this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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go vegan
Bloodmouths don't want to hear it. They need to pretend their corpse habit is sustainable and friendly because if any of them actually thought about the animals they're hurting they'd feel bad.
The way to get people on your side (and you know, actually help the animals) is to do pretty much the opposite of what you're doing. Black-and-white thinking ("either you're a vegan, or you're a bloodmouth!") is paradoxically going to drive people away from what you're saying and cause more animals to be harmed.
Just not an option for most people, and not an appealing option for even more than that.
You don't even need to go vegan to have a positive impact.
Personally, I've been buying a lot more meat alternatives from Impossible, Beyond, Gardein, et al. Had to cut out red meat for heart health, but those alternatives quickly grew on me. The environmental and animal welfare benefits are just a bonus.
This is a red herring.
It's an option for everyone reading this comment, I guarantee it.
The extra insulin I would have to take as a T1 diabetic to cover a carb-heavy diet would quickly outweigh any financial savings eating beans and rice would.
There are dozens of us out there who have restrictive diets that, while veg* diets are technically possible, are not easy, financially sound, or realistic. I try to stick to a primarily vegetarian diet, but I also recognize that protein is an outsized portion of my diet compared to most people. To accomplish that, animal products are important to me. Cheese, eggs, and even the occasional meat product are going to be things I eat, and not feel bad about.
You know, fair. In a humane world we'd find a way to support people like you, but right now I guess there are probably some people who really must feed on corpses to survive. I still say this is a red herring, because bloodmouths use you as a cover for their own unjustified blood letting.
I east so much damn protein, but not because I need to.
Beans are like the cheapest thing you can buy.
Technically, yes, and in a survival situation, sure. But when you can get whatever you want at a grocery store / restaurant, it's a much bigger hurdle for people to make that change. Realistically, people are going to eat what they like.
I'd have never even bothered with the plant-based "meats" had the doctor not told me, flat out, "Unless you change your diet, you are going to die". Literally took those words before I was able to force myself to change my eating habits.
Pushing cold-turkey veganism isn't really helping the cause here. Yes, that would be ideal, but it's letting perfect be the enemy of good.
I literally became a vegan because vegans kept telling me to, it definitely does work. Almost every vegan started out eating meat.
If by "not an option" you are referring to cost, it turns out that it actually is usually cheaper to eat plant-based diets overall, and real-world spending data agrees with that
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via%3Dihub
Not the cost, the easy risk of malnutrition and requirement of supplements for B12, iron, D, iodine and omega-3...
The majority of vegans also have difficulty getting all of their protein/amino acids. I actually use a vegan protein powder due to lactose intolerance that solves this issue, but it's an extra cost not everyone can cover.
Not to mention the elevated risk of Diabetes due to the high carbohydrate diet most vegans have.
Or... You can just eat a chicken breast and solve all of these issues.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
It's not that it's not possible, it's that it's so easy for the layperson to fuck up. Both those claims about low diabetes risks and being able to supplement missing micronutrients are true alone, but mix them together and you get a risky balance that needs careful tracking.
You're basically required to eat a cup of cashews a day and put nutritional yeast in at least one meal. If you deviate from this you're going to be at risk of malnutrition.
Otherwise you're going to be opting for fortified foods like bread, rice, salt, cereal, etc. Which again have all good choices within them but if you deviate from the recommended track (wheat bread, bran cereal, etc) then without close tracking you're most likely either eating too little risking malnutrition or you're eating too many carbs to compensate and spiking your blood sugar
Also there's several concerns of using fortified foods as your main source of micronutrients. Mostly that fortified foods don't fully replace the nutrition of whole foods, and the upper levels of these supplements aren't well controlled leading to a risk of toxicity. Stand-alone supplements are a better alternative, but do have a cost associated with them.
You can totally do vegan, and do it right, but you're never going to recommend it to Debby down the street who packs her kids lunches every day without also recommending she starts her family on a multivitamin. It's just not scalable to the whole population like that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21139125/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066912/
Also from your article:
While the diet supports it, this is just as much a correlation. It does not account for the other lifestyle choices of vegans and vegetarians such as exercising more often than the typical person.