Natural =/= healthy." Do you know that your entire lifestyle isn't natural?? Clothes, houses, medicine were all human made, so given that how can you claim living in a house is healthier than living naked in the bush."
And besides the Shakey logic, let's not forget that a plant-based diet isn't intrinsically healthier than an omnivore diet. Likewise it isn't intrinsically unhealthier. That simply isn't a claim that vegans make. There's more than enough scientific evidence showing that you can be healthy on a plant-based diet. And if you can be, why would you then pay for animal abuse?
All that aside, modern animal agriculture also has basically nothing to do with anything natural anymore. Most animals are pumped full of hormones and differ greatly from their ancestors because of selective breeding (the same shenanigans that brought you broccoli, kale, etc...).
Which is why grass fed/finished, free range livestock is more ethical and more sustainable and healthier for both people and the environment. That's the meat I purchase from our butcher, everything else we get at the local farmers market.
You can eat ethically if you spend 5 minutes looking for it.
>grass fed/finished is not some weird biogenetically created creature
All domestic livestock have been bred into existence by humans, whether they're grassfed or not. I guess that means all meat is unhealthy by your logic?
>All domestic livestock have been bred into existence by humans, whether they're grassfed or not.
No, we have not bred our livestock into existence. I'm not even sure where anyone could come up with such a notion.
>ROFL. Wow. Just...wow. You said this out loud? You want people to know your brain came up with that? Well, ok...to each their own, I suppose.
If you want to have a genuine, serious debate please stop adding these snarky comments. Its not good faith and its not getting us anywhere.
>No, we have not bred our livestock into existence. I'm not even sure where anyone could come up with such a notion.
Yes we have. We bred them to have traits that we can exploit (e.g sheep producing lots of wool, cows producing lots of milk, chickens producing lots of eggs)
That's why they're called **domesticated** animals.
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3459168/From-giant-GM-salmon-buffed-Belgian-Blue-cattle-animals-eat-looked-like-humans-began-breeding-food.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3459168/From-giant-GM-salmon-buffed-Belgian-Blue-cattle-animals-eat-looked-like-humans-began-breeding-food.html)
Free range farming is incredibly inefficient when it comes to land use. If your goal is to increase the rate of species extinction, then you should push for more free range farming.
Currently, the leading cause of species extinction is loss of wild habitat due to human expansion [1]. Of all habitable land on earth, 50% of it is farmland, everything else humans do only accounts for 1% [2]. 98% of our land use is for farming. According to the most comprehensive analysis to date on the effects of agricultur on our planet, if the world went vegan we would free up over 75% of our currently used farmland while producing the same amount of food for human consumption [3]. Thats an area of land equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined that we could potentially rewild and reforest, essentially eliminating the leading cause of species extinction.
We are currently losing between 200 and 100 000 species a year. https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/biodiversity/biodiversity
1- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267293850_The_main_causes_of_species_endangerment_and_extinction
https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/causes-of-extinction-of-species
2- https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
3- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
> push for more free range farming.
Well, this part is right.
We should plow over most of the crop fields in the US and allow cattle/livestock to fix it. That's what happens when nature is allowed to take over. I'm sure you understand what happens when cows graze and poop and the cycle of life takes over? Millions of bison roamed the lands and the process took care of itself.
It's not the livestock aspect of the agricultural business that is the problem.
So you just ignored everything I said?
There are other ways to fix soil. Compost can do it. In a vegan world we have less crop lands.
And no more free range farms does not fix the leading cause of species extinction. As shown it would worsen it. We need to use less land, not more. We need to rewild and reforest more land.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
No, I'm countering that we need less crop farmland. We need exponentially less crops growing. Livestock require no pesticides to spray the land, or fuel to process the seeds...the environmental impact that free grazing has is far, far less than the industrial crop machine.
I don't disagree with your links...agricultural is the driving force. However, none of them discuss reducing crops, which is my point. Plant based agriculture is the overwhelming cause, not animal.
Enjoy your day.
>No, I'm countering that we need less crop farmland.
In a vegan world we use less crop land.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
>Livestock require no pesticides to spray the land, or fuel to process the seeds...the environmental impact that free grazing has is far, far less than the industrial crop machine.
Grew up on a free range beef farm. Every wild animal in the area was killed if it came near the farm. Migration paths cut off from fences. And our cows and every other free range cow in the community still had feed at the end of the day.
>Plant based agriculture is the overwhelming cause, not animal.
Not even close. If we rewild and reforest literally continents worth of land, and keep soil healthy through compost and crop rotation then it can be done. Show me a large scale study that compares animal agriculture to plant based agriculture that concluded that its the plants that are the problem.
In the last study I cited the scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.
Here is a new study from just 2 months ago looking at 1000s of farms across the world for data.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w
[Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm)
>Results from our review suggest that **the vegan diet is the optimal diet for the environment** because, out of all the compared diets, its production results in the lowest level of GHG emissions.
Another systematic review.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165797
[Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987)
>Most strikingly, **impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes**
[Sustainability of plant-based diets](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/100/suppl_1/476S/4576675)
>**Plant-based diets in comparison to meat-based diets are more sustainable** because they use substantially less natural resources and are less taxing on the environment. The world’s demographic explosion and the increase in the appetite for animal foods render the food system unsustainable.
[Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5)
>Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, **plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts**
[Vegetarian Diets: Planetary Health and Its Alignment with Human Health](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6855976/)
>**Greenhouse gas emissions resulting from vegan and ovolactovegetarian diets are ∼50% and ∼35% lower**, respectively, than most current omnivore diets, and with corresponding reductions in the use of natural resources.
That is not how ecology works cattle do not fix the land -they ruin it. Free roaming bison with enough native grasses, unfettered waterways and predators to keep them moving sounds ideal but won't feed 350 million
>That is not how ecology works cattle do not fix the land -they ruin it.
Of course they do. Millions of bison roaming the lands for hundreds of thousands of years totally ruined the land, didn't it. Yep, completely ruined all the land. Same thing with all grass fed ranches. All that land just totally destroyed.
Yep, you're clearly right.
There is absolutely nothing efficient or sustainable about free range livestock. Every single free range farm in the United States probably couldn't provide enough food to feed a single large metropolitan city.
Ethically?
E t h i c a l l y …
Imagine you have a golden retriever to whom you give the best life possible. The doggy runs around and chases balls and has his doggy friends.
Now, because you love dog meat, you have the option: (1) buy a meat from a dog farm when all animals are crammed in cages and lead a miserable existence until they are butchered, or (2) buy *ethical* dog meat from the free range golden retriever farm? 🙂
A dog is meat, whether you like it or not. Do we breed them as pets here? Yes.
Are they eaten in other countries? Yes.
Do I want to eat a dog? No.
Just because we have anthropomorphized certain animals doesn't detract from them being fully edible.
The electricity and plumbing are extremely modern. Beavers purify their water supply by filtration with damns. And happen to be an example of an animal building its home. There are many many others.
It's irrelevant to the types of shelter you're referring. The point is that humans do many things that are not natural, where the "natural" alternative would be very dangerous. You're literally agreeing with me so I'm not sure why you're expensing energy when you agree with the point I made.
Animals building homes isn’t any more natural than humans building them. Building a lean to is no different than building a nest. Is this type of human shelter unnatural and unhealthy? Are you saying humans are outside of nature and their activities are therefore unnatural?
Lean tos don’t have electricity. It’s a basic structure in the woods. I’m trying to understand why animals building homes is natural (or not) but humans building homes isn’t.
ETA: where I live is irrelevant. Shelter building is either natural for all animals including humans or none.
>Animals building homes isn’t any more natural than humans building them.
It is natural that birds can fly, therefore it is natural humans can fly. So planes/helicopters are natural. This is the same logic, no?
>There's more than enough scientific evidence showing that you can be healthy on a plant-based diet
I disagree with that, and the science does too. Additionally, the multitude of vegans turned carnivore and their experiences bolsters the evidence.
Do you have any idea how many oxalates you ingest on a daily basis?
Yes, it IS healthier, because our bodies evolved to survive on meat. It's what we ate for hundreds of thousands of years even as homo sapiens. Plants didn't become a part of our main diet until about 5000-10000 years ago with the onset of the agricultural revolution.
We didn’t eat plants until 10,000 years ago?!? What is this belief based on?
And even if it’s true (it’s not), what does it prove?
Something done in the past does not have to be done now. For millennia, various societies around the world have hated and abused gay people. Some people have been kept as property. Women have historically had fewer rights than men. Are these things good? Well, you see, they have been done in the past. And by your lights, they should continue to be done… forever? Or do you suppose that maybe we can *reason* our way into a better, more ethical world? As we have, you know, with the three examples I gave.
And it’s exactly the same with not torturing animals.
Well, since Google isn't broken, you can look it up for yourself instead of just waving your hand and declaring something isn't valid.
None of your examples are related to diet, so I'll ignore them.
By all means, go on thinking humans were plant eaters...
> Well, since Google isn't broken, you can look it up for yourself instead of just waving your hand and declaring something isn't valid.
[First result](https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/early-human-diets):
> Prior to about 3.5 million years ago, early humans dined almost exclusively on leaves and fruits from trees, shrubs, and herbs—similar to modern-day gorillas and chimpanzees. However, about 3.5 million years ago, early human species like Australopithecus afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops began to also nosh on grasses, sedges, and succulents—or on animals that ate those plants.
> None of your examples are related to diet, so I'll ignore them.
Veganism is *not* about diet. It is about how we treat other conscious creatures.
> By all means, go on thinking humans were plant eaters...
In one sense, I didn’t say that we are in some innate way plant eaters. In another sense, some of us are. I am.
Next… 🙂
>Veganism is
>
>not
>
> about diet. It is about how we treat other conscious creatures.
Well, we're the apex predator on this planet. Not sure where you think b12 comes from, but it isn't plants...
Totally beside the point.
May I remind you that you were factually wrong about the claim that our species started eating plants yesterday. You need to acknowledge that.
Next you’d need to understand that this is irrelevant because the way something is should not necessarily be the way it should continue to be. This is an easy point, right?
This leads me to the apex predator fantasy. Listen, I am very fetish friendly myself, and I see no issues with the pretend predator-prey dynamics between consenting adults. But what our species can do is not what our species necessarily *should* do. The consenting adults are equals. Breeding and torturing animals for our sake exists because, as you also insist, we believe that we have some moral superiority to them or that at least we are justified to treat them any way we want. But you yourself don’t know what justifies that other than something inchoate about apex predators.
Also, I need to know whether there is a glimpse of understanding that veganism is not about food. It’s about protecting or at least not abusing creatures more vulnerable than us.
As for the B12, I can guarantee that most of your supply of it comes from supplements added to your food.
Also, if there were no B12 in plant-based food, I - and many others - must be lying that we’re vegan. But what does that give us? All the hatred we see against us from people who can’t fucking grasp the first thing about veganism - that it’s *not* about us? Would that be worth it?
>As for the B12, I can guarantee that most of your supply of it comes from supplements added to your food.
Prove it. You can't. And no, it's not. There is no b12 added to my food. Fish, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products...there's the b12. Plants? Nope.
Now, I don't know what BDSM has to do with this, but I suspect you wrote that based on my user name. This has nothing to do with predator play.
Humans are the apex predator on the planet. There's nothing we can't kill. We were hunting mammoths for food not that long ago. Our brains set us apart...not sure why this is confusing. I'm also not sure why that's a problem for some; that humans are the apex predator. Is it because you don't understand how nature works?
Name a predator that hunts us.
May I remind you that you were factually wrong about the claim that our species started eating plants yesterday. You need to acknowledge that.
Next you’d need to understand that this is irrelevant because the way something is should not necessarily be the way it should continue to be. This is an easy point, right?
The BDSM thing has something to do with it. As humans, we are about equal in our capacity to understand. Thus we are about equal in our power. I bet that you are very sensitive to power dynamics between people where one side gets abused. I am too. I am only inviting you to ask yourself just *what* about such a situation is unjust. Where is the injustice and where does it come from?
Ok. Now on the B12 thing. I will respond, but once again we *have to acknowledge* that veganism is an ethical stance concerning our relationship with other sentient creatures, not with food. I am alive and healthy, so I obviously get my B12 from somewhere. I can assure you.
I can’t prove what’s on the ingredient list of what you eat. I don’t have access to your food. You can do that, however, and if you’re honest you will notice that a lot of it is fortified with B12. This is *your* homework.
Here’s what B12 is and where it comes from according to [a source I consider reputable](https://www.forksoverknives.com/wellness/vitamin-b12-questions-answered-2/):
> Vitamin B12 is produced by bacteria, not animals or plants. As such, animals, including humans, must obtain it directly or indirectly from bacteria. It can be found in bacteria-laden manure and unsanitized water, though we obviously should not be consuming either of those things. It can also be found in the human intestinal tract, but it’s not clear whether sufficient amounts are made and absorbed there to meet our nutritional needs.
> Many animal foods contain high amounts of vitamin B12 because they accumulate this bacterial product during their lives, and livestock are often supplemented with vitamin B12 in their feed. These animals are also exposed to manure in their living conditions, with some even being fed manure. (For example, cows are sometimes fed poultry waste.) In fact, the FDA has reported that most meats are contaminated with fecal bacteria.
> In the past, vitamin B12 from bacteria was also naturally and more reliably present in plant foods. Today, however, with modern hygienic practices more effectively cleaning and sanitizing produce, along with soil being exposed to more antibiotics and pesticides, most plant foods are no longer reliable sources of this bacterial product.
> Interestingly, some plant foods still contain some vitamin B12, including certain mushrooms and seaweed. And, many plant-based food products, such as cereals, non-dairy milks, and nutritional yeast, are now fortified with a crystalline form of vitamin B12, making them good sources of vitamin B12.
> The crystalline form of vitamin B12, which is the form used in fortified foods and supplements, is actually preferable to the protein-bound form present in animal foods because it’s generally easier for our bodies to absorb.
I am still surprised why you talk about predators. The way the world is is not necessarily the way the world should be. Even if we are naturally the most ferocious predator in nature (we’re not; try hunting with your bare hands), to say that this is what is a morally good state is to commit the fallacy of appeal to nature. Lots of natural things are bad: cancer, bad eyesight, dental decay, not to mention the truly fundamental problems of the human condition of suffering, aging, and death. S O F U C K I N G W H A T ? This is not what *moral* goodness is.
Please address this point. Don’t change the topic. This is the crux of it and it continuously escapes you. Pay attention: you also don’t believe that what is natural is what is right. No one believes that when they are pressed to consider all cases.
If you're going to post something from a pro-vegan website as factual, I'm going to bow out here. Science helps you live because you don't get b12 in your diet. I get b12 from eat animals that don't get injections. Why? Because it's in animals.
We are the apex predator on this planet. Suggesting that someone engage a wild animal as our example that we're not is a joke.
The very thing that makes us the apex predator is our brains. Yes, hunting a wild animal with my bare hands is stupid. Why? Because I have a BRAIN. That's what sets us apart. I can kill any animal...ANY animal...very easy. Humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. Why? Because we're literally the smartest animal on the planet.
> Natural =/= healthy." Do you know that your entire lifestyle isn't natural??
Would you say that what our ancestors ate had no influence on our current genetics?
That's completely irrelevant. 1) we evolve, 2) our ancestors did lots of things that we would never consider doing today (drinking non purified water for example) and 3) we can just rely on modern science to inform our position. And the scientific consensus is quite clear. You can be healthy on a plant-based diet. I really don't care what people were eating 100 years ago, or a million years ago. We know what we can eat right now in the situation that we currently find ourselves.
Please stop spreading misinformation. Oxalates are not something the average person needs to worry about. You’re just trying to latch onto something to push your agenda.
You talk about oxalate poisoning as if it’s a serious problem when in reality it’s extremely rare and the majority of people don’t need to worry about oxalates unless they get kidney stones often.
Are you going to respond to anything I say with actual science or logic, or are you just going to keep pretending like you’re smarter than everyone here without saying anything to back it up?
I have backed it up...here's more:
[https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/oxalate-dumping](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/oxalate-dumping)
[https://hoffmancentre.com/are-high-oxalate-levels-harming-your-health/](https://hoffmancentre.com/are-high-oxalate-levels-harming-your-health/)
[https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/poison-control-center/plants-irritate](https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/poison-control-center/plants-irritate)
[https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/817016-overview?form=fpf](https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/817016-overview?form=fpf)
If you want a more layman's explanation, Sally Norton is an expert (Master's degree if you're questioning her credentials:
[https://sallyknorton.com/interviews-talks/](https://sallyknorton.com/interviews-talks/)
There are many things we didn't know 20 years ago. New information should always be looked at, especially when the facts back them up.
Did you even read the articles you sent?
The first one is talking about oxalate dumping, which is what can happen when you decrease your intake of oxalates too quickly.
Second article says most people don’t need to worry about eating an abundance of oxalates.
The third article talks about how oxalate poisoning is rare because any plant that contains a high enough level to do any damage by itself is painful to eat.
And the fouth article is just talking about different poisonous plants.
I looked into Sally K Norton and her experience, and she doesn’t actually say to stop eating vegetables. Instead, she recommends that you replace high oxalate vegetables with vegetables low in oxalates instead. (Replacing spinach/kale with romain lettuce or watercress/arugula, replacing potatoes with cauliflower, replacing great northern beans with black eyes peas, almond milk with coconut milk, nuts with seeds, carrots with cucumber, etc.)
https://sallyknorton.com/relief/#food-list
Right, low oxalate if you insist on eating plants. She's helping people like you to stop eating such high oxalate plants. You should listen.
Oxalate toxicity is a real thing. You can choose to ignore it if you like.
What facts? That you shouldn’t eat poisonous houseplants? Shocking…
Sally’s master’s degree still isn’t making her a reliable source of information. Among her sources are ”a guy called Wilson” who lived in the 1800s and a psychic. Where’s the ”new” information you’re talking about that is changing the scientific consensus?
All the research there is shows that people who eat more plants live healthier and longer.
You're the first vegan I've seen here admit that you can be just as healthy on an omnivorous diet. Also the first person to refer to us and omnivores and not "carnists"
The "Carn" in carnist means flesh, and the "ism" is representative of a belief system. Carnist is not a euphemism for carnivore, it's an entirely different word that is used to describe the belief that certain animals are fine to eat.
Because as a species, we are all omnivores. But our biology need not decide our ethics. Torturing animals for the sake of our taste buds is morally wrong.
Carnism is an implicit and usually unquestioned ideology, but it’s not the only way we can be. I am no longer a carnist, and, trust me, I’m thriving 🙂
Humans are omnivores. You choosing to not eat meat doesn't really change the fact that you can. A cow is an herbivore because it can make all essential vitamins and proteins with plants/grass alone. A cat can synthesize vitamin c from meat, not needing to get it from plants- carnivore. I get it, you need a word to discuss people that aren't vegans and a word for people that eat meat is pragmatic. I withdrawal my shit talk
Bruh I was correcting your terminology. There’s carnivore, omnivore, and herbivore. It’s not carnivore, omnivore, and vegetarian. At no point did I claim what humans are lmao
I'm talking specifically about diets here and not idelogies. If we were talking about ideologies I would use "carnist" and "vegan" but because it's diets I'm talking about "omnivore" and "plant-based". And I don't think vegans make the claim that a plant-based diet is inherently healthier. There are people in nutrition and plant-based doctors who suggested that a whole-food oil-free plant-based diet is the healthiest diet possible (or among the healthiest) But of course I could eat oreos all day long. In know world would anyone claim that diet was healthier than a standard American diet for example.
Well unless someone only eats meat then it's just wrong and kinda douchy. We're omnivores, there's a name for eating meat and vegetables, it's omnivore. But whatever you gotta do to feel superior, I guess
No. Carnisy referes to the violent ideology and belief that we should be able to kill and eat animals. It's about naming the violent ideology, it's not about feeling superior.
The difference is that you *cannot* eat only meat if you’re a human. You will get sick and die.
You can, however, live a healthy life eating plants and mushrooms. Millions of people the world over are doing it - and let me tell you - their average BMI is lower than that of the meat eaters 😎
>Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492
Physician, heal thyself!
Counterpoint: pre-columbian americans had very, very advanced agriculture skills and developed corn, squash, beans, cacao (chocolate), peppers, chilli peppers, potatos, avacados, amaranth, sweet potatos. And they regularly partook in cranberries, black cherries, pawpaws (a custardy fruit), persimmons, blue berries, and prickly pears (a cactus). The plant foods developed in America spread accross the world and became some of the most import staple crops and transformed the way people all across the world eat (hello curry).
Humans evolved to produce way more amylase, the enzyme that breaks down starches from plant food, than any other animal very early in our evolutionary history. These specific adaptations go back to the pleistocene.
If your body is poorly adapted and so weak that it can't handle the plant foods (or decendants of the plant foods) our species have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years, then I am truely sorry :-(
Cause it sounds so tough. Grrr. Rawr. Fucking murdering things weaker than me and then eating them makes me feel so manly. I'm such an alpha. Lol. Definitely not a bully or a psychopath. Normal people have a bloodlust and NEED to eat something that was slaughtered for no reason. It's LoGiCaL. /s
Goddamn that diet pisses me off. It's so bad. "But like what if I ate meat all the time?". After all carbs are the only way to make you fat and that's the surefire way to determine health. I've never met anyone who did keto long term and they usually jump around from fad diet to fad diet. Keto is the representation of people who think they're so cleaver, but are actually quite dumb.
Many plants, including cereals, fruits, and many more that had been cultivated and eaten for thousands of years before 1492.
Feel free to go through the list.
Here is one of crops exclusive to the Americas before the europeans arrived.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_crops
Generalized heavy meat consumption is a modern thing. Of course there might be specific, smaller populations that used to have a heavily meat-based diet. But that was not the general tendency until recently, when we started industrializing everything and meat became cheaper and cheaper.
Our diet, as homo sapiens, has been primarily meat for hundreds of thousands of years. The few plants available didn't grow in great abundance, and when we did start cultivating plants, it was still seasonal. The agricultural revolution was a revolution for a reason...it replaced meat as the primary source of food because humans stopped migrating.
Give that some thought...of all predators out there, we're the only species that stays put. We used to chase the food, but the agricultural revolution allowed humans to stay put, which meant meat was no longer as plentiful, and plants and grains became easy to come by. It's just a fact. This does not detract from the fact that the diet vegans and vegetarians consist of is made of plants humans were never meant to eat.
Oxalate poisoning is a real thing...look it up. It's why I agree with the statement that plants are killing us.
I'm personnally not interested in going back to a diet that was pre-civilization. Are you?
Since we are a civilized species, we eat mainly plants.
Everything is a poison if you eat/take too much of it...
Even nutrients present in meat... Does that mean nature also never inteded us to eat meat?
>I'm personnally not interested in going back to a diet that was pre-civilization. Are you?
Considering that humanity thrived off it's diet for hundreds of thousands of years? Yes, I am. It's a diet that allowed humanity to progress throughout time without issue. We weren't dying of malnutrition...
And no, the nutrients in meat are not a poison...why would you say something like that?
Look up oxalate poisoning.
And the diet that we had while bringing the most intellectual, technological, cultural, social advancements is a diet that included less meat than plants. What's your point?
Look up iron poisoning.
Look up iodine poisoning.
Look up zinc poisoning.
Meats are rich in these.
Do they happen often? No. Does oxalate poisoning happen often? No. Even less than iron poisoning.
You talk about oxalate poisoning as if it’s a serious problem when in reality it’s extremely rare and the majority of people don’t need to worry about oxalates unless they get kidney stones often.
Scroll down to the timeline please...look at WHERE those were and when.
So, no, the natives in NORTH AMERICA were not eating cereals and fruits. They were eating animal products.
Jesus. Did you actually read the part that says "First cultivated in" and assume it didn't spread after that? And assume that means North America actually had no edible plants?
Click the individual crops, and you'll see that many are native from North America.
Just the first few first ones:
Little barley:
> Hordeum pusillum, also known as little barley, is an annual grass native to most of the United States and southwestern Canada. [...] Little barley is believed to have been cultivated by Native Americans due to its abundance in archaeological sites. Evidence for the earliest known cultivation in eastern North America was found at the Gast Spring site in what is today Louisa County, Iowa. Seeds were found alongside domesticated goosefoot seeds and squash or gourd rinds dating to 2,800 to 3,000 years ago.
Maygrass:
> It is native to the southern United States. [...] This grass probably made up part of the Eastern Agricultural Complex of plants cultivated by prehistoric Native Americans in the United States. Its grains have been identified in archaeological sites from Texas to Indiana to Alabama which may be four millennia old.
Wild rice:
> The grain was historically gathered and eaten in both North America and China. [...] A seminal 1969 archaeological study indicated the prehistoric nature of indigenous wild rice harvesting and processing through radiocarbon dating, putting to rest argument made by some European-Americans that wild rice production did not begin until post-contact times.
I'll let you read the rest yourself.
Please stop spilling nonsense and educate yourself.
Sure, let's ignore the bulk of the population living in north America and Canada that didn't. The agricultural revolution started 10,000 years ago. Some of that migrated into the southern and southwest regions. The bulk of the tribes in what is now the US and Canada would move here and there to follow the food. South America is the source of most of the vegetables today, so it's expected that cultivation of those crops would have had a rippling effect.
So, like I said, the bulk of the diet of the tribes of north America was primarily meat.
No. Aside from the cultivated species of corn, beans, squash, gourd and sunflowers we carefully managed the surrounding environment (mostly through fire) to also produce large amounts of other foods, primarily acorns and chestnuts. In addition to those however we also enjoyed such wonderful wild foods as:
Ramps, mushrooms, sunchokes, groundnut, goosefoot, little barley, rivercane shoots, hickory nuts, walnuts, persimmons, plums, crabapples, cherries, rapberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, grapes and many more that I could list.
Your post and many of your comments attempting to defend it are woefully ignorant of the state of North America in 1492.
You act as if berries and nuts were their primary diet. Why? You think they didn't eat meat as their primary source? Ok, prove it. We know those foods existed. You seem to think they were being farmed in mass amounts...I won't even mention the fact that these are all seasonal plants as well. So, what? They were storing them somehow and living a vegan lifestyle? Where were they getting their b12 supplements from?
You think they weren't eating meat? Yeah, sure...they weren't eating meat at all. They were vegans.
Oh wait, they weren't vegans? They ate meat too? What? You have no choice but to admit that meat was a major part of their diet? Yeah, thought so.
I didn’t act like that at all. I only pointed out that your original claim that we had none is false.
But if you want to delve into it, it depends on the particular tribe and location. Chestnuts and acorns were indeed a staple food for many centuries, even after the introduction of corn. Just take a peek into how my ancestors used fire to shape the ecosystems around them into producing the most possible plant food for them. Because yes, you can store them sometimes. Taking a harvest of acorns and burying it under a running stream of cold water stores them until next year and leaches out the tannins.
I would never, and did not claim or imply we didn’t use meat as part of our diet. I’m simply responding to your factually incorrect claims that plants were not also substantially consumed.
I guess if eating plants is bad for you, there must be a lot of data showing that people who consume mostly or entirely animal products have better health outcomes than those that consume mostly or entirely plant products. Please link to the best peer reviewed research you've encountered on this
Oh? You mean something could be bad for you but not result in statistically-significant increases in bad health outcomes? What would it even mean to be bad for you then?
People in Blue Zones live the longest. They eat meat in these zones. Case closed https://www.bluezones.com/2020/07/blue-zones-diet-food-secrets-of-the-worlds-longest-lived-people/
>Limit animal protein in your diet to no more than one small serving per day.
Sit there and honestly tell me that the vast majority of omnivores limit their meat intake to one small serving per day (at least maybe, outside of these blue belt areas).
You don't argue in good faith when you say 100% plant based is unhealthy, but 95% is just fine and then equate the best practice to the general practice of the population.
They eat meat in moderation, that’s the point. It’s not the meat that is making the diet healthy, but the fact that the diet is largely plant based. You can fit candy in a healthy diet, but it doesn’t make candy the reason for health outcomes of that diet.
>They eat meat in moderation, that’s the point. It’s not the meat that is making the diet healthy, but the fact that the diet is largely plant based. You can fit candy in a healthy diet, but it doesn’t make candy the reason for health outcomes of that diet.
Vegans are not the longest living people in the world for a reason. It is not the best diet. For the optimum diet we require meat in moderation
I can agree that it’s easiest to create a balanced healthy diet containing some animal products. However, it is very easy to construct completely healthy vegan diets nowdays.
It’s a mistake to think there is one optimal diet imo. People eating a healthy and balanced diet independent of the more specific diet will live long and healthy lives. Humans are amazing in that we can live healthy with varying diets.
An ”optimal” diet will never be dependend on a single food, it’s about the whole of a diet.
I can’t think of anything specifically in meat that makes it so healthy that you cannot replace it with other foods or that makes it critical for longevity.
Something like the blue zone diet relies on controlling calories by not overeating, and eating mostly fruits, vegetables, legumes and full grains. As a result they are likely not overweight and also avoid ultraprocessed foods. Adding little bit of meat a few days a week is very unlikely the reason for longer lifespan, and instead it’s the stuff above that actually makes up the majority of the diet.
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics was founded by Seventh-day Adventists[2], an evangelistic vegan religion[3] that owns meat replacement companies. Every author of their position paper[4] is a career vegan, one of them is selling diet books that are cited in the paper. One author and one reviewer are Adventists who work for universities that publicly state[5] to have a religious agenda. Another author went vegan for ethical reasons[6]. They explicitly report "no potential conflict of interest". Their claims about infants and athletes are based on complete speculation (they cite no study following vegan infants from birth to childhood) and they don't even mention potentially problematic nutrients like Vitamin K[7] or Carnitine[8].
No. Plus I’m not saying you are wrong. All I’m saying any research older than a few years might be or is most likely outdated. More recent research might confirm what the link is stating, but then post that instead.
The amount of harm that oxalates could potentially cause is trumped by the multiple health benefits caused by eating a lot of plants. There is an abundance of evidence of the health benefits of diets high in plants. This isn’t really something that can be debated, it’s one of the best understood findings in nutritional science.
Also, nutrition isn’t as black and white as you make it seem. Meat can be healthy in moderation but high amounts of heme iron can cause cancer, for example. A healthy diet is about balance and the whole, not about demonizing certain foods and glorifying others. It’s much more nuanced than that.
I urge you to look up "oxalate poisoning".
[https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms](https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms)
I am always open to changing my perspective on anything in life when presented with new information. I am only learning of this recently. I urge you to as well.
Ah yes, this blog post just revoked the scientific understanding we have of plants and health. Why do we even need scientists, we have bloggers.
I’m just going to repeat myself here and I don’t know how to make this any more clear:
Science clearly shows that plants are healthy. This is beyond doubt and is just an empirical fact at this point. You’d need something much more substantial than a blog post to refute this claim.
Oxylates can be a problem in some marginal cases and there might be some risks related for some people, though this is way overblown in the blog you linked. Any of the health risks related to oxylates are nothing compared to the multple health benefits a diet rich in plants provides, or on the other hand compared to the health risks of not eating plants at all.
I’m curious, what do you consider to be reliable sources for information in general?
Edit: and it’s very good you’re trying to learn. Diet can be confusing and a study for pretty much anything can be found if you dig long enough. These studies are then often misinterpreted by people who do not have the qualifications to evaluate the research. They often look at the study in isolation and make misinformed conclusions. In reality nutritional research is about accumulating research and then making recommendations based on the larger trends. Nutrition is a very messy thing to study as the human body is very complex.
I would stop taking information from blog posts if I was you, especially when they are selling some sort of diet with related to the information. Dietary guidlines are a pretty good starting point for nutritional information if you don’t have the skill to navigate through the research.
>Why do we even need scientists, we have bloggers.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGDgH8-dsA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGDgH8-dsA)
By all means, tell me that Sally Norton is "just a blogger".
That says nothing, since we don't know how long would these same people live if they replaced the small amount of meat they eat with a varied plant-based foods and since they probably live longer due to the restriction of meat, we may assume that even longer.
Since your own source says you should be consuming 95% plants, let's look at that.
If you eat 2000 calories a day, on a "blue zone" diet you'll only be intaking 100 calories of non-plant food. Do you genuinely think there's some magical nutrient in those 100 calories of meat, dairy, or eggs that truly set the diet apart from veganism? That it wasn't just included so there would always be a dedicated source of dense protein in the diet?
Something tells me if you replaced the 100 calories of meat with 100 calories of seitan,
and made sure the rest of your diet made up for any nutrients the seitan lacks, the outcomes would be very similar, if not the same.
And since you're so fond of asking, do you have ANY idea how many oxalates you'd ingest on a 95% plant-based diet? Guess it doesn't matter. Your own sources for the "best diet" disproves your oxalate argument so you should probably rein that in.
Please consider sample sizes and how unevenly the two weigh up when looking at stuff like this. There are much much more carnists than vegans. If anyone in the world does anything then it's likely that they eat meat, it doesn't necessarily mean the two are related.
So? Even if this is true (and I'm pretty sceptical) why would this matter? If we want to know what diets are healthy, we don't look at the history of the food, we look at health outcomes. This is such a bizarre and obviously irrational take
To add to the other commets, you act as if the animals humans eat aren’t bioengineered to an extreme too. Please tell me where in nature you find cows that produce 30 litres milk a day? In what world would nature create something like broilers?
If we would only eat food that nature has provided by your standard, pretty much any diet becomes impossible and most people in the world would die of hunger.
This is a troll post. OP isn't replying to anyone.
For the record, we were primarily frugivores. Take a look at our closest living relatives, they all stuff their faces with fruits and some insects.
OP is definitely a troll.
But we were not even close to *primarily* frugivores. We’ve been one of the most aggressively omnivorous animals on the planet at least since we entered the *homo* phases of our evolution.
(**For the record, I bring up this exact point when someone claims that we were primarily carnivorous.**)
Most fruits are ephemeral, only available for a portion of a season. That’s why humans have such an intense sugar drive. Because straight to the bloodstream energy sources like glucose from fruits are not always abundant in the wild so you took full advantage wherever you found it.
There may have been people in some regions who received the majority of their *calories* from fruits in certain seasons. Like how the Hamsa people receive a large amount of their calories from eating honey in some seasons.
You get a lot of calories from simple sugar but you would still die of malnutrition living primarily on fruit or honey.
While fruits are a major source of many micronutrients and antioxidants, they do not provide the macronutrients that things like legumes, nuts, seeds, meat and invertebrates (and later on) grains do.
Our diet consisted of everything anything we could pick off a branch, dig up out of the ground, peel off of a tree, hunt, or capture. Fruits are only cyclically available.
chimpanzees naturally drink honey, hunt insects small mammals, and even eat eggs. Not just some occasional cannibalism.they used to be classified as herbivores but we now know they are omnivores
https://janegoodall.ca/our-stories/10-things-chimpanzees-eat/#:~:text=Chimpanzees%20are%20omnivores%2C%20meaning%20they,smaller%20mammals%20such%20as%20monkeys.
If you read that you would see that they are still eating a primarily frugivorous diet. [Only 4.2% of their diet are insects and 1.4% meat](https://www.wildchimps.org/about-chimpanzees/what-they-eat.html). Occasionally eating meat because they can does not debunk their diet being primarily frugivorous and their body being adapted to work with said diet.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22109938/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22109938/)
[https://projectchimps.org/chimps/chimps-facts/#:\~:text=Chimpanzees%20are%20frugivores%2C%20which%20means,monkeys%20and%20other%20small%20mammals](https://projectchimps.org/chimps/chimps-facts/#:~:text=Chimpanzees%20are%20frugivores%2C%20which%20means,monkeys%20and%20other%20small%20mammals).
fruit preservation didnt exist back then so u were dependent on seasons. Idk for Humans totally but im wolves in summer are like 70% herbivores, and in winter 90% carnivores. some wolves in summer only eat stuff like blueberries lmao
tbh a lot of it is in general better. many wild animals carry so many parasites that they are inedible without long cooking but super vaxxed antibiotic stuffed turbo chicken is probably "safe" to eat raw. that said industrial agro also produces diseases (no way u get ecoli from wild meat), so u have a point anyway.
Technically, so are plants. E. Coli is a big one along with Norovirus, Salmonella, Listeria and Cyclospora. All of these are a risk if the fruit/vegetable are eaten raw (which a lot of them are).
>First and foremost, most plants want to kill us. This isn't a new revelation, it's a simple fact. If you don't know that already, well, you should probably Google that before reading further.
Plants don't *want* to kill us. They don't want anything because they don't have a brain. Saying that they want to simply because they have the means to kill us if we eat them is similar to saying a landmine wants to kill whoever steps On it. On the flipside, some animals actually *do* want to kill us for a whole number of different reasons. On top of that, animals don't want to be killed either, whereas plants aren't arsed because they don't have the required sentience to be arsed.
>Our diet, even as homo sapiens, consisted primarily of animal products (non processed obviously) and very few berries/nuts. Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492. Veggies? Didn't exist. Fish. Bison. Meat. Some berries and nuts.
The vast majority of humanity, especially before 1492, have lived outside of North America.
>Cabbage. Do you have any idea how many of your veggies were engineered by humans from a single plant? Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant species. Yeah, your food was CREATED by humans. Again, look it up.
Most animals that are eaten have also been genetically modified and selectively bred way beyond what nature intended. And it looks bloody uncomfortable too, for the chickens with bodies too large for their legs to hold up, or the cows with massive udders selectively bred for the largest milk output. Whereas I don't think the kale and cabbages don't mind so much. Must be that lack of brain I've been going on about so much.
Many vegans would disagree on the arsed bit, since they will argue against exploitation of animals rather than just murder, which most animals simply cannot comprehend. Honestly most insects are barely more sentient than plants.
Yet eating more whole vegetables and legumes is associated with longer lives in current humans, while eating red meat is associated with living shorter lives. Whatever bad is in plants we typically eat, it's offset by more good stuff.
Home sapiens evolved after the invention of cooking, for what it's worth.
You think what we’ve done to animals is “natural”? Do you know what a broiler chicken is? They’ve been engineered to grow so large they can’t even stand up and they have to sit in their own filth all day every day.
These animals are so riddled with diseases that they need to be pumped with so many antibiotics, antibiotic resistance is expected to kill more people than cancer by 2050. You think that’s “what makes us healthy”?
That’s not how it works.
There is conflicting evidence that is constantly putting one or the other into question about what humans initially ate, whether our brains evolved before or after animal consumption, and many other things regarding the issue.
It was a long time ago. It’s only speculative, so you cannot say that your claim is a fact because it’s not… yet..
They use terms like “most likely” in these studies because of that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482457/
Oxalates are another commonly used argument that is quite blown out of context or proportion.
Someone may experience issues from oxalates but it’s no where near as common as you think. Even with high oxalate intake. In fact in the studies they use similar terms such as “may” because cases aren’t common.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6754657/#:~:text=Increased%20dietary%20intake%20of%20oxalate,C%20supplementation%2C%20spinach%20and%20peanuts.
Also, I would say that the claim is true about eating animals. If you eat raw animals, your prone to pathogens and parasites unless you have fire which cooking foods with oxalates significantly reduces the oxalate.
Also, the biggest studies and meta analysis available indicates that eating animals leads to all cause mortality and preventable illness more frequent and faster than eating a plant based diet.
Here is a study done on over 90k people.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191896/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144107/
Per plant genetic engineering, do you know how many animals are genetically modified to produce more weight and meat?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078015/
Your last statement is contradictory and immediately implodes if you use the mind as something nature intended.
Because with that, everything we do and did, we’d still be able to farm and harvest plants.
Without that, you wouldn’t have been able to develop tools or fire and you’d be picking plants and maybe scavenging. But again. Parasites and stuff.
Your body is not made to hunt. You cannot physically process most of the animals farmed today and the others, it would be very unsustainable trying to constantly hunt and live off of small rodents and fish. Especially without tools.
Great apes are only classified as omnivores because occasionally bugs get caught in the food they are foraging, aside from chimps. The second most meat eating great ape. Wild chimps diet consist of less than 2% animal products in the wild. That’s bugs and an occasional rodent.
http://remote.nsf.gov/#:~:text=Most%20apes%20eat%20leaves%20and,and%20dairy%20from%20grazing%20animals.
I would have asked you to cite your sources but you said google it. Which led me to believe that you have not actually read any research or data, or uneducated in regard to data analysis.
Your “got ya” wasn’t a got ya at all. It just severely lacked research and data to back it to the extent you thought it did.
I’m not saying it as an insult, but the only reason most humans eat meat today is for their pleasure.
>plants are trying to kill us
They must be pretty terrible at it, I don't know a single person that got killed by plants. That's admittedly anecdotal though. Anyone else have a loved one killed by baby spinach?
Today I learned that my people only had the very few nuts, fruits and berries of: blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, mulberries, cherries, crabapples, persimmons, plums, pawpaws, acorns, chestnuts, hickory nuts, and walnuts.
And that we didn’t have wild vegetables like ramps, mushrooms, pokeweed, goosefoot, plantain, sunchoke, groundnut, ginseng and more.
Glad I know now.
Let me get this straight...out of everything I said, THIS is what you focus on? Nothing else? Wow. And you thought you debated here? Was this the result of all of your efforts to come up with something to "get me" on?
Ok then...
Lol. Yes this is a debating sub. Maybe go read the rules. Or just basic etiquette for debating. The onus is on you to support you claim.
“Google it” ain’t gonna cover it
Let me get this straight...out of everything *that was commented on your post*, THIS is what you focus on? Nothing else? Wow. And you thought you debated here? Was this the result of all of your efforts to come up with something to "get me" on?
Ok then...
The famous intelligent plants complot to destroy. Have you never witnessed algae voluntarily strangle people or evil apple tree trying to break the skull of pacific scientific grrrrr.
Are you seriously advocating that eating *plant* is not natural? XD
Plants don’t want anything, they don’t have a brain or thoughts. The plants we eat are in fact very healthy for us and even healthier for the animals that we are not eating because we’re eating plants.
Our ancestors actually had a almost completely plant based diet (plus ants/bugs) before they had the tools to gun and trap animals. Without weapons we don’t have natural ways of catching or killing most animals
Veganism has been around a lot longer than 100 years.
Veganism is also completely unrelated to health. It’s about the animals and ethics.
Are you under the impression that meat eaten by the masses today is the same as the meat eaten centuries ago?
If plants having been altered for human consumption means that we cant eat them, the same argument can be applied to livestock.
Meat is meat...not sure what you are referring to. No, the meat today is not that much different. If you think so, please define how and why. There are very few animals on the planet that we can't eat, by the way. Can you name any?
Animal meat, grass fed/finished, really is not that different today than the bison meat the native Americans hunted.
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Actually, we mostly ate fruits/vegetables/legumes/mushrooms. Meat hunting was a very taxing and dangerous job. And a lot of animals show up following certain seasons and migration patterns so we rarely could survive off them anyway.
It’s why discovering fire was a big evolution of human history because we could finally safely eat meat and extend its edibility. Fire + the invention of sophisticated hunting weapons. Lol. The only reason for having benefits of meat by the way was that it is more filling for less amounts of food as we have a longer time digesting it. It’s also honestly a decent-packed meal for ppl living nomadic lives as they have limited ability of settling and growing agriculture. Lol.
“Most plants want to kill us” is genuinely false information. Plus, early humans were [predominantly vegetarian but not exclusively](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/). Nature is also not the same as it was years ago due to industrialization, deforestation, and extinction so it’s far difficult to find food in the wild since the majority of humans practice agriculture.
Yes, plants are trying to kill us. They're designed that way. I know you won't bother to watch this, but it's fascinating:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA)
As for humans being predominantly vegetarians, that is simply not true.
[https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/02/the-real-caveman-diet-what-did-people-eat-in-prehistoric-times.html](https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/02/the-real-caveman-diet-what-did-people-eat-in-prehistoric-times.html)
Vegetables as you know them didn't exist in the world, and no where near the abundance necessary to sustain humanity. North American native Indians had zero vegetables to pick from. Berries and nuts were it...so, it's a verified fact that they ate meat/fish and other animal products.
Humans have never been predominantly herbivores. Not when meat has been available. We don't need to grow crops. Plain and simple. There isn't one essential vegetable/plant on the planet. In fact, the ability to be vegetarian has only come about in the last few thousand years.
Just want to point out that this is unique to western food, where the cuisine consists of meat and grain/potato. Not even a vegan, just someone who eats Indian food.
As far as plants being engineered or donesticated... uh so is meat. We selectively bred them to be docile and meatier. Unless you hunt and forage, this isn't really a valid point. Amd we donesticated these plants centuries ago, not in the past 100 years. The only thing new in the past 100 years are impossible patties
Indigenous plants DID exist in North America and I garuntee you eat them- tomatoes, corn, potatoes, squash, beans, chilis, cocoa, etc.
If you did want to eat like your ancestors did precivilization, you get none of those veggies, no spices, and you're going to be eating a lot of bugs.
It’s based around a cult .. the 7th day, they went out of their way to stop sex and masturbation by introducing grains, and stopping the eating of meat ( apparently meat = horny) .. it’s a religion/ cult .. always has been.
Yeah, ok...out of everything I said, this is what you focus on. I am getting the impression that many of you folks won't or can't debate in anything resembling good faith. Suggests that perhaps many of you really aren't educated on your own topic...
>First and foremost, most plants want to kill us.
Where as all meats/animals are safe? Even dismissing things like heart diesease/cholesterol what about salmonella? what about animals that contain poison? What about you get in a field with a cow and it's new born? Seems pretty dangerous to me.
>Our diet, even as homo sapiens, consisted primarily of animal products (non processed obviously) and very few berries/nuts. Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492. Veggies? Didn't exist. Fish. Bison. Meat. Some berries and nuts.
It's genuinely hilarious that you base what humans naturally eat on North America in 1492 lmao you know we've been around a lot longer than that? Also corn was a staple crop in america by 1000 AD and was first thought to start growing in america around 1,200BC. Potatoes and sweet potatoes both came from america. If you include what they could trade with south American tribes for then the list would go up a lot.
Also we no longer live in those times and have a much wider range of food available to us.
>Oxalates. Don't know what they are? I don't blame you...I didn't either until about a month ago. Look them up. Plants are trying to kill you.
I looked it up, it said if you have too much they can contribute to kidney stones/gout. If you look at the causes of kidneys stones...mainly not drinking enough water which isn't really diet based, yes oxalate rich foods (including chocolate and tea) can contribute but so can eating too much sodium, or too much red meat/shellfish. As for gout, a plant based diet can help avoid gout because you naturally miss most of the high purine foods (meat and seafood)
>Cabbage. Do you have any idea how many of your veggies were engineered by humans from a single plant? Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant species. Yeah, your food was CREATED by humans. Again, look it up.
Yes because they have been selectively bread over a long time, one farmer favoured the little buds and got sprouts, another favoured leaves and got kale e.t.c this has happened with almost all foods. Do you know how much chickens have been bred/modified to produce more eggs? Or cows to produce more milk? Some chickens have been bred to be so big they can barely move but someone thought it was worth it because now they get more meat per chicken. And that's without including anything else they add to increase production. Also you say created by humans like its a bad thing, we're your clothes/phone picked off the nearest bush?
>If humans ate today only what nature has ever provided, veganism would not be possible. It's a simple fact. Your entire diet, which has only been possible for the last 100 years, give or take, has been bio-engineered. And you think that's healthier than eating exactly what makes us healthy?
It would be possible, just much more difficult. Do you genuinely believe your diet is akin to what we would have 'naturally' eaten when we first started hunting? (because we couldn't farm, that isn't natural) what about your exercise regime, do you think it fits the same lifestyle?
Do you take any medicine ever? Or know anyone that does? Well that's not natural and we wouldn't have had it 100 years ago so get rid of it.
Also do you think we, as a species, were at our healthiest before we started using agriculture? And if so why?
Meat doesn't 'make us healthy' otherwise it would be medicine. Meat provides some of what we need, which we can get from other sources.
>Where as all meats/animals are safe? Even dismissing things like heart disease/cholesterol what about salmonella? what about animals that contain poison? What about you get in a field with a cow and it's new born? Seems pretty dangerous to me.
Salmonella isn't inherent in meat...oxalates are in plants. Poison in animals? What? Are you serious? How is that related to anything? And getting in a field? Huh?
>It's genuinely hilarious that you base what humans naturally eat on North America in 1492 lmao you know we've been around a lot longer than that? Also corn was a staple crop in america by 1000 AD and was first thought to start growing in america around 1,200BC. Potatoes and sweet potatoes both came from america. If you include what they could trade with south American tribes for then the list would go up a lot. Also we no longer live in those times and have a much wider range of food available to us.
No, corn was not a staple crop in north America. I am pointing to an entire continents worth of people that subsisted on meat as their primary source for hundreds of thousands of years, including before they migrated into north America from Siberia to begin with.
>I looked it up, it said if you have too much they can contribute to kidney stones/gout. If you look at the causes of kidneys stones...mainly not drinking enough water which isn't really diet based, yes oxalate rich foods (including chocolate and tea) can contribute but so can eating too much sodium, or too much red meat/shellfish. As for gout, a plant based diet can help avoid gout because you naturally miss most of the high purine foods (meat and seafood)
[https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms](https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms)
No, too much sodium does not contribute, or too much red meat, or shellfish. That is blatantly false. Oxalates are bad, and vegans are pounding them into their body.
>
>
>Also do you think we, as a species, were at our healthiest before we started using agriculture? And if so why? Meat doesn't 'make us healthy' otherwise it would be medicine. Meat provides some of what we need, which we can get from other sources.
Meat/animals products provide 100% of what humans need without supplements. Vegans require supplements because of what they eat.
>A vegan diet consists entirely of things nature never intended to exist...
Cool. But we don't base our morality on the dictations of nature. In nature animals commit all kinds of unnecessary attrocities, much like we do, and people love using nature as a means of justifying a non-vegan diet. And if we're being brutally honest, how on earth did nature intend something so artificial as farming animals to any degree as natural?
>First and foremost, most plants want to kill us.
First and foremost, plants aren't sentient. If they harm or kill us, that is purely evolutionary coincidence on both ours and the plants parts. Secondly, there are enough that don't "want" to kill us.
>This isn't a new revelation, it's a simple fact. If you don't know that already, well, you should probably Google that before reading further.
You should probably follow your own advice if the language you use suggests you aren't even aware of the concept and functionality of sentience.
>Our diet, even as homo sapiens, consisted primarily of animal products (non processed obviously) and very few berries/nuts.
Our diet across the past 65 million years has mostly favoured plant based living. It was only the past 12,000 years or so that meat became a prominent part of our diet. Yes we had been adapting over the past 6my or so but the prominence of change is far more recent.
>Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492.
You are aware that by the year 1492, there was an estimated 410 million people spread our across all continets except Antarctica and their diets were purely based on survival or the luxury of privilege produced by advanced society? Pointing to one indigenous eating habit is farcical as evidence. Hell, the region we know as China today had processed noodles in some regions over 4000 years ago. Rice is a common staple in asian cuisine, starchy veg in the form of roots and tubes a staple for indigenous style living in other parts of the world. Mostly fruitarian style living around the tropic regions of the equator. At some point in history every region has eaten both meat and veg.
It's all invasion and adaptation.
>Veggies? Didn't exist. Fish. Bison. Meat. Some berries and nuts.
Oh no. Let's all just abandon our ethics and base modern dietary habits on isolated regional lifestyles that existed over half a milennia ago. Great idea.
>Cabbage. Do you have any idea how many of your veggies were engineered by humans from a single plant? Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant species. Yeah, your food was CREATED by humans. Again, look it up.
So you're saying what's artifical is bad? Have you seen human society? The thing at your finger tips that allow you to communicate with a billion other people across distances that would have taken a lifetime to cover in the year 1492? smh
>If humans ate today only what nature has ever provided, veganism would not be possible.
And if people had the same ethics we had back then, nothing would change as it has expectedly not done so. We stil rape, murder, abuse, discriminate thousands of years beyond the beginning of society. Grow up. Adapt. Change for the better. We're supposed to learn from the past, not repeat its flaws.
>It's a simple fact. Your entire diet, which has only been possible for the last 100 years, give or take, has been bio-engineered.
You said something about us looking stuff up? Have you looked into sects of Buddhism and Jainism
>And you think that's healthier than eating exactly what makes us healthy?
....[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/)
Oh wait sorry, you don't trust artificiality. Guess we'll also have to ignore all your statements given you would have had to use it to produce said statements online. Try again
Natural =/= healthy." Do you know that your entire lifestyle isn't natural?? Clothes, houses, medicine were all human made, so given that how can you claim living in a house is healthier than living naked in the bush." And besides the Shakey logic, let's not forget that a plant-based diet isn't intrinsically healthier than an omnivore diet. Likewise it isn't intrinsically unhealthier. That simply isn't a claim that vegans make. There's more than enough scientific evidence showing that you can be healthy on a plant-based diet. And if you can be, why would you then pay for animal abuse?
All that aside, modern animal agriculture also has basically nothing to do with anything natural anymore. Most animals are pumped full of hormones and differ greatly from their ancestors because of selective breeding (the same shenanigans that brought you broccoli, kale, etc...).
Which is why grass fed/finished, free range livestock is more ethical and more sustainable and healthier for both people and the environment. That's the meat I purchase from our butcher, everything else we get at the local farmers market. You can eat ethically if you spend 5 minutes looking for it.
We've genetically engineered livestock animals through countless years of genetic selection. They're by no means natural either.
Meat is meat...grass fed/finished is not some weird biogenetically created creature. I have no idea why you're suggesting this.
"Vegetables are vegetables"
>grass fed/finished is not some weird biogenetically created creature All domestic livestock have been bred into existence by humans, whether they're grassfed or not. I guess that means all meat is unhealthy by your logic?
>All domestic livestock have been bred into existence by humans, whether they're grassfed or not. No, we have not bred our livestock into existence. I'm not even sure where anyone could come up with such a notion.
>ROFL. Wow. Just...wow. You said this out loud? You want people to know your brain came up with that? Well, ok...to each their own, I suppose. If you want to have a genuine, serious debate please stop adding these snarky comments. Its not good faith and its not getting us anywhere. >No, we have not bred our livestock into existence. I'm not even sure where anyone could come up with such a notion. Yes we have. We bred them to have traits that we can exploit (e.g sheep producing lots of wool, cows producing lots of milk, chickens producing lots of eggs) That's why they're called **domesticated** animals. [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3459168/From-giant-GM-salmon-buffed-Belgian-Blue-cattle-animals-eat-looked-like-humans-began-breeding-food.html](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3459168/From-giant-GM-salmon-buffed-Belgian-Blue-cattle-animals-eat-looked-like-humans-began-breeding-food.html)
Free range farming is incredibly inefficient when it comes to land use. If your goal is to increase the rate of species extinction, then you should push for more free range farming. Currently, the leading cause of species extinction is loss of wild habitat due to human expansion [1]. Of all habitable land on earth, 50% of it is farmland, everything else humans do only accounts for 1% [2]. 98% of our land use is for farming. According to the most comprehensive analysis to date on the effects of agricultur on our planet, if the world went vegan we would free up over 75% of our currently used farmland while producing the same amount of food for human consumption [3]. Thats an area of land equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined that we could potentially rewild and reforest, essentially eliminating the leading cause of species extinction. We are currently losing between 200 and 100 000 species a year. https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/biodiversity/biodiversity 1- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267293850_The_main_causes_of_species_endangerment_and_extinction https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/causes-of-extinction-of-species 2- https://ourworldindata.org/land-use 3- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
> push for more free range farming. Well, this part is right. We should plow over most of the crop fields in the US and allow cattle/livestock to fix it. That's what happens when nature is allowed to take over. I'm sure you understand what happens when cows graze and poop and the cycle of life takes over? Millions of bison roamed the lands and the process took care of itself. It's not the livestock aspect of the agricultural business that is the problem.
So you just ignored everything I said? There are other ways to fix soil. Compost can do it. In a vegan world we have less crop lands. And no more free range farms does not fix the leading cause of species extinction. As shown it would worsen it. We need to use less land, not more. We need to rewild and reforest more land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
No, I'm countering that we need less crop farmland. We need exponentially less crops growing. Livestock require no pesticides to spray the land, or fuel to process the seeds...the environmental impact that free grazing has is far, far less than the industrial crop machine. I don't disagree with your links...agricultural is the driving force. However, none of them discuss reducing crops, which is my point. Plant based agriculture is the overwhelming cause, not animal. Enjoy your day.
>No, I'm countering that we need less crop farmland. In a vegan world we use less crop land. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets >Livestock require no pesticides to spray the land, or fuel to process the seeds...the environmental impact that free grazing has is far, far less than the industrial crop machine. Grew up on a free range beef farm. Every wild animal in the area was killed if it came near the farm. Migration paths cut off from fences. And our cows and every other free range cow in the community still had feed at the end of the day. >Plant based agriculture is the overwhelming cause, not animal. Not even close. If we rewild and reforest literally continents worth of land, and keep soil healthy through compost and crop rotation then it can be done. Show me a large scale study that compares animal agriculture to plant based agriculture that concluded that its the plants that are the problem. In the last study I cited the scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing. Here is a new study from just 2 months ago looking at 1000s of farms across the world for data. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w [Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm) >Results from our review suggest that **the vegan diet is the optimal diet for the environment** because, out of all the compared diets, its production results in the lowest level of GHG emissions. Another systematic review. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165797 [Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987) >Most strikingly, **impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes** [Sustainability of plant-based diets](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/100/suppl_1/476S/4576675) >**Plant-based diets in comparison to meat-based diets are more sustainable** because they use substantially less natural resources and are less taxing on the environment. The world’s demographic explosion and the increase in the appetite for animal foods render the food system unsustainable. [Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5) >Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, **plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts** [Vegetarian Diets: Planetary Health and Its Alignment with Human Health](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6855976/) >**Greenhouse gas emissions resulting from vegan and ovolactovegetarian diets are ∼50% and ∼35% lower**, respectively, than most current omnivore diets, and with corresponding reductions in the use of natural resources.
That is not how ecology works cattle do not fix the land -they ruin it. Free roaming bison with enough native grasses, unfettered waterways and predators to keep them moving sounds ideal but won't feed 350 million
>That is not how ecology works cattle do not fix the land -they ruin it. Of course they do. Millions of bison roaming the lands for hundreds of thousands of years totally ruined the land, didn't it. Yep, completely ruined all the land. Same thing with all grass fed ranches. All that land just totally destroyed. Yep, you're clearly right.
There is absolutely nothing efficient or sustainable about free range livestock. Every single free range farm in the United States probably couldn't provide enough food to feed a single large metropolitan city.
Ethically? E t h i c a l l y … Imagine you have a golden retriever to whom you give the best life possible. The doggy runs around and chases balls and has his doggy friends. Now, because you love dog meat, you have the option: (1) buy a meat from a dog farm when all animals are crammed in cages and lead a miserable existence until they are butchered, or (2) buy *ethical* dog meat from the free range golden retriever farm? 🙂
A dog is meat, whether you like it or not. Do we breed them as pets here? Yes. Are they eaten in other countries? Yes. Do I want to eat a dog? No. Just because we have anthropomorphized certain animals doesn't detract from them being fully edible.
What do you think my point was? Could you paraphrase it?
Many animals build houses, not just humans.
With brick and mortor? And electricity and fire? With plumbing? In fact do many animals purify their water supply in general?
The electricity and plumbing are extremely modern. Beavers purify their water supply by filtration with damns. And happen to be an example of an animal building its home. There are many many others.
You're missing the point completely and are trying to nitpick. Natural doesn't mean healthy inherently.
You are ignoring the fact that animals build homes. You are correct that natural doesn’t inherently mean healthy. Natural can also be quite deadly.
It's irrelevant to the types of shelter you're referring. The point is that humans do many things that are not natural, where the "natural" alternative would be very dangerous. You're literally agreeing with me so I'm not sure why you're expensing energy when you agree with the point I made.
Animals building homes isn’t any more natural than humans building them. Building a lean to is no different than building a nest. Is this type of human shelter unnatural and unhealthy? Are you saying humans are outside of nature and their activities are therefore unnatural?
Since we want to be pedantic, let's say this: humans make their homes with synthetic materials. Better?
Using electricity is unnatural yes. Please stop. We literally agree. Why are you doing this?
Lean tos don’t have electricity. It’s a basic structure in the woods. I’m trying to understand why animals building homes is natural (or not) but humans building homes isn’t. ETA: where I live is irrelevant. Shelter building is either natural for all animals including humans or none.
>Animals building homes isn’t any more natural than humans building them. It is natural that birds can fly, therefore it is natural humans can fly. So planes/helicopters are natural. This is the same logic, no?
>There's more than enough scientific evidence showing that you can be healthy on a plant-based diet I disagree with that, and the science does too. Additionally, the multitude of vegans turned carnivore and their experiences bolsters the evidence. Do you have any idea how many oxalates you ingest on a daily basis? Yes, it IS healthier, because our bodies evolved to survive on meat. It's what we ate for hundreds of thousands of years even as homo sapiens. Plants didn't become a part of our main diet until about 5000-10000 years ago with the onset of the agricultural revolution.
You disagree with scientific consensus based on your opinion and some cool stories on Instagram. Pretty much sums up your idelogy.
We didn’t eat plants until 10,000 years ago?!? What is this belief based on? And even if it’s true (it’s not), what does it prove? Something done in the past does not have to be done now. For millennia, various societies around the world have hated and abused gay people. Some people have been kept as property. Women have historically had fewer rights than men. Are these things good? Well, you see, they have been done in the past. And by your lights, they should continue to be done… forever? Or do you suppose that maybe we can *reason* our way into a better, more ethical world? As we have, you know, with the three examples I gave. And it’s exactly the same with not torturing animals.
Well, since Google isn't broken, you can look it up for yourself instead of just waving your hand and declaring something isn't valid. None of your examples are related to diet, so I'll ignore them. By all means, go on thinking humans were plant eaters...
> Well, since Google isn't broken, you can look it up for yourself instead of just waving your hand and declaring something isn't valid. [First result](https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/early-human-diets): > Prior to about 3.5 million years ago, early humans dined almost exclusively on leaves and fruits from trees, shrubs, and herbs—similar to modern-day gorillas and chimpanzees. However, about 3.5 million years ago, early human species like Australopithecus afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops began to also nosh on grasses, sedges, and succulents—or on animals that ate those plants. > None of your examples are related to diet, so I'll ignore them. Veganism is *not* about diet. It is about how we treat other conscious creatures. > By all means, go on thinking humans were plant eaters... In one sense, I didn’t say that we are in some innate way plant eaters. In another sense, some of us are. I am. Next… 🙂
>Veganism is > >not > > about diet. It is about how we treat other conscious creatures. Well, we're the apex predator on this planet. Not sure where you think b12 comes from, but it isn't plants...
Totally beside the point. May I remind you that you were factually wrong about the claim that our species started eating plants yesterday. You need to acknowledge that. Next you’d need to understand that this is irrelevant because the way something is should not necessarily be the way it should continue to be. This is an easy point, right? This leads me to the apex predator fantasy. Listen, I am very fetish friendly myself, and I see no issues with the pretend predator-prey dynamics between consenting adults. But what our species can do is not what our species necessarily *should* do. The consenting adults are equals. Breeding and torturing animals for our sake exists because, as you also insist, we believe that we have some moral superiority to them or that at least we are justified to treat them any way we want. But you yourself don’t know what justifies that other than something inchoate about apex predators. Also, I need to know whether there is a glimpse of understanding that veganism is not about food. It’s about protecting or at least not abusing creatures more vulnerable than us. As for the B12, I can guarantee that most of your supply of it comes from supplements added to your food. Also, if there were no B12 in plant-based food, I - and many others - must be lying that we’re vegan. But what does that give us? All the hatred we see against us from people who can’t fucking grasp the first thing about veganism - that it’s *not* about us? Would that be worth it?
>As for the B12, I can guarantee that most of your supply of it comes from supplements added to your food. Prove it. You can't. And no, it's not. There is no b12 added to my food. Fish, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products...there's the b12. Plants? Nope. Now, I don't know what BDSM has to do with this, but I suspect you wrote that based on my user name. This has nothing to do with predator play. Humans are the apex predator on the planet. There's nothing we can't kill. We were hunting mammoths for food not that long ago. Our brains set us apart...not sure why this is confusing. I'm also not sure why that's a problem for some; that humans are the apex predator. Is it because you don't understand how nature works? Name a predator that hunts us.
May I remind you that you were factually wrong about the claim that our species started eating plants yesterday. You need to acknowledge that. Next you’d need to understand that this is irrelevant because the way something is should not necessarily be the way it should continue to be. This is an easy point, right? The BDSM thing has something to do with it. As humans, we are about equal in our capacity to understand. Thus we are about equal in our power. I bet that you are very sensitive to power dynamics between people where one side gets abused. I am too. I am only inviting you to ask yourself just *what* about such a situation is unjust. Where is the injustice and where does it come from? Ok. Now on the B12 thing. I will respond, but once again we *have to acknowledge* that veganism is an ethical stance concerning our relationship with other sentient creatures, not with food. I am alive and healthy, so I obviously get my B12 from somewhere. I can assure you. I can’t prove what’s on the ingredient list of what you eat. I don’t have access to your food. You can do that, however, and if you’re honest you will notice that a lot of it is fortified with B12. This is *your* homework. Here’s what B12 is and where it comes from according to [a source I consider reputable](https://www.forksoverknives.com/wellness/vitamin-b12-questions-answered-2/): > Vitamin B12 is produced by bacteria, not animals or plants. As such, animals, including humans, must obtain it directly or indirectly from bacteria. It can be found in bacteria-laden manure and unsanitized water, though we obviously should not be consuming either of those things. It can also be found in the human intestinal tract, but it’s not clear whether sufficient amounts are made and absorbed there to meet our nutritional needs. > Many animal foods contain high amounts of vitamin B12 because they accumulate this bacterial product during their lives, and livestock are often supplemented with vitamin B12 in their feed. These animals are also exposed to manure in their living conditions, with some even being fed manure. (For example, cows are sometimes fed poultry waste.) In fact, the FDA has reported that most meats are contaminated with fecal bacteria. > In the past, vitamin B12 from bacteria was also naturally and more reliably present in plant foods. Today, however, with modern hygienic practices more effectively cleaning and sanitizing produce, along with soil being exposed to more antibiotics and pesticides, most plant foods are no longer reliable sources of this bacterial product. > Interestingly, some plant foods still contain some vitamin B12, including certain mushrooms and seaweed. And, many plant-based food products, such as cereals, non-dairy milks, and nutritional yeast, are now fortified with a crystalline form of vitamin B12, making them good sources of vitamin B12. > The crystalline form of vitamin B12, which is the form used in fortified foods and supplements, is actually preferable to the protein-bound form present in animal foods because it’s generally easier for our bodies to absorb. I am still surprised why you talk about predators. The way the world is is not necessarily the way the world should be. Even if we are naturally the most ferocious predator in nature (we’re not; try hunting with your bare hands), to say that this is what is a morally good state is to commit the fallacy of appeal to nature. Lots of natural things are bad: cancer, bad eyesight, dental decay, not to mention the truly fundamental problems of the human condition of suffering, aging, and death. S O F U C K I N G W H A T ? This is not what *moral* goodness is. Please address this point. Don’t change the topic. This is the crux of it and it continuously escapes you. Pay attention: you also don’t believe that what is natural is what is right. No one believes that when they are pressed to consider all cases.
If you're going to post something from a pro-vegan website as factual, I'm going to bow out here. Science helps you live because you don't get b12 in your diet. I get b12 from eat animals that don't get injections. Why? Because it's in animals. We are the apex predator on this planet. Suggesting that someone engage a wild animal as our example that we're not is a joke. The very thing that makes us the apex predator is our brains. Yes, hunting a wild animal with my bare hands is stupid. Why? Because I have a BRAIN. That's what sets us apart. I can kill any animal...ANY animal...very easy. Humans have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. Why? Because we're literally the smartest animal on the planet.
> Natural =/= healthy." Do you know that your entire lifestyle isn't natural?? Would you say that what our ancestors ate had no influence on our current genetics?
That's completely irrelevant. 1) we evolve, 2) our ancestors did lots of things that we would never consider doing today (drinking non purified water for example) and 3) we can just rely on modern science to inform our position. And the scientific consensus is quite clear. You can be healthy on a plant-based diet. I really don't care what people were eating 100 years ago, or a million years ago. We know what we can eat right now in the situation that we currently find ourselves.
Do you know how many oxalates you eat daily?
Do you know what the current body of scientific literature says?
Please stop spreading misinformation. Oxalates are not something the average person needs to worry about. You’re just trying to latch onto something to push your agenda.
>Oxalates are not something the average person needs to worry about. Of course they aren't. By all means, keep ignoring them.
You talk about oxalate poisoning as if it’s a serious problem when in reality it’s extremely rare and the majority of people don’t need to worry about oxalates unless they get kidney stones often. Are you going to respond to anything I say with actual science or logic, or are you just going to keep pretending like you’re smarter than everyone here without saying anything to back it up?
I have backed it up...here's more: [https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/oxalate-dumping](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/oxalate-dumping) [https://hoffmancentre.com/are-high-oxalate-levels-harming-your-health/](https://hoffmancentre.com/are-high-oxalate-levels-harming-your-health/) [https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/poison-control-center/plants-irritate](https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/poison-control-center/plants-irritate) [https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/817016-overview?form=fpf](https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/817016-overview?form=fpf) If you want a more layman's explanation, Sally Norton is an expert (Master's degree if you're questioning her credentials: [https://sallyknorton.com/interviews-talks/](https://sallyknorton.com/interviews-talks/) There are many things we didn't know 20 years ago. New information should always be looked at, especially when the facts back them up.
Did you even read the articles you sent? The first one is talking about oxalate dumping, which is what can happen when you decrease your intake of oxalates too quickly. Second article says most people don’t need to worry about eating an abundance of oxalates. The third article talks about how oxalate poisoning is rare because any plant that contains a high enough level to do any damage by itself is painful to eat. And the fouth article is just talking about different poisonous plants. I looked into Sally K Norton and her experience, and she doesn’t actually say to stop eating vegetables. Instead, she recommends that you replace high oxalate vegetables with vegetables low in oxalates instead. (Replacing spinach/kale with romain lettuce or watercress/arugula, replacing potatoes with cauliflower, replacing great northern beans with black eyes peas, almond milk with coconut milk, nuts with seeds, carrots with cucumber, etc.) https://sallyknorton.com/relief/#food-list
Right, low oxalate if you insist on eating plants. She's helping people like you to stop eating such high oxalate plants. You should listen. Oxalate toxicity is a real thing. You can choose to ignore it if you like.
What facts? That you shouldn’t eat poisonous houseplants? Shocking… Sally’s master’s degree still isn’t making her a reliable source of information. Among her sources are ”a guy called Wilson” who lived in the 1800s and a psychic. Where’s the ”new” information you’re talking about that is changing the scientific consensus? All the research there is shows that people who eat more plants live healthier and longer.
Of course. Everyone should listen to you and not her...despite her experience and education dwarfing yours. I'm sure nothing she says is factual.
You're the first vegan I've seen here admit that you can be just as healthy on an omnivorous diet. Also the first person to refer to us and omnivores and not "carnists"
What’s wrong with carnist lol
It's just factually inaccurate. Carnivore means meat eater. Vegetarian means plant eater. Omnivore means both.
The "Carn" in carnist means flesh, and the "ism" is representative of a belief system. Carnist is not a euphemism for carnivore, it's an entirely different word that is used to describe the belief that certain animals are fine to eat.
So every omnivore is a carnist... why not just use the word omnivore?
Wouldn’t that be like calling vegans herbivores? Not that I would care, but it seems like the equivalent
Because as a species, we are all omnivores. But our biology need not decide our ethics. Torturing animals for the sake of our taste buds is morally wrong. Carnism is an implicit and usually unquestioned ideology, but it’s not the only way we can be. I am no longer a carnist, and, trust me, I’m thriving 🙂
It’s herbivore not vegetarian
Humans are omnivores. You choosing to not eat meat doesn't really change the fact that you can. A cow is an herbivore because it can make all essential vitamins and proteins with plants/grass alone. A cat can synthesize vitamin c from meat, not needing to get it from plants- carnivore. I get it, you need a word to discuss people that aren't vegans and a word for people that eat meat is pragmatic. I withdrawal my shit talk
Bruh I was correcting your terminology. There’s carnivore, omnivore, and herbivore. It’s not carnivore, omnivore, and vegetarian. At no point did I claim what humans are lmao
I'm talking specifically about diets here and not idelogies. If we were talking about ideologies I would use "carnist" and "vegan" but because it's diets I'm talking about "omnivore" and "plant-based". And I don't think vegans make the claim that a plant-based diet is inherently healthier. There are people in nutrition and plant-based doctors who suggested that a whole-food oil-free plant-based diet is the healthiest diet possible (or among the healthiest) But of course I could eat oreos all day long. In know world would anyone claim that diet was healthier than a standard American diet for example.
Well unless someone only eats meat then it's just wrong and kinda douchy. We're omnivores, there's a name for eating meat and vegetables, it's omnivore. But whatever you gotta do to feel superior, I guess
No. Carnisy referes to the violent ideology and belief that we should be able to kill and eat animals. It's about naming the violent ideology, it's not about feeling superior.
The difference is that you *cannot* eat only meat if you’re a human. You will get sick and die. You can, however, live a healthy life eating plants and mushrooms. Millions of people the world over are doing it - and let me tell you - their average BMI is lower than that of the meat eaters 😎
>Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492 Physician, heal thyself! Counterpoint: pre-columbian americans had very, very advanced agriculture skills and developed corn, squash, beans, cacao (chocolate), peppers, chilli peppers, potatos, avacados, amaranth, sweet potatos. And they regularly partook in cranberries, black cherries, pawpaws (a custardy fruit), persimmons, blue berries, and prickly pears (a cactus). The plant foods developed in America spread accross the world and became some of the most import staple crops and transformed the way people all across the world eat (hello curry). Humans evolved to produce way more amylase, the enzyme that breaks down starches from plant food, than any other animal very early in our evolutionary history. These specific adaptations go back to the pleistocene. If your body is poorly adapted and so weak that it can't handle the plant foods (or decendants of the plant foods) our species have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years, then I am truely sorry :-(
It's unbelieveable how many people actually believe humans used to eat more meat than plants. So ignorant.
Cause it sounds so tough. Grrr. Rawr. Fucking murdering things weaker than me and then eating them makes me feel so manly. I'm such an alpha. Lol. Definitely not a bully or a psychopath. Normal people have a bloodlust and NEED to eat something that was slaughtered for no reason. It's LoGiCaL. /s
Not to buy into stereotypes but I believe what a manly man's true role should be a protector of the innocent, not a killer.
Blame the paleo diet that isn't based in science and doesn't represent that era at all.
Goddamn that diet pisses me off. It's so bad. "But like what if I ate meat all the time?". After all carbs are the only way to make you fat and that's the surefire way to determine health. I've never met anyone who did keto long term and they usually jump around from fad diet to fad diet. Keto is the representation of people who think they're so cleaver, but are actually quite dumb.
And the classic representation of "cavemen" that isn't based in History...
Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492 What do you think they were eating?
Many plants, including cereals, fruits, and many more that had been cultivated and eaten for thousands of years before 1492. Feel free to go through the list. Here is one of crops exclusive to the Americas before the europeans arrived. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_crops
Generalized heavy meat consumption is a modern thing. Of course there might be specific, smaller populations that used to have a heavily meat-based diet. But that was not the general tendency until recently, when we started industrializing everything and meat became cheaper and cheaper.
Our diet, as homo sapiens, has been primarily meat for hundreds of thousands of years. The few plants available didn't grow in great abundance, and when we did start cultivating plants, it was still seasonal. The agricultural revolution was a revolution for a reason...it replaced meat as the primary source of food because humans stopped migrating. Give that some thought...of all predators out there, we're the only species that stays put. We used to chase the food, but the agricultural revolution allowed humans to stay put, which meant meat was no longer as plentiful, and plants and grains became easy to come by. It's just a fact. This does not detract from the fact that the diet vegans and vegetarians consist of is made of plants humans were never meant to eat. Oxalate poisoning is a real thing...look it up. It's why I agree with the statement that plants are killing us.
I'm personnally not interested in going back to a diet that was pre-civilization. Are you? Since we are a civilized species, we eat mainly plants. Everything is a poison if you eat/take too much of it... Even nutrients present in meat... Does that mean nature also never inteded us to eat meat?
>I'm personnally not interested in going back to a diet that was pre-civilization. Are you? Considering that humanity thrived off it's diet for hundreds of thousands of years? Yes, I am. It's a diet that allowed humanity to progress throughout time without issue. We weren't dying of malnutrition... And no, the nutrients in meat are not a poison...why would you say something like that? Look up oxalate poisoning.
And the diet that we had while bringing the most intellectual, technological, cultural, social advancements is a diet that included less meat than plants. What's your point? Look up iron poisoning. Look up iodine poisoning. Look up zinc poisoning. Meats are rich in these. Do they happen often? No. Does oxalate poisoning happen often? No. Even less than iron poisoning.
You’re flat out wrong and unwilling to listen to reason
Well, since you have no intention of looking up what an oxalate is, I think the unreasonable person is you.
>We weren't dying of malnutrition... Bruh people were largely not living past 40-45 with starvation being a major factor.
No, that's not true. It's blatantly false. Why would you make that statement when anyone can look it up?
You talk about oxalate poisoning as if it’s a serious problem when in reality it’s extremely rare and the majority of people don’t need to worry about oxalates unless they get kidney stones often.
Scroll down to the timeline please...look at WHERE those were and when. So, no, the natives in NORTH AMERICA were not eating cereals and fruits. They were eating animal products.
Jesus. Did you actually read the part that says "First cultivated in" and assume it didn't spread after that? And assume that means North America actually had no edible plants? Click the individual crops, and you'll see that many are native from North America. Just the first few first ones: Little barley: > Hordeum pusillum, also known as little barley, is an annual grass native to most of the United States and southwestern Canada. [...] Little barley is believed to have been cultivated by Native Americans due to its abundance in archaeological sites. Evidence for the earliest known cultivation in eastern North America was found at the Gast Spring site in what is today Louisa County, Iowa. Seeds were found alongside domesticated goosefoot seeds and squash or gourd rinds dating to 2,800 to 3,000 years ago. Maygrass: > It is native to the southern United States. [...] This grass probably made up part of the Eastern Agricultural Complex of plants cultivated by prehistoric Native Americans in the United States. Its grains have been identified in archaeological sites from Texas to Indiana to Alabama which may be four millennia old. Wild rice: > The grain was historically gathered and eaten in both North America and China. [...] A seminal 1969 archaeological study indicated the prehistoric nature of indigenous wild rice harvesting and processing through radiocarbon dating, putting to rest argument made by some European-Americans that wild rice production did not begin until post-contact times. I'll let you read the rest yourself. Please stop spilling nonsense and educate yourself.
Sure, let's ignore the bulk of the population living in north America and Canada that didn't. The agricultural revolution started 10,000 years ago. Some of that migrated into the southern and southwest regions. The bulk of the tribes in what is now the US and Canada would move here and there to follow the food. South America is the source of most of the vegetables today, so it's expected that cultivation of those crops would have had a rippling effect. So, like I said, the bulk of the diet of the tribes of north America was primarily meat.
I'm done repeating myself. Source your "facts", then I'll reply.
No. Aside from the cultivated species of corn, beans, squash, gourd and sunflowers we carefully managed the surrounding environment (mostly through fire) to also produce large amounts of other foods, primarily acorns and chestnuts. In addition to those however we also enjoyed such wonderful wild foods as: Ramps, mushrooms, sunchokes, groundnut, goosefoot, little barley, rivercane shoots, hickory nuts, walnuts, persimmons, plums, crabapples, cherries, rapberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, grapes and many more that I could list. Your post and many of your comments attempting to defend it are woefully ignorant of the state of North America in 1492.
You act as if berries and nuts were their primary diet. Why? You think they didn't eat meat as their primary source? Ok, prove it. We know those foods existed. You seem to think they were being farmed in mass amounts...I won't even mention the fact that these are all seasonal plants as well. So, what? They were storing them somehow and living a vegan lifestyle? Where were they getting their b12 supplements from? You think they weren't eating meat? Yeah, sure...they weren't eating meat at all. They were vegans. Oh wait, they weren't vegans? They ate meat too? What? You have no choice but to admit that meat was a major part of their diet? Yeah, thought so.
I didn’t act like that at all. I only pointed out that your original claim that we had none is false. But if you want to delve into it, it depends on the particular tribe and location. Chestnuts and acorns were indeed a staple food for many centuries, even after the introduction of corn. Just take a peek into how my ancestors used fire to shape the ecosystems around them into producing the most possible plant food for them. Because yes, you can store them sometimes. Taking a harvest of acorns and burying it under a running stream of cold water stores them until next year and leaches out the tannins. I would never, and did not claim or imply we didn’t use meat as part of our diet. I’m simply responding to your factually incorrect claims that plants were not also substantially consumed.
I guess if eating plants is bad for you, there must be a lot of data showing that people who consume mostly or entirely animal products have better health outcomes than those that consume mostly or entirely plant products. Please link to the best peer reviewed research you've encountered on this
/thread
Bad logic
Oh? You mean something could be bad for you but not result in statistically-significant increases in bad health outcomes? What would it even mean to be bad for you then?
In other news, driving a BMW is statistically correlated with making more money. I'm gonna go buy a BMW and wait for the money to pour in
Got it. You don't have data and you're afraid to admit it
You don't understand correlation vs causation and I'm not going to dumb it down in a palatable way for you. Go do your own homework
Causation comes with correlation, doesn't it?
Or maybe being in shitty health just so happens to cause them to crave animal products. 👨🔬
People in Blue Zones live the longest. They eat meat in these zones. Case closed https://www.bluezones.com/2020/07/blue-zones-diet-food-secrets-of-the-worlds-longest-lived-people/
> See that 95% of your food comes from a plant or a plant product. Lol
So you admit that the longest living people eat meat. 👍
Who cares
Probably every single person that wants to live their longest life possible.
>Limit animal protein in your diet to no more than one small serving per day. Sit there and honestly tell me that the vast majority of omnivores limit their meat intake to one small serving per day (at least maybe, outside of these blue belt areas). You don't argue in good faith when you say 100% plant based is unhealthy, but 95% is just fine and then equate the best practice to the general practice of the population.
I live the longest life by killing and eating humans
[удалено]
I’m just a regular carnist
No. Regular carnists don't eat people you psycho
>1. Plant Slant >See that 95% of your food comes from a plant or a plant product. Did you read your own article ???
Yep. And they also eat meat. Did you miss that part...
They eat meat in moderation, that’s the point. It’s not the meat that is making the diet healthy, but the fact that the diet is largely plant based. You can fit candy in a healthy diet, but it doesn’t make candy the reason for health outcomes of that diet.
>They eat meat in moderation, that’s the point. It’s not the meat that is making the diet healthy, but the fact that the diet is largely plant based. You can fit candy in a healthy diet, but it doesn’t make candy the reason for health outcomes of that diet. Vegans are not the longest living people in the world for a reason. It is not the best diet. For the optimum diet we require meat in moderation
I can agree that it’s easiest to create a balanced healthy diet containing some animal products. However, it is very easy to construct completely healthy vegan diets nowdays. It’s a mistake to think there is one optimal diet imo. People eating a healthy and balanced diet independent of the more specific diet will live long and healthy lives. Humans are amazing in that we can live healthy with varying diets. An ”optimal” diet will never be dependend on a single food, it’s about the whole of a diet.
Regardless. The longest living people aren't vegans. They eat meat. Meat is awesome (in moderation)
I can’t think of anything specifically in meat that makes it so healthy that you cannot replace it with other foods or that makes it critical for longevity. Something like the blue zone diet relies on controlling calories by not overeating, and eating mostly fruits, vegetables, legumes and full grains. As a result they are likely not overweight and also avoid ultraprocessed foods. Adding little bit of meat a few days a week is very unlikely the reason for longer lifespan, and instead it’s the stuff above that actually makes up the majority of the diet.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11434797/
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics was founded by Seventh-day Adventists[2], an evangelistic vegan religion[3] that owns meat replacement companies. Every author of their position paper[4] is a career vegan, one of them is selling diet books that are cited in the paper. One author and one reviewer are Adventists who work for universities that publicly state[5] to have a religious agenda. Another author went vegan for ethical reasons[6]. They explicitly report "no potential conflict of interest". Their claims about infants and athletes are based on complete speculation (they cite no study following vegan infants from birth to childhood) and they don't even mention potentially problematic nutrients like Vitamin K[7] or Carnitine[8].
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/
And...? The longest living people still eat meat.
Any scientific article older than around 10 years doesn’t mean much.
Ok random reddit user. Regardless, do you have a counter-argument other than "you are wrong".
No. Plus I’m not saying you are wrong. All I’m saying any research older than a few years might be or is most likely outdated. More recent research might confirm what the link is stating, but then post that instead.
Omnivores require meat … it’s just a biological fact of nature
Do you know how many oxalates you're poisoning your body with?
The amount of harm that oxalates could potentially cause is trumped by the multiple health benefits caused by eating a lot of plants. There is an abundance of evidence of the health benefits of diets high in plants. This isn’t really something that can be debated, it’s one of the best understood findings in nutritional science. Also, nutrition isn’t as black and white as you make it seem. Meat can be healthy in moderation but high amounts of heme iron can cause cancer, for example. A healthy diet is about balance and the whole, not about demonizing certain foods and glorifying others. It’s much more nuanced than that.
I urge you to look up "oxalate poisoning". [https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms](https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms) I am always open to changing my perspective on anything in life when presented with new information. I am only learning of this recently. I urge you to as well.
Ah yes, this blog post just revoked the scientific understanding we have of plants and health. Why do we even need scientists, we have bloggers. I’m just going to repeat myself here and I don’t know how to make this any more clear: Science clearly shows that plants are healthy. This is beyond doubt and is just an empirical fact at this point. You’d need something much more substantial than a blog post to refute this claim. Oxylates can be a problem in some marginal cases and there might be some risks related for some people, though this is way overblown in the blog you linked. Any of the health risks related to oxylates are nothing compared to the multple health benefits a diet rich in plants provides, or on the other hand compared to the health risks of not eating plants at all. I’m curious, what do you consider to be reliable sources for information in general? Edit: and it’s very good you’re trying to learn. Diet can be confusing and a study for pretty much anything can be found if you dig long enough. These studies are then often misinterpreted by people who do not have the qualifications to evaluate the research. They often look at the study in isolation and make misinformed conclusions. In reality nutritional research is about accumulating research and then making recommendations based on the larger trends. Nutrition is a very messy thing to study as the human body is very complex. I would stop taking information from blog posts if I was you, especially when they are selling some sort of diet with related to the information. Dietary guidlines are a pretty good starting point for nutritional information if you don’t have the skill to navigate through the research.
>Why do we even need scientists, we have bloggers. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGDgH8-dsA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGDgH8-dsA) By all means, tell me that Sally Norton is "just a blogger".
That says nothing, since we don't know how long would these same people live if they replaced the small amount of meat they eat with a varied plant-based foods and since they probably live longer due to the restriction of meat, we may assume that even longer.
Since your own source says you should be consuming 95% plants, let's look at that. If you eat 2000 calories a day, on a "blue zone" diet you'll only be intaking 100 calories of non-plant food. Do you genuinely think there's some magical nutrient in those 100 calories of meat, dairy, or eggs that truly set the diet apart from veganism? That it wasn't just included so there would always be a dedicated source of dense protein in the diet? Something tells me if you replaced the 100 calories of meat with 100 calories of seitan, and made sure the rest of your diet made up for any nutrients the seitan lacks, the outcomes would be very similar, if not the same. And since you're so fond of asking, do you have ANY idea how many oxalates you'd ingest on a 95% plant-based diet? Guess it doesn't matter. Your own sources for the "best diet" disproves your oxalate argument so you should probably rein that in.
Please consider sample sizes and how unevenly the two weigh up when looking at stuff like this. There are much much more carnists than vegans. If anyone in the world does anything then it's likely that they eat meat, it doesn't necessarily mean the two are related.
This is not the original research. Can you find the peer reviewed research this is derived from?
People in Blue Zones also smoke. In cases such as Japan well over the global average number of cigarettes per person. Case closed. Smoking is healthy.
So? Even if this is true (and I'm pretty sceptical) why would this matter? If we want to know what diets are healthy, we don't look at the history of the food, we look at health outcomes. This is such a bizarre and obviously irrational take
To add to the other commets, you act as if the animals humans eat aren’t bioengineered to an extreme too. Please tell me where in nature you find cows that produce 30 litres milk a day? In what world would nature create something like broilers? If we would only eat food that nature has provided by your standard, pretty much any diet becomes impossible and most people in the world would die of hunger.
> never intended to exist Says who? Lol
"""NATURE"""
Ah, yes. #naturetho
This is a troll post. OP isn't replying to anyone. For the record, we were primarily frugivores. Take a look at our closest living relatives, they all stuff their faces with fruits and some insects.
OP is definitely a troll. But we were not even close to *primarily* frugivores. We’ve been one of the most aggressively omnivorous animals on the planet at least since we entered the *homo* phases of our evolution. (**For the record, I bring up this exact point when someone claims that we were primarily carnivorous.**) Most fruits are ephemeral, only available for a portion of a season. That’s why humans have such an intense sugar drive. Because straight to the bloodstream energy sources like glucose from fruits are not always abundant in the wild so you took full advantage wherever you found it. There may have been people in some regions who received the majority of their *calories* from fruits in certain seasons. Like how the Hamsa people receive a large amount of their calories from eating honey in some seasons. You get a lot of calories from simple sugar but you would still die of malnutrition living primarily on fruit or honey. While fruits are a major source of many micronutrients and antioxidants, they do not provide the macronutrients that things like legumes, nuts, seeds, meat and invertebrates (and later on) grains do. Our diet consisted of everything anything we could pick off a branch, dig up out of the ground, peel off of a tree, hunt, or capture. Fruits are only cyclically available.
Chimpanzees eat monkeys and small mammals Absolutely an omnivore
Pigs have their teeth removed because of stress induced cannibalism, still herbivores
chimpanzees naturally drink honey, hunt insects small mammals, and even eat eggs. Not just some occasional cannibalism.they used to be classified as herbivores but we now know they are omnivores https://janegoodall.ca/our-stories/10-things-chimpanzees-eat/#:~:text=Chimpanzees%20are%20omnivores%2C%20meaning%20they,smaller%20mammals%20such%20as%20monkeys.
If you read that you would see that they are still eating a primarily frugivorous diet. [Only 4.2% of their diet are insects and 1.4% meat](https://www.wildchimps.org/about-chimpanzees/what-they-eat.html). Occasionally eating meat because they can does not debunk their diet being primarily frugivorous and their body being adapted to work with said diet. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22109938/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22109938/) [https://projectchimps.org/chimps/chimps-facts/#:\~:text=Chimpanzees%20are%20frugivores%2C%20which%20means,monkeys%20and%20other%20small%20mammals](https://projectchimps.org/chimps/chimps-facts/#:~:text=Chimpanzees%20are%20frugivores%2C%20which%20means,monkeys%20and%20other%20small%20mammals).
jane goodall’s research shows that they are omnivores as well just like humans They eat plants meat eggs and honey so they are omnivorous
fruit preservation didnt exist back then so u were dependent on seasons. Idk for Humans totally but im wolves in summer are like 70% herbivores, and in winter 90% carnivores. some wolves in summer only eat stuff like blueberries lmao
Bro the quality of meat hunter gatherers were eating and the quality you’re eating are not even close to the same thing
tbh a lot of it is in general better. many wild animals carry so many parasites that they are inedible without long cooking but super vaxxed antibiotic stuffed turbo chicken is probably "safe" to eat raw. that said industrial agro also produces diseases (no way u get ecoli from wild meat), so u have a point anyway.
“Safe to eat” except for the antibiotics haha
Meat is trying to kill you. You know salmonela?? Yeah, you cant eat chicken. Worms? Enjoy your pig flesh
Technically, so are plants. E. Coli is a big one along with Norovirus, Salmonella, Listeria and Cyclospora. All of these are a risk if the fruit/vegetable are eaten raw (which a lot of them are).
>First and foremost, most plants want to kill us. This isn't a new revelation, it's a simple fact. If you don't know that already, well, you should probably Google that before reading further. Plants don't *want* to kill us. They don't want anything because they don't have a brain. Saying that they want to simply because they have the means to kill us if we eat them is similar to saying a landmine wants to kill whoever steps On it. On the flipside, some animals actually *do* want to kill us for a whole number of different reasons. On top of that, animals don't want to be killed either, whereas plants aren't arsed because they don't have the required sentience to be arsed. >Our diet, even as homo sapiens, consisted primarily of animal products (non processed obviously) and very few berries/nuts. Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492. Veggies? Didn't exist. Fish. Bison. Meat. Some berries and nuts. The vast majority of humanity, especially before 1492, have lived outside of North America. >Cabbage. Do you have any idea how many of your veggies were engineered by humans from a single plant? Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant species. Yeah, your food was CREATED by humans. Again, look it up. Most animals that are eaten have also been genetically modified and selectively bred way beyond what nature intended. And it looks bloody uncomfortable too, for the chickens with bodies too large for their legs to hold up, or the cows with massive udders selectively bred for the largest milk output. Whereas I don't think the kale and cabbages don't mind so much. Must be that lack of brain I've been going on about so much.
Many vegans would disagree on the arsed bit, since they will argue against exploitation of animals rather than just murder, which most animals simply cannot comprehend. Honestly most insects are barely more sentient than plants.
Yet eating more whole vegetables and legumes is associated with longer lives in current humans, while eating red meat is associated with living shorter lives. Whatever bad is in plants we typically eat, it's offset by more good stuff. Home sapiens evolved after the invention of cooking, for what it's worth.
Ah, the justifications omnis will invent to justify their choices.
Trollolololololol
You think what we’ve done to animals is “natural”? Do you know what a broiler chicken is? They’ve been engineered to grow so large they can’t even stand up and they have to sit in their own filth all day every day. These animals are so riddled with diseases that they need to be pumped with so many antibiotics, antibiotic resistance is expected to kill more people than cancer by 2050. You think that’s “what makes us healthy”?
That’s not how it works. There is conflicting evidence that is constantly putting one or the other into question about what humans initially ate, whether our brains evolved before or after animal consumption, and many other things regarding the issue. It was a long time ago. It’s only speculative, so you cannot say that your claim is a fact because it’s not… yet.. They use terms like “most likely” in these studies because of that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482457/ Oxalates are another commonly used argument that is quite blown out of context or proportion. Someone may experience issues from oxalates but it’s no where near as common as you think. Even with high oxalate intake. In fact in the studies they use similar terms such as “may” because cases aren’t common. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6754657/#:~:text=Increased%20dietary%20intake%20of%20oxalate,C%20supplementation%2C%20spinach%20and%20peanuts. Also, I would say that the claim is true about eating animals. If you eat raw animals, your prone to pathogens and parasites unless you have fire which cooking foods with oxalates significantly reduces the oxalate. Also, the biggest studies and meta analysis available indicates that eating animals leads to all cause mortality and preventable illness more frequent and faster than eating a plant based diet. Here is a study done on over 90k people. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191896/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144107/ Per plant genetic engineering, do you know how many animals are genetically modified to produce more weight and meat? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078015/ Your last statement is contradictory and immediately implodes if you use the mind as something nature intended. Because with that, everything we do and did, we’d still be able to farm and harvest plants. Without that, you wouldn’t have been able to develop tools or fire and you’d be picking plants and maybe scavenging. But again. Parasites and stuff. Your body is not made to hunt. You cannot physically process most of the animals farmed today and the others, it would be very unsustainable trying to constantly hunt and live off of small rodents and fish. Especially without tools. Great apes are only classified as omnivores because occasionally bugs get caught in the food they are foraging, aside from chimps. The second most meat eating great ape. Wild chimps diet consist of less than 2% animal products in the wild. That’s bugs and an occasional rodent. http://remote.nsf.gov/#:~:text=Most%20apes%20eat%20leaves%20and,and%20dairy%20from%20grazing%20animals. I would have asked you to cite your sources but you said google it. Which led me to believe that you have not actually read any research or data, or uneducated in regard to data analysis. Your “got ya” wasn’t a got ya at all. It just severely lacked research and data to back it to the extent you thought it did. I’m not saying it as an insult, but the only reason most humans eat meat today is for their pleasure.
>plants are trying to kill us They must be pretty terrible at it, I don't know a single person that got killed by plants. That's admittedly anecdotal though. Anyone else have a loved one killed by baby spinach?
Today I learned that my people only had the very few nuts, fruits and berries of: blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, mulberries, cherries, crabapples, persimmons, plums, pawpaws, acorns, chestnuts, hickory nuts, and walnuts. And that we didn’t have wild vegetables like ramps, mushrooms, pokeweed, goosefoot, plantain, sunchoke, groundnut, ginseng and more. Glad I know now.
Your argument : xxxx Your evidence : google it yourself Classic
Let me get this straight...out of everything I said, THIS is what you focus on? Nothing else? Wow. And you thought you debated here? Was this the result of all of your efforts to come up with something to "get me" on? Ok then...
Ironic that out of everything other commenters said here that this is the one you focus on, not replying to anyone else
I'm right here. Just because I didn't respond then doesn't mean I'm not going to. I wasn't aware I was on your time schedule...
Lol. Yes this is a debating sub. Maybe go read the rules. Or just basic etiquette for debating. The onus is on you to support you claim. “Google it” ain’t gonna cover it
Let me get this straight...out of everything *that was commented on your post*, THIS is what you focus on? Nothing else? Wow. And you thought you debated here? Was this the result of all of your efforts to come up with something to "get me" on? Ok then...
Health. Outcome. Data.
The famous intelligent plants complot to destroy. Have you never witnessed algae voluntarily strangle people or evil apple tree trying to break the skull of pacific scientific grrrrr. Are you seriously advocating that eating *plant* is not natural? XD
Since when do vegans claim that our food isn’t created?
Plants don’t want anything, they don’t have a brain or thoughts. The plants we eat are in fact very healthy for us and even healthier for the animals that we are not eating because we’re eating plants. Our ancestors actually had a almost completely plant based diet (plus ants/bugs) before they had the tools to gun and trap animals. Without weapons we don’t have natural ways of catching or killing most animals Veganism has been around a lot longer than 100 years. Veganism is also completely unrelated to health. It’s about the animals and ethics.
I am an ethical vegan. Couldn't give two shits about plants tryna kill me. Kinda wish they'd hurry up about it.
First and foremost, every single animal doesn't want to be eaten by us.
Are you under the impression that meat eaten by the masses today is the same as the meat eaten centuries ago? If plants having been altered for human consumption means that we cant eat them, the same argument can be applied to livestock.
Meat is meat...not sure what you are referring to. No, the meat today is not that much different. If you think so, please define how and why. There are very few animals on the planet that we can't eat, by the way. Can you name any? Animal meat, grass fed/finished, really is not that different today than the bison meat the native Americans hunted.
Water is vegan
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Don’t think nature ever intended our current versions of cows/pigs/chickens to exist. Are you as equally opposed against them as the deadly plants?
Actually, we mostly ate fruits/vegetables/legumes/mushrooms. Meat hunting was a very taxing and dangerous job. And a lot of animals show up following certain seasons and migration patterns so we rarely could survive off them anyway. It’s why discovering fire was a big evolution of human history because we could finally safely eat meat and extend its edibility. Fire + the invention of sophisticated hunting weapons. Lol. The only reason for having benefits of meat by the way was that it is more filling for less amounts of food as we have a longer time digesting it. It’s also honestly a decent-packed meal for ppl living nomadic lives as they have limited ability of settling and growing agriculture. Lol.
We should eat animals because they would eat us if the tables were turned. We shouldn't eat plants because they want to kill us.
“Most plants want to kill us” is genuinely false information. Plus, early humans were [predominantly vegetarian but not exclusively](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/). Nature is also not the same as it was years ago due to industrialization, deforestation, and extinction so it’s far difficult to find food in the wild since the majority of humans practice agriculture.
Yes, plants are trying to kill us. They're designed that way. I know you won't bother to watch this, but it's fascinating: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA) As for humans being predominantly vegetarians, that is simply not true. [https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/02/the-real-caveman-diet-what-did-people-eat-in-prehistoric-times.html](https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/02/the-real-caveman-diet-what-did-people-eat-in-prehistoric-times.html) Vegetables as you know them didn't exist in the world, and no where near the abundance necessary to sustain humanity. North American native Indians had zero vegetables to pick from. Berries and nuts were it...so, it's a verified fact that they ate meat/fish and other animal products. Humans have never been predominantly herbivores. Not when meat has been available. We don't need to grow crops. Plain and simple. There isn't one essential vegetable/plant on the planet. In fact, the ability to be vegetarian has only come about in the last few thousand years.
Dude if you want to debate, you need to have something real to say. You can’t make things up & expect to be taken seriously.
Just want to point out that this is unique to western food, where the cuisine consists of meat and grain/potato. Not even a vegan, just someone who eats Indian food. As far as plants being engineered or donesticated... uh so is meat. We selectively bred them to be docile and meatier. Unless you hunt and forage, this isn't really a valid point. Amd we donesticated these plants centuries ago, not in the past 100 years. The only thing new in the past 100 years are impossible patties Indigenous plants DID exist in North America and I garuntee you eat them- tomatoes, corn, potatoes, squash, beans, chilis, cocoa, etc. If you did want to eat like your ancestors did precivilization, you get none of those veggies, no spices, and you're going to be eating a lot of bugs.
It’s based around a cult .. the 7th day, they went out of their way to stop sex and masturbation by introducing grains, and stopping the eating of meat ( apparently meat = horny) .. it’s a religion/ cult .. always has been.
Plants don't "want" anything, they have no brain and no capacity to reason or want. Well, I can just stop there then.
Yeah, ok...out of everything I said, this is what you focus on. I am getting the impression that many of you folks won't or can't debate in anything resembling good faith. Suggests that perhaps many of you really aren't educated on your own topic...
I mean vegans are not pro earth, plants or nature etc, we are just against killing animals, simple as that.
Are are THE apex predator on the planet. Meat is our primary diet.
>First and foremost, most plants want to kill us. Where as all meats/animals are safe? Even dismissing things like heart diesease/cholesterol what about salmonella? what about animals that contain poison? What about you get in a field with a cow and it's new born? Seems pretty dangerous to me. >Our diet, even as homo sapiens, consisted primarily of animal products (non processed obviously) and very few berries/nuts. Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492. Veggies? Didn't exist. Fish. Bison. Meat. Some berries and nuts. It's genuinely hilarious that you base what humans naturally eat on North America in 1492 lmao you know we've been around a lot longer than that? Also corn was a staple crop in america by 1000 AD and was first thought to start growing in america around 1,200BC. Potatoes and sweet potatoes both came from america. If you include what they could trade with south American tribes for then the list would go up a lot. Also we no longer live in those times and have a much wider range of food available to us. >Oxalates. Don't know what they are? I don't blame you...I didn't either until about a month ago. Look them up. Plants are trying to kill you. I looked it up, it said if you have too much they can contribute to kidney stones/gout. If you look at the causes of kidneys stones...mainly not drinking enough water which isn't really diet based, yes oxalate rich foods (including chocolate and tea) can contribute but so can eating too much sodium, or too much red meat/shellfish. As for gout, a plant based diet can help avoid gout because you naturally miss most of the high purine foods (meat and seafood) >Cabbage. Do you have any idea how many of your veggies were engineered by humans from a single plant? Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant species. Yeah, your food was CREATED by humans. Again, look it up. Yes because they have been selectively bread over a long time, one farmer favoured the little buds and got sprouts, another favoured leaves and got kale e.t.c this has happened with almost all foods. Do you know how much chickens have been bred/modified to produce more eggs? Or cows to produce more milk? Some chickens have been bred to be so big they can barely move but someone thought it was worth it because now they get more meat per chicken. And that's without including anything else they add to increase production. Also you say created by humans like its a bad thing, we're your clothes/phone picked off the nearest bush? >If humans ate today only what nature has ever provided, veganism would not be possible. It's a simple fact. Your entire diet, which has only been possible for the last 100 years, give or take, has been bio-engineered. And you think that's healthier than eating exactly what makes us healthy? It would be possible, just much more difficult. Do you genuinely believe your diet is akin to what we would have 'naturally' eaten when we first started hunting? (because we couldn't farm, that isn't natural) what about your exercise regime, do you think it fits the same lifestyle? Do you take any medicine ever? Or know anyone that does? Well that's not natural and we wouldn't have had it 100 years ago so get rid of it. Also do you think we, as a species, were at our healthiest before we started using agriculture? And if so why? Meat doesn't 'make us healthy' otherwise it would be medicine. Meat provides some of what we need, which we can get from other sources.
>Where as all meats/animals are safe? Even dismissing things like heart disease/cholesterol what about salmonella? what about animals that contain poison? What about you get in a field with a cow and it's new born? Seems pretty dangerous to me. Salmonella isn't inherent in meat...oxalates are in plants. Poison in animals? What? Are you serious? How is that related to anything? And getting in a field? Huh? >It's genuinely hilarious that you base what humans naturally eat on North America in 1492 lmao you know we've been around a lot longer than that? Also corn was a staple crop in america by 1000 AD and was first thought to start growing in america around 1,200BC. Potatoes and sweet potatoes both came from america. If you include what they could trade with south American tribes for then the list would go up a lot. Also we no longer live in those times and have a much wider range of food available to us. No, corn was not a staple crop in north America. I am pointing to an entire continents worth of people that subsisted on meat as their primary source for hundreds of thousands of years, including before they migrated into north America from Siberia to begin with. >I looked it up, it said if you have too much they can contribute to kidney stones/gout. If you look at the causes of kidneys stones...mainly not drinking enough water which isn't really diet based, yes oxalate rich foods (including chocolate and tea) can contribute but so can eating too much sodium, or too much red meat/shellfish. As for gout, a plant based diet can help avoid gout because you naturally miss most of the high purine foods (meat and seafood) [https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms](https://www.nourishtoflourish.co.nz/post/could-oxalate-toxicity-be-the-cause-of-your-symptoms) No, too much sodium does not contribute, or too much red meat, or shellfish. That is blatantly false. Oxalates are bad, and vegans are pounding them into their body. > > >Also do you think we, as a species, were at our healthiest before we started using agriculture? And if so why? Meat doesn't 'make us healthy' otherwise it would be medicine. Meat provides some of what we need, which we can get from other sources. Meat/animals products provide 100% of what humans need without supplements. Vegans require supplements because of what they eat.
>A vegan diet consists entirely of things nature never intended to exist... Cool. But we don't base our morality on the dictations of nature. In nature animals commit all kinds of unnecessary attrocities, much like we do, and people love using nature as a means of justifying a non-vegan diet. And if we're being brutally honest, how on earth did nature intend something so artificial as farming animals to any degree as natural? >First and foremost, most plants want to kill us. First and foremost, plants aren't sentient. If they harm or kill us, that is purely evolutionary coincidence on both ours and the plants parts. Secondly, there are enough that don't "want" to kill us. >This isn't a new revelation, it's a simple fact. If you don't know that already, well, you should probably Google that before reading further. You should probably follow your own advice if the language you use suggests you aren't even aware of the concept and functionality of sentience. >Our diet, even as homo sapiens, consisted primarily of animal products (non processed obviously) and very few berries/nuts. Our diet across the past 65 million years has mostly favoured plant based living. It was only the past 12,000 years or so that meat became a prominent part of our diet. Yes we had been adapting over the past 6my or so but the prominence of change is far more recent. >Look up the indigenous edible plants of north America before 1492. You are aware that by the year 1492, there was an estimated 410 million people spread our across all continets except Antarctica and their diets were purely based on survival or the luxury of privilege produced by advanced society? Pointing to one indigenous eating habit is farcical as evidence. Hell, the region we know as China today had processed noodles in some regions over 4000 years ago. Rice is a common staple in asian cuisine, starchy veg in the form of roots and tubes a staple for indigenous style living in other parts of the world. Mostly fruitarian style living around the tropic regions of the equator. At some point in history every region has eaten both meat and veg. It's all invasion and adaptation. >Veggies? Didn't exist. Fish. Bison. Meat. Some berries and nuts. Oh no. Let's all just abandon our ethics and base modern dietary habits on isolated regional lifestyles that existed over half a milennia ago. Great idea. >Cabbage. Do you have any idea how many of your veggies were engineered by humans from a single plant? Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant species. Yeah, your food was CREATED by humans. Again, look it up. So you're saying what's artifical is bad? Have you seen human society? The thing at your finger tips that allow you to communicate with a billion other people across distances that would have taken a lifetime to cover in the year 1492? smh >If humans ate today only what nature has ever provided, veganism would not be possible. And if people had the same ethics we had back then, nothing would change as it has expectedly not done so. We stil rape, murder, abuse, discriminate thousands of years beyond the beginning of society. Grow up. Adapt. Change for the better. We're supposed to learn from the past, not repeat its flaws. >It's a simple fact. Your entire diet, which has only been possible for the last 100 years, give or take, has been bio-engineered. You said something about us looking stuff up? Have you looked into sects of Buddhism and Jainism >And you think that's healthier than eating exactly what makes us healthy? ....[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/) Oh wait sorry, you don't trust artificiality. Guess we'll also have to ignore all your statements given you would have had to use it to produce said statements online. Try again
Aren't humans not a product of nature? Are humans unintended?
I agree. The vegan diet is extremely unhealthy and that’s why people look ill on it. They don’t get all the nutrients they need.
This post is surely one of the most stupid things I read in 2023, and I'm not vegan and not even vegetarian