Why are you not vegan....

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Meat is something I'll happily pay for the higher quality stuff as it's a notable difference.

Why it has to be the extreme of no meat I don't really understand. There are many diets that do work 'better' than others for individuals and the options should be there. I'm more concerned with the amount of sugar in things.
 
Cantankerous said:
Meat is something I'll happily pay for the higher quality stuff as it's a notable difference.

Why it has to be the extreme of no meat I don't really understand. There are many diets that do work 'better' than others for individuals and the options should be there. I'm more concerned with the amount of sugar in things.
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Sugar (and all it’s related sweetener chemicals and derivatives), salt, palm oil, food colouring, etc. There’s a lot of crap in food that I’d be more bothered about than whether it’s vegan/ vegetarian friendly or not.
 
Cheers for suggestions,I cba with the microwave queue as we only get 20 mins tea breaks so I need to keep it a cold snack so fruit first break ,nuts last break (cashew or walnuts or mixed)............ In the middle

Edit ,maybe a food flask needed .......
 
The thing is yes we do probably eat too much meat in the modern world (My grandfather would only have meat on a Sunday and lived to 93) and I have cut back on it over the past 5 years but the thing is Vegan is largely unproven as it is a relatively new thing. The human body has evolved over thousands of years with the consumption of meat and especially dairy. Taking this away in a split second (In evolutionary terms) doesn't bode well in my eyes to life longevity.
 
adam cool dude said:
The thing is yes we do probably eat too much meat in the modern world (My grandfather would only have meat on a Sunday and lived to 93) and I have cut back on it over the past 5 years but the thing is Vegan is largely unproven as it is a relatively new thing. The human body has evolved over thousands of years with the consumption of meat and especially dairy. Taking this away in a split second (In evolutionary terms) doesn't bode well in my eyes to life longevity.
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Only ate meat once a week and lived to 93?!?!? BUT JAPAN!!!!!11111oneoneone
 
adam cool dude said:
The thing is yes we do probably eat too much meat in the modern world (My grandfather would only have meat on a Sunday and lived to 93) and I have cut back on it over the past 5 years but the thing is Vegan is largely unproven as it is a relatively new thing. The human body has evolved over thousands of years with the consumption of meat and especially dairy. Taking this away in a split second (In evolutionary terms) doesn't bode well in my eyes to life longevity.
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Humans are adapted to be versatile omnivores. A natural vegan lifestyle is impossible for humans but modern technology makes it possible partly by mass transport of food over long distances and partly by artificial replacements for non-food products previously made from bits of animals.

The only nutrient that it's absolutely impossible to get from the diet part of a vegan lifestyle is B12. No sources for humans other than animals. None at all. And a person will die without B12. Slowly, deteriorating over years with an increase in the rate of deterioration. Due to this initial acclimatisation by slow change, by the time symptoms become too severe to overlook permanent damage will probably have been done. But modern technology and infrastructure provides a solution to that problem - it's possible to mass produce B12 as a waste product from certain types of bacteria. Or you can eat the faeces of certain animals, which contain enough B12 to keep a human healthy. But personally I'd go with the B12 made in factory-labs as a waste product from bacteria.

For everything else, the key things is knowing what nutrients are in what plants to what extent and selecting what you eat accordingly. Some nutrients are harder to get from plants (iron and calcium come to my mind, but there are others), but some plants have a fairly high amount of them. No plant protein has all of the essential amino acids in the proportions humans require to make their own proteins (proteins aren't used directly - they're recycled into their constituent amino acids and reused to make the required proteins) but different plants have higher or lower proportions of different essential amino acids so with the right mix of plants it's possible to get the right amount of each essential amino acid in the right proportions. This is where the modern mass transport of food over long distances comes in - it makes it possible to obtain a wide enough variety of plants to eat.

That's what's underlying the claims that the diet part of veganism is healthier than the diet humans are actually adapted for. Until recently, people eating the diet part of veganism had to learn something about nutrition, source fresh raw ingredients and do their own cooking. Compare that with a typical diet of fast food and highly processed food mass produced to the lowest cost and an almost complete lack of knowledge of nutrition and it's not surprising that the informed diet of home cooking from fresh raw ingedients comes out on top. But now there's a growing amount of highly processed vegan fast food mass produced to the lowest cost and people eating that vegan diet will know and care as little about nutrition as the rest of the people highly processed fast food mass produced to the lowest cost.

So yeah, humans are versatile enough to make it possible for modern technology to make it possible for humans to live and even thrive on a diet that's a suboptimal match for human physiology. We have the knowledge and technology to force that diet to become an optimal match for human physiology. But the vast majority of people won't make it match well enough or can't afford to make it match well enough. There will be an increase in malnutrition as a result. There's more slack with an omnivorous diet because humans are physiologically adapted to an omnivorous diet. A vegan diet requires a much closer to optimal match. And eating either animal faeces or B12 made in a factory lab from the waste products of bacteria.
 
I must admit whilst I will happily accept that a vegetarian life style is healthy as well as environmentally sustainable, I do find it harder to swallow about a strict vegan one..... for reasons mentioned in the post above.

For me becoming vegan is simply not gonna happen, but i do eat a lot of what could be considered vegetarian food. (tho i think of it as meat free rather than specifically vegetarian)
 
My grandad had what would be considered an appalling diet and lived until, 96 i think it was (and was still driving until 2 or 3 months before he died). He had smoked cigars for much of his life, was a hardcore drinker, fried everything, and ate stuff like jelly mixed with condensed milk and one i miss a lot, toasted cheese under the grill with sausages. - really nice but really unhealthy) and his bread was always coated with the dripping out of the frying pan (lard of course).

OTOH my grandma, his wife died of stomach and bowel cancer in early 70s and had also had a massive stroke 20 years previous to that...... maybe partly diet related maybe just the luck of the lottery of DNA or random chance... who knows?


either way you cant make any conclusions one way or the other based on the odd outlier which we all see..... I am fairly confident if you had a sample size of 10s of 1000s you would see a definite effect on average life expectancy when comparing to diet. (Scotland for instance)
 
bigmike20vt said:
My grandad had what would be considered an appalling diet and lived until, 96 i think it was (and was still driving until 2 or 3 months before he died). He had smoked cigars for much of his life, fried everything, and ate stuff like jelly mixed with condensed milk - really nice but really unhealthy) and his bread was always coated with the dripping out of the frying pan (lard of course).
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You'll always get outliers of course, the exception to the rule but this is why we have statistics.
 

Tescos had up for unsupported vegan environmental impact claims​

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ASA Ruling on Tesco Stores Ltd t/a Tesco​

1., 2. & 3. Tesco Stores Ltd t/a Tesco said all the ads featured a plant-burger and made reference to the “Plant Chef products”, a range of 100% plant-based products.
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However, the ASA understands that some plant-based products may contain a combination of ingredients, which may have been subject to complex production processes – such products could theoretically result in their having a similar or greater negative environmental impact than basic plant ingredients, or a meat-based alternative.
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Beneath the image of the woman eating a Plant Chef burger, ad (f) stated “As a nation, if we swapped beef for a plant-based alternative just 1 out of 5 times, the amount of CO2 emissions we could save would be the equivalent to driving 27 billion fewer miles in a car!” We recognised that information suggested a more general premise that swapping meat for a plant-based diet generally was better for the environment. However, we considered the focus of all the ads was to promote the Tesco Plant Chef range, as highlighted by the claim that “We’ve lowered the price of dozens of Plant Chef products”, rather than to promote a move to eating a more plant-based diet generally.
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Because we considered the ads implied that switching to products in the Plant Chef range would positively affect the environment, we expected to see evidence that that was the case based on the full life cycle of the Plant Chef burger in comparison with a meat burger. However, we understood that Tesco did not hold any evidence in relation to the full lifecycle of any of the products in the Plant Chef range, or of the burger featured in the ads. We were therefore unable to assess the product’s total environment impact over its life cycle compared with that of a meat burger.
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Ahleckz said:
Only ate meat once a week and lived to 93?!?!? BUT JAPAN!!!!!11111oneoneone
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I didn't really word it well. He only ate meat as a child until he went into the army at 18. He ate a lot more meat as he got older but as a child of six and living in London it was bread and dripin for the most part. Even still he never ate meat on the scale most people do today.

200sols said:
You'll always get outliers of course, the exception to the rule but this is why we have statistics.
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I wouldn't say it is outliers. I would say it is more genetics.

There was a woman who lived to 104 and drank Dr Pepper every day.
 
jpaul said:

Tescos had up for unsupported vegan environmental impact claims​

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ASA Ruling on Tesco Stores Ltd t/a Tesco​

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It doesn't mean the statement isn't true, it's just unproven in regards to the specifics of their product range, I'd like to think they'd put their money where their mouth is though and commission a scientific study of their product life cycle to prove the veracity of their claim and if it was found false they would then have motivation to work towards making the production process better for the environment
 
Minusorange said:
It doesn't mean the statement isn't true, it's just unproven in regards to the specifics of their product range, I'd like to think they'd put their money where their mouth is though and commission a scientific study of their product life cycle to prove the veracity of their claim and if it was found false they would then have motivation to work towards making the production process better for the environment
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It does have a point. I used to work in a place producing Pizza's and the whole place had to be laboriously deep cleaned before any Vegan production could commence which wasn't really an issue if you were running margarita Pizza's everyday. Not to mention most of the processed parts like Vegan Pepperoni would be coming from some far fetched country whereas most ingredients for a plain marg pizza would be locally sourced.
 
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