There is so much misinformation and outright stupidity in this thread, I don't know where to begin. For millions of years our species and the ones that preceded us were meat eaters. Raw meat eaters, and when we couldn't find game, we would look to everything else to survive until the next meal. Go vegan, and youll get heart disease. Saturated fat is not the cause of heart disease. Our bodies are trained to eat meat, NOT bread, grains, legumes, etc. Theres a reason why sugar spikes insulin, let's see if anyone knows why? I'll give you a hint, it's to save us from starving to death.
Please research before you post. Just because you like meat, dosn't mean anything you just said is backed by statistics.
Dude, WTF? I want a quarter ounce of what you're smoking. Source: Vegetarian Health: Heart Disease If by "youll get heart disease" you mean "youll lower your risk for heart disease", then you're right on the money. I find that peer-reviewed research articles are generally a better, more credible source of information than your hunch about veganism leading to heart disease.
Humans are omnivores, we can eat animal products and plants. Also, bread is grains lol, no need to separate that.
Our bodies are adapted to eating meat for 99% of our evolutionary history, we only had massive amounts of carbs in our diets after there were too many of us to feed just meat. Thanks for those veggie links, I've seen them all being an ex-vegan. Guess what? Correlation does not equal causation. The benefit from being a health consious vegan, is likely because it's compared to a standard processed, high carb diet. If you eat only veggies and fruit all day, your dietary intake of sugar is still relatively low compared to the rest of the population, or a control cohort for that matter. Did you know that scientific studies have biases, and can be manipulated? I can sit here, and link you to studies that show less reactive oxygen species in people who eat NO fruit or veggies, then the ROS levels of people who ate fruits and veggies. It's because these veggies and fruits and all the carbohydrate foods for that matter have been carefully artificially selected to have bred out the poison and up the sugar, but they still contain slight amounts of chemicals that are beneficial AS poisons, in small amounts. Eat certain fruits; it's a good for you, eat the wrong fruit; you die. Hormesis is the basic name for this principle. We eat carbohydrates during our search for food (real food, meat, fat!), which also acts as our fast. The carbohydrates in plants, ruffage and fruits raise our insulin, making our body more efficient at storing fat, to prevent weight loss and eventually harvesting muscle tissue and organs as energy. These "fruits", supersweet huge fruits didn't exist as they are now, and certaintly safe fruit, or fruit for that matter was not abundant, and even non-existant in some regions of every continent. Tell me, were ANY of our ancestors vegan? By choice? What separates a prey from a predator? Intelligence. Certain species of gorilla eat fruit and veggies, and they are also one of the only - if not the only - other creatures that have heart attacks. Saturated fat as been demonized by cardiologists, yet it makes up our bodies, lines our arteries and hearts. How can it be bad for you? The lipid hypothesis is false, and is over and over again proven false. Degenerative disease began basically when we replaced fat in our diet with carbohydrate. Sugar, carbohydrate, breads and rice whatever you want to call it, in amounts unnatural and unseen previously by our human bodies, is the cause of most of these disease. Heard of coliacs? Intolerance to gluten, actually our bodies are all intolerant, and are toxified by, grains. Wheat is a toxic food. I love meat, as do you and as do our bodies because we are hunters and have survived (nay, thrived ) on meat for millenia. Get 60-65 percent of your calories should come from fat. 30 percent from protien and the rest from carbs. Any carbs will do, because all carbs are the same. Bread is grains, but there are many different types of grain. Our diets naturally have consisted of maybe 20 percent at the most carbohydrates, and the rest fat, and protien. Tell me, how did our bodies adapt to high carb (or low carb if you're a vegan) meat lacking diets? I guess if I "had you going there", I had you going for good reason because it's true, its the right way to eat and it's the way our ancestors have eaten and how our bodys are built to eat.
This is a leap of logic. So eating fruit is like Russian roulette?... "Oh GOD! I TOOK THE FUCKING WATERMELON!!!" But seriously, the apples were the choice we were looking for. Apples. Grapes would suffice, but you touch the fucking watermelon. And well. you die. Dude... Do you realize you are attacking fruits and vegetables? I can 'get it' if your telling me that meat is a readily available high source of protein. I get it. But if your telling me that you should watch what fruits and vegatables your eating because you could potentially start giving yourself harm. I'd say your fucking nuts man. That's about all.
I don't think you even read what I said. Yes, originally fruits were russian roulette. I'm not telling you that fruit will make you sick. Haha, I'm saying originally fruits have poisons, and these low dose poisons in CURRENT artificially selected fruit, is good for us, ie hormetic. My point is a majority of our calories are supposed to be coming from fat, not carbohydrates and actual sugar, which is incredibly rare in nature. What aren't you understanding?
Dude you started out with heart disease, then you moved to death. When the reality of the matter is, for a common sense balanced diet you should only have red meat around once a week salmon 2-3 times a week, sole up to 4 - 5, tilapia (more fatty) 1 - 2 all meat fats are not created equal. As for complete veganism, for me it's a spiritual path, I will do my best t in order to lessen the suffering of other sentient beings, and I feel way better for it; it heightens my senses, and makes me less tired. Basically it's an all around high that's good for me, and the planet I live in. Cattle production is one of the worlds largest users of fresh water, and biggest emitters of CO2 gas. Chickens are raised in 1'x1' cubical and often don't even have enough space to open their wings. Start overlooking the suffering of the small, and soon large scale suffering will be common place.
Common sense: we ate lots of and almost exclusively meat for hundreds of thousands of years. Big game, cow buffalo mammoth? So how is properly cooked meat bad? It's not. Even better would be raw.
your comparing native culture with 'civilized' culture. I don't think anyone on this thread has labeled meat as bad. I have repeatedly said that the problem is the exploitation of living animals. Simple analogy, is it wrong to work in factories? Is it wrong to exploit people in factories? Supporting the exploitation of animals has serious concequences on your pysche and by a larger extent the metaphysical condition of the planet. By your posts you seem to be the 'all or nothing' type of person who jumps 100% into whatever he does. You go from negative to positive, back to negative, and eventually decide that positive is much more fulfilling that negative. I don't mean to call you out, as your seeking nature is an admirable quality. However, like so many priests of so many religions you can get lost in the chase and forget that fulfillment can never be attained by seeking. Seek emptiness and you will be fulfilled.
I completely agree about the factory animals. That's why I get my meats from humane farms I can visit. I like what you're trying to achieve, and like I said I was vegan for a while, and sure it's better for the environment and for the animals, but it's not really the best for your health.
Still I think you need to convince me that it's not good for your health. All of the stats that you've mentioned are completely bogus. Give at least one credible article that says that you cannot achieve a healthy lifestyle as a vegan and I will listen. Edit: however I still believe for clarity of mind, you cannot beat veganism. If one wants to prepare for any sort of soul searching, or achieve a high on life it is best to avoid meat.
oh and I just wanted to say one more thing. Everyone wants to be a hero. Well go vegan for a week a be a hero to a few of the animals that grew up in cages. You won't get a spot on the evening news or find your way into page 10 of the press, but you'll know what you did was right, and you'll make a difference to a chicken or two who never saw sunlight.
if you are able to supplement missing protein and fats with other substances then it can be a very healthy diet. taking a multivitamin is required but everyone should take one anyway because the food we eat is getting less and less healthy for us. its really not hard to substitute the protein you would be getting with meat with chic peas, tofu, lentils etc with a bit of olive oil to complete the fat. cooked well, all of these foods are fucking amazing and nothing was harmed in the process of it. you don't have to wonder why your chicken breast tastes like chemical or if its natural for it to be that large (its not) you don't have to think of the cows and cows standing out in a field waiting to go up the ramp to have a hole blown into its skull. how they treat the animals we eat is disgusting.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WssRIarxsCk&NR=1]YouTube - My Thai Chef - Fried Tofu Recipe[/ame] thai tofu
Howdy if you are able to supplement missing protein and fats with other substances then it can be a very healthy diet. Just want to make a note, that there are things in raw meat (the original way we ate it) that are not supplement-able and not found in anything else, AND that serve a primary role in our health. Not to mention L-carnitine, taurine, all these amino's that are only found in meat and in the case of taurine, fish. its really not hard to substitute the protein you would be getting with meat with chic peas, tofu, lentils etc with a bit of olive oil to complete the protein. You're probably high when you wrote this, (only forum where this is not insulting) but olive oil is just fat, no protien. Not to mention the protien is NOT what you'd be missing, especially if you're "looked up" all the vegetarian food that is high in protien. What you're going to be lacking in is FAT, because fat is pretty rare in nature besides on animals! Avocado's, olives and all these nut and seed oils would not have been available back then, and therefore are not the best possible diet for you or I to be living on now. Now think, would you, in any given location around the planet in the last million years (before agriculture, obviously) been able to FIND all of these high protien foods, and in abundant amounts, year round no less? The answer is a resonating and sobering NO, for all the vegans and vegetarians. You would have had access to the same thing, though, that we all have subsisted on unanimously for millenia: flesh. This flesh is made of the exact types of fats in the exact ratios (this is another post all together) that they are supposed to be, and when you start consuming unnatural (YES, UNNATURAL) amounts of polyunsaturated fats from sources that in the wild WE WOULD NOT HAVE, you're messing with a delicate balance of the lipid profiles in your blood. We are composed of mostly saturated fat, because this is the most stable fat. Monounsaturated fat is the next most abundant fat in our bodies, and actually accounts for a large chunk of our fat composition. This fat is safe and found in many of the animals that we naturally would have eaten. Many of these animals naturally eat the grass, so the grass they eat determines thier fat composition. Just like grass fed meat has more omega-3s etc. these animals are "made of what they ate", literally. Polyunsaturated fats are found in large quantities in foods like peanut, rapeseed, linseed, canola, etc. These are the cheap foods that fast food fries with. When eating these fats that are high in polyunsaturated fat, we are consuming amounts of PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acids) that would be exteremly improbable - nay, impossible to match or even come close to, on a standard human diet before the invention of agriculture. Polyunsaturated fats play important and vital roles in our bodies, but there are reports of possible oxidation of polyunsaturated fats because of the extra carbon bonds, and this can cause inflammation in the blood vessels, and we all know this leads to atherosclerosis, and heart disease. Do veggies cause heart disease? No, of course not. The standard diet compared to a person who varies thier diet with veggies and fruits is no comparison at all; these veg-n-fruiters are opting for less dense carbohydrates, rather than more dense carbohydrate foods (I'm talking about the standard american diet). So what you see as a health benefit from fruits and veg, is more of a calorie reduction effect then the effect of the actual veggies. Of course, if you eat just fruit and lots and lots of it, it still counts as sugar, fruit is not a free pass! Where is sugar in nature? Exteremly rare; most apples are bitter and probably some poisonous. In fact, the apple's and virtuall ALL FRUIT WE HAVE TODAY IS BRED TO BE SWEET AND HUGE. So they are not representations of what original fruit, or any natural fruit for that matter, would look like. For example, dog is our creation from the wolf, as we super-intensively selectively-bred them for hundreds of years, surely these dogs, so distinct from eachother, couldn't have possibly emerged and been distributed worldwide without the help of humans. In our creating "perfect" fruits, we have 1. fed lots of people, 2. changed the sugar content and size of the fruit, 3. distributed, marketed and created a demand for them, and finally, 4. bred out bad, poisonous types. Fruit we eat has small toxins (called antioxidants) that actually cause the body to work more efficiently. Virtuall all the essential minerals, vitamins and elements we have are toxins, but in small amounts, they confer greater health. This "biphasic" or two-sided reaction to a toxin is classified hormesis, wherein the smaller dose provides a positive reaction or immunity, and a larger one a negative, or toxic reaction. Lung cancer statistics show that 1-5 year smokers ("smoked at some point in life") had lower lung cancer rates then never smokers, 5-10 year smokers, and 10-20 year smokers. The short period of smoking caused there body to be able to fight it more, and thus confers a slight immunity. You might say this is an unreasonable supposition, but new scientific trends and writings on hormesis and low-dose toxin are showing that it is not. Hormesis applys to everything, oxygen we breathe, iron in our blood, posassium, calcium, iodine, sodium, vitamin A, B, C, D, the sun, radiation (X-Ray radiation hormesis: google that for some fun) and even down to the plant toxins (which are many things, vitamins in the plant, or phytochemicals and phytoestrogens, terpenes and more) all these things would be toxic at a point, but in small amounts confer greater health. Bingo. Hormesis. So say you like hormesis. This mean fruit is good right? Low dose toxin, they're sweet, and they are everywhere. This is true! But, fruit as an addition to a diet already high in carbohydrates is not a good thing. Fat must be your main source of energy, significant plant matter should be consumed (as it would be if we were looking for food a century ago) but carbs from sugar and breads and all other vegetarian sources (remember meat doesnt have carbs) shouldn't make up a significant portion of your diet! Leafy veggies, kale, all these are exteremely low in calories but do help pass food, and ancient fossils we've found of feces show that they ate fiberous tree material. However no matter how much of these veggies, and certain other foods that are low in calories like carrots, celery, potatoes, squash and basically all the good "glycemic index" foods, they won't make up a high carb intake. But what will? Breads, pasta, and vegetarian foods that are high in carbs. If you feel good on a vegan diet because youre eating only lefy veggies and small amount of fruit, its because youre fasting! But you should break your fast too, because theres the other side of the "feast or famine" coin, feast. That would be ancient you and me, going and killing an animal and eating it. I'm an animal lover, I don't even kill flies. And I know everything you know and feel everything you feel. I was vegan for about a year. It only worked for me because I ate only natural food; no bread. However when I cut out rice, and all these carbohydrates that spike insulin and raise blood glucose, I found out that your body can make glucose on it's on as per needed like magic. So carbs in general are okay in small amounts but unneccesary. Then I thought about how people in the past didn't have sweet fruit, so then that means ancient man's diet was even more drastically lower in carbohydrate, and such higher in (raw) animal fat and bone. Ever wonder why people get gluten intolerance? Because wheat and other grains are toxic to our body because we've never eaten them. Sugar causes cancer, and all these foods are high in sugar. I wonder why sugar causes cancer, and I also wonder why we eat sugar so much in the form of carbohydrate. So I have a decision to make, care about the animals or do what my ancestors did? No excess sugars = no cancer. No wonder my grandparents never got cancer; eating so much meat and everything fried in lard! Which is a saturated fat by the way... But when it comes to feeding my body, I want to live as long as possible and provide for my son and actually NOT ever have a heart attack. I'll stick with getting 60 percent calories from fat, 25-30 from protien and 15 from carb. This is low carb, high fat because our body does not pack fat on without an insulin response (because, like I said, carbohydrates are for times of famine, ie NO MEAT AROUND) so when you have a low carb diet, high in animal fat the animal fat is rebuilding your body the way it's been trained to and is used to for millions of years. "So easy, a caveman colud do it!".
you jump to conclusions about ancient man that are not consistent with scientific reseach, for example the ancient enlightened civilization of egypt. Agriculture existed from an early date in Egypt. For the common people of Egypt, cereal foods formed the main backbone of their diet from the predynastic period onward Even for the rich, this staple mean generally consisted of a variety of different breads, often with other ingredients mixed in. Sometimes these ingredients were purposeful, while at other times not. Because of the crude utensils used to make bread, quartz, felspar, mica, ferro magnesium minerals and other foreign bodies, including germs were almost always present in the flour. bread was made by mixing the dough, kneading it with both hands or sometimes with the feet in large containers. Yeast, salt, spices, milk and sometimes butter and eggs were then added, before the bread was placed in a baking form or patted into various shapes. At first it was cooked in open fires or even on the embers. But from the Old Kingdom on, bread-moulds were used which were preheated, wiped with fat and filled with the dough. Slowly this process became more sophisticated. In the Middle Kingdom, tall, tapered bread ovens with a firebox at the bottom, a grating and domed, upper compartment which was open at the top were used. At first, and really for even later common consumption, bread was usually cooked in the shape of a pancake. However, later bread was made in long or round rolls, and sometimes even shaped into figures, particularly for ceremonial purposes. Large, soft griddle cakes were also made, just as in Nubia today. Sometimes thick loaves were made, with a hollow center that was then filled with beans, vegetables or other items. Sometimes flat bread was made with raised edges in order to hold eggs, or other fillings. Eventually, bread was made with various other ingredients, but there was no distinction between bread and pastries. Yet bread was often sweetened with honey or dates, or flavored with sesame, aniseed or fruit. Vegetables Obviously, even for the poor, other items such as vegetables, fruit and fish were consumed, all gifts of the Nile. They often ate beans, chick peas, lentils and green peas, just as modern Egyptians do today. Leeks and Egyptian lettuce was also popular. garlic were eaten, as well as thought to repel agents of diseases, and onions were popular, as well as being used for medical purposes. Though Herodotus tells us otherwise, radishes do not appear to have been consumed much. Fruit Chances are we do not know all the different types of fruit consumed. The most popular fruit in ancient Egypt was probably dates, which are rich in sugar and protein. While the rich used honey as a sweetener, the poor more often employed dates. They were also dried for later consumption, and were sometimes fermented to make wine. We know that figs were eaten, but mostly from illustrations and references. Grapes were popular when available, and were also sun-dried to make raisins. Persea Mimusops laurifolia we know from the food left in tombs, as well as pomegranates, which have been found as far back as the 12th Dynasty. We have even found a watermelon in the New Kingdom tomb of Nebseni. We only know of Egyptian plums from the New Kingdom, and the peach does not show up until the Ptolemaic (Greek) period. Olives were probably bought into Egypt with the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period, but walnuts and carob pods (St. John's bread) are only known from the New Kingdom onward. Meat, Fish and Poultry While it is difficult to believe that certain meats, such as fish and wild poultry did not show up fairly frequently on the tables of common people, we are told by Egyptologists that it was for the most part only the rich who regularly feasted on most meat. The poor ate geese, ducks, quails, cranes and other species, and from the New Kingdom onward raised domesticated fowl. Most edible fish from the Nile were consumed, though some fish, such as the genera Lepidotus and Phragus and a few others were forbidden because of their connection with the myth of Osiris. In some locations, even the Nile perch was worshipped, and therefore never eaten. While fish were roasted or boiled, most frequently they were salted and preserved and dried in the sun. Beef from cattle was frequently eaten by the rich, but appeared on the tables of common people usually only during festive occasions, when a sheep or goat might be slaughtered. We also see from tomb paintings, the preparation of wild game such as antelope, ibex, gazelles and deer. Pork was eaten, though the animal was associated with the evil god Seth. Early on it was widely consumed in Lower Egypt, but rarely in Upper Egypt. Yet we know that pigs were later bred and pork widely eaten throughout Egypt.