| AlfredoTurkey said: If that's true (that most overweight people are not vegan) it has nothing to do with the diet and more to do with the fact that vegans represent a very small amount of the population. They're also much more inclined, by nature of their living choice, to focus ON their diets. If you look at the worlds greatest athletes, almost all of them are eating lean meat. These are people with 2% body fat and abs so ripped, you could shred cheese on them. Body builders, olympians... almost every one of them are eating lean meats. If a person wants to lose weight, eating 1,000 calories a day will do it. You could eat oeros, milk shakes, cheese burgers, drink Coke or Pepsi... but if you stay at 1,000 calories, you'll lose weight. Now, will you be healthy? No, not at all. But that's a different topic. I understand and know not all calories are the same but I wasn't talking about health. I was simply talking about losing weight and being trim. Some vegans walk around, shouting on the roof tops and street corners about how they're trim solely because they don't eat meat which is an absolute and utter LIE. It's not about meat or no meat. It's about hard work and proper diet. That's all I'm saying. |
Vegans being a "very small amount of the population" doesn't come into it as we're talking averages within a population, not total numbers of people. That said, I agree that there may be something to vegans being healthier in other ways as well. Though I'm not 100% convinced as there is a siginficant chunk of the vegan population that made the choice for ethical reasons and is less likely to be diet-focused. Additionally, the so-called "junk food" vegans skew the data further.
The number of vegan athletes is growing rapidly, and many of them report improvements in performance and/or recovery rates compared to when they were omnivorous. But I actually didn't address the short-term benefit/detriment of different diets, I only addressed the long-term. And the long-term heavily favours a whole food vegan diet as so many diseases are strongly correlated to eating animal products. Similar to how using cocaine may be a short-term benefit for some, but a long-term detriment for most.
Read up on obesogens. It's possible to eat fewer calories than ideal and yet not lose weight.
I agree that weight control is not a reason to go vegan, in and of itself. I had successful weight control as an omnivore, I had successful weight control as a vegetarian, and now I have successful weight control as a vegan.
