions.
As I've said elsewhere -- I don't care what anyone eats or doesn't eat. I wish you luck with your diet. Some people can handle it. I got very sick. That's all there is to it.
There is no evidence you got very sick.
What year did you go vegan?
You seem to have no idea what I'm talking about even though all of the major vegan outlets provide such evidence, also based on scientific studies. May favourite is probably Dr Michael Greger who, whilst perhaps not perfect, does make an earnest effort to dig into the scientific literature.
I was already aware of all the evidence you brought up, and it's not at all convincing. What little truth there might be in it, there is an absolute flood of studies showing that the vegan diet is the optimal diet for all humans, as all humans are physiologically herbivores.
All people can handle it. Some people are dishonest and/or incompetent. If you failed the vegan diet (I don't believe you ever actually were vegan) then that is absolutely your fault for being crap at it. It's not even hard to be vegan. That's all there is to it.
Congratulations for not UPVOTING YOURSELF again. That's progress.
I went vegetarian nearly 20 years ago. The vegan situation came about a few years after that. I was on and off for a long time but I had two prolonged periods of pure veganism.
I have to go out but I'll be back later to answer. But if you are going to continue accusing me of being a fraud or a liar I will fucking block you. There's no need for rudeness here or anywhere else. Learn to control yourself and discuss issues without being a dick.
Later...
If you went vegan nearly 20 years ago, that would've been around the year 1999. And if you had been vegan for 17 years for a few years after that, let's say 3 years (by saying a few, I assume that is more a couple) then you became a vegan in around 2002. 17 years from that time is 2018/2019. Wow, you're still a vegan.
And wow, the internet and digital camera and record keeping technology have become significantly better since then. Yet you have no personal evidence, whatsoever, apart from an obviously fraudulent story, that you were ever a vegan. No photos of you hanging out with the stinky vegan friends you claimed to have, no photos of you at vegan events, no blood tests, no doctor's reports, nothing.
From https://www.nhs.uk
"GP records should be retained until 10 years after the patient's death or after the patient has permanently left the country, unless they remain in the European Union.
Electronic patient records must not be destroyed or deleted for the foreseeable future."
If what I say is so unbelievable, why do you need to attack and slander me? Do you have a problem with people who disagree with your dogma?
I do know what you're talking about. I read, and bought into, all that shit for many years. Only when I started to do my own research did I notice how misleading the vegan propaganda actually is.
Oh, and you still haven't brought this precious evidence with you. If you're gonna demand I back up everything I say with evidence, then you'd better play your side of the game too. If you wanna protect your precious dogma, bring the proof it's the best diet. You won't, of course, because there is no proof. It doesn't exist.
You don't like proof; you just like to feel as though you're RIGHT. You don't strike me as the type who needs evidence. You just believe, don't you! Like a feeble little sheep. You get your information from a cluster of incestuous sources and you believe. You swallow it. And you close your ears to anybody that says different. They're just wrong. Heathens. Dangerous. Burn the witch! You really think a diet where you need to INJECT YOUR ARSE with synthetic B12 is the healthiest diet of them all? Listen to yourself.
Let's just give this gem a moment on its own. Let us reflect on its ignorance. LOL. Humans are omnivores. Open a biology book. What other bullshit do you believe? I'm genuinely interested now. Unicorns? Fairies? Magic men in the sky?
Dr Greger: cherry-picking, vegan propagandist! Are you serious? Jesus! I'm not gonna read through someone else's filter. Especially not his! I go straight to the original scientific source and use my own cognitive abilities. BTW, Greger claims that blood cholesterol is linked to dietary cholesterol. He's wrong. Look up the science.
So veganism works. If it doesn't it's not the vegan diet's fault; it's incompetence or the person is just lying. You sure there aren't any other options? Vegan diet: don't eat animal products. Stick to plant based. Keep an eye on macro- and micro-nutrients. Ok. YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. But I didn't eat any animal products. And I took all the supplements recommended at the time. And I made sure I was getting protein and... YOU'RE A FUCKING LIAR THEN! rage quit
You didn't mention for how many months you've been vegan. I'm guessing not too many.
Sorry, I meant to say frugivores not herbivores.
I don't inject my arse with B12. I don't know of any vegan who does. B12 is produced by soil bacteria, and can thus be found in dirt and water. Drinking from natural water sources or eating vegetables that haven't been washed could both provide our original needs. Because the livestock are also deficient in that in the modern world, they too are supplemented with it.
I think your ignorance about B12 clearly indicates you were never really vegan.
If Dr Michael Greger is cherry picking, then you must be picking the individual atoms of cherries, because the contrast between what he does and what you have done is quite stark. All you seem to have done is cherry pick the cherry picking of paleo and keto websites and/or blogs.
The second last paragraph is again completely unsupported by evidence. Science shows that if someone is actually doing all those things (which I don't think you were. In your apparently fraudulent story you weren't even committed enough to veganism to stop cooking meat for others) they will have no nutritional deficiencies and very good health. There are vegan ultra marathon runners.
Anyway, as I said. If such an ignorant statement about B12 is one of your arguments, it is really obvious that you were never a vegan.
And lowering my dietary cholesterol lowered my blood cholesterol. Vegans typically have lower blood cholesterol levels than non-vegans. That's why doctors recommend reducing dietary cholesterol intake to reduce cholesterol. It's pretty obvious. Another nail in the coffin for your supposed veganism and scientific understanding.
oh, and btw I think it's very rude to go into another person's post and UPVOTE YOURSELF. Have you no shame?