Real Wizard -
[b]
"As opposed to the current omnivore diet adhered to by most, which leads to clogged arteries, heart disease, colon cancer and type 2 diabetes?" [/b]
The current omnivore diet you are speaking of is riddled with processed
garbage. Yet vegans single out meat as the culprit behind these
diseases. The current omnivore diet you are speaking about is a far,
far, cry from a healthy omnivorous diet similar to the one we ate for
millions of years.
[b]"And we're talking about
how eliminating meat and dairy from your diet can potentially cause
health problems? I don't mean to be argumentative, but where are our
priorities? "
[/b]
1)You are not being argumentative.
2) I do consider the health of our species a priority and that putting everyone on a vegan diet would be almost disastrous and certainly not optimal.
[b]" But to unequivocally say it's unhealthy and inferior to eating meat
and dairy? There is no factual evidence to support that. "
[/b]
It's inferior to a healthy omnivorous diet. Do you know what a healthy
omnivorous diet is? Or are you just assuming that it's a diet where
people gorge themselves with meat and dairy?
[b]
"Much of what we hear about these diets being healthy is propaganda from the meat and dairy industry." [/b]
And I'm supposed to believe that vegans and the soy industry have nothing to lose?
The emotional investment for vegans can't be discounted.
[b]
"As the number of vegetarians and vegans increase, the propaganda machines are upping their game [/b]
What about the number of ex-vegetarians?
[QUOTE] [b]GratefulFan wrote:[/b]
[QUOTE] [b]mick_g wrote:[/b]
I think it's unethical to eat meat, because it is not something we need to do. We can change it for vegetables, helping both the environment, and feeding the world, and probably we are healthier off as well.
AND the animals don't have to suffer anymore, and have their precious lifes shortened.
and talking about meat eating as a natural thing to do, i wonder how many would continue eating meat, if they had to slaughter the animals themselves, and prepare it... [/QUOTE]
I live in Canada, and when you live in Canada but not in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver it's wonderfully, blessedly difficult to escape the realization that human beings are part of a stunning and sometimes cruelly beautiful natural system with almost unfathomable widsom in it's every breath. And we *are* part of the natural world, not an invasive species as many modern urban philosophs would have it, bad human behaviour notwithstanding. We're not "superior" to the "lower" animals any more than a fox is "superior" to a "lower" rabbit. That is a fallacious indulgence of people who as far as I can tell are projecting a model for sorting things that begins with their own obnoxious and thoroughly misplaced sense of their own superiority. Humans are apex predators, just like lions and grizzlies and crocodiles and where we interact directly with the natural world through activities like hunting humans play a vital role in the health of ecosystems. I don't personally hunt, and never would, but hunters are my family, coworkers and friends. I don't suffer under the kind of delusions that Brian May does about the characters of those who hunt wild game, or inexplicably cast the eating of venison as "frivolous" as has been done here. If anything the deep respect hunters have for the animals they kill is far more profound and reality based than your average badger hugger or self-fascinated vegan.
Agriculture is not strictly predation, and we mostly do it badly right now, but we do it badly in addressable ways. Comparisons have been made here between the treatment and consumption of animals and past treatment of women and black people. We were always wrong to devalue the humanity and potential of anybody based on things like race or gender or class. Always wrong. Deeply wrong. Similarly there is a growing recognition that we have always been wrong where we have failed to adequately see animals as fully sentient beings whose physical, mental and emotional experience is important, particularly when that experience includes drastically reduced quality of life and needless suffering. But that is a completely different concept than whether or not they should be taken for food. When did that become wrong? Certainly it's not wrong when other animals do it. It's wasn't wrong in times past when alternate means to meet nutritional requirements were unknown or otherwise out of reach. Few but the most virulent of animal rights nutcases would argue it's wrong today in remote communities like the Canadian Arctic region where food flown in to already impoverished communities costs anywhere from two to four and more times that of food in downtown Toronto. Of course Brian May would likely tell them to move, like he tells farmers to farm something else, with absolutely no regard for personal history, values or experiences outside his own. Somebody here said it "might" be okay to hunt deer around cities, in some special cases that made sense their head. So consuming animals then does not fit with the absolute moral position of we've come to with regard to things like slavery and inequality. People still want to use it though, taking all the emotional power of the argument and none of the burden of rationality or logic.
Livestock are so much more than just dumb beasts waiting around inertly to be murdered by humans. They are a vital part of sustainable agriculture through their conversion of sunlight to food and their cycling of nutrients back to the land, for example. And they are infinitely valuable just in the wonder of their being, a fact not changed by the fact that their lives do not end naturally. It's a complete arrogance for vegans and vegetarians and militant animal rights people to imagine that they alone have the market cornered on compassion and respect for animals. I guarantee I don't have an ounce less regard for any animal on the planet than any of you, though I convert my own experiences and feelings into different conclusions. The personal rejection of meat eating is a perfectly reasonable response to our human capacity for empathy and compassion, but so is a response of wonder, gratitude, acceptance and humility in the face of a biological reality that death, even our own death, begets life in the almost impenetrably wise and complex natural system we are part of.
Get over yourselves. Really. You're far less important than you think and far less equipped to convert your personal and thus necessarily limited set of experiences and beliefs into a moral panacea for the rest of the world you imagine to be based on any kind of objective truth. It's not. It's completely subjective, and a dangerous type of subjective as it so easily sweeps people and ideas in almost exclusively on the emotional appeal. Witness the sorry state of the UK badger cull debate for a painfully current example.
Nice post Grateful Fan. More needs to be done for animal welfare while they are alive and sometimes to the manner in which they are killed. But that doesn't mean we should feel guilty about using them as a source of food. Once the animal is dead, it doesn't know anything, just like the rest of us.
[QUOTE] [b]Heavenite wrote:[/b]
More needs to be done for animal welfare while they are alive and sometimes to the manner in which they are killed. But that doesn't mean we should feel guilty about using them as a source of food. Once the animal is dead, it doesn't know anything, just like the rest of us.
[/QUOTE]
It's a difficult question. I think guilt is a natural response and perhaps the question is less if we should feel guilty and more if and how that guilt should inform us. Sometimes guilt is a clear signal that we are doing something wrong and that we need to make different choices. Other times it's part of a range of conflicting emotions on competing needs and wants. At its worst it's a bit of a fibber and a thief, a paralytic that can keep us spinning in place escaping reality and needed action or a pied piper leading us to the wrong action. I told a story here previously about a mouse problem in my house that I fruitlessly battled for months if not years with failing humane options. I so wanted to avoid killing them in part to be a role model to my child that I ended up exposing him to the potential for disease and fire for a year. In trying to be a good person I was a bit of a bad parent. Ironic. My actions though initially reasonable and always well intentioned mostly allowed me to avoid difficult feelings and difficult action and keep my self perception intact. For all it's genuine morality it was also self indulgent, which I think is a decent description of a lot of animal rights concepts. Guilt isn't always clarifying.
I recently watched a video titled 'The Good Slaughter': http://vimeo.com/22077752. It's what we all mean I think when we articulate the things we want for animals destined to become our food. It's everything we would like factory farming to be but usually isn't. The animals are respected, the owner of the processing plant clearly cares and has a real connection to the consequences of his livelihood. It was still enormously difficult to watch, the reality challenging to acknowledge. The way we have organized ourselves in society means the vast majority of us are removed from this reality of life and death in food production. Seeing the animals as they were in this video was in some ways harder than seeing them as anonymous clumps of bovine anxiety prodded and herded together towards their deaths as we usually see them. Here they were alone, quiet, mostly unafraid. I was drawn, as most would be, to their eyes. It's that connection that makes them so clearly individuals, and for me the haunting afterburn in the minutes and rituals and efficiences that follow their deaths. We have the capacity to understand that something has been lost, taken. That in whatever capacity, even if a rudimentary one, the lives of those creatures had value to them. Had they been able to anticipate what was coming they would have fought frantically with every muscle cell and neuron to save themselves. In the close up we've traded the future of a valuable individual life for a short, messy, gnashing trip down somebody's digestive track. It's easy to feel guilt, to feel even grief. The bigger picture is harder to reach from down there on the slaughterhouse floor.
Some months ago I read the results of an essay contest in the New York Times that had challenged readers to compose pieces on why it was ethical to eat meat. The winner and finalists chosen by the judging panel are on the left linked from the pink circles here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/the-winner-of-our-contest-on-the-ethics-of-eating-meat.html. They are quick enough and all worth a read. The most popular one as chosen by readers was oddly the one that made me most sad. Perhaps not surprisingly it was by the founder of PETA. It was an argument that ethical meat eating was close because in the future meat would be grown in vitro, bypassing altogether the ethical problems. But if life is the value, and I'd argue that it should be, we will have lost something if we surrender too thoroughly to guilt for our own comfort. In sidestepping the deaths of farmed creatures we also of course lose the benefit of their lives, both to them and the ways in which they shape us as human beings. It's one of the great ironies of the animal rights movement that it is in many ways so blindly anthropocentric and paternal. There is a great, utterly humbling synergistic rhythm to the natural world that is not always kind and not always comfortable. It should inspire awe, humility, gratitude, acceptance, empathy, courage, more. Guilt is but one emotion that like nature needs balance. But it shouts so loud while the others whisper that we have to be very, very careful and thoughtful about guilt.
"The latest myth is that soy lowers your sperm count"
The entire myth runs that soy renders your sperm count irrelevant - once you stink of that shit, no woman is going to fuck you in the first place!
I think the myth making on that one came from the soy industry with their "Real Men Eat Soy" press release in response to the Harvard study that raised the red flag in the first place. Is it not common sense for a man to limit how many times a week he floods his body with what are essentially estrogens in the same way it is common sense to limit red and processed meat consumption, particularly as the science on it remains unclear?
[QUOTE] [b]GratefulFan wrote:[/b]
I think the myth making on that one came from the soy industry with their "Real Men Eat Soy" press release in response to the Harvard study that raised the red flag in the first place. Is it not common sense for a man to limit how many times a week he floods his body with what are essentially estrogens in the same way it is common sense to limit red and processed meat consumption, particularly as the science on it remains unclear?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE] [b]Q NUT wrote:[/b]
[QUOTE] [b]GratefulFan wrote:[/b]
I think the myth making on that one came from the soy industry with their "Real Men Eat Soy" press release in response to the Harvard study that raised the red flag in the first place. Is it not common sense for a man to limit how many times a week he floods his body with what are essentially estrogens in the same way it is common sense to limit red and processed meat consumption, particularly as the science on it remains unclear?[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
Yea but it's more common sense to limit soy intake than red meat intake for a number of reasons.
1) Soy is a relatively new food to the human diet (very new to most) which is why it is one of the top allergenic foods. Meat is not.
2) Long term consumption of soy protein is unknown in the amounts that are recommended. Meat has been consumed for 2+ million years.
3) Experimental studies of soy are inconsistent. Some show negative effects. Number of experiments that show red meat to be harmful - Zero
4) Red Meat is by miles far more nutritious than soy
Vegan's are f*#!ed up? Is that your professional opinion or did you pull that one out your ass? Google Joel Kirkillis (vegan bodybuilder) Robert Cheeke (vegan bodybuilder) Brad Pitt (vegan actor) Carl Lewis (vegan athlete)
No doubt that we are omnivores? So the fact that people flourish (myself included) without consuming animal products (and we don't have the gout, arthritis and cholestral that goes with consuming animal products) is actually "unnatural" in your opinion? Vegans don't need supplements, I have been vegan for 7 years and have not taken ANY supplements. I have been a Queen fan since 1984 and when I heard that Brian was going vegan it was such an amazing feeling to know that one of my idols is also a sensitive and aware individual. Brian May is too intelligent to jump into anything without doing the proper research. If he thought that veganism was "unnatural" or harmful, a man with his intellect would not even entertain the notion. Brian, you have rised even higher in my estimation (didn't think it was possible!!)
Red meat harmful - Zero? You're kidding me right? The consumption of meat renders your system acidic. You do not have the required digestive enzymes to break meat down in your stomach (if you did you would be able to eat it raw) It literally rots in your stomach before it finally moves on. Your body has to leach calcium and phosphate from your bones in order to neatralise the acidity caused by the consumption of meat. And now I'm supposed to believe your "scientific" claim that red meat consumption is not harmful? Ever heard of heart disease? Vegans don't suffer from it. Go and check out why Bill Clinton has also become vegan. You might also want to check out a couple of vegan bodybuilders and athletes who don't need animal products to acquire their protein (Joel Kirkillis, Robert Cheeke, Carl Lewis)
[quote]Ever heard of heart disease? Vegans don't suffer from it[/quote]
Amazing, has anyone told Robin Gibb, long time vegan, who had heart disease, plus a whole bunch of liver problems?
I'm sure he'd be thrilled that he couldn't get it, so would Dick Cheney, his 7 or 8 heart attacks could've never happened.
Typical propoganda, pleased either do some real research or be quiet, you are making all vegans look like idiots. Well planned Vegan diets COULD prevent heart disease, but so can well planned ANY diets, poorly planned vegan diets can lead to it.
It's not a black and white topic. There is little doubt that including meat is the more "natural" diet for humans. Just not too much because it causes inflammation in the body. But in the right amount, it is highly nutritious without causing harm to most people. The Atkins diet lowers LDL (ie bad cholesterol) and improves the ratio of the good form of cholesterol (ie HDL) to LDL by lowering the body's levels of the latter. My total cholesterol went from 5.6 to 3.1 while I was on the Atkins diet.
Doesn't mean it is all plain sailing though, because of meat's effects on inflammation. Inflammation is the process through which our body heals, so in of itself it is a good thing and meat helps with that. However too much inflammation can damage us as well, and that's where the problem lies!
[QUOTE] [b]emrabt wrote:[/b]
[quote]Ever heard of heart disease? Vegans don't suffer from it[/quote]
Amazing, has anyone told Robin Gibb, long time vegan, who had heart disease, plus a whole bunch of liver problems?
I'm sure he'd be thrilled that he couldn't get it, so would Dick Cheney, his 7 or 8 heart attacks never happened.
Typical propoganda, pleased either do some real research or be quiet, you are making all vegans look like idiots. Well planned Vegan diets COULD prevent heart disease, but so can well planned ANY diets, poorly planned vegan diets can lead to it.
[/QUOTE]
Dick Cheney???!!!
Dick Cheney is not a vegan, he might just be the least vegan person to ever have walked the face of the planet. He shot his gamekeeper in the face while shooting quail!
[quote]
Dick Cheney is not a vegan, he might just be the least vegan person to ever have walked the face of the planet. He shot his gamekeeper in the face while shooting quail! [/quote]
That should read "could've" never happen. as in, it was all down to meat.
Oh, haha, that makes a lot more sense.
