Healthy vegan diet / plant-based - for health, save the planet, ethics, are you already? ( Archived) (72)

Those are all excellent points and questions. I think further polls to see what people think about those would be good, and to educate those who are confused or lacking knowledge. Maybe we can coordinate such polls, so that we can avoid redundancy, which might make people not wanting to vote (I sure don't want to spend time voting for similar / same).

PS. I'd have added more options, but it did not allow me to, so I decided for those questions.

Very well said and written, I totally agree.

I think it's better, in those instances where it's obvious a person is confused - or has ulterior motives / purposely spreads misinformation - to just supply education, rather than ask questions to possibly feed that person's agenda or it escalating into a pointless "discussion" / argument.

I already provided answers, so I recommend let's leave it by that.

I don't, I provided education in the insight why one would make comments that are not required or even off-topic. It's a poll, after all.

That is how it is often seen by those who have an issue with logic and science.

"Shaming" as a purposely used action for any reason is pointless. Rather, the focus I use and has shown to be the correct path forward, is providing insight through education and scientific proof (proven logic).

A discussion is useful if participating parties are willing to "have an open mind" AKA are willing to be proven wrong based on supplying proven facts (facts based on scientific consensus AKA approved by peer review), or in case those parties do not have those facts known and want to engage in fact finding together.

Discussions turn into arguments, the latter which are always pointless, if one's pride and bias prevents education based on factual truth - and that is what I am not interested in and I made clear I will avoid.

But I do welcome properly phrased questions that are on-topic, in this case, diet related and its related aspects of health and nutrition; the ethical/psychological and ecological aspects are not part of the OP / poll.

That is an incorrect assumption of yours, see my answer below.

Your statement falls into one / some of the "logical fallacies" - for a list:


Yes, lots of thin people consume animal meat - I know that just too well, I have always been thin (in fact, I have been underweight) while eating lots of meat, the majority of my diet in fact. After I switched to a healthy plant-based diet, I gained weight, healthily (some fat, mostly muscle), without going to the gym.

Consuming a plant-based diet does not guarantee thinness - this is true, because nothing is guaranteed ever when generalized. However, when being specific, a healthy(!) plant-based diet will in almost all cases guarantee for one to achieve and sustain a healthy weight (not "thinness", that is undefined). And again, strictly speaking, even then it's "in almost all cases" and not "always" because of medical reasons that might be impossible or seemingly impossible to achieve. Both statements have been scientifically proven on a medical level (lab tested and peer reviewed), there are YT channels to go into those in detail, also nutritionfacts.org is a good source.

Again, it's important to be specific and factual, AKA not to "muddle the waters" with broad claims and statements that seem logical at first, but have a lot of logical holes in them and other logical issues. It's best to evaluate one's statements with the list of logical fallacies (see link I provided) to help understand if a statement or argument applies and thus should not be posted.

Points well made, but let's not let this grow into an argument. Asking an honest (not underhanded) question is ok. Making statements that don't fall with any of the "logical fallacies" is ok too, ideally backed up with a reference - a link to the article / vid reigns supreme; but a descriptive info to where to find suffices, if one is truly interested in learning the truth, then they will search for it.

Those who have commented, please don't forget to vote also - thank you! :D

That depends on what is considered "real food", which you make clear in your next statement and includes meat, where you make logical fallacies through factual wrong statements that are based on your opinions / bias as facts:

The largest and strongest animals are and always have been (dinos) herbivores, and that body mass is mostly muscle, which is created from proteins / amino acids - how is that possible, if "protein can't be found in veg", there is also an issue with your statement in terms of that "a little bit of meat" consumption by humans is "a good thing", when B12 alone can be found in plenty amounts in a number of plant sources, plus there is always plant-based (vegan) supplements that provide that, in case you do not want to / can't get sufficient amounts of B12 from plant sources themselves.

Yes, meat has a lot of nutrients in them, but also "things" that are very harmful to the human body - heme iron, cholesterol and sat-fats specifically, which lead to cancer and obesity; you can get the non-heme iron from a number of plants, and the human body produces its own cholesterol and fats, thus adding that to one's diet is counterproductive to human health.

The conclusion is that, unless there is no sufficient access to caloric-dense plant sources (avocados, nuts, seeds) to equalize your energy expenditure - which is only true nowadays for survivalists / very remote areas of the world - there is no need and even is counterproductive to human health to consume animal products.

There is also the math aspect of it, which relates to land mass, water and food requirements for a sustained and sufficient "production" of animal mammals to provide sufficient B12 and "protein"... (btw, B12 is not produced by the animal mammals, but fed to them by the agriculture industry, you do know that, right?)

If you'd do the math (this was done for various countries and their regions, scientifically correctly AKA w/ correct numbers) you'd realize a number of things:

1. the landmass is just not there to sustain this - especially in smaller countries like Japan and the UK, and especially in the use of "free range" animals, which a lot of people go on about;
2. the huge amount of potable water requirement is wasteful and could and should rather be used for irrigation for plant-food production;
3. the huge amount of plant-matter consumed by all those animals for this mathematical model, could instead be fed to humans directly and that would already end world hunger.

Again, that's based on bias and make-believe, not factual data and science. There are a lot of issues with this line of thinking, relating in particular to negative ecological impact and human health - for the latter, you can find plenty of scientifically written articles via

nutritionfacts.org/?s=fish

For most countries the infrastructure is already there to achieve all that with plant sources, especially once they remove animal agriculture. And transportation is already switching to electricity, which is not even the biggest ecological impact, but animal agriculture is. Lots of reliable info:

For those who are interested to learn about fats and other health subjects, this is a recent video with those subjects talked about / explained by a medical professional (MD):