The great vegan diet ‘con’
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Another variant of this that's no less infuriating is the classic "corporations do most of the polluting, so I'm entirely absolved of responsibility".
Surprisingly, the children who were given the soup containing meat each day seemed to have a significant edge. By the end of the study, they outperformed all the other children on a test for non-verbal reasoning. Along with the children who received soup with added oil, they also did the best on a test of arithmetic ability
In fact, there are several important brain nutrients that simply do not exist in plants or fungi. Creatine, carnosine, taurine, EPA and DHA omega-3 (the third kind can be found in plants), haem iron and vitamins B12 and D3 generally only occur naturally in foods derived from animal products
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200127-how-a-vegan-diet...
Granted humans aren't chickens, but we're closer to chickens than chickpeas that's undeniable.
"Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising."
> we're closer to chickens than chickpeas that's undeniable
So the best food for people is human meat? Soylent green, anyone?
> So the best food for people is human meat? Soylent green, anyone?
Well, sure, taken to the logical extreme. Cultures that lean heavily into meat do tend to eat the whole animal though. You've basically got the choice of scarfing down brains and liver as a dessert, or to compensate with vegetables on the side of your steak.
3 treatments (meat, milk, oil "energy"), plus control, and 3 tests.
> children receiving supplemental food with meat significantly outperformed all other children on the Raven's Progressive Matrices.
> Children supplemented with meat, and children supplemented with energy, outperformed children in the Control group on tests of arithmetic ability.
> There were no group differences on tests of verbal comprehension.
This is demonstrably false nonsense.
Omega-3 fatty acids exist in almost all plants (especially leafy greens) and is synthesized to EPA/DHA in the body. If you eat junk food with high omega-6 content, the conversion process won't be efficient enough, and you need to take an algae-based EPA/DHA supplement; but unlike nasty fish from the polluted ocean, this supplement comes from a hermetic lab with third party purity testing.
The rest of the nutrients purported to be lacking in a plant-based diet and be debunked with a few easy web searches as well. Obviously, one has to be mindful of macro and micro-nutrient consumption, but this is true with any diet, and is even more so if health is of concern.
It feels like a desperate attempt of the meat industry to delay the inevitable, not too different from cigarette and oil industry tactics we've all seen in the past. They also had a plethora of experts to convince the public it's a good thing to smokwe. Food industry is powerful and it will go down kicking, that's for sure.
> When the documentary Cowspiracy came out and said 51 per cent of emissions are from livestock, I knew that was not true. I knew that the official global number was 14.5 per cent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. And even that is an exaggerated number.
If you want to learn more, and why the contribution of meat production may be even higher than 51%, see the following paper: https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...
One thing from the article I can agree with. Don't eat highly processed food. Not all vegan diets are healthy diets.
If you want to stay healthy, eat whole plant-based foods, minimum fat. Whenever someone has health problem, doctors will recommend plant based diet - like with cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses, gallblader & pancreas, kidney, endometriosis ... it's easily verifiable.
In fact, 15 top killer diseases are preventable with plant-based diets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXXygDRyBU
If I had more time, I would have written a better comment. Sorry.
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals." https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
You could make a similar argument about slavery, the reason we abolished it has nothing to do with productivity estimations.
It's baffling. You won't find any vegans that haven't got depression, anxiety, or some other mood disorder. In all seriousness I wonder if being vegan is similar to an eating disorder, where people are looking for some measure of control in their lives and food is the one thing they can control.
Thanks for proving my point for me.
Very brave, though the author forgets to compare to literally any other numbers. A quick check reveals that Australia slaughtered ~1.5M chickens PER DAY in 2013. Currently it's ~2M per day [0].
So the author argues not to avoid cruelty because it only reduces cruelty by 99.9932%. This is garbage.
[0] https://www.chicken.org.au/facts-and-figures/#Production
And did you know that fires set by the agriculture industry in Indonesia puts out more CO2 than America, some days? [2] And that's just Indonesia.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45146581 https://savetheorangutan.org/threats/palm-oil/ https://news.mongabay.com/2019/11/indonesia-fires-amazon-car...
Farm areas that can grow human edible food tend to not be used for animal feed. Animal feed is also created by the by-product of human edible food, which if we didn't give it to animals it would just be made into compost. The efficiency coefficient of food turned into compost is not that great with a lot of it turning into methane, get eaten by bacteria, and runoff into the oceans and water supplies.
For corn for example, 7% of the harvest is suited for human consumption. The efficiency coefficient is pretty terrible if we throw away the remaining 93%. Wheat and rice has similar problemsd. Vegetarian oil create a lot of by-product, much which goes to animal feed.
This (crop monoculture) is a consequence of animal agriculture, not justification for it. If anything, we could stop cutting down all the rainforests to make room for cattle and their soybeans.
> For corn for example, 7% of the harvest is suited for human consumption. The efficiency coefficient is pretty terrible if we throw away the remaining 93%.
We don't need to produce those 93% of corn at all. We can reforest fields/pastures used for meat production and store a busload of CO2 in the process - https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...
> Farm areas that can grow human edible food tend to not be used for animal feed.
I don't know ... 75% of fields are used for animal agriculture, so one can easily get to that conclusion, but in my experience, those areas are intermixed (is it a word?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
> The efficiency coefficient of food turned into compost is not that great with a lot of it turning into methane, get eaten by bacteria, and runoff into the oceans and water supplies.
How much methane does composting produce depends on composting method, aerobic composting is significantly better in this regard and in the end, composting is better than putting the food/organic materials into landfills.
Feeding the soil bacteria and enhancing the soil profile (with compost) is a good thing. We need more of those little critters.
Not so sure about the runoff - I think that argument applies to pesticides/herbicides, where it's a big problem. Compost is an organic matter, a soil in the end - but soil erosion is a problem, so I tend to agree :)
https://www.compostmagazine.com/compost-benefits/
> Vegetarian oil create a lot of by-product, much which goes to animal feed.
Seed oils are not healthy, not for us, not for animals, not for people eating those animals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM
Where is this argued at all? It does include this bit:
>This isn’t a call to forks for you to head to your nearest all-you-can-eat steakhouse. Buxton would like to see everyone reduce consumption of meat from industrial farming and transition towards more sustainably raised meat, “which will likely mean consuming less”.
It seems like the purpose of the article is to point out that veganism is not a magic solution, despite it being advertised that way. But nowhere does it claim that we should "not avoid cruelty".
Cheese is processed milk.
Buy super firm tofu blocks, portabella mushrooms.
Recipes such as black bean & beetroot burgers are superb. I'm on the lookout to more classic recipes, maybe using soy protein or even anything more complicated as long as it doesn't need an industrial kitchen.
https://itsavegworldafterall.com/black-bean-beet-burger-reci...
What history? Maybe human history, but evolutionary history says we're frugivorous apes, and that's the history that most materially affects our bio-chemical systems.
> I agree that cruelty is not OK but to say animal products are flat out unnecessary is wrong.
You're welcome to make an argument for "ethical" production of animal products, but most do not take in account the perspective of the victim - an individual like you and I.
> It is not palatable or globally viable for every human to eat 2 cups a day of peas for proper protein intake.
Nor is it necessary, and assuming so shows a great ignorance of the role and appropriate amount of protein required for a healthy human diet.
You: "You're raping animals! Stop being so selfish!"
Do you understand how your response here is not helpful? Nobody is going to read your post and think "oh yeah, they're totally right, I have to go fully vegan immediately." They're going to think "I am trying to do better and meet you halfway and you ignored that and called me a rapist."
Absolutism is fine when it's you holding yourself to your own standards, but it is often a bad tactic for producing better outcomes in reality.
I realize you may feel that animals are equal to humans, and that therefore any harm perpetrated upon them is equivalent to the same harm being perpetrated upon humans. But you have to understand that the vast majority of people - myself included - simply don't agree with that stance. The question is: do you want us to still help you achieve some of your goals, or no?
In this analogy, you come along and say "don't bother, you're gonna get lung cancer and die anyway."
I'd still suggest that delivering the message in a way that is more empathetic towards the person trying to make the change would be likely to get better results in terms of changing minds.
The term "con" should raise red flags — a more neutral approach to the topic would be more helpful but then that wouldnt increase sales.
Make a list of left/democrat foods and a list of right/republican foods. It's not hard. It's super weird that this is not hard.
In the West we probably eat too much meat (from a health perspective at least) so we should probably try to eat less of it, which can be as simple as not eating meat every day or at every meal. That's it, not very controversial and, yes, you can still eat 'proper' burgers when you go out.
But regardless, it has always seemed weird to me that our society applies such radically different moral standards to the treatment of livestock versus the treatment of pets, and how that even varies from creature to creature. Leather is fine, but fur is "murder" and killing cats/dogs is actually a crime.
I think that they take the argument the wrong direction, but at least the fully vegan no-animal-products-in-my-life folks are being consistent.
I think we agree about pets. Many people treat pets like people but when it comes down to it, they're not, and people won't treat them that way when it counts. Most people won't starve their family to pay for medical care for a pet. The pretense bothers me and feels hypocritical to an animal that trusts its owner so much.
I'm vegetarian in a one-animal-at-a-time sense. I sometimes think of it in terms of killing squirrels, since I see a lot of squirrels every day. For every burger you eat, imagine you have to go out and stomp a squirrel to death. I don't particularly care about squirrels but doing that would be pretty gross and traumatic, so if it's all the same I'll just eat some beans. The benefit to the environment is similarly incremental.
They'd learn so much about what life actually is.
But I don't actually want to live in that world, because I know enough to hope it never returns.
There is not enough space to feed everyone same amount of meat/dairy we westerners eat, because we would need several Earths, which we simply don't have. It's not sustainable.
If someone's diet preferences are destroying the Earth, should not we limit their liberty to do so?
P.S. See this graph and weep. https://climatehealers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Slide0... (from https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...)
Look a this demagoguery of lopsided comparisons:
> A vegan diet may destroy more life than sustainable cattle farming.
> Regenerative cattle ranching is one of our best tools at mitigating climate change.