'Most People I Know Who Went Vegan Have Gone Back to Eating Meat'
menshealth.com
menshealth.com
The guy at the start of the article went from being vegan for decades to now consuming "nine eggs and a handful of sausages for breakfast, a few quarter-pounders for lunch and whatever meat he can stack up on for dinner."
That's insane and I think gets to the heart of the issue - extreme diets.
I'd been a lacto-ovo vegetarian (lacto: milk, cheese and yogurt, ovo: egs) since 1990. Recently, my doctor wanted me to add fish for Omega 3. As I did that, I also realized adding grilled chicken would be smart - insane amounts of protein and very little animal fat. I'm still primarily a lacto-ovo vegetarian, I still enjoy many vegetarian meals, and now I've added fish and chicken to the mix. On the upside, I've dramatically increased the number of restaurants I can go to when going out with friends!
What I'm not doing is eating a pound or two of chicken every day along with lox for breakfast! I've just added some fish and chicken to my diet. I really don't understand the extremism.
> 95% of respondents reported it being because of animal welfare, 83.9% because of the environment, and 55.9% because of health reasons.
I do it for animal welfare and the extremism has made me think multiple time because I consider myself as a very moderate person in various subject, including food for 35 years but that’s not the case anymore. It didn’t appear as a radical decision overnight but as a reflection over years and gradually transitioned through the Overton scale.
It IS extremist, but many other extremisms are widely accepted by large groups of population but not endorsed by all : [HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL ON] Embargos, Boycotts, child labor, God, human genome science[OFF]… you name it. Anti-slavery where also considered extremists (and still are in some places). You’ve got to ignore some judgements (like being seen as an extremist) and concentrate on the facts if you want to go "against the current" (not sure we say this in English)
https://www.veganisingit.com/vegan-food-statistics-trends-20....
Extreme diets are often more a means of virtue signaling or addressing hidden mental conditions than anything to do with health. Adherents want to fit in with a certain group and then they invent various justifications to make their choices seem more reasonable.
Small amounts of animal fat are unlikely to cause any health problems, but great quantities can be harmful.
As an anecdotal experience, a few years ago I have been diagnosed with an incipient atherosclerosis, which has scared me a lot.
Analyzing what might have caused it, I assumed that it could have been the great amount of dairy that I was eating at that time, i.e. the high daily intake of saturated fat.
I have completely changed my diet, with the essential difference being the fatty acid profile of the food. After some experiments I have settled on a diet where more than 90% of my daily fat intake was provided by a mixture of oils added to food (50 mL of extra-virgin olive oil for oleic acid, 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil for linoleic acid and vitamin E, 10 mL of cod liver oil for DHA and EPA and vitamin A and a drop of an oil with vitamins D3 and K2).
After about a year since the change of diet the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared together with some other older problems caused by a poor peripheral circulation.
From this I have concluded that my guess about my high consumption of dairy (i.e. of saturated fat) being the culprit for my cardiovascular health problems had been correct.
From my dietician: saturated fat isn't as bad as you generally read, but is still vastly inferior to poly-insaturated fat for health, so fat from fish like salmon and eggs are to be prefered to fat from red meat or fat poultry (mostly mono-insaturated and saturated. Tip from me: if it isn't liquid at room temp, it's not poly-insaturated). Also, while it's true that in general, animal fat is "worse" than vegetable fat, this is an average: palm oil is worse than egg or fish fat.
Also, animal fat can store a lot of lipophilic drugs when dosing is made liberally, and while i'm pretty sure in the West (or at least in Continental Europe) drugs given to animals are regulated, this isn't the case everywhere, so depending on where you live and if factory farms near your home are recent and cheap, beware.
From a certain perspective fish oil is probably "better" than olive oil in terms of lipid ratios. But I'm not going to saute my vegetables in fish oil.
https://peterattiamd.com/davidallison2/
Some people have this weird desire to over simplify and label certain foods as "good" or "bad" or "healthy" or "unhealthy". The reality is that there are hardly any purely bad foods and almost everything contains at least some useful nutrients. The dose makes the poison. Everything in moderation.
https://health.gov/our-work/nutrition-physical-activity/diet...
I think that "everyone being so extreme" is part of a larger today's issue: people are just not okay anymore with being normal/average/just okay. And when I say "not okay" I really mean that people are anxious and get depressed.
If you think about it, it's crazy.
So people need to find something that defines themselves.
There's not anymore such thing like, let's say, "Robert who is vegan" but rather "A vegan named Robert" (or, specularly: "Robert who is carnivore" but rather "A carnivore named Robert").
The "issue" is strong in the IT industry as well, btw: no more "Robert who is an SWE/SDE/DevOps/whatever" but rather "An SWE/SDE/DevOps/whatever named Robert".
So yeah... People absorb these kind of "pre-made personalities" and don't bother developing their own. They get some off-the shelf opinions to repeat over and over, and don't bother developing their own.
Needless to say, echo chambers don't help.
It is likely that this exception will be temporary, because there already exists the technology of producing whey protein by a culture of a genetically-modified fungus. There are good chances that in at most a decade such protein production by fungal cultures could substitute the whey protein and the egg-white protein of animal origins.
In any case for now I did this step back because with an 100% vegan diet it is extremely difficult to satisfy simultaneously 4 conditions: a high enough daily protein intake, but without a too high energy intake that would cause a weight gain, and without paying more for the vegan food than for a meat-based food, while having a sedentary life style.
If any of these 4 constraints is relaxed, then it becomes easy to eat a vegan diet.
When you are willing to spend much more money for vegan food than for meat-based food, then there are a lot of plant protein extracts that are many times more expensive than chicken meat. When you are doing a hard physical work that requires eating more than 3000 kcal per day, then it is easy to combine proteins from cereals with proteins from legumes, so that you will eat enough proteins per day.
On the other hand, if you must satisfy all 4 constraints, that is difficult. In Europe where I live, there exists only one way to satisfy all 4 constraints, by extracting at home gluten from wheat flour, which requires time and water. The rest of the proteins can be obtained from legumes such as lentils, peas, chickpeas or beans.
Even by dumping most of the starch from wheat flour, after eating enough gluten and legumes you can eat only small quantities of other food without exceeding the admissible amount of calories per day. This makes the daily menus too monotonous.
So after two years and a half, I have begun to use whey protein concentrate (from which I make a cheese substitute by mixing it with vegetable oil and other ingredients in smaller amounts; this has the aspect and taste of melted cheese, but it has a much healthier fat content; where I live whey protein concentrate is a little cheaper than chicken meat). This allows to add proteins to the menu whenever needed, with only a minimal addition of calories, which allows a much greater freedom in the choices of food.
As long as I have been eating strictly vegan food I had to completely avoid any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or bananas or maize or rice, because they would have provided more calories than I could eat without gaining weight.
Now I no longer have any restrictions on what I may eat, based on the energy content, returning to how it was when I was using lean meat as the main source of proteins, when I could eat much more varied vegetables and fruits than when I was eating only vegan food.
Here the only protein sources that are cheaper than chicken meat or whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate (per their protein content) are wheat flour, lentils, chickpeas, beans and some forms of oats. Dry peas are also cheap, but they are seldom encountered, because most people eat only green peas, which are quite expensive per their protein content.
I am sure it is possible to actually be healthy being vegan, but it seems so many (at least on social media) focus on "Organic" or "Non-GMO" and somehow think that magically makes something healthy. When I see a vegan recipe that honestly looks good but every other word is "organic this", "organic that". Or try to say they are not using sugar but are using maple syrup instead.
If you want to be vegan because of ethical concerns about animals, than go for it. But I think going vegan just for the sake of being healthy is likely misguided and you likely did not do enough research to do it properly.
Personally I go for a balance. I will never be full vegan, but I also where it makes sense have vegan meals. Indian I always prefer to be vegan since those are not trying to replicate meat. I continue to use dairy instead of an alternative milk for my coffee.
I keep red meat to a minimum, don't do burgers often but when I do I am doing a real burger.
Some of the meatless products from trader joes (the meatless orange meatless chicken has become a staple over some cauliflower rice and broccoli has become a staple of mine).
I think it depends on your reason for going vegan. Some do it for health or the environment, and maybe those people don't stick to it? You might not see the health results you wish, or you lose motivation being like great I'm one less hamburger when Taylor Swift flies across the world every 5 minutes. Me + my wife do it for humanitarian reasons and I have yet to wake up and be like "today I don't care about the animals anymore", but that's just me.
I don't think I've seen someone who flipped due to animal rights going back to eating meat, but super super small sample size.
I do see, however, articles like this all the time. My opinion is that it gets clicks by people who want to validate not being vegan (like people who are afraid to take the plunge), meat-heads who love hating on vegans, or people who are maybe curious but then read this and be like "oh I guess nobody stays vegan". Also there may or may not be a lot of vested interest in the meat industry's success, so perhaps there's some incentive to post articles like this.
The soybean farmer may enjoy the fact that I eat the beans they grow versus some cow, but cows eat so much more than me and if everyone went vegan overnight or all meat cows died or whatever, soy prices would plummet and the farmers would go broke
Seems like a small price to pay for getting those fields back to hosting natural life.
And many of the people who come from the health perspective don't really do it on any scientific basis, but weird fads that are very restrictive and not sustainable. You will have people only eating fruit or raw vegetables which is just generally not healthy.
It's far easier to change a fad diet than to change ethics.
I have the feeling English language lacks of a proper word for that. Other languages call it "vegetalism". When you embrace the differences you understand more easely the motivations and why many some follow or tryout a trend then quit, while others sticks longer.
What should I do? I know I need meat and animal protein, I just know it.
Should I just eat game meat and wild fish?
Basically they reach maturity and die
Maturity is loosely used here, they reach a certain weight but not biological adulthood.
The problem with a lot of vegans I've known is they tend to think "vegan" means "healthy." For instance, you can eat a diet of entirely french fries and candy and be sticking to what is technically a vegan diet, as long as the oil is not coming from animal products - so I think a lot of people getting "sick" from it is just not paying attention to basic macros and nutrition that you don't usually spend a lot of time thinking about in a "typical" diet. Furthermore, if you try to bring this up, you'll get absolutely dog piled with terrible pseudo science about the diet. It's been difficult to have anything approaching a rational discussion about it for a while because of this.
Okay, let's do that:
Cow’s milk has significantly higher impacts than the plant-based alternatives across all metrics. It causes around three times as much greenhouse gas emissions; uses around ten times as much land; two to twenty times as much freshwater; and creates much higher levels of eutrophication.
Particularly in this example if everyone switched to almond milk from dairy milk - it takes something like a few hundred gallons of water to produce a few cups of almond milk, not even including the water used in the actual milk itself. I'm sure I don't need to sketch out the math of why that wouldn't be sustainable if everyone switched to it, and I'm sure I don't need to talk in depth about the looming drought disaster in the american southwest (where a massive percent of the world's supply of almonds are produced) or the long term impacts of extracting tons of groundwater for farming.
Yet, products like almond milk (Again, this is just one example, there are others) that are pitched as the "solution" to the types of problems caused by dairy farming when you can see very quickly on the back of a napkin that almost none of it would be sustainable under current farming practices. That isn't even getting into the heavy use of insecticides and certain types of fertilizers the impact that has on the environment, etc. It's a more complicated subject than you are trying to boil it down to.
https://www.milkproducerscouncil.org/_files/ugd/318cf1_1f72a...
So, based on the research I've seen on this topic, I think claims like these are misleading in a way I don't really feel like debating, because it's exhausting and laden with propaganda (both from dairy farmers and from vegans).
In short, looking at things like "water used" is entirely misleading because that's not actually the environmental problem, it's about groundwater depletion - again, these topics are much more complicated than the way they are typically presented.
This is a good resource, it discusses 'freshwater withdrawals weighted by local water scarcity' which I think is the same as 'groundwater depletion' but perhaps different.
Also this doesn't talk about almond milk, only soy vs. cow milk.
If you pull your data from sites like milkproducerscouncil.org, what else do you expect?
The only almond trees left in the Central Valley are irrigated. Many of them from wells. Which are drying up. So they want LA's water, even though ag gets most of the water already.
Have not gone through this, but it's a response to the sources studies. https://www.farmersagainstmisinformation.com/news/lets-discu...
Could you share the other examples with us?
Most restaurants offer a vegetarian option, but now many of those options have become vegan, rather than having to maintain a separate vegan option.
Enough said: I got the reference for you, the original is in french but Youtube's auto translate works kind-of ok. Be ready for some serious details on vitamins, their vegetal or animal sources, and the differences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZBEDSaRxds
If you can be vegan, take some off-the-shelf supplements, and remain long term healthy, then you got very lucky genes. Having vegans through long spans of your ancestry obviously will stake things in your favor there.
- the tone of "Maybe eat more Quinoa ;-) ? how well do you methilate?" reads condescending and mocking to me.
- using videos as "sources" is not always appreciated here (various reasons already discussed).
- lack of substance: my understanding of your post is "1. Beware of the nutriments forms 2. Here’s an interesting videos on vitamins 3. Genetic helps to be vegan". HN crowd like informations and reflections, not much warning and "go see that link" without substantial abstract of the content.
Thanks again for the channel link, very interesting and I’d like to see other experts arguments on this.
Side note: didn’t catch Pyridoxal sulfate in the video, did you mean phosphate ?
2. An exclusively plant based diet is hard to maintain but if you look at the research on why people quit plant based diets,
(1) it’s because most people quit every diet…even in this article the first “vegan” (he wasn’t vegan, he just adopted a plant based diet for health reasons) did not just quit his plant based diet but also his carnivore diet and will likely settle at a standard onnivore diet.
(2) even for people who are actually vegans (ie they are against the killing and commodification of animals), when they do exit veganism it’s because of social pressures. I’m pretty much all of the world veganism requires you to constantly go against the grain. The hardest part about being vegan is living in a non vegan world. If you flip the script, and imagine a hypothetical world in which everyone was vegan, I bet the 0.5-1% of the people who decided they wanted to start catching random sentient beings, torturing and murdering them, and then consuming their blood, pus, secretions and flesh, would not be able to continue doing that for too long either.
The fact that many philosophers and thinkers across the political spectrum, even those who aren’t vegan themselves, can admit the ethical value of veganism (for example Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ben Shapiro, have all publicly said it’s the morally correct principle, and they’re hypocritical to not be vegan themselves) is a promising sign that the principle itself is sound.
Also, the closing of vegan restaurants is overstated. Most places where vegan restaurants are closing is because most non vegan places now include vegan options. Setting aside that the restaurant business, especially in the wake of the pandemic sees tremendous turnover anyways, it’s much harder to survive as a vegan restaurant when over a span of 5-10 you’ve gone from having almost no competition to having competition from 50% of the restaurants in your area. And non vegan restaurants offering vegan options benefit further because they can accommodate groups with non vegans whereas it’s more unlikely for a group with a mix of vegan and non vegans to pick the vegan restaurant.
Also the word vegan is bad for sales: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/11/22/the-secret-sellin... (i didn't read this but have heard this a bunch)