Science

I disagree entirely with all your claims including your original. People don't eat vegan because it's healthier, they do it because we treat animals like shit and are killing the planet.

Cattle are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. Source: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable

Beef production cause greenhouse gas emissions through the agricultural production process and through land-use change. Source: https://www.wri.org/insights/6-pressing-questions-about-beef-and-climate-change-answered

Unsustainable dairy farming and feed production can lead to the loss of ecologically important areas, such as prairies, wetlands, and forests. Source: https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/dairy

I won't get into how inhumane the slaughter of animals is but the vast majority of meat bought at your grocery store or chain restaurant was killed in a cruel way. I used to live smack dab in the middle of 3 slaughterhouses and that shit was like a david cronenberg film.

Not to mention the water pollution from the slaughterhouses. Slaughterhouses and animal processing facilities that produce beef, chicken, turkey and other animal products are major water polluters. Source: https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/map-us-slaughterhouses-shows-watershed-level-pollution

Less vegan source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/18/epa-sued-weak-standards-allow-slaughterhouses-pollute-waterways-meat-processing

Even more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8694297/

I eat certain types of meat but let's not kid ourselves into thinking any of it is ethical. Propaganda, all of it.

Well, a vegan diet is indeed less healthy than a balanced diet, but most people who follow such a diet don't do it for health. Farm animals are typically fed monocrops, and they are very inefficient at turning them into meat: eating an animal that fed on plants wastes an order of magnitude more amount of the plant than directly consuming it. They also produce greenhouse gases and contribute to antimicrobial resistance (which is a HUGE problem right now).

So basically everything you say in this entire post is nonsense that you made up with no sources. I left reddit to get away from this blather but I guess the internet is just filled with misinformation to make ourselves feel better huh.

So in my personal experience, I wasn't able to figure out veganism or vegetarianism more until recently, but it still doesn't feel sustainable for me.

I tried a few times and didn't have adequate nutrients, and would feel like I needed meat so would eat it. Lately I realized that mainly in my view vegans and vegetarians replace meat and dairy with beans, rice, legumes, nuts, seeds, etc. - that is basically their "meat". So once I figured this out, at least I feel more able to sustain the diet. I think before I was simply not getting enough protein or complete proteins, because "just don't eat meat or dairy" is vague and doesn't suggest what to eat instead. I have also known vegetarians who had deficiencies.

So lately I've been able to go a few days at a time without meat and it feels ok. I feel my current limit may be like a week while four days feels comfortable.

I also crashed doing this recently when I did some like "lifting" exercise and no matter how much veggie protein I tried to get in, it was feeling inadequate.

It feels like reproduction, physical work (and maybe mental at times), or strenuous exercise require meat.

Otherwise there is a strong tradition of celibates of being vegan or vegetarian; in many lives of saints I keep reading that they vowed to abstain (which means no meat, but might allow dairy or fish) or ate only "vegetables" (which I assume must mean some of the specific proteins I mentioned, likely beans and something, unless they miraculously feasted on something insufficient which is alleged in some cases of saints).

So there is a Western spiritual consideration of avoiding meat for spiritual gains, even if the meat would otherwise nourish the body and give more health and longevity.

Even those who are married or engaged in physical work can tolerate days of abstinence which are obligatory (in Catholic tradition anyway. Orthodox too I think). Other religions like Hindus I think also are vegetarian but they have milk, which definitely can make the diet more sustainable because milk has a lot of nutrients in it that other plants don't give the same amount of.

Yeah so for kids too veganism is unhealthy I think (religiously fasting isn't recommended to a certain age, although maybe abstinence has been spoken of as being ok, I forget).

As far as environmental impact goes, in general I was thinking about this, food seems to be rough on the environment. Because how "green" is growing a bunch of beans? They're probably going to be grown by tractors, requiring all kinds of fuel and factories to produce it. idk how many farms are using animals to plow with - but then that's kind of an "animal" product and not vegan. It almost feels inescapable that animals will be used for food. Or will die when veggies are being harvested. I know a farmer who just ran a deer over the other day while cutting hay (idk if the animal died). But yeah the standard vegan diet is probably pretty harsh on the environment. If they aren't using tractors, then I would be curious what vegans think of using horses and if they use them? What does the ideal vegan diet look like that isn't having a negative environmental impact?

However on the other hand, it does seem to take less resources to make meat at times so they may have a point there. But then this argument goes back and forth because we have enough resources to feed people with meat. So it may use more of the environment but we have more environment that can be made use of.

So anyway I'm comfortably "flexitarian" currently, limiting meat intake. Mostly because it's easier to not cook meat some days or have to clean up as much. That's as far as I feel comfortable going with veganism. I think that's a reasonable compromise.

Note: The author of this post has repeatedly attempted to shift the burden of proof. They provided no evidence for the many broad claims in their original post, yet demands "peer-reviewed" sources from others as a dismissal.

At this point in time (3 days after original post), every claim in the original post has remained unsourced.

Examples of shifting the burden of proof in this thread:

• "Yeah, lots of vegan propaganda there. Blogs are not peer reviewed sources by the way."
• "Gonna need a source for that claim buddy. / edit on your new sources: Those aren’t peer reviewed sources." in reply to a simple denial of an unsourced claim in the original post.
• Deflecting a request for source with anecdote: "All the farms where I live"

Examples in other threads:

• Original post: entire claim is based on an unsourced, incomplete list. Claims "I have sources for this graph" but doesn't post them.

• Dismisses arguments because the user linked to Wikipedia

• Another dismissal of Wikipedia being biased when it was only quoted for summarizing the findings of an academic study

• Original post makes dubious, unsourced claims

• False unsourced claim of Germany's divorce rate increasing since 2002, which incidentally was another questionably cause fallacy.

You say Hong Kong has a higher life expectancy but fail to say that study after study has shown that this is because they largely don't smoke and are economically affluent and therefore not subject to diseases of poverty. The correlation of them being meat eaters is not the cause of their longevity.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468266721002085#:~:text=Hong%20Kong's%20leading%20longevity%20is,development%20contributed%20to%20this%20achievement.

https://borgenproject.org/life-expectancy-in-hong-kong/

You say that heme iron is found only in meat as if we need it but iron from any source will give you your nutritional needs. Every Hindu on the planet has somehow survived without eating meat so it's weird to represent heme-iron as if it's somehow superior. Easier to absorb, yes, but also might give you colon cancer so it's kind of a mixed bag.

https://www.foodnerdinc.com/blogs/food-for-thought/iron

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/iron/

At this point in time, I agree that raising children on a poorly-planned vegan diet is unethical, in the same way that raising them on any other unbalanced diet is (there is a similar problem, at least in parts of the US but easily possibly elsewhere, of children raised on highly-processed foods with high-fat high-sugar and high-sodium (you get the point) and with little-to-no fruit or vegetables beyond potato chips and tomato sauces).

I honestly don't know if a well-planned vegan diet is adequate for children. My very quick review of recent academic literature had conflicting claims on whether a well-planned vegan diet could be effective. Ultimately, I would base my answer of 'unhealthy/destructive to young children' on a food science consensus and I'm not confident there is one.

Regardless, there's some pretty broken arguments in the original post, including the descriptor 'evil' (what does that even mean in this context? malicious?) and the appeal to 'natural' as a positive argument in itself. Pasteurizing milk isn't natural.

Vegan farming is unsustainable. Animals naturally help the soil become more nutritious.

Vegan doesn't mean animals don't exist, and theoretically they should be a part of the environment. If it were run by pro-animal vegans rather than merely for vegans, I would expect some kind of permaculture including animals. Also, I'm guessing there are industrial work-around like packaged fertilizer if that's the implication.

Vegan foods are terrible for the environment. Mass produced mono crops destroy the soil.

Are you implying that mono animal farming is any better for the soil?

Take a iron deficient person and give them plant iron and it will be weeks to never before their iron returns. Feed them a liver and see it spike up in a day. The same can be said of vitamin A and many other vitamins

Is this meant to be an argument? The point is to plan a diet to not be iron deficient in the first place! Prevention > Cure

Every “Vegan” body builder got their start on whey protein.

Is this meant to be an argument? Most people aren't aiming to be body builders, which is in fact an unhealthy, unnatural and destructive lifestyle itself. Also, [dubious claim, citation needed]

Hong Kong has one of the highest life expectancies on earth and one of the highest meat consumption rates on earth.

Correlation ≠ Causation. One country doesn't form a trend. USA has a life expectancy of around 50th in the world. Brazil are around 55th. Argentina are around 65th. Samoa is around 115th. These are all nations that top the charts of estimated meat consumption per capita, USA by far.

Hong Kong has other social reasons for a high life expectancy. I really don't think you can chalk it up to 'more meat'. Take, for instance, their universal health care, safe streets, public transport & walk-ability, good weather, varied diet. Diet plays a role but evidently increased meat consumption doesn't make a nations suddenly live the longest. It's a very dumb argument and you should reconsider any source that you read that implied it was a good argument.

Furthermore, meat consumption is often associated with wealth, as it's generally more expensive, and people with wealth have more opportunity to be healthy.