Eagle367 said: We were made to eat meat. Meat is an essential component of the diet but like anything else should be taken in a balanced diet. The most important thing for health is that you have a balance between diet and excersize instead of prohibiting yourself to eat food we were made to eat |
There is no reason to believe meat is essential to a human diet. There's no nutrient, or health benefit, that's exclusive to eating meat. The nutrients we get from eating animals, they get from eating plants (or eating animals that eat plants). Our biology also suggests we started out as herbivores, and that to this day we are poorly adapted to eating meat. (I'll expand on that below).
Eagle367 said: Your last point about suffering makes me angry because you also "torture and kill" plants brutally for vegan diets. You chop them up rip them apart just because no blood does not mean a plant's life is any worth more than an animal. If you don't want to kill then eat only fruits and without harming the seeds.Vegans also participate in killing and 'murdering' living beings. Stop being self righteous you kill to eat like any animal. Only plants are exempt from this because they are producers. Tell me are plants not living also. This is in no way a valid argument for being vegan and it is irritating as hell when vegans assume so. According to your own words you also torture and murder plants. Deal with it |
Plants don't have central nervous systems, and there's no suggestion they have sentience. But even if we accept everything you say at face value, that's a strong argument for going vegan. Why? Because when you eat meat that was born and grown for human consumption, it is fed a vast amount of plants also. So when you eat a small amount of meat, you're also contributing to the "suffering" of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plants as well. Even if you believe plants have feelings (and I don't), that's nonetheless a strongly pro-vegan argument. Anything else ignores the science, and common sense.
Airaku said:
It really depends on your body. My mom was a vegetarian for years but had to stop because she was becoming very sick. My mother both have low iron and eating a lot of spinach alone wasn't enough. Her doctors made her stop before she got sick. However if you don't have that problem then there is no issues with it.
I've heard from people that being a Vegan is better than being a vegetarian. Vegans tend to have more energy than most people and part of that is because eating pure fruits and vegetables is easy for your body to break down. In addition to that, applying basic science her. The transfer of energy gets lowered from carnivore to carnivore. A Giraffe will directly eat a plant and have a lot of energy, a Lion may eat that Giraffe but it will receive less energy and their body needs to break it down. If we were to kill the Lion and eat it. We would receive significantly less energy than the Lion did and our bodies would need to work harder to break it down.
Here's the funny thing. Giraffe's need 30 minutes of sleep a day. A female Lion (who does most of the hunting) sleeps for around 18 hours a day. There's a real difference there. A lot of Vegan's claim that they function or much less sleep and they are filled with far more energy. Vegetarians don't quite level to that. While I find it hard to believe this is possible as per being human, and Giraffe's sleep less than any other mammal. The reports are there and the science adds up. Hell, even a deer sleeps 30 minutes at a time, but throughout the day. They are also always alert while sleeping. Whilst not being alert while sleeping, vegans claim to be more alert during their day.
While being a vegan is significantly harder, and far more effective than being a vegetarian. You will need to give up dairy and grains. As those two are harder for your body to process and stores both weight and causes energy loss by your bodies requirement to work harder to break it down.[...]
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Our bodies aren't very adept at getting iron from red meat. We absorb a relatively small amount of the iron (and other nutrients) present. Sounds to me like she may have been eating the wrong things, or eating them at the wrong times of day, or simply not eating enough of them. My iron is better than ever before, and it's not solely from spinach. It's from buckwheat, and flax, and, and, and.
I'm a vegan and I eat grains and my body is thriving. Given up dairy is a natural (dairy consumption contributes to diabetes, poor weight management, and many other problems), but giving up grains? I'm not gluten-intolerant, so I don't see the logic in that for me. But I'm selective, consuming sprouted grains, ancient grains, etc. I'm not talking about Wonder Bread here. :)
Eagle367 said:
But don't say murder and torture. Eating meat is in our nature just look at our anatomy. If killing animals is torture and cruel and murder then so is plants. I have seen vegans act self righteous and they think they are doing something humanitarian or great or fantastic when they don't eat animals. You can eat grass for all I care but don't act superior because of that. Just a reality check that technically we torture plants a hell of a lot more than we do animals and we are fine with that so the animal murder part is all in your heads and I am proud not to be a part of this arrogance and eating meat is also healthy if taken in the right dosage. A meat eater can be just as much healthy and even more than vegans, so stop with this self service garbage you people have going in
Sorry for the hard language but this behavior makes me furious and mad as hell. I am human and hence eat meat and plant because humans as a species is omnivores.
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I think your strong emotions are blinding you. The science doesn't back up anything you just typed.
Our anatomy is poorly adapted to animal products. Our throats are too small, our jaws aren't offset, our teeth aren't sharp enough, or nails aren't durable enough, our intestines are too long, etc. There's nothing about our anatomy that is well adapted to eating meat. Scientists have tried to give coronary heart disease to dogs in controlled conditions, and failed; like other omnivores, dogs have short intestines that reduce the amount of cholesterol they absorb from meat. Humans have much longer intestines in relation to our "trunk" length, about a 10:1 ratio which is typical of herbivores. Try eating nothing but raw meat, and try doing it without cutting tools, and try to catch and kill that meat without weapons, and tell me how naturally adapted our biology is to eating meat. We started cutting and cooking meat in the blink of an evolutionary eye, so our biology is little changed from before those inventions/discoveries. From an evolutionary biology point of view we're either herbivores, or we're poorly adapted omnivores.
And again, huge amounts of plants are grown for feeding animals, so if you are concerned with plant health and welfare then go vegan. The animals an omnivore eats consume hundreds of times as many plants as you would consume as a vegan. And thse are the same plants that don't have brains or central nervous systems, right?
OdinHades said: I could never live without cheeseburgers. It's just not possible, I'm sorry! =/ |
Curious... not even if you were offered millions of dollars to do so? If so, wow, that's some addiction you got there! ;)
Mummelmann said: As for the OP: mankind is herbivore, we have enzymes that break down protein chains from animalistic sources a lot better, we have a digestive system that needs vitamin B and bodily functions such as healing wounds and maintaining tendons and other, essential structures of our bodies are greatly helped by things like collagen, which is abundant in meat sources. We also have canines and heavy maulers in our mouths and the most powerful jaw muscles of any animal relative to their size and function. It's a biological fact that we are meant to eat all sorts of food, and most vegetarians and vegans need to eat a slew of vitamins and minerals on the side to maintain healthy storages of essentials in their bodies. As for the environmental argument; it seems reasonable at first glance, until you realize that per-calorie worth of vegetables is lower compared to the carbon footprint and producing massive amounts of crops require immense landmass, tending and, inevitable at such a grand scale; widespread use of pesticides and other chemicals (100% eco is simply not possible on a huge scale), not to mention the potential disaster should the weather not play along if a larger percentage of the population become a lot more dependent on vegetables and fruit.
As for the moral part; it's probably the best argument of the lot since it's both one with merit and one that is more subjective and justifiable. However; think about this, in order to grow huge crops, you'd need to slaughter a lot of animals to keep them from ruining crops and vegetation, you would also need to cultivate a lot more land, which would decrease sizes of habitats and biotopes for countless organisms; that means evicting entire species and murdering a bunch of animals simply to prevent them from eathing your food, that's not really any more logical or moral than slaughtering and then eating. Killing an animal for food makes more sense than killing it to save crops, from most point of view's anyway. Besides; even without all this, there's still the conundrum of biological facts like plant consumption, plants and vegetables sustain themselves on soil, soil is enrichened by bacteria and dead tissue from, you gussed it, animals and other organisms, which means that on a spiritual and moral level, you can't really avoid consuming animals in some form or another, no matter what you do.[...]
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Where to begin. Firstly, 'herbivore'. "That word, I do not think it means what you think it means." You say herbivore, then describe something else (omnivore, carnivore, not 100% sure where you were going with that). That said, see my comments above. We don't have canines (have you *looked* at how much sharper canine teeth is than human teeth?). I made a bunch of comments earlier in this email that points out how our biology is primarily herbivorous, if you scroll up. There's very little pointing to us being biologically omnivorous, which is why we get so much disease from eating meat. Coronary heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, parkinson's, alzheimer's, and many other are strongly associated with omnivorous diets.
Arguments based on the amount of water required per calorie? That's a specious argument, completely devoid of any value. I could drop 1ml of lemon juice in 1000 litres of water and then ship it around the world and point out that my diluted lemon water is worse to transport per calorie than Coca Cola. So what? The average person is nutrient deprived, but not calorie deprived. If you want calories get a large milkshake from McDonald's, and it will have all the calories the average person needs for an entire day. So what? Plants are high in nutrition and low in calorie, and arguing about environmental impact per calorie is a line of logic similar to what the tobacco industry used to use to defend itself. Unless and until the average person is calorie deprived, such arguments are utterly without value by any reasonable definition.
Your argument that we would need to clear more land to make more vegetables is quite incorrect. 45% of the Earth's ice-free land is dedicated to animal agriculture (space for the animals themselves, and the land that does nothing but make animal feed). They eat hundreds of times as much food energy as we get from eating them. Deforestation is largely caused by animal agriculture. Turn the existing land used for animal agriculture over to feeding humans, and there'd be land (and food) to spare. Livestock eat one third of the world's grain, as just one example.
Your final argument is also incorrect. Vegan farming is a growing trend, and is sustainable.