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  #1   ^
Old Sat, Jan-01-22, 12:38
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default Veganuary can be bad for your health and the planet

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Veganuary can be bad for your health and the planet

Before you jump on the Veganuary bandwagon, take heed: too much plant-based food can be bad for your health and the planet, as one former advocate discovered


Tim Shieff used to live up to that hoary old gag: “How do you know if someone is vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” Convinced that his new diet, which he adopted for animal welfare reasons in 2012, was making him stronger and healthier, the former champion parkour athlete quickly turned his YouTube channel into a vegan soap box.

Shieff, 33, from Derby, got a lucrative gig as the vegan chef on Jamie Oliver’s YouTube channel. He was on the cover of vegan magazines and competed on the television series Ninja Warrior UK as the “vegan prince” — a poster boy for a burgeoning movement. “I helped birth the wave that is now in every supermarket,” he says.

But all the while he was suffering from joint pain, chronic fatigue and depression. For years he blamed his old diet, which he believed was somehow “still within me”. Then, in a desperate move that went against everything he believed, Shieff bought and ate some eggs and fish.

“I felt almost a veil of depression lift from my mind,” he says. “All these niggling injuries started to recover within a short space of time.”

Shieff’s return to meat and dairy trashed his new career and triggered a vicious backlash. As many lapsed vegan evangelists have discovered, there is a lot of beef on the community’s militant fringes. There were brickbats and death threats. “It got pretty intense,” he says.

His decision also fuelled tensions in and around a grassroots movement that has morphed into a multibillion-pound industry. As Veganuary gathers pace — this year a record 600,000 people worldwide are thought to have signed up to take part in the month-long effort to forgo animal products — an already fraught debate is focusing on the diet’s disputed health and environmental virtues.

“People think they’ve made an entirely positive choice when they give up meat, but the reality is that they’ve been conditioned to believe this by the narrative being promoted by a whole range of vested interests,” says Jayne Buxton, the author The Great Plant-Based Con, due to be published next month. Chief among these interests, she says, “are the corporations that have set out to capture a slice of the very lucrative plant-based processed food market”.

According to the analysts Kantar, one in eight meals we prepare at home is vegan — and we cook 350 million more vegan plates of food annually than we did five years ago. One in five households have at least one vegan, and the market for plant-based alternatives to dairy and meat doubled from £608 million to £1.2 billion between 2017 and 2021.

This leap into the mainstream is evident in supermarket aisles awash with oat milks, almond milks, hemp milks and pea milks, and meat-free bacon, mince, sausages and “squeaky bean vegan pastrami-style sandwich slices”. Sainsbury’s website has more than 4,000 plant-based or vegan products.

It is possible to follow a healthy, well-balanced vegan diet, say others, not least if it means eating more vegetables. The NHS advises vegans to take care to consume essential nutrients including calcium and iron (present in several vegetables, pulses, dried fruits and bread), vitamin D (hello sunshine), vitamin B12 (fortified cereals, soya drinks and Marmite) and omega-3 fatty acids (walnuts and the oils of flaxseed, rapeseed and soya). But what concerns experts is the extent to which it is possible to follow a very unhealthy vegan diet — a fact not always made clear on the virtuously packaged processed products churned out by the big food corporations.

“The perception that plant-based means healthy just doesn’t hold true any longer,” says Sarah Berry, a senior lecturer in nutritional sciences at King’s College London. Wherever food comes from, processing and adulteration reduce its nutritional value. Berry points out that whole, large oats or almonds are much healthier than their ground alternatives because they take longer to digest, extending their nutritional value. Moreover, processed plant-based meat alternatives often contain higher levels of salt.

A growing number of new vegans are changing their diets not to improve their health but to protect the planet. Nearly a quarter of Veganuary’s signatories last year said the environment was the biggest factor in their decision, up from 12 per cent in 2019. “This is really the first year we’ve seen the environment come up like that,” says Toni Vernelli, the campaign’s head of communications.

But the carbon impact of the new veganism, which isn’t enumerated on the back of a packet of plant-based burgers, is also under scrutiny. Cultivated mushrooms, for example, which are the main ingredient in an array of meat alternatives, are grown indoors at high temperatures and emit further CO2 as they grow. Analysis by Michigan University found they produced 3kg of CO2 per kilogram of produce, slightly less than chicken (4.1kg) and the same as saltwater fish.

Almond milk is massively water intensive, while poorly managed soy plantations contribute to deforestation. In 2020, a study by Nottingham University and the Sustainable Food Trust determined that a kilogram of soya beans produces 13 pints of soy milk — but up to 150 pints of dairy milk if fed to a cow. The trust raised eyebrows when it said consumers of soy milk would “do better to switch to milk from cows, especially cows traditionally grazed on grass, if they want to help make a more sustainable planet”.

Vernelli pointed out that the study failed to take into account methane emissions from cattle — or the impact of the dairy industry on the animals. Global livestock as a whole accounts for a hefty 14.5 per cent of all “man-made” greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN. But even if a mainstream shift towards eating more plant-based alternatives represents a net environmental gain, Buxton believes the carbon footprint of meat is routinely overstated by the plant-based movement, which in turn underplays its own footprint. “Giving up meat to save the planet is the ultimate exercise in rearranging deckchairs,” she says.

Debates about the disputed virtues of veganism are as heated as an industrial mushroom farm. Last week, Lord Deben, the chairman of the government’s climate change committee, accused vegan activists of jumping on the climate change bandwagon to further their agenda. “They do it because they have other views about animals, but they have to accept that it is not about climate change,” he said, adding that we need better meat, not an end to livestock. “If everybody were a vegan . . . we wouldn’t have the healthy soil that we need.”

Buxton is forthright in her emailed answers but declines to speak to me by phone for fear of inadvertently “inflaming” an argument that, increasingly, is more than simply an old-fashioned food fight between carnivores and vegans.

Ethical food advocates are sceptical of the food and agriculture corporations piling into veganism. Joanna Blythman, a long-time supporter of organic food and a campaigner against factory farming, has said that vegan evangelists are propping up an ultra-processed food industry that was at last being forced to reckon with the nation’s declining health and expanding waistlines. “Then, just in the nick of time, along comes the vegan-driven, ‘plant food’ army, handing them a ‘Get out of jail free’ card, a chance to recast their industry as saviour of the nation’s health,” she wrote. “And while they’re at it, why not also go for gold and reinvent health-wrecking junk under a new green banner, as rescuing the planet?”

Prominent organisations including Veganuary and the Vegan Society have supported the role of the corporate food giants in the plant-based boom. But the purest vegans share Blythman’s scepticism and have, for example, boycotted Nestlé’s new vegan KitKat, which it launched last year.

As Shieff found, vegan militancy can bite. Even Vernelli, a Canadian-born butcher’s daughter who has been a vegan for more than 30 years, struggles with the judgment and rancour simmering in parts of her community. “Thirty years ago when you told someone you were vegan they thought you were insane,” she says. “Now it’s become really accepted that as a society the amount of meat we eat is unsustainable, but the biggest barrier is this idea that if you can’t be a perfect vegan, there’s no point in doing anything. It’s really holding back progress.”

When Shieff quit veganism, he started to look at the rapidly changing industry very differently. “I’d been buying coconut oil from wherever, and avocados and mangos from Thailand, and then at the farm shop down the road there are eggs from chickens that are eating the worms in the grass,” he says. “I thought: ‘How can this be worse for me or the environment?’ ”

Shieff, whose YouTube channel is now largely devoted to adventures in spiritualism and a form of exercise involving a length of rope (it’s not skipping), experimented with several diets after ditching veganism, including a spell eating nothing but animal products. For the past few months, he has settled on a radical regime that is well balanced yet partly honours his instincts to care for living things. It’s called vegetarianism. Perhaps it’ll catch on.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...tions-8n92ccx5t
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  #2   ^
Old Sun, Jan-02-22, 09:12
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Dodger Dodger is offline
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I do wonder about the vegans that eat highly processed foods that are designed to look and taste like meats.
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Old Mon, Jan-03-22, 10:55
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Nancy LC Nancy LC is offline
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It is less fraught for me to put forth my skepticism about religion than it is to post anything about veganism on my Facebook page.
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  #4   ^
Old Wed, Jan-05-22, 16:29
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WereBear WereBear is online now
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Originally Posted by Nancy LC
It is less fraught for me to put forth my skepticism about religion than it is to post anything about veganism on my Facebook page.


SO true. I am very wary of any fanaticism. They are trying to convince themselves when they do that.
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