argumentatively vegan

i'm just going to repost the thread here. i'm not even bothering to deal with capital letters or spelling / grammatical errors.

---it's far easier to care about animal cruelty when you don't have the guilt of consuming animal products. (within reason, we're far from being completely off animal products outside of our diets)

Animal products and animal cruelty are not the same thing and certainly don't have to be.

perhaps not in theory, but in practice that's just not true. (by that i mean people don't care / have the resources to make it true)

Of course it is true, if u want to eat meat which is free range and slaughtered 'well', u can do that, it just costs more. Maybe what really irks u is that the majority of people simply don't care.

if you look into "free range" you'll see how much of a misnomer it is. this is not a question of what irks me, my status is saying that it's easier for someone who isn't protecting their diet to see what's going on and think about it.

what do you mean 'protecting their diet"?
We live by consuming the life of others, everything that was ever consumed was once alive. If you have ever watched nature you will know that cruelty and violence happens on an industrial scale. We are the first animal on planet earth which endeavors to live 'ethically.'

vfmp: "Protecting" as in "attempting to justify" one's dietary choices.
Humans are the ones committing cruelty on an unmatched and (actually) industrial scale.
And as far as living ethically, our species still has a whole lot of room for improvement.

lol, I commend you on becoming the first homo-sapien which has become a herbivore vfmp, but the rest of us in the human race are omnivores with canine teeth and pancreases

vfmp: Last I checked, I also had canines and a pancreas. Cool theory though

an aunt: It is so easy to reduce meat product consumption and/or go for the free range. A little restraint from everyone would make a huge difference to the scale of cattle, pigs and chicken farming industry which is linked to animal cruelty.

an old co-worker: I think that's the point, no? People don't want to care. If you care you have to do something about it, and it's much more convenient to do nothing, to change nothing.

indeed. and italics-man, modern history might be with you but the science is not. the last few years (in particular, we have decades of studies in fact that were ignored due to industry power) of nutrition research make it freakishly clear that consuming animal products - while an important ability in terms of long-term evolutionary survival - is actually really bad for us, and the root cause of most of our medical maladies.
if you're at all interested in the science, check it out for yourself, if you're not, your arguments fall under the category of "protecting your diet".

neuroscientist: Strictly speaking its not true for kids. They absolutely need meat for optimal brain and body development, however after maturation, every adult would benefit from obtaining protein from plant sources rather than meat. Undercooked meat can be especially bad, its really a risk thing. You're more likely to damage yourself with meat. That said some people cant really afford to eat optimally and meat can be cheap, bones too, organs are the worst for you and now people eat them as a delicacy which is pretty fucked. Most people do protect their diet and stay with the comfortable. The original point is totally valid, I'm confused as to where I stand because steaks are delicious. Theory got trumped again.

i'll stick with the science, thanks. and the facts are all available. if everyone would invest as much time investigating and educating themselves instead if arguing armed with a century of industrial propaganda our society would be in a very different shape. check out the video link i just posted.

that's nonsense and the "health" industry is just as much of a multi million dollar industry as the meat industry. Food processed in the way it is in mass production is bad for you, too much sugar, salt, additives etc. But there is no evidence whatsoever that well farmed unprocessed meat is bad for you, quite the contrary. We are omnivores we are supposed to eat a wide variety of foods. The digestive tract is not supposed to process only beans and fibre.

There are a host of proteins in animal protein in the correct ratios for us that are impossible to synthesize. Acids like creatine are essential for health growth. Both the health AND the meat industry expend enormous efforts to front "scientific trials" to prove the validity of their arguments. If you want to send me some information from an independent source that is peer reviewed I will happily read it with an open mind.

italics-man, there is TONS of evidence. and you're totally proving my point - instead of educating yourself, you're arguing with "common knowledge" that's been informed by... not science. and the research is all available, we're talking respectable peer-reviewed journals. if you're willing to invest this much time arguing with me, but not investigating, what does that tell you?

As I stated before "If you want to send me some information from an independent source that is peer reviewed I will happily read it with an open mind." Otherwise stop pretending that the scientific community is some kind of homogeionous group that has "decided" that meat is bad for you. That is a straight up lie.

italics: watch the video i just posted and check out nutritionfacts.org - all sources are listed. there, i've done what you asked for. i'm not "pretending". check out the documentary forks over knives too.

tpj: I'll just put this here. the secrets of food marketing

Michael Greger and "Forks and Knives" lol, just a tip but as a rule agenda based vegan scientists like Greger who cherry pick data and documentaries which base their studies on debunked studies are not the Independent information I asked for. Next you'll be asking me to read "The China Study." Check out this study from 2014 in Austria concluding the ill effects of non meat based diets. Concluding vegans are twice as likely to develop allergies, 50% increase in cancer, 50% increase in heart disease and lower quality of life.

[talics' comment calling my mental state into question was deleted by him after my response]

okay, i'm going to ignore the name calling and actually respond to the valid points that you raised:

1. dr greger's agenda is health through nutrition. when you make claims like "who cherry pick data", feel free to back them up with actual counter-papers. if you look across nutritionfacts.org you'll see all sorts of interesting things that will surprise you - i felt the same way you did until i came across that stuff, and the reason i found it so compelling is that it's not all "ra ra eat vegan"; he's extremely careful about showing all sides of what he's read and is very good about differentiating between obvious conclusion, reasonable conclusion, and what a study suggests / implies.

2. i've just looked into the china study criticism, and quite frankly i'm now sitting on the fence until i see something solid regarding the criticisms and the responses to them. after a quick look and some intriguing video through multiple sources i'm now suspicious, but the criticism that i did find has some serious flaws if you think about them for more than two seconds. so never mind forks over knives, then. unless you can ignore the china study references and want to see fascinating and disturbing things about the media and marketing.

3. the austrian study is very interesting, because it talks about vegan diets but doesn't take into consideration how educated / responsible those vegans were. it's INCREDIBLY easy to become vegan and eat badly. anybody who becomes vegan and doesn't know that they need to worry about b12 and vitamin d, for example? they're cruising for mental illness. anybody who goes vegan and eats fried / processed vegan food? avoiding bad foods doesn't mean the same thing as eating healthy. vegan doesn't mean "whole foods", and even "whole foods" doesn't mean getting the full spectrum of nutrition. which is why one needs to educate oneself about nutrition and eat responsibly.

it's definitely better to eat a relatively healthy meat-based diet than an unhealthy vegan-diet. what's even better, though, is learning about nutrition (something schools, the media and by and large THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT have neglected), and making informed decisions.

i urge you to watch dr greger's presentation in spite of your misgivings.

I commend you on a very considered response. I am certainly no expert on matters of nutrition, and the Austrian report is relatively new but does seem to be reputable and peer reviewed. My point is merely that the issue is not settled as much as those on either side would like to pretend it is. There has been a huge increase in all kinds of diseases due to the way our food is processed and prepared, for example the large rise in heart disease has shot up since the 1920s. There are so many factors which can account for this from our lifestyles to pollution to just the fact that we are living way longer than our ancestors did. At the very least if meat is harmful at all it is very likely to be dwarfed by a cacophony of other things which would have a far more meaningful impact on health. Regarding criticism of Greger there are many, Harriet Hall is probably the best known. No one criticizes the studies he uses just that he omits other studies which do not support his views and that he is clearly a man with an agenda. Another interesting study is a WHO study who reluctantly concluded "A very small inverse association between intake of total fruits and vegetables and cancer risk was observed in this study."

again, me becoming vegan was not a knee-jerk emotional reaction, i was initially decidedly anti-vegan and only switched as the evidence began to pile up.

on the face of it, that WHO study seems to suggest that high fruit and vegetable intake isn't enough to counter the effects of animal product intake. i'd like to know more about the study before i accept those conclusions without context.

regarding the criticism of dr greger, i'm aware of it and looked into it before. the claims are all made without counter-argument, without pointing out the significance of the studies he's purportedly left out. once again, i urge you to watch from table to able and hear what he's discovered.

all i'm asking is that everyone invests time looking into these things, not hanging on to the first things they find that justify not looking into these things. it's one thing to agree that people should make up their own minds, but it's quite another to do so without taking into account the enormous disparity between the knowledge the academics have and the knowledge that's disseminated through the medical community and the financially motivated media.

one of the reasons i keep pushing the presentation, by the way, is because he addresses your concern that the issue isn't settled. the scary thing is that all the academic bodies and even the meat, dairy and poultry industries acknowledge all the evidence, but their responses cross the line of absurdity. sometimes in a humorous way, sometimes not.