Veganism

Many vegans, particularly female ones, come to their eating habits from a moment of disgust during their youth.  Vegan books frequently depict eating meat as a disgusting act.  These days, few people grow up on farms or grow up hunting, so it's become relatively easy to trigger the disgust reflex.  All it takes is a grocery store turkey with the feet on, a little bit of blood in the meat, or a few vivid lines in Skinny Bitch.

An overly-sensitive disgust reflex is akin to an overly-sensitive immune system.  This is not a stretch, it is a literal comparison.  In fact, an overly-sensitive disgust reflex IS an overly-sensitive immune system.

• Disgust is usually triggered by vectors of disease (feces, rotten meat)
• The purpose of our immune system is to defend against disease
• Disgust is part of our immune system

When that mechanism becomes overly-sensitive, people can become disgusted by all kinds of things that aren't actually vectors of disease, often with negative health consequences.  Enter veganism.

To the extent it is motivated by an overly-sensitive disgust reflex, VEGANISM IS AN AUTO-IMMUNE DISORDER.

Disgust is key to the spread of veganism.  Therefore, it becomes imperative to raise children, especially girls, in ways that their disgust reflex isn't so easily triggered.  I don't what that step-by-step process is, but I'm confident that there is a set of steps that can be taken to inoculate children with high reliability.  It probably means purposeful exposure to dead animals via hunting or butchering at a young age.  Schools will never do it -- and certainly not public schools -- so that makes it a parental obligation.

If we inoculate a generation of girls against veganism, then the whole thing withers on the vine.

We should also reform the factory farm system, which truly is disgusting.

Mark Bittman wants you to be a semi-vegan.

For New Year's, The New York Times food columnist knows that many people want to "lose some weight" and "eat better".

"If defining this betterness has become increasingly more difficult (half the diet books that spilled over my desk in December focused on going gluten-free), the core of the answer is known to everyone: eat more plants."

Yes, regurgitate this statement like an herbivore chewing its cud -- eat more plants.  Ignore the fact that plants are vastly more chemically diverse than animals.  Ignore the fact that plants are the source of our poisons as well as our medicines.  Ignore the fact that the biggest issue with the modern diet is too much industrial food.

Bittman then jumps from "eat more plants" -- a health claim -- to veganism, a moral ideology:

"And if the diet that most starkly represents this — veganism — is no longer considered bizarre or unreasonably spartan, neither is it exactly mainstream. (For the record, vegans don’t simply avoid meat; they eschew all animal products, including dairy, eggs and even honey.)"

Yeah, I wonder why it's never gone mainstream, why there are hordes of former vegans eating paleo, and why prominent former vegans are coming out in favor of ethical omnivorism.

Then he slips in his sales pitch for semi-veganism:

My point here is to make semi-veganism work for you. Once a week, let bean burgers stand in for hamburgers, leave the meat out of your pasta sauce, make a risotto the likes of which you’ve probably never had — and you may just find yourself eating “better.”

Did you see the magic trick that Bittman just pulled?  You have to watch closely.  Here, watch it in slow-motion.

• Most people want to lose weight for New Year's
• Lose weight = eat better
• Eat better = eat more plants
• Eat more plants = veganism
• Semi-veganism = veganism for non-ideologues

David Copperfield couldn't have done it better.

If you hold an ideological belief, then just SAY SO and BELIEVE IN IT.  I have no issue with any vegan who says, "This is my ideology.  This is how I choose to live."  More power to ya, brother.

But it infuriates me when people try to pass off an ideology as something other than ideology.  Just take ideology and wrap up in a way that sounds reasonable and non-ideological.  IT'S JUST ONE MEAL A WEEK!  WHAT'S UNREASONABLE ABOUT ONE MEAL A WEEK?  JUST ONE BOCA BURGER, BROTHER.

It's single-serving ideology at its worst.

Let's play a game called Word Association.  I'm going to give you some words, and you tell me what comes to mind. 

Anti-science.

...

Anti-evolution.

...

Ideology over everything.

...

What do you think of?  Surprise!  The New York Times.

Remember, ideology sells.

#warpath

Sometimes posts just write themselves.  I don't know how to explain it -- it's as if the universe understands my sense of humor, and then arranges for such events to take place.  Our northern neighbors in Canada just hosted a national science contest, which featured some seriously impressive findings by extremely young and talented students.  We'll start with first prize:

Marshall Zhang, a Grade 11 student in Richmond Hill, Ont., used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto to identify how two drugs interacted with a specific part of a mutant protein that's responsible for most cases of CF [cystic fibrosis].

He then proved what he'd found using living cells in culture.

"Not only did they (the drugs) work together, they worked together so well that they actually allowed the cells that were treated with both compounds to function as if they were the cells of healthy individuals," said Zhang, who was awarded a $5,000 prize.

Incredible.  This kid is only in the 11th grade.  Hats off to you, Marshall.

Want to know what earned second prize?

The second-place prize of $4,000 at the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge went to three 19-year-old students from Montreal who made sorbet without gelatin, potentially opening up a large new vegetarian market for the dessert.

Vegetarian sorbet.  Second prize went to a novel way for vegans to eat dessert.  I mean, how could this not win first prize?  Oh, it's so funny it makes my sides hurt. 

Now contrast that with the paleo-friendly third and fourth place prizes:

Third place went to Shannon Watson, 18, of Ottawa, who identified bacteria in a probiotic fermented milk product from Zambia that inhibit the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Yasamin Mahjoub, 16, of Calgary won fourth place for showing that hormones produced by pregnant women protect neurons from the effects of iron accumulation in the brain, a characteristic of multiple sclerosis.

So an 18 year-old discovers a particularly beneficial strain of bacteria from a traditional lacto-fermented food found in a less developed society, and a 16 year-old shows how to harness the natural adaptive intelligence of the human body during pregnancy.  If these kids keep going down those paths, they are going to clean up.  Alternatively, they could pioneer novel industrial food processing methods to satisfy the conscience and sweet tooth of ideologues. 

Guess which team won a bonus $1,000 prize for the finding with the greatest commercial potential?  Breakthrough treatment of cystic fibrosis?  A new and better antibiotic?  An innovative MS treatment?  Nope.  The judges correctly assessed which product would fly fastest off the shelves: VEGAN SORBET.

Dear Universe,

That was a good one.

Your friend,

John

The full article is here.  And please don't forget to like or re-tweet this important scientific breakthrough.

Well, folks, it was only a matter of time before my vegan bashing (see here, here, here, and here) got me in hot water.  One of my long time friends, who has been a vegan for many years, decided to take my education into her own hands.  Without telling me, she bought me two books on vegan nutrition and shipped them to my apartment.

I order a lot of books from Amazon, so I assumed the package contained books I had ordered.  You can imagine my surprise and confusion when I saw vegan books inside.  They were like red hot coals in my hands.  Actually, strike that -- "red" and "coal" doesn't sound very vegan to me.  They were like bright green kryptonite, pulsing with some renewable energy source.  I nearly threw them off the roof.

Well, I'm going to read them.  Many of the other paleo leaders have tried vegetarianism or veganism for some period of time (Wolf, Le Corre), but I haven't -- so I'm going to do my assigned reading.  The books are Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life and Thrive Fitness: The Vegan-Based Training Program for Maximum Strength, Health, and Fitness.  I also have been meaning to read Eating Animals, the book that eliminated Natalie Portman from the dating market.  I am looking forward to it, and will try to read these books with an open mind.

Note to readers: If you want to re-educate me on any other topics by sending me free books, please let me know and I will send you my mailing address.

This is big.  George Monbiot has been one of the most vocal advocates of veganism for environmental reasons.  And he just changed his tune.   In a recent article for the Guardian, Monbiot now accepts a role for eating meat as part of a healthy food system and environment.  He admits that new calculations show the environmental impact of raising livestock is less than had been claimed, and that properly raising farm animals (not via our factory farm system) is not only benign, but worthwhile.

There's a temptation to gloat -- let's not do that.  Instead, let's take a moment to respect Monbiot's open-mindedness and the evidence-based way he changed his thinking.  It's not easy to write a column saying that you've been espousing wrong ideas for the past decade in pursuit of noble goals.

"This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case."

• One of the key insights to efficient feeding of livestock is understanding the animals' natural diet.  Sounds a lot like paleo for animals to me.

• Frequently cited environmental stats on raising livestock are *way* off.

"Like many greens I have thoughtlessly repeated the claim that it requires 100,000 litres of water to produce every kilogram of beef. Fairlie shows that this figure is wrong by around three orders of magnitude."

"Similarly daft assumptions underlie the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, a higher proportion than transport. Fairlie shows that it made a number of basic mistakes."

• Vegan farming isn't a solution

"[Fairlie] also shows that many vegetable oils have a bigger footprint than animal fats, and reminds us that even vegan farming necessitates the large-scale killing or ecological exclusion of animals: in this case pests. On the other hand, he slaughters the claims made by some livestock farmers about the soil carbon they can lock away."

• By not eating ethically and properly raised meat, vegans aren't influencing the debate...or the market. 

"By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It's time we got stuck in."

Wow.  Sounds a lot like what former vegan Lierre Kieth passionately advocated in The Vegetarian Myth.  Read the whole article.

And here is the book that changed Monbiot's mind.  Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie.

(Thanks to Lauri for the pointer.)

1. The military exposes the myth of the modern running shoe

2. Raids are increasing on farms and private food-supply clubs

3. Former vegetarian rips into the religion of veganism

4. Do men and women have significantly different dietary requirements?  Maybe, maybe not

5. The Barefoot Bandit movie

6. AM New York (free subway newspaper) covers the caveman diet (pg. 20)

Ultra-marathoner and vegan Scott Jurek was recently profiled in the NYT.   For those who aren't familiar with Jurek, he's a crazy sick ultra-marathoner who dominates many of these 50 mile, 100 mile, 100+ mile races.  The piece is unique in that it ignores the ethical aspects of veganism and just talks about athletic performance.  Let's see what they have to say.

In college, his diet began to improve, and as he “saw how much disease is lifestyle related,” he began eating “real food, eating the way people have been eating for thousands of years.”

I'm all for real food, but claims to history in favor of real food is not an argument in favor of veganism.

“None of this is weird,” he said. “If you go back 300 or 400 years, meat was reserved for special occasions, and those people were working hard. 

Go back 300 or 400 years?  The 18th century is the benchmark of healthy eating?  To the extent people ate less meat back then it was because they were poor.

"Remember, almost every long-distance runner turns into a vegan while they’re racing, anyway — you can’t digest fat or protein very well.”

There are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't know where to start.

• You can get fat or protein from plant sources, so that's just a non-sequitur.
• Just because you're eating carbohydrates while you're running doesn't mean that you're a vegan.   It means you're momentarily a vegetarian, I suppose.
• And even that assumes that you body isn't using it's own fat or protein stores.  That's kind of like eating an animal.
• Also, most of these distance racers are eating heavily processed energy gels and bars -- not "real food", much less vegan food.

All it takes is one look at a long-distance runner's body to see that they have little muscle mass and they're all skin and bones.  Hence my choice of picture.

He said he needed 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day, “and I get that all from plant sources. It’s not hard, either. I like to eat, and I don’t have to worry about weight management. All I need is a high-carbohydrate diet with enough protein and fat.”

My emphasis.  If you're eating 8,000 calories a day, good luck getting it from fat and protein -- you'll be too full.  Interesting...to maximize caloric intake, eat a high-carbohydrate diet.  Wait, isn't that what we're told to do to minimize caloric intake too?  Which is it?

I'm not saying that Scott Jurek is eating the wrong way -- God, no.  He's a super-star athlete, his achievements are mind-blowing, and if he says a vegan diet helps him achieve that, then I'm not going to suggest otherwise.  By eating a high carbohydrate diet, he's training his body to use carbohydrate as fuel, which is probably essential for his type of long-distance exertions.

But should we eat like Michael Phelps, with his 12,000 calories a day of chocolate-chip pancakes, energy drinks, and pizza?  No.  And we shouldn't eat like Scott Jurek either.