| kappie1977 said: I'm not a vegan/vegetarian, but respect the habit of some of my friends who are vegetarian. Vegan is not really healthy as you will even miss more vitamins and minerals then when you would only be vegetarian. I would advise to just eat a little less meat and/or replace most meat with fish, when you eat around 2x a week meat and the rest with fish (or vegetarian meal) I think this would help and makes sure you don't eat too much meat (because that's also not healthy) but still don't really need to take additional vitamins and minerals. As you might know in nature humans need meat (not much) but otherwise we wouldn't not have evolved as we did now. I know quite some vegetarians and they all need to take extra vitamines (mostly B12) but also others and minerals for iron and calcium. |
False. Animals don't create nutrients, they get them from eating plants. When you point to vitamin B12, that's a self-defeating argument as vitamin B12 isn't created by animals either, it is produced by bacteria. Animals traditionally got it from eating plants from the ground, and drinking water on the ground. These days, they give vitamin B12 supplements to factory farmed animals as they'd be deficient otherwise. So when you eat factory farmed meat (which is the overhwhelming majority of meat that most people eat), you're actually eating supplemented vitamin B12 yourself.
Plant-based foods can have every nutrient you can imagine (even B12 in small quantities, as is the case with some seaweeds, and vitamin D in the case of UV-exposed mushrooms), and plant-based foods on average have far, far, far more nutrients per calorie than animal-based foods.
Your claim that humans need meat is also false. We used to think that our evolution started to kick off when we started eating meat (which importantly acknowledges the fact that much of our evolution was mostly meat-free), but new evidence suggests it was actually when we started cooking starch-based foods. That's what gave our bodies the extra calories for our brains to grow.
As for iron and calcium, dairy actually reduces the amount of calcium in the body (digesting dairy requires it to pull calcium out of the bloodstream to process the dairy-based foods), and plant-based foods have lots of iron (and if consumed with vitamin C rich foods, it's as bio-available as any other source). The heme iron in red meat is actually not good for humans at all. An interesting element of plant-based iron is that if the body is iron deficient then it absorbs it more readily, and if it has an abundance of iron then it absorbs it less well. The body has no such defence mechanism for the heme iron common in red meats, which it absorbs readily even if the body has too much iron already (and too much iron in the body can be a very bad thing).
Last edited by scrapking - on 30 October 2017
