https://www.theguardian.com/food/20...iggest-champion

I read somewhere that the usual pattern is for a vegan to give up and add increasing amounts of animal products to their diet starting 1-2 years from beginning the diet. A year after that, they have returned to being an omnivore.

I've now become actively hostile to the movement in a way I never felt towards vegetarians. The staggering amounts of water in those "nut milks," the pesticides and herbicides of agriculture, and the miniscule impact they have, as non-consumers, on the humane animal movement; all makes them sanctimonious liars.

If they ever actually thought about it, they would realize they make no sense. The irony is most of them think they are helping the environment, when they have merely fallen for propaganda from corporate food concerns.

The good-looking social media Influencers -- many of whom have been caught eating non-Vegan -- are more persuasive than science. Which is outright dangerous.

Thing is, they are such devoted fanatics they give death threats to people who rip the lid off. I remember 5-6 such vegans over the years, one who even wrote a cookbook, who tried to go public about the effect on their health.

Sites and blogs all taken down from vegan lobby pressure.

I have a vegetarian friend
her rationale?
"I don't want to eat anything with a face on it"

I know I often bring up the types of people I would come in contact with when I worked in a grocery store, but here I go again.



There was this one guy who came in daily buying large quantities of things like wheat gluten, almond milk, almond flour, oats, sweet potatoes, etc, but never any animal products at all.


I eventually found out that he and his wife ran a vegan restaurant. He often wore a T-shirt that said "Not bad for a vegan". So many vegans are either puffy and pudgy from all the carbs, or they're bone thin with no muscle due to lack of protein. But this guy had muscle, lots of it, and wasn't the least bit puffy or pudgy anywhere.



I always wondered how he could possibly look like that and be a vegan. I eventually decided that he must actually be a closet meat eater, and was only pretending to be a vegan to promote his vegan restaurant. I just can't see any other way that he could have maintained that form all the years that he was a regular customer.

I'm not seeing any faces on those.

Keep doing it, Calianna! This is how science should start: continuous, informed, observation I always find your insights interesting.



Those vegans who "came out" and told people their doctor told them they had to eat meat? I think it's Lierre Keith's book which states they all eat salmon, at the very least. Go ahead, be a proud Pescatarian. But that would blow up the propaganda: which we now know comes from the Seventh Day Adventists. They were behind suing Dr. Noakes in South Africa.

And okay, do whatever YOU want. But making the rest of us fall in line by lying to us? That's not right.

No, Caliana. But before they became steak they were cows. And cows have faces.

Sometimes I think about all the lives that have been slaughtered so that I could have protein

but it is such an uncomfortable image
I quickly try to distract myself

I have teeth of an omnivore, an alimentary canal of an omnivore, digestive enzymes of an omnivore, and dietary needs of an omnivore.

So do vegans. They may choose to eat like herbivores, but they are still omnivores.

Plants are difficult to digest. Some herbivores have several stomachs and ferment their food before swallowing, some eat their own feces to run the food through a second time, and some have extraordinarily long alimentary canals so the food stays in the digestive juices for a long time. I have one stomach, a short alimentary canal, and I am not about to eat my own feces.

I figure that for optimum health, I should honor my body and be an omnivore.

There are 7 nutrients that vegans cannot get https://www.healthline.com/nutritio...?c=983285870264

I don't think a vegan diet is a healthy diet. What I'm doing is working fine for me. I'm 75 years old, on zero prescriptions, almost never get sick (I think I've had one short cold in the last 15 years), and a heart doctor said I have a circulatory system of a healthy 50 year old.

I am a picky eater. Low carb, high fat, moderate protein. There are a lot of foods that fit my WOE but I simply do not like the taste of, so I avoid them.

I have no problems with vegans or vegetarians, unless they are militant or proselytizing about it. They are just being picky eaters too.

My wife and I have a couple of good friends who are vegans, and when we go out to eat, we choose a restaurant where we can all get something we like. I've never asked them why they are vegans, and I don't care.

Do unto others. I don't try to force my diet on anyone else, don't try to force your diet on me.

Bob

I give thanks to those animals I eat. And when I slaughter a bird for eating, I say thank you. It's humbling.

Over the years,I came to realize most vegetables died for me to eat ,too. Perhaps that is why I was the taught to say grace before a meal, to be thankful for my food. Only these days, I say it to the animal....and the plant.

Our level of discomfort varies person to person. There was a time I didn't think about my food at all...just buy , make a meal, then eat it. Only when I started producing my own lamb, did I start down this journey of appreciation. And it took years. Years.

I now see every plant as valuable. And don't pull a weed without thinking about it's value. Everything has a purpose.

I eat meat and plants. Some people do well on just plants. Others do not. Some do well on just meats. Others do not. Most of us do best on plant and animal protein. Both.

( I do have great concern for contaminates on our veg, fruits and gra ins. Which then concentrates in our meats.)

Sure, we slaughter animals just to eat.

For our domesticated animals, we also give them life. I don't think we'd have herds of cattle munching grass on the grasslands of farms if we didn't intend to eventually eat them.

They never would have been born. So rather than thinking I took their lives to eat, I think I gave them life.

There are a lot of ranches in Florida. I see herds of cattle living a carefree life with no predators until we humans, the final predator take their lives for our sustenance.

Most modern facilities take their lives quickly and much more humanely than a lion on their back.

Like Ms. Arielle, I too thank them before I dig in. I know that they don't hear me, but it keeps me aware of the connection.

Life lives off life. When I'm gone, if I'm not consumed in a fire, something will eat me, whether it's the smallest microbes or a larger entity.

Actually, I'd like to be 'buried at sea', so my body can become food for other living creatures like crabs and fish, and not be wasted in a fire that does nothing but adds air pollution. If that can't be done, bury me under a tree with no casket so the soil building animals can make some use of my protein. I'll be done with my body, let it give life to something else.

What I don't eat are animals that I think are tortured before slaughter. Lobsters that are caught and put in tanks with their claws bound shut to me are treated cruelly. I don't eat them. Chickens grown in small cages? I don't eat chicken. Farmed fish the same for me. Even the eggs I eat are pasture raised.

There is no right or wrong way, this is just my personal way.

Also, if it weren't for omnivores and carnivores, the herbivores would have stripped this planet clean of all vegetation before humans evolved and there would be no life at all.

Think of the Galapagos island and the marine iguana. The marine iguana used to be land based, but with no predators on their island, they ate themselves out of house and home.

So they turned to the sea for food. Pretty soon all the easy to eat seaweed was consumed too so the iguanas had to dive deeper and deeper into the cold water to get a bite.

They hold their breath, dive deep into the water, take a bite, surface, and sit on a rock to warm their cold blooded bodies back up. If they don't they will die on the next dive.

And the iguanas who can't hold their breath long enough to get food will starve to death. The ones who are too sensitive to the cold water will freeze to death. Carnivores and omnivores are important to the balance of the closed system we call Earth.

Bob

Very well put, Bob! Thank you. You mirror my own approach, where I also avoid chicken, buy local, pasture-raised, eggs, and otherwise take steps to invest in humane food sources.

In the book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith, she tells how she planted a garden and found herself at war with garden slugs. She spent backbreaking hours collecting them by hand, and then killing them with relocation. She discovered she had to put fertilizer with bone and blood meal on her plants or they wouldn't live.

We can't avoid the cycle of life. It's a fantasy to think we can. What we can avoid is cruelty.

That will actually work.

I don't check in here nearly often enough, so I'm just now seeing this.



Of course all the meat in the grocery store came from an animal, which means it had a face at one point. But how often does a vegan ever see those faces? They don't. All they're seeing is the nutritious meat, and rejecting it because it came from a creature that had a face.



If having a face is the deciding factor, then perhaps vegans should start eating worms, since worms have no face, but do have nutrients found in animal products. I can't seem to find a full list of nutrients found in earthworms (Do they have B12 or not? my googling skills aren't up to the task of finding out that information), but it only stands to reason that worms would have at least some of the nutrients lacking in a vegan diet. And no faces at any point in their existence to make the vegan squeamish about eating them, assuming they can get around the idea of eating worms.


Of course worms do have a mouth, which is how they eat dirt, so that may be enough to dissuade vegans from eating worms too.

I think veganism is an appeal to emotions and ideals: which are good things until they get twisted out of shape.

The problem is that it has becomes a belief system crafted with fantasy. No good comes from that.

Veganism has become like a religion to many. Like religions, they are fine with me unless someone tries to convince me to give up my beliefs and adopt theirs.

So if someone wants to be a vegan, I have no problem. If they start proselytizing, it becomes a problem for me.

Outside of this forum, I don't promote keto. I do it here, because it is the appropriate place to do so.

If someone asks how I keep my weight down, I will tell them keto, and if they ask for more info, I'll explain.

But that's it.

Bob