I’m breaking this down into the 3 main categories—Environmental, Animal Rights, and Health. (The 3 mainstays of vegan philosophy). I’ll try to be as organized as I can be. And as simple. However, this is still a very long article—Because the issue is anything but simple. Veganism tries to take an immensely layered and complex modern problem and simplify it to one axiom: No animal products. Its naïve simplicity is what fails it—So I’ll try not to be TOO simple.
Why I’m writing this: The first reason is obviously a response to veganism and to vegan agendas. I have vegan friends close to me who are sick and slowly killing themselves for a cause that isn’t even working. This is terrifying to me, because I myself know personally how involved one gets with their vegan diet, and how hard it is to get out of it.
In short, “greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago”. Read that again. Worse than the worst case scenario. This is a big problem, especially for those of us who have children. We’re in deep shit, and I’ve been saying this since I was 13 years old and although I’ve seen some improvement since 1999, and at least acknowledgement, we’re still in deeper shit than ever.
We’re 5 billion people past our carrying capacity as a species. Right now we’re living off fossil fuels. When the fuels run out, there will be mass death tolls across the entire world. In the billions, within the next hundred years. This is not a joke, or a crazy idea, or an exaggeration. This is the fact of the matter, and what happens to all animals that overshoot their carrying capacity.
1. ENVIRONMENTAL-
Why agriculture is destroying the environment:
a. Topsoil. Agriculture depletes topsoil. The mass monocrop farming (agribusiness) of America has gotten rid of our topsoil completely. Topsoil is now gone in most American farm soil, and we require the use of synthetic soil and chemical fertilizers to grow the food, which is empty of nutrients because there’s no real soil. (Which is problematic for vegans who rely on these plant sources to have nutrients. And in general rely heavily, or mostly, on agriculture for the entirety of their diets). What builds soil is animals. Insects, birds, ruminants. Agriculture kills it. Agriculture wipes out all form of life, right down to the dirt, in order to grow one species of plant. This is environmental genocide.
We acknowledge that fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource, but we don’t consider topsoil to be. However, Steven Stoll explains:
“Lost soil is unrecoverable, and the pace of its formation is so slow that the end product must be considered nonrenewable. ..In the 1930s land not cultivated since 1887 was examined. Under the pine crowns… researchers found 50 years of accumulated topsoil 1/16 of an inch deep. At that rate of creation the pines would see their first inch in 800 years, their first foot in 9,600 years—the age of Agriculture itself.”
We need a diet and lifestyle again that is NOT dependent on agriculture. That does not kill our topsoil. I’ll explain.
"The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself" -Roosevelt, 1937
Sustainable ways to grow plant food (and animal food) can be done through pasture-raising, perennial polyculture, and permaculture.
These farming constructs take full advantage of symbiotic, complementary relationships between plant and animal species.
Permaculture definition:
The development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient.
Franklin Hiram King coined the term
permanent agriculture in his classic book from 1911,
Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. In this context, permanent agriculture is understood as agriculture that can be sustained indefinitely.
The BBC documentary
“Farm for the Future” explains in simplest terms how permaculture works, and shows permaculture farms in action. I highly recommend watching it.
Permaculture on an organic farm on the Swabian Mountains in Germany
It gets rid of the idea of “war on nature” that agriculture has in its endless battle to kill off weeds, kill of insects, kill off rodents, kill off EVERYTHING but the god damn crop they’re trying to conceive on a massive scale.
Even organic agriculture is bad for the soil. Especially on the scale it takes to feed billions of people.
Animals build topsoil through their excrement, but also in their eating of grasses. Ruminants such as cows, bison, etc. as well as chickens and all birds nourish the soil while they’re eating, and strengthen the grasses.
“When you graze tall grass, cattle cut it short. Then the plant doesn’t need a long root mass so it sloughs off the deep root system. Repeated cycles of this builds organic matter deep in the soil and increases it on top. The high organic matter allows the soil to better soak up rainwater and prevent erosion. It’s also more productive.” –Francis Thicke
A good resource on backyard, small-scale permaculture is Toby Hemenway’s
Gaia Garden: Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
Vegan permaculture is possible and is the only way really that veganism is somewhat sustainable for the environment, although it isn’t as efficient and effective as having some animals as well since their fertilizer is needed to enrich the soil. It is a semi- realistic possibility. (I say semi because long-term Veganism is not realistic, and you really do need the chickens around as natural pest control. And you need to build topsoil through their excrement. And humans can't survive on a vegan diet.)
Perennial polyculture was proposed by Wes Jackson in 1978. It basically means that in a field, instead of having one crop, you intersperse several different crops within the same field. This is closer to the state of nature than traditional agriculture. It also involves using perennials instead of annuals, which don’t have to be replanted every year, leading to soil erosion. Annual monocrops strip the soil each year of its nutrients, and need to be tilled and re-seeded every year. Perennial plants are more sustainable.
b.
Another endangered entity due to Industrial Agriculture is phosphorus. Peak oil is one thing, and peak phosphorous another. “Physicist Patrick Déry estimates that U.S. “peak phosphorus” occurred in 1988 and for the world in 1989.” (“Peak Phosphorous”
http://eartheasy.com/blog/2009/01/peak-phosphorus/)
“Instead of supporting farmers.. the government began supporting corn at the expense of farmers.”
–Michael Pollen
c. Pasture-fed. This is the second most important thing, and it belongs equally in environmental and animal-rights categories. Cows, sheep, goats, and chickens should never, ever be put in factory farms, for obvious reasons that most people know about now. They need to be outside, eating their natural diets (grass, insects, rodents etc). We all know corn/soy/wheat makes these animals sick. (Except chickens and pigs, who eat just about everything).
As stated above, letting cattle graze on grass builds topsoil, and a good root system. The BBC documentary
“A Farm for the Future” goes further into the importance of good grasses and their role in topsoil protection.
Vegans always assume I am for factory farming when they find out I eat meat again, and they constantly use that convention, as if it’s the only way to raise animals. Ignoring the 10,000 year old way of life in which animals lived on pastures, and in small-forested land. Eating and living their lives until they became food. To vegans, only CAFO’s exist. Not the natural order of things.
Video on Polyface Farm, the most well-known sustainable farm in the US. It's a little cheesy but brings up good points and important aspects of sustainable farming.
Chickens at Polyface Farm
In addition to being the morally correct way to raise food animals, cows walking to grass is much more “efficient and economical than mechanically harvesting forage and transporting it to the cows.” This in turn saves environmental costs of mass agriculture, and the oil needed to plant, harvest, process, ship, etc to the factory farms, or elsewhere.
d. Pesticide/Herbicide use.
Considered mandatory on many Industrial farms that produce mass amounts of produce. These chemicals kill, harm and poison many species of animal, insect and bacterial life, so it’s important that vegans try and eat only organic, perennial polyculture, and vegan permaculture-based foods. Otherwise the foods aren’t vegan.
Genital feminization of male humans and animals: the industrial pesticides used in agriculture are among the class of chemicals that mimic or stimulates estrogenic activity in the body and are linked, or suspected of being linked, to decreased sperm counts and genital abnormalities in male animals up and down the food chain.
Herbicides linked to cancer, neurological disorders: Nanaimo, British Columbia, has recently banned the use of herbicides on residential lawns based on the growing body of evidence that they're linked to a host of cancers, reproductive problems, respiratory illness and neurological effects from learning disorders to full-blown Parkinson's disease. The herbicides used on lawns are often just repackaged versions of the same chemicals, like Roundup, sold in bulk to farmers. (http://news.change.org/stories/4-reasons-why-modern-agriculture-is-bad-for-you)
e. Fuel cost. Mainstream Veganism --and all mainstream diets-- require much more oil and gas than necessary in the production and shipment of products. The first being the fuel cost of agriculture, everything is done by machine, from plowing, planting, spraying fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Then harvesting, shipping.
Most modern vegan food requires quite a bit of processing in order to be sold and consumed. From processed tofu you get in containers to fake meats, (which are basically as disgusting to put into your body as junk foods like cheetos or a trip to McDonalds) processed cereal flakes, protein powders, protein bars, pastas, and the many prepared frozen food items are no better for the person or the environment than conventional SAD (Standard American Diet) foods. And require just as much processing.
f. Big Corporations. Many staple vegan food companies are actually owned by larger, much more sinister corporations that are destroying the earth. Let’s run through the list:
1. Dean Foods owns White Wave/Silk. The main shareholders of Dean Foods are Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Exxon/Mobile, GE, Home Depot, Phizer, Phillip Morris and Walmart.
2. Litelife is owned by ConAgra.
3. Hain Food Group owns Bearitos, Bread Shop, Celestial Seasonings, Garden of Eatin’, Health Valley, Imagine Foods (Rice Dream), Terra Chips, and Westbrae.
4. Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen are both owned by Small Planet Foods, which is owned by General Mills. And General Mills is owned by: Alcoa Aluminum, Chevron, Disney, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon/Mobile, GE, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Nike, Pepsico, Philip Morris, Starbucks, Target, and Texas Instruments.
5. Coca Cola owns Fresh Samantha and Odwalla Juice.
6. Philip Morris owns Kraft Foods which owns Boca Burgers
7. Nestle owns Arrowhead Water and Poland Spring Water
Vegans should know this--- practically every vegan product bought is supporting the fucking Voldemort’s of the Industrial World.
2. ANIMAL RIGHTS-
a. Animal death. Agriculture today requires the use of heavy machinery and equipment, as well as the spraying of pesticides that make animals sick and kill smaller life forms. The machinery used in tilling, planting, spraying and harvesting literally runs over animals trying to live in the depleted fields (and perhaps munch on some spinach). Resulting in agricultural roadkill. Mice, voles, rabbits, groundhogs, and all types of rodents and small animals are just plowed over during the above processes. Sometimes even larger animals like foxes and baby deer are maimed or killed in the process but it’s mostly animals that literally live in the soil.
This is something I have a huge problem with, because the accidental killing of animals during harvest, just like roadkill, is a massively wasteful and growing problem within the U.S. and other developed countries. I think killing something in order to obtain your corn, wheat and soy is a hundred times more reprehensible than killing it in order to eat it. Veg*ns for some reason don’t agree with this. They think they’re saving so many animals by not eating them directly, that the secret, un-talked about killing of them in the harvesting of their food is a non-issue. Well I’m telling you: IT’S AN ISSUE. And another consequence of agriculture in general, especially on a mass scale. Farmers are also guilty of shooting deer and other animals they see eating their crops. Though hopefully they eat them afterward.
b. Animal Rights again raises the issue of Pasture Raising our food animals. (see above) They have the right to live on the earth and eat the grass and insects they evolved to. When I was a vegan, one of my main goals was to get farm animals back onto farms, and out of factories. This is still one of my main goals now that I’m not vegan.
And now that I’ve studied the subject more in depth than I did when I was 15, I discovered that pasture-grazing is good for the soil, good for the grasses, good for the animals, and good for me. And although only two-thirds of the earth can be used for agriculture, the vast majority of it can be used by animals to graze and live on.
I never understood what vegans who don’t "believe" in eating animals intended to do with farm animals? The vegans who want everyone on earth to be vegan. You can’t just release them into the wild. Do they want to kill off (let go extinct) the species of animals that were domesticated? How is that right? How is that any better than killing them for food? Killing off whole species of animals? Like genocide. No. Let’s get our farm animals back where they belong and treat them right before we eat them: PUT THEM ON FARMS. Let’s not attempt to set them free, or live alongside them as friends only, or let them go extinct. Let’s put them back on farms.
c. Eating animals. I’m not going to get too into the philosophy of ‘eating meat is wrong’ because that’s a debate I consider to be especially unrealistic. And arbitrary and personal. But if you want my opinion, I’ve come to realize this is a child-like way of viewing the world. Life involves death, and humans can’t live and reproduce without eating meat, for a million health reasons listed below (please see Health section below). Same with cats and dogs who are made to be ‘vegan’. It makes them sick. They’re not “wrong” to eat meat. It’s just life. Life sucks, or you adapt.
Since I never intended to make the whole world vegan, and never thought eating meat was wrong (except from factory farms), maybe that was easier for me to switch back over to eating it. I can see how it would be more difficult for someone who believes that eating animals (although intrinsic and essential to nature) is wrong, to start eating it again. But I don’t think sentimentalizing nature gets anyone anywhere.
Veg Myth: Land being used to pasture-feed animals should be used in the agricultural production of grains to feed humans in Third World countries.
Answer: Ok this gets kind of complex and long. First—This solution is not sustainable, does not work and quite frankly, is again a really simple, naïve, wishful way of thinking; that just is not how the world works.
1. We know now that agriculture is wasteful and unsustainable. Although vegan groups like Britain’s VegFam claim “A 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 wheat, 10 people growing corn; but only 2 producing cattle.” –Jim Motavalli
However, this diet of soy, wheat or corn will result in “massive malnutrition along with …kwashiorkor, pellagra, retardation, blindness—and ultimately death. The figure of two cattle might be true if you assume grain feeding. …By contrast, a 10-acre farm of polyculture …would produce:
-3,000 eggs
-1,000 broilers
-80 stewing hens
-2,000 lbs of beef
-2,500 lbs of pork
-100 turkeys
-50 rabbits
Not to mention a few inches of topsoil.” –Lierre Keith The Vegetarian Myth and Michael Pollen, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Also take into consideration the vast amounts of nutritious organ meats, and how much bone broth you could make with all that food. These are foods that nourish, not soy, wheat and corn. Also, you’re getting leather that can be worn, and egg shells than can be ground and taken as calcium supplements (instead of buying packaged, shipped and wasteful calcium supplements from the store). Or the shells can go right back to the chickens themselves, who will eat them and assimilate the calcium.
2. Two-thirds of the earth is utterly unsuited to agriculture. That’s a lot of land that could be put to use with pasture feeding and permaculture. For example, New England. Cows grow here, and deer. Not corn, wheat and soy. Eat within your bioregion.
3. These veg*n claims are all based around factory-farming statistics. When they say “a pound of wheat can be grown with 60 lbs of water, whereas a pound of meat requires 2,500 to 6,000 lbs” they’re talking about CAFO cows fed grain.
“On pasture, cattle will drink 8-15 gallons of water a day. The average pasture-raised steer takes 21 months to reach a market weight. That’s 630 days, at 8 lbs a gallon, for a total of anywhere between 40,320-75,600 lbs of water for an entire cow. That’s 450-500 lbs of meat, with another 146 lbs of fat and bone trimmed off, [food in my book]. Taking the mean of 475 lbs, the midpoint of 57,960 gallons yields a figure of 122 lbs of water per pound of meat.” –Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth
That’s a bit of a difference to the veg*n estimate of 2,500-6,000 per pound of CAFO cows. In addition, much of that water a pasture-fed cow is ingesting is returned to the earth via its urine and excrement (fertilizer). In factory farms, this is not so.
However, cows aren’t meant to be raised everywhere—They require regions like New England that have a lot of water. Pasture animals more suited to arid climates include buffalo, bighorn sheep, and camels.
4. Once fossil fuel runs out, so do the grains. Then what for the starving children in Africa? And us?
5. There are no international aid agencies that suggest vegetarianism as a solution to world hunger. None. Because it isn’t one.
6. Economical reasons. Forcing our grains on other countries harms those countries. Please consider the following by former Canadian Minister of Agriculture, Lyle Vandyke:
“Consider a farmer in Ghana who used to be able to make a living growing rice. Several years ago, Ghana was able to feed [itself] and export their surplus. Now, it imports rice. From where? Developed countries. Why? Because it’s cheaper. Even if it costs the rice producers in the developed world much more to produce the rice, he doesn’t have to make a profit from his crop. The government pays him to grow it, so he can sell it more cheaply to Ghana than the farmer in Ghana can. And that farmer in Ghana? He can’t feed his family anymore.”
If you want to help people in third world countries, go through companies like Heifer (
www.heifer.org) and get them a goat, or a cow, or whatever animals are meant to live in their region. These create a local production of food for the people indigenous to eat and/or sell. And it’s sustainable. And as I’ll explain later in this article, much more nutrient-dense and efficient. From Heifer’s website:
“With gifts of livestock and training, Heifer projects help families improve their nutrition and generate income in sustainable ways. We refer to the animals as "living loans" because in exchange for their livestock and training, families agree to give one of its animal's offspring to another family in need. It's called Passing on the Gift – a cornerstone of our mission that creates an ever-expanding network of hope and peace.”
Lierre Keith, in her book The Vegetarian Myth writes:
“Why should people in Cambodia be dependent on the U.S. for their basic sustenance? It condemns them to participating in a market economy where they will have to dedicate their labor and local resources to produce raw materials like timber and metal ore, or cheap consumer goods like sneakers or computer chips, for rich nations. With the pennies they get in return, they will then have to buy food from the same rich nations… This is a destructive, inhumane, and oppressive arrangement.”
This was once called Imperialism. Now it’s called Globalization.
3. HEALTH
“We have invented nothing in 12,000 years”
–Picasso in reference to cave paintings at Lascaux
a. Meat-eating background. The 20,000+ year old paintings found across Europe, such as the ones in Lascaux (pictured above), or the ones at Chauvet Cave in Werner Herzog’s recent documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” are definitive, beautiful, factual, and tangible evidence that we as a species consisted and depended upon hunting and meat-eating for a significant portion of our diets.
Notably, the paintings contain no images of the surrounding landscape or the vegetation of the time. The Hunt clearly was an enormous part of life for these people. And evidence of animal bones and tools to kill/butcher are still evident in the caves as well. Thousands of years old.
“In anthropological scientific circles, there’s absolutely no debate about it--- every respected authority will confirm that we were hunters…
Our meat-eating heritage… is an inescapable fact.”
–Dr. Michael Eades
A spear tip, about 16” long, carved of yew wood was found in 1911 in Clacton, England. It is somewhere between 360,000 to 420,000 years old.
Another spear, almost 8 feet long, was 120,000 years old. It was found amid the ribs of an extinct elephant in Lehringer, Germany in 1948.
For many years it had been believed that systematic big-game hunting did not occur until the appearance of fully modern humans around 40,000 years ago. Previously it was believed that only scavenging by carnivores and hominids had taken place. The more recent findings at Lehringer, Clacton, Shoningen and others refute this hypothesis, and show we were hunting far before we even became human.
Food for Thought: Meat and fish contain approximately 100 times more nutrients (vitamins, fats, minerals, amino acids, etc) than that of plant matter.
And organ meats (offal) contain approximately 100 times more nutrients than meat (the muscle part of the animal).
I had someone ask me recently “what’s so nutritious about dead animal flesh??” and I actually got embarrassed by her question. Not only for the amount of ignorance and misinformation (and loss of our ancestor’s knowledge) within it, but also because at one point as a teenager I was asking the same question. It’s embarrassing... for our culture to be this ignorant. So I will explain!
Animal products (including dairy and eggs) are a highly concentrated form of nutrition. That is why we eat them. That’s why we kill for meat, because it’s so valuable.
Our primitive ancestors subsisted on a diet composed largely of meat and fat, augmented with vegetables, nuts, fruit and seeds. Studies of their remains reveal that they had excellent bone structure, heavy musculature and flawless teeth. Agricultural man added milk, grains and legumes. “[These foods] allowed him to pursue a more [profitable] lifestyle than the hunter-gatherers, but at a price.” –Sally Fallon, ‘Nourishing Traditions’
From Walter L. Voegtlin, M.D.’s 1998 book The Stone Age Diet: Based on In-Depth Studies of Human Ecology and the Diet of Man
CEREAL GRAINS ARE BAD FOR YOU
b. Grains. So fast-forward a few thousand years. Tribes of humans switch over to agricultural living. Patriarchy is formed in order to keep track of “What is mine and what is yours”, to draw borders, keep land to farm, and to delineate the idea of “wife” and “children”. And civilization was created. (Hunter-gatherers lived mostly Matriarchal, polygamous and promiscuous lifestyles in which a whole tribe slept within (and around..), hunted with, and raised children together).
We’re now eating foods that didn’t even exist until a few thousand years ago. The list of “the diseases of civilization” goes on and on: arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, celiac, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia, cancer. Diseases not known to have existed and that still don’t exist in hunter-gatherer societies today. (For ex: The Inuit, the traditional Masai, traditional Mosuo…)
Not to mention our bad teeth, bad eyesight, and lower IQ’s in general.
Indigenous peoples who ate traditional foods, and their fantastic teeth
Nutrition and Physcial Degeneration published in 1939 by Dr. Weston Price is an in-depth, decades-long study of isolated populations on native diets and the disastrous effects processed foods and commercial farming methods had on human health. “Dr. Price’s findings have as much relevance today as they did 60 years ago.” The book includes about a hundred photographs he took on his trips around the world to study cultures LITERALLY right before (or as) global trade reached them. His work is invaluable to this day because in the 1930’s indigenous people all over the world were being bombarded by Westerner’s way of life, and within 10-20 years most of them would be gone. Today, these cultures dont exist as they did traditionally beside the Inuit and some Masai.
The foods that Dr Price found to be costing these people their health were agricultural products: Wheat, flour, sugars, and processed foods like canned vegetables.
^Swiss children who ate a traditional diet and had good teeth and nice facial bone structure
Swiss children who ate modern foods (flours, sugars) and had bad teeth and less proportionate faces
Tahitians on their traditional diet
^Modernized Tahitians after they started to eat globalized foods (wheat flour, sugar)
The images really do speak a thousand words. The foods of modern man destroyed these people. The main reason for suicide that Dr. Price came across during his travels was over tooth decay and the mind-destroying pain of it. In the cultures that did NOT willingly switch over to agriculture and global foods there was practically NO tooth decay found. Or if present, very minimal.
Also, NONE of the healthy people he studied were vegetarians. And of course none were vegan. Although Price specifically looked for indigenous groups that achieved perfect health on plant foods only. He wrote: “It is significant that I have as yet found no group that was building and maintaining good bodies exclusively on plant foods. A number of groups are endeavoring to do so with marked evidence of failure”
The photos above show the superb dentition and facial development of people living on nutrient-dense foods. What he noticed over and over again was that these people were beautiful. They had no deformities. No one was ugly. Everyone’s faces and bodies were proportional, their teeth fitting perfectly in their mouths. Their skin flawless. Acne did not exist among the healthy cultures. I can’t say this about most Americans. How many of us have had braces? Wisdom teeth that don’t fit? Have had cavities? Have noses too narrow for us to breathe properly with? (known as “mouth breathers”)Have disproportionate faces?
Across the board, when Price asked the people why they ate what they did, their answer in every culture was “to make perfect babies”.
“Dr Price’s research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient dense whole foods and vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.” –Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions
Dr. Price also discovered vit K through his research of traditional foods. He brought them home into the lab and discovered something he referred to as the “X” factor found mainly in rich, grass-fed butter oils—later dubbed vit K.
FAT!
“True vitamin A occurs only in foods of animal origin, and requires fat for absorption.” –Mary Enig, PhD. Know Your Fats p 71
c.
Fat is good. The role of good fats in the human diet has been downplayed a lot in the past few decades. Picking up only recently now that its common knowledge that trans fats (veg. oils) are evil. (Here’s how veg. oils are made. It’s truly disgusting
http://wellnessmama.com/2193/why-you-should-never-eat-vegetable-oil-or-margarine/)
d. Vegan diets are low in fat. Although there are really amazing fats from certain plants, it’s not enough (and they don’t contain the fat-soluble vitamins that animal fats do) to keep the majority of vegan diets from being deficient in fat and fat-soluble vitamins.
Coconut oil, olive oil, palm oil, flax oil and avocados should be eaten in abundance on a vegan diet. Even so, these fats are expensive (and are all pretty much non-local to New England, except perhaps olive oil).
e. Depression. Fat is one reason why those who suffer from depression don’t do well on vegan diets, and why vegans tend to suffer from it. The human brain is 80% saturated fat. It needs to be replenished and fed every day in order to function properly.
f. Omegas. Another reason is the lack of omega 3s in the vegan diet. (And SAD diet in general). This fatty acid is contained in flax oil (and some nuts) in much smaller amounts than in fish, butter and eggs, but flax does not contain EPA (Eicosapentaenoic acid) or DHA (Docosahexaenoic acid), other essential nutrients for brain health and development, and plentiful in fish and fish oils. Flax oil contains ALA (α-Linolenic acid) that can be converted to EPA, but not DHA. And the conversion rate is minimal (and a waste of energy). Only about 5-15% of ALA can be converted. Some people cannot convert at all, mainly Northern Europeans. For these people being on a vegan diet is dangerous.
To get the benefits of 2 TBSP of fish oil, one must consume 1 cup of flax oil. And consuming that much flax oil, is, well… not advised.
g. Traditional diets. “The Masai and kindred African tribes subsist largely on milk, blood and beef [organs, etc]. They are free from heart disease and have low cholesterol levels”. –Ho Kang-Jey “Archeological Pathology”, 1971
A Study of the long-lived inhabitants of Soviet Georgia revealed that those who ate the fattiest meats lived the longest. –From G.Z. Pitskhelauri “The Long Living of Soviet Georgia” In fact, all centurions are meat-eaters. I don’t know of any vegetarian centurions.
In Okinawa, where the average lifespan for women is 84 years, the inhabitants eat generous amounts of pork and seafood and do all their cooking in lard. –From D. Franklyn “Health Magazine” September 1996
Although the Japanese diet is extolled around here as low fat, it’s not. They consume more cholesterol than most Americans. Through seafood, eggs, pork, beef and organ meats. They also (traditionally) do not consume grains, just white rice.
Out of the Westerners, lets look at the French for a sec. The French diet is loaded with saturated fat in the form of butter, eggs, cheese, cream, liver, meats and pates. “Yet the French have a lower rate of coronary heart disease than most other Western countries. In the U.S., 315 out of every 100,000 middle-aged men die of heart attacks each year. In France the rate is 145 per 100,000. In the Gascony region, where goose and duck livers form a staple of the diet, the rate is a low 80 per 100,000.” –S. Fallon, Nourishing Traditions
This phenomenon is known as The French Paradox.
However, the French do suffer from many degenerative diseases. They eat large amounts of sugar and flours and in recent years succumbed to the time saving temptations of processed foods.
“A chorus of establishment voices, including the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, claims that animal fat is linked not only with heart disease, but with various cancers. Yet when researchers from the University of Maryland analyzed the data they used to make such claims, they found that vegetable fat [margarine, canola oil] consumption was correlated with high rates of cancer and animal fat was not.” –Mary Enig, Phd, “Federation Proceedings” July 1978
h.
Cholesterol. Technically a sterol, not a fat, and contrary to popular opinion in the past 50 years is actually one of the healthiest nutrients. If you want more information on why cholesterol isn’t actually evil and why “The Lipid Hypothesis” has been repudiated years ago read Dr. Mary Enig’s
Know Your Fats, Sally Fallon’s
Nourishing Traditions or
Google it.
Breast milk provides a higher proportion of cholesterol than almost any other food. We’re talking about the healthiest food for humans--- the food made for us, by us. Sally Fallon and Mary Enig state on pg. 6 of Nourishing Traditions:
“It contains over 50% of its calories as fat, much of it saturated fat. Both cholesterol and saturated fat are essential for growth in babies and children, especially the development of the brain. Yet, the American Heart Association is now recommending a low cholesterol, low fat diet for children! Most commercial formulas are low in saturated fats and soy formulas are completely devoid of cholesterol. A recent study linked lowfat diets with failure to thrive in children.”
***25% of the body’s cholesterol is in the brain***
Veg. Myth: because our bodies produce cholesterol, we don’t need to eat it.
Answer: “It is not possible to eat enough cholesterol-containing foods every day to supply the amount that a human needs.” –Mary Enig, PhD.
Infants especially need cholesterol for their developing brains and nervous systems. Soy milk (and all plant “milks”) contains none.
That label on your soy milk that says “not for use as infant formula” is there because some seriously misinformed parents decided that was better for their baby than cow’s milk or breast milk and fed her it until she was severely malnourished. Another baby girl fed soy milk was admitted to the hospital with “heart failure, rickets, vasculitis and neurological damage.”
Never mind the other, hormonal reasons not to feed your children soy. It’s highly estrogenic. Also men should avoid a diet high in soy products, it messes with their hormones. Soy is also gross for other reasons, I don’t know if I can get into it later.
Another not very well known fact about cholesterol (and all good fats) is that it’s a powerful antioxidant. And that cholesterol is the body’s basic repair substance. Lastly—all your hormones, including sex hormones, are made from cholesterol.
PROTEIN
Protein is essential for normal growth, the formation of hormones, blood clotting, repairing tissue, and just about endless amounts of human processes. “Just as animal fats are our only true sources of vitamins A+D, and other bodybuilding factors, animal protein is the only source of complete protein.” Complete proteins are those that contain sufficient levels of all essential amino acids.
a. Amino acids. The entire essential, and many “nonessential”, are present in animal protein. They are not found in plant proteins, which are individually missing several essential amino acids.
Plant foods are considered incomplete proteins because they don’t contain all the essential amino acids and must be combined with other plants in order to make up a complete protein. This is called complementary protein.
People following a veg*n diet must eat protein foods that have complementary proteins so the essential amino acids missing from one protein food can be supplied by another.
**The body must ingest all the essential amino acids in order
to use any of them**
“The two best sources of protein in the veg. kingdom are legumes and cereal grains, but all plant foods are low in tryptophan, cystine and threonine. In order to obtain the best possible protein combination from veg. sources, pulses and grains should be eat together and combined with at least a small amount of animal protein.” –S. Fallon and Mary Enig, Phd., Nourishing Traditions
“Muscle and other protein structures may be dismantled
to obtain the one amino acid that is needed.”
Veg Myth: high protein diets cause bone loss
Answer: This is supported neither by scientific research or by anthropological surveys. And inadequate protein leads to loss of myocardial muscle and may therefore contribute to coronary heart disease. What veg*ns are referring to here are high protein diets that don’t have adequate amounts of fat. Protein cannot be adequately utilized without dietary fat. This is why protein and fat occur together in eggs, milk, fish and meats. High protein, low fat diets indeed cause many problems like too rapid growth, and deficiencies in vit A+D because you need fat to absorb the fat soluble vitamins! (Therefore this deficiency also occurs in many vegans).
VITAMIN + MINERAL DEFICIENCIES
Not only is it difficult to meet the protein and fat requirements on a vegan diet, it often leads to deficiencies in many important vitamins and minerals, both macro and micro.
a. A vegan diet lacks the fat-soluble catalysts needed for vitamin and mineral absorption. As we discussed earlier, vitamins A+D are found in their true, fat-soluble forms only in animal products. Furthermore, phytates in grains block absorption of calcium, zinc, copper and magnesium. Grains need to be soaked or fermented before they can be digested by humans. But this is not normally done on a vegan diet. This is also one of the problems with soy. It blocks absorption of minerals. You do not want to eat tofu or drink soymilk. Soy should be fermented and eaten in the form of natto or miso in order to be digestible.
b. Vitamin D. A vitamin vegans tend to be deficient in, as well as dark-skinned people living in Northern climates, and girl children who are forced to wear burkas (Hello Muslims… oh and Muslim women are also sometimes vit D deficient if their diets are poor and they can’t let the sun touch them!)
In one study, 28% of macrobiotic (mostly vegan) children had rickets (vit D deficiency disease) in the summer. In the winter, it was 55%.
–P.C. Dagnelie, “High prevalence of rickets in infants on macrobiotic diets”, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 51, 202-208.
c. B12. Of course B12 is not found in vegan diet, but all vegans know this now and supplement accordingly (but don’t admit that the production of these additional supplements is much more wasteful than, say, eating an egg.)
Macro minerals vegans tend to be low (or deficient) in:
-iron
-calcium
-magnesium
-phosphorous
Then there are the many micro-minerals that pretty much everyone is deficient in (other than people who eat traditional diets to their cultures or diets rich in nutrient-dense foods). There are close to a hundred micro minerals, ten of which a little are needed by the body every day, they are:
-Copper
-Chromium
-Selenium
-Iodine
-Molybdenum
-Silicon
-Manganese
-Fluorine
-Zinc
A way to get more micro minerals is to buy that gray, unbleached and un-ground ocean sea salt (it comes in a bag and the salt is kind of damp). This is filled with micro minerals that have not been bleached or ground out (hence its gray, oceany color). Use this to make electrolyte drinks with and use in all cooking. Also, when stressed, put a small amount of salt under your tongue and the minerals will go directly to your blood stream. P.s. That bleached white salt shit we normally use is garbage.
SUGAR BLUES
So modern man has a sugar addiction. This is especially true in vegans, or anyone who is hypoglycemic. Vegans and vegetarians tend to have intense sugar cravings. (I have several friends I can think of, and myself when I was vegan as well. I was the Vegan Cupcake Queen.). They’re craving sugar for 3 reasons:
1. A diet of carbohydrate is bound to make one hypoglycemic, and when blood sugar is failing, its imperative one gets it back up. Since they don’t eat any quality protein, their brains are desperate for serotonin and endorphins (hence also their depression). Sugar produces an endorphin high.
2. Tryptophan. As stated above, this amino acid is very lacking in the vegan diet. Insulin is flooded through your body after eating sugar, and (simply put) the chemical reaction that follows allows any stored tryptophan in your body to go to your brain.
3. To combat exhaustion. Vegans are often exhausted. I was. Hypoglycemic, anemic, etc. Sugar fixes exhaustion, albeit temporarily (or until the next time a vegan gets hungry, which is approximately every 2 hours).
“The actual amount of carbohydrates required by humans for health is zero.”
–Dr. Michael Eades
Your body makes all the glucose it needs for your brain. (Probably the reason why the body can make it, because it makes it at a steady supply, and that’s how the brain likes it).
The vegan diet produces a supply that is too sporadic—Too high, too low, too high, too low. Constantly. Back and forth. Every day. It’s exhausting.. The daily highs and crashes of a carb-heavy vegan diet is not just hard on the body (causing high blood pressure, hypoglycemia, and eventually diabetes) but also very hard on the brain.
And none of us should listen to the USDA’s recommendation that we eat a diet that is 60% carbohydrate. That food pyramid with the entire bottom consisting of bread? Not healthy. Not sustainable for the earth.
To Wrap Up:
It’s well known that many cultures participate in fasting and temporary abstinence from meat-eating as a cleansing, or spiritual practice. This often takes place in late winter or early spring when food is sparse. This proves beneficial in keeping away or curing gout, kidney problems, or just wanting to flush the body or “soul”. However, flushing for too long strips the body of its essential proteins, vitamins and minerals it needs to live.
Veganism is a fast, and should never be followed for too long. You will literally starve your body and your brain. And is particularly dangerous for growing children and women (and men) in their child-producing years.
The reason why vegetarianism works for monks and other ascetics is that they lead contemplative, low-energy, low-stress, solitary and celibate lives. The vegetarian diet keeps their libidos lowered and offers a somewhat “hazy” atmosphere to life; therefore this coincides well with their lifestyle choice and religious beliefs.
IN SUMMARY: Guidelines of what to do to create more sustainability.
7. Stop supporting mass Industrial Agriculture, and especially foods that require a lot of processing. No tortilla chips, soda, produce, processed cheese snacks, protein powders, bars, candies, um basically 99% of what is in the grocery store should be wiped out. That’s if you A. Don’t want to die of a painful degenerative disease and B. Kill the environment in the process of killing yourself..
8. Eat locally. Those of us living in New England don’t need to be eating bananas everyday. Or avocados or mangos or Indian spices or Chinese vegetables from China on a regular basis. For special occasions fine. Like Cinco de Mayo make some guacamole with hot peppers from Mexico. But should you normally be eating these foods? Is it good for the environment? No. It’s obscenely wasteful the amounts of fuel needed to produce and ship these foods all over the US and world.
9. Stop having babies.
10. Help initiate the switch over to permaculture, perennial polyculture, and pasture-grazing animals and help replace mass agriculture.
11. Stop buying bottled water. Don’t worry--- when we’re not killing the planet anymore we’ll have clean water again and we won’t have to kill it some more with bottled water.
12. Hunt your own food. Again, New Englanders, there’s lotsss of deer around here that need to be eaten so that they don’t keep getting plowed over by cars. Their main natural predator, the wolf, has been dislocated by their second main predator, man. And man is now too busy buying Styrofoam packaged meat from CAFOs to go kill his natural prey: the deer.
13. Have a garden. Grow as much of your own produce as you can. It doesn’t take too much land, especially if done using the guidelines of permaculture.
14. Have smaller homes, closer together (think cities) and get rid of the suburbs. This will also reduce a lot of necessity to have a car everyday. Cities and farms, that’s the most efficient way to live. Suburbs are a waste of everything. All these lawns are a waste of earth.
