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):
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:
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.
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.
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.
Someone in the UK made the argument that animal factory farming is horrible and unhealthy, the way to go is to eat "grass fed, free range" animals... then I did the math and it clearly shows there isn't enough landmass in the UK, not even in the US, to support that kind of thinking, it's just delusional wish-thinking / make-believe. Not to mention, it still doesn't solve the issue of wasteful drinking water consumption even in that case - so the ecological impact - or the negative impact on human health. People just stand behind things they know nothing about, just to support their bias, regardless of how delusional it is. Just sad.
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.
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.
Yes, everyone does, that goes without saying and there there was no need for you to say that - but people like to say it nevertheless because of feeling bad about their thoughts (subconsciously) and thus feel because of their habits (that is called "cognitive dissonance"). There some YT vids that explain that, if you are interested in gaining an insight of why you were compelled to say and think that way. But this has nothing to do with the diet itself; I have provided this bit of insight for educational reasons and I will not further discuss / explain it, as that would be off-topic.
You are justifying your ethics here, and has nothing to do with the health or diet aspect; also as a note, a "moderation diet" never works long-term (for health reasons, such as losing weight), that is the scientific consensus. Logically, it has been compared to "I'm only smoking a little bit" or "I'm only doing drugs a little bit" or "I'm only a little bit of an alcoholic".
Ethnically speaking it also creates a lot of logical holes - but that'd be off-topic to talk about that here, so again, I will not discuss that further, there are YT vids and other online sources for that.
NOTE: This is a response based on facts to rectify this misinformation, I will not discuss this:
You raised two completely different reasons why you are against a vegan / plant-based diet:
1. "it is unhealthy for humans, because they are omnivores" - this is a general misconception spread by various media outlets - online, print, tv, ... and usually the animal agriculture industry or pharmaceutical industry is behind this (this has been proven / exposed many times over).
Thus, this claim that humans are omnivores, is scientifically wrong - or rather, not exact; we are opportunistic omnivores, meaning, we can consume animal flesh and blood, and animal secretions (milks, eggs), which humans have done millions of years ago, but only for survival reasons trying to meet their caloric deficit and thus not starve - meaning, those humans (again, before animal agriculture) were forced to supplement their diet with small animals mostly - mice and rats, rabbits, ... - even insect larvae and grown insects. Only after humans were able to make and then used longer weapons such as spears, they were going after medium and then large animals. This has been proven through analysis of fossils from the teeth of people throughout that era.
Humans eventually developed "husbandry" for animals, which then eventually turned into animal agriculture and factory farming, and in combination with developing trading and the invention of the wheel and logistics, this created an abundance of access to animal meat and animal secretions. Followed then by factory farming, but even before that, people started developing diseases that were non-existent before their start of animal exploitation: becoming overweight, even obese, diabetes, atherosclerosis leading to heart attacks and strokes, increased speed of aging (hair loss, getting gray hair), dementia and Alzheimer's, among other neurological diseases.
2. "being a vegan is hypocritical" - you are talking about Veganism, not "vegan eating", which is another misconception and the two are completely separate subjects. And there is nothing hypocritical about "being (a) Vegan" unless you claim to be and then kill sentient beings purposely. Being vegan for ethical reasons means following Veganism, which is defined by "the vegan society" and is "the reduction of animal suffering" and includes humans (human animals) too. But again, that is a completely separate topic from diet / health, but it goes to show that people like to use it to muddle the truth and as an excuse to spread hatred and misinformation against Vegans, Veganism and vegan diets / eating plant-based.
Therefore, these two topics - "is it / it is not healthy" and ethical aspects of vegan dieting, do not require any further answers and discussion. If there are any questions about a plant-based diet, those are valid to be asked.
I also have a poll on here, please make your choice, only takes a minute to read and choose.
(I chose "current events & politics, because this becomes more and more of a topic in the mainstream media, and has an impact on the whole world and consequently politics)
There's a South Park (yeah, I know, a lot of people don't like it, but they do have some episodes that actually have a valuable lesson to them) episode about it, where Eric Cartman (resident "fatso") has heart attacks and nearly dies because "the girls" of the school make the cafeteria switch to "healthy plant-based foods"... this is very telling how people feel (often though due to "cognitive dissonance", but that's another whole topic).
He (Eric Cartman) keeps this up and has additional heart attacks in coming days / weeks, until the menu got switched to meals created with "plant-goo" - referring to "beyond meat" - an artificial, lab-created substance. It's basically compared to McDonald's "pink goo", which consists of ground up "waste products" from slaughterhouses.
This "plant-goo" is then doused with salt (sodium) and other flavors, to make it taste like ground beef / chicken / fish / ... and this was first hidden from Eric, but after a few minutes him eating it was revealed to him, and he... was fine with it, citing that he doesn't care because it just tastes like all the previous animal-based food crap he liked and "needs". And that's why "impossible meat" and "beyond meat" are billion-dollar businesses already, and are only getting bigger and bigger - and is the reason why the US fast-food chain "Burger King" has adopted selling an "impossible burger" (called "impossible whopper"), KFC has also a vegan KFC bucket, and McDonald's is (in some regions) and will be selling also vegan burger options.
The sad take-away from this SP episode - and even sadder because that's what most people think - is that people think a healthy plant-based / vegan diet tastes like crap or at least boring, or that it would mean giving up known tastes / flavors - meat tastes, eggs and cheese - or whole dishes, especially hotdogs and burgers (in North America).
Of course, those plant-based lab-produced alternatives and store-sold meat-counterparts are all almost as unhealthy (little to no sat- and trans-fats, at least) as their animal-meat counterparts, and people will still continue develop diseases, but at least it will help the ecosystem - which is in grave danger, wars for drinking water are predicted to start in 10 to 20 years due to the animal agriculture industry, hunger and famine, the erosion of the sea ecosystem and disappearance of fish due to overfishing, not to mention climate change / warming and melting of polar ice and resulting in massive flooding worldwide, due to factory farming and animal agriculture in general but especially the dairy and thus dairy cheese industry, the disappearance of bees and that will be the end of pollination and thus trees and plants will die out - all connected to water, which is squandered by the animal agriculture industry, especially the dairy industry.
And this is just an overview - too much for most and the reason why most people just don't care to learn about it, it takes too much time to read, to think, to plan to make changes... just too much effort. But gradually at least it is happening, with the help of KFC, Burger King and McDonald's, and the various offerings in the frozen section in stores - hot dogs, burgers, roasts, ...
marksapio Forum Posts (15)
Healthy vegan diet / plant-based - for health, save the planet, ethics, are you already?
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):