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Steve Wagar
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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Jebus wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:28 pm Are you suggesting that there is a cut off point between harmful and not harmful amounts rather than a linear correlation?
Great question, and yes, I am. The reason I think I can get away with this is (a) we are self-repairing organisms, and (b) we face other risks in life as well.
Jebus wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:28 pm On what do you base that estimation?
I knew I'd be forced to account if I threw a number out, but you deserved to hear some kind of number. I cite my prior comment about self-repair and other risks. I am suggesting, without going through the full exercise, that if I were to line up all my risks and prioritize, by keeping the animal products to about 2 oz/week I can push it far enough down the list that it won't be the thing that gets me sick/kills me.
Jebus wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:28 pm How do you know that? How could any lung cancer patient know if it was the ten thousandth or ten thousand and first cigarette that did them in?
You're going for the jugular here ;-) Same answer, but I'm going to elaborate on self-repair. A whole-foods plant-based diet has been demonstrated to reverse cancer, and the reason is that the body is very good at repairing itself and as soon as you stop assaulting it full blast all the time it will do exactly that. So I could just say that statistically taking in a small number of carcinogens is safer than a large amount in a linear way, but I am going further and saying that the body flushes that risk out. So risk avoidance is much better than linear; I won't try to prove it is perfect. Now, I certainly wouldn't recommend 2 oz meat+dairy/week to a sick person (or to anyone), but I've had only two colds in the past 9 years and no other illnesses, and the colds had no visible symptoms. Did I inflict them on myself with my (clearly) lax diet? Probably, but for me it was a good tradeoff.
Jebus wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:28 pm That was a fallacy of relative privation.
Prioritization is not a fallacy, except to ethicists ;-)
Jebus wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:28 pm Killing almost always causes direct and indirect suffering. My personal belief is that when given two choices one should choose the ones that causes the least total amount of suffering.
Of course I can't argue with that! But when will we live in a world where all the consequences of every action are always considered? It is no doubt easy for us in our (faux) ivory tower to say we should factor in every consequence, but the knock-on effects of a complex economy are not so easily managed.
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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brimstoneSalad wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:32 pm
Steve Wagar wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:37 pm I am not ok with sentient beings suffering; I am saying that suffering is unnecessary to food production. Killing is generally necessary, and that is unfortunate and brings momentary suffering, but can be done quickly.
It comes down to the question of whether we value hedonism, or interests.
I would prefer not to be killed painlessly, even if I didn't know it was coming. Most sentient beings want to live; it's not just about experiencing pain, but about having that inherent desire to live violated. I would experience quite a bit of pain to keep living, because my life has value to me. We see the same in other species too.

While harmful, killing can be justified to save a life, but if it's not necessary why do it?
Again, vegans can always win from their ivory tower (I'll stop mentioning that it is faux; we can assume no animals were harmed building it :lol: ). The crux of this argument is whether it is necessary, not whether meat-eaters are monstrously unethical. You argue that animals in the wild eat meat because they don't know any better and have no viable alternative food sources either. Ok, fine. But the same is true of us, historically. I'm not going to undertake a review of all of civilization, but let's just say that animal agriculture facilitated the growth of civilization as we know it. You are now suggesting that we know better and can stop. I would propose that we know nothing of the kind and can't stop. It is not that we don't know some of the things we need to know to stop, but we don't know all of them. The most critical (and undervalued point, by vegan ethicists, I think) is that our culture is built around animal agriculture and we like it that way. We (collectively, not you or me) don't know how we could psychologically continue without it. And that reason alone is why it will continue no matter what we conclude here and now.
Steve Wagar wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:37 pmI think that can be equated to animals killing animals in the wild; not evil.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:32 pm Those animals are not evil for two reasons:
1. They aren't really moral agents and they don't understand the harm they're causing.
2. They have to do it to survive, so it's justified by that (We can kill our shipmates if we're stranded on a desert island too, to survive, it's not considered evil).

But it's somewhat of a myth that nature is that savage. Most animals humans would eat will not die from predation; after they mature, it's usually age and disease that do them in. Being in the wild is not the horror most people imagine, and being hunted isn't that traumatic.
Still, it would be nice to help wild animals suffer less, for example, by eradicating some diseases like rabies, and AIDS (in its respective species).
A wild life can probably be very worth living, and they live much longer and more fulfilled lives than farmed animals.
That is a good point that nature isn't so savage; most prey do live out normal lives without getting caught. I wondered why you mentioned it, but comparing to animal agriculture, where every single one dies, I can see that nature starts to look pretty friendly! And an improved nature where they suffer even less would be nice, too, though at this point I would be satisfied to see us stop driving nearly every species extinct.

But to your point, while we can understand the harm we are causing, we are not yet culturally prepared to avoid it, so we are left with no choice but to keep doing it. And that, of course, begs the real question, what would it take for us to "properly" consider all the implications of our actions to make the best possible choices? If nothing else, it takes time. But most people are unwilling to entertain the question, so it also takes overcoming resistance to change. As we know all too well now, the world has people who embrace change and those who would rather stick their head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening.

You suggest that meat-eaters are "just" hedonists, but it not as if, when they choose the beef burger over the veggie burger, they reason "the meat tastes better so that dumb animal deserved to die". The problem is that the meat tastes better so... was there a so? The problem is that the whole SAD American diet tastes better, and we are, in the interests of our own survival, wired to respond strongly to things that we prefer over things we don't. And we're not wired to worry about downstream effects. Should reason trump the survival instinct? Of course, if the survival instinct has been tricked, but just try to convince anyone of that. Those few people (like us) who value reason over their nature will be your only converts. If they had to stop eating meat to save the planet from being destroyed (which is the case Cowspiracy makes), they would probably eventually do it, but not before it was too late. Which is why it is a good thing factory-grown meat is right around the corner... it is our only chance.
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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brimstoneSalad wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:39 pm
Jebus wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:28 pm Are you suggesting that there is a cut off point between harmful and not harmful amounts rather than a linear correlation?
I think he's saying there's a point at which the risk is so small it's not worth it for people to worry about.
Like if you go somewhere there's granite tiles or counter tops; you're probably being exposed to extra radiation. But micro-managing your life that much may not be worth the few extra days you (statistically) get at the end of it. Diminishing returns.
Yes, you are right, that was what I was saying, and I guess I was trying to say that by citing "other risks". But my other justification regarding self-repair also occurred to me as it eliminates the linearity.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:39 pm I think people often misunderstand cumulative effects and random ones.
With heart disease, it's a slow buildup that you can watch and even reverse. Moderating exposure makes you pretty safe.
With carcinogens, it might be the one cigarette you ever smoked, or even walking by somebody who is smoking, that did it. Random effects are much more frightening and can't be completely avoided through moderation of exposure.
While random risks are certainly more frightening, knowing that our bodies fight off cancer and disease so well mitigates moderate exposure dramatically.
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:36 am I can't agree with the language "evolved from more carnivorous animals"; they are still the same animals from a metabolic standpoint.
In terms of species, they are the same, but there's substantial variation in digestion and metabolism. Digestive changes evolve very fast; much faster than visible morphology. This has been studied at some length in the past decade.

Here's are a couple results talking about one:
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/23/science/la-sci-how-dogs-evolved-20130124
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/01/diet-shaped-dog-domestication

I don't have time to go into a lot of detail here or explore the studies, but those articles should help shed some light on it, and the fact of how rapid animals (including humans) evolve to different diets. Dietary efficiency is one of the strongest evolutionary pressures on animals, which is why it's so fast.

What we don't evolve resistance to is things like chronic disease caused by diet, because these only affect us in our 40's or later, well after we have reproduced, and probably beyond the life expectancy due to other reasons for "wild" humans. There's no reason to believe on those grounds alone, though, that we're more suited to fruit or anything else because in our evolutionary history we have never been subject to those pressures. If a fruit diet killed us at 50, ancient man wouldn't have had much opportunity to discover that or evolve a resistance to it.
We're only now discovering those diseases as we live longer, so it's only modern science that can tell us about what's healthy in terms of reducing chronic disease, not ancestral diets.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:36 amBut if they can eat with less environmental impact at no cost to their health, all the better.
From the limited evidence we have, it's actually better for them, like it is for us. Supplementation is important too, though, particularly for large breeds.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:36 amIt doesn't require more land if we are eating 0.1% as much meat.
Sure, but in that case it's the reduction in meat that's doing it, not the method of production. It would take even less land to do factory farmed meat at 0.1% the consumption.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:36 amWhich is a lucky thing because it is the only hope we have right now.
That may be what finally does it, but there's hope we can speed things along, and even save more animals and slow climate change in the mean time. It could be a decade before in vitro meat is mainstream, and we may not have that long. Houston is a sobering example of the surprises climate change has up its sleeve. It could be worse and sooner than anybody has predicted.
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:56 am A whole-foods plant-based diet has been demonstrated to reverse cancer, and the reason is that the body is very good at repairing itself and as soon as you stop assaulting it full blast all the time it will do exactly that.
That's not correct. The real benefits are preventative. In terms of treatment/reversal it can only improve your chances with some cancer by denying the cancer food and making it grow more slowly giving you more time, but it can't in itself kill the cancer: it's still up to your immune system to identify and annihilate the cancer before it metastasizes and kills you.

Even a very strong and aggressive immune system is not a cure for cancer; it doesn't matter how strong your army is if it can't identify the enemy. Cancer is remarkably easy to kill even for a weak immune system (spontaneous remission can happen on death's door), but only if you can ID it, and that takes dumb luck.

Reverse heart disease? Sure. But not cancer, certainly not reliably.

A low methionine plant based diet can be excellent adjunct therapy to go along with something like chemo (which does kill cancer... but only while it's multiplying, and it kills healthy cells too, so that is a little bit of a crap shoot too), but ultimately a good diet only gives you time to roll the dice a few more times. Your immune system still has to get lucky and ID the problem to take care of it (there are so many kinds of cancer, and the problem is that they look almost exactly like your normal cells).
Cancer vaccines are the promising technology here, that's the only cure aside from dumb luck.

Until those are a reality, the only safe thing is to minimize your risk of getting cancer to as low as possible, which means avoiding carcinogens and loading up on the antioxidants to scavenge free radicals and prevent DNA damage. No amount of broccoli will completely negate the risk introduced from a hamburger. You can try to reduce your risk in other areas to compensate, but not introduced risk is negated in itself.

You're right that at a certain point it makes more practical sense to focus on other causes of cancer and spend time limiting those, but it still doesn't make sense from the perspective of life extension to deliberately introduce carcinogens when there's no good reason to.
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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brimstoneSalad wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:45 pm Digestive changes evolve very fast; much faster than visible morphology. Dietary efficiency is one of the strongest evolutionary pressures on animals, which is why it's so fast.
I'm not saying the Uppsala University study doesn't make some valid points for valid reasons, so I'll just concede the point for simplicity. But it is overly simplistic to just say that sometimes evolution is faster. Two factors contribute to evolution: mutation and natural selection. You can select all you want, but only from among the existing pool of mutations. Tough times encourage rapid change, but tough times can't increase the mutation rate. So rapid evolution is much more likely to be rapid natural selection of existing genes than the creation of wholly new genes. So was there enough genetic variability in the protodog population to allow an herbivorous dog to emerge, or similarly to turn us from frugivores into whatever it is that eats beans? Maybe. We have certainly become pretty tolerant of it and our best scientific studies are not finding appreciable drawbacks. But we haven't done much if anything to study it in detail. Has there been enough time since the dawn of agriculture to mutate new genes to metabolize all these things better than we could before? 10,000 years? I doubt it, that's a drop in the bucket. Has it been enough to naturally select the very best of what we had? Definitely. The argument for evolutionary changes to digest meat are stronger because we have been eating meat a lot longer than we have been farming, but I don't think all those changes overcome certain facts, like our long digestive tract, which is not great for eating meat.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:45 pm What we don't evolve resistance to is things like chronic disease caused by diet, because these only affect us in our 40's or later, well after we have reproduced, and probably beyond the life expectancy due to other reasons for "wild" humans. There's no reason to believe on those grounds alone, though, that we're more suited to fruit or anything else because in our evolutionary history we have never been subject to those pressures. If a fruit diet killed us at 50, ancient man wouldn't have had much opportunity to discover that or evolve a resistance to it.
We're only now discovering those diseases as we live longer, so it's only modern science that can tell us about what's healthy in terms of reducing chronic disease, not ancestral diets.
Now, this is an interesting point, but I don't think it holds up. Science tells us that every chronic disease is like an animal in a zoo we can study and master, and it's such a great thing we now have science to do that. Ideally, it then produces a pharmaceutical to cure every ill. (sorry, that was a low blow, I'm sure you don't promote pharmaceuticals!) But the larger truth is that chronic diseases are primarily the consequence of bad diets, regardless of whether you are young or old, that start to emerge later in life only because the immune system and other auto-repair mechanisms are starting to fail. Bad diets will still adversely affect younger people, e.g. making them feel tired, getting them sick with colds, etc. If aging could be cured, we could keep eating bad diets for much longer before noticing any ill effects, and could probably do a number of unhealthy things indefinitely and completely cure them along the way. So aging just amplifies the effects of bad diet.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:45 pm
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:36 amBut if they can eat with less environmental impact at no cost to their health, all the better.
From the limited evidence we have, it's actually better for them, like it is for us. Supplementation is important too, though, particularly for large breeds.
That makes sense; it is hard to imagine that a carnivorous diet wouldn't be at least somewhat bad for pets as well, if for no other reason that it is top of the food chain and so highest toxicity and acidity.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:45 pm
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:36 amIt doesn't require more land if we are eating 0.1% as much meat.
Sure, but in that case it's the reduction in meat that's doing it, not the method of production. It would take even less land to do factory farmed meat at 0.1% the consumption.
Sure, but all that matters for my point is that humane animal farming is plausible (to the extent pasture farming is humane; I guess we could wait for the animals to be pretty old first if demand were truly that much smaller as I propose). So yes, it depends on making a lot less.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:45 pm That may be what finally does it, but there's hope we can speed things along, and even save more animals and slow climate change in the mean time. It could be a decade before in vitro meat is mainstream, and we may not have that long. Houston is a sobering example of the surprises climate change has up its sleeve. It could be worse and sooner than anybody has predicted.
It seems it already is worse and sooner than anyone predicted, and not a moment too soon. I've always said that our best hope of saving the planet is to destroy it as quickly as possible. I say this tongue in cheek, but what I mean is that people won't take strong enough action until they see real cataclysms. We (the Paris Accord, that is) certainly aren't taking climate change seriously enough yet. It's tongue in cheek only because trying to destroy it fast might work, just like a heart attack is not the best kind of wake-up call to a bad diet.

True, we can't bank on technological improvements to always be there to bail us out, so we should educate ourselves to do things the right way.
And sometimes (often) technology creates more problems than it solves. The green revolution feeds the planet, but at the cost of killing it. And in vitro meat may be available in ten years, but will still cause chronic disease. And ten years is no where near fast enough anyway, considering it will take many more years for it to supplant animals, unless, of course, the economic pyramid scheme we have built the animal agriculture industry on comes crashing down and have no choice but to pay for meat what it really costs, which nobody would be willing to pay (very often). That would inspire people to switch to fake meat fast, just as Coke switched to high fructose corn syrup and never looked back (except in Mexico).
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:41 am The crux of this argument is whether it is necessary, not whether meat-eaters are monstrously unethical.
There's harm, and then there's judgement of character.

That people do not know it is unnecessary can be a defense of their characters, but it doesn't lessen the harm it does, and at a certain point when people choose to be ignorant (there is a tendency to plug the ears or employ rationalizations) they are complicit in the harm they do. The choice of ignorance is just another kind of evil.

There are certainly people who are not educated enough and legitimately do not have access to this information or anybody to give it to them, and that is in part OUR failing. But there are also many who have actively ignored or rationalized. A good person aspires to knowledge of the harm he or she does rather than ignorance so that harm can be reduced. Ignorance only goes so far as defense of character.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:41 amYou argue that animals in the wild eat meat because they don't know any better and have no viable alternative food sources either. Ok, fine. But the same is true of us, historically.
I'm not saying it is good or not harmful, only that they are not evil. And I agree with you in historical terms for limited animal product use. Before the 1950's when B-12 was discovered and produced on a large scale, vegetarianism was 100% morally defensible. Animal agriculture was at various times also necessary for food security (it no longer is in the developed world).
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:41 amThe most critical (and undervalued point, by vegan ethicists, I think) is that our culture is built around animal agriculture and we like it that way.
That people are hedonists and choose not to stop is not an argument against our being capable of it if we chose it.
You're basically just employing a fatalistic negation of free will to negate personal responsibility, but we can view free will as a useful concept within the lens of hard determinism.

Sure, if you define it that way then in the most technical sense if we have no choices then a rapist doesn't choose to rape, and a genocidal maniac doesn't choose to massacre families in the street; they do it because of cold hard causality and are just amoral cogs in the universe.
That's just to say we can't judge anybody for anything ever. But we can. We can in practice, and we can be consistent about it. We can see into human character based on the actions they do and say "this is a bad character", we can identify bad character as a proximate source for harm in the world even without the illusion of true free will or breaking from hard determinism. We can speak of choices as deterministic products of character, and in that context we're all making choices all of the time -- including the choice to be ignorant.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:41 amWe (collectively, not you or me) don't know how we could psychologically continue without it. And that reason alone is why it will continue no matter what we conclude here and now.
The choice to succumb to rationalization or ego; these are aspects of character and we can call them evil. Nobody is completely without them, but the good people aspire to a meta-cognition that limits them and bravely seeks to do good.
Steve Wagar wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:37 pm But to your point, while we can understand the harm we are causing, we are not yet culturally prepared to avoid it, so we are left with no choice but to keep doing it.
Overnight maybe not, but individual by individual there's nothing in our infrastructure that would preclude it. We could make the turnaround in a couple years in the developed world. We already feed animals on grains, we'd just have to stop breeding more of them.
Steve Wagar wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:37 pm But most people are unwilling to entertain the question, so it also takes overcoming resistance to change. As we know all too well now, the world has people who embrace change and those who would rather stick their head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening.
Sure, and it's not too hard to put the words "evil" and "good" to those vices and virtues respectively. People can change, they can employ meta-cognition to evolve vices into virtues. Of course this takes time, but there's no reason to defend the vice on those grounds.
You don't have to be in an ivory tower to speak earnestly about these things, we don't even have to be assholes to do it, but there's no reason to pretend the shoe doesn't fit either.
Steve Wagar wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:37 pm Should reason trump the survival instinct? Of course, if the survival instinct has been tricked, but just try to convince anyone of that. Those few people (like us) who value reason over their nature will be your only converts. If they had to stop eating meat to save the planet from being destroyed (which is the case Cowspiracy makes), they would probably eventually do it, but not before it was too late. Which is why it is a good thing factory-grown meat is right around the corner... it is our only chance.
I agree in vitro meat will be enormous, but people can change too. Plenty of people wake up and realize their bad thought patterns, learn critical thinking, learn about ethics.
It seems like by rejecting the idea that certain elements of character or certain behaviors are evil (that is not to say the whole person is evil) you're undermining the argument for change of mind and behavior. Or maybe you don't think people can change?
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

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Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pm But it is overly simplistic to just say that sometimes evolution is faster. Two factors contribute to evolution: mutation and natural selection.
A beneficial mutation can also be lost if there's not enough pressure for it, due to the randomness of sexual reproduction. Evolution is fast when there's more pressure, that isn't to say there's not still a speed-limit.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmSo was there enough genetic variability in the protodog population to allow an herbivorous dog to emerge, or similarly to turn us from frugivores into whatever it is that eats beans? Maybe.
Given we have yo-yoed between vastly different diets as need arose, it is evolutionarily advantageous to keep those genes around. Given how fast dogs and other species adapt to new diets, there's no reason to believe humans are any different.
When we did eat fruit, we didn't eat it for very long; no reason to believe there were any more than modest adaptations to it that didn't significantly harm our ability to eat other foods (like improved color vision, perhaps). We never specialized for it in a substantial way. Certainly much less than dogs specialized as carnivores, and yet contemporary dogs are healthier on plant based diets.

You could argue that, even for a carnivore, plants are inherently more healthy as a source of nutrition for a number of reasons -- I think you'd be right, but you'd be appealing to modern evidence and not making an evolutionary appeal. The same kind of evidence tells us how healthy veggies and beans are.

I went over the claims against beans elsewhere.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmHas there been enough time since the dawn of agriculture to mutate new genes to metabolize all these things better than we could before? 10,000 years? I doubt it, that's a drop in the bucket.
We already had those genes. Phytates, for example, are widely occurring in plants (not just beans, they're just more concentrated) and there was never a period where we didn't eat greens, except perhaps brief periods of carnivory.

Given how drastically levels reduce with cooking, I don't think we even had to get better at getting around them at all. Chimps and other close relatives are much more challenged by "anti-nutrients" (which are actually good for us anyway, in many ways) than humans are by cooked beans.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmThe argument for evolutionary changes to digest meat are stronger because we have been eating meat a lot longer than we have been farming, but I don't think all those changes overcome certain facts, like our long digestive tract, which is not great for eating meat.
The problem with meat is fundamentally different from the problem of eating a different type of plant (and it applies to carnivores too, regardless of evolution).
Also, cultivation resulted in us changing the plants to better suit us (like lower levels of certain substances), we didn't need to change for things like beans.
The only significant changes involve better adaptation to starches from cooked tubers and grains.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmScience tells us that every chronic disease is like an animal in a zoo we can study and master, and it's such a great thing we now have science to do that. Ideally, it then produces a pharmaceutical to cure every ill. (sorry, that was a low blow, I'm sure you don't promote pharmaceuticals!)
That's not how it works. We're doing a lot of work to look at dietary factors today, and mainstream scientific bodies make recommendations on plant based diets to do just that (not pills).
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmBut the larger truth is that chronic diseases are primarily the consequence of bad diets, regardless of whether you are young or old, that start to emerge later in life only because the immune system and other auto-repair mechanisms are starting to fail.
I addressed the auto-repair bit elsewhere, but the reason we know diet is to blame is science.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmBad diets will still adversely affect younger people, e.g. making them feel tired, getting them sick with colds, etc.
Only very bad diets. Humans are remarkably flexible.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmIf aging could be cured, we could keep eating bad diets for much longer before noticing any ill effects, and could probably do a number of unhealthy things indefinitely and completely cure them along the way. So aging just amplifies the effects of bad diet.
Not really. Things like heart disease actually take a long time to build up; it's not just because you got older but because the plaques had to form.
Cancer is the same way, it's a lottery, not an issue of breakdown in repair mechanisms. Some people lose the lottery as children.

Your understanding of disease is quite off base.

Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmThat makes sense; it is hard to imagine that a carnivorous diet wouldn't be at least somewhat bad for pets as well, if for no other reason that it is top of the food chain and so highest toxicity and acidity.
Bioaccumulation of toxins is part of it.
There's also the high concentration of methionine (where restriction has been shown to increase longevity in many animals), the high levels of iron which are carcinogenic themselves (heme iron) and facilitate the replication of pathogens, and the fact that when your food is made from the same stuff you are (meat) your microbiome is fine tuned to digest you from the inside out (a disturbing prospect).
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmI've always said that our best hope of saving the planet is to destroy it as quickly as possible. I say this tongue in cheek, but what I mean is that people won't take strong enough action until they see real cataclysms.
That might be true. Hopefully we can get a wake up call before it's too late.
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmThe green revolution feeds the planet, but at the cost of killing it.
How is that?
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmAnd in vitro meat may be available in ten years, but will still cause chronic disease.
True, but at least we'll be around to get sick. :D
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

Post by Steve Wagar »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:54 pm It seems like by rejecting the idea that certain elements of character or certain behaviors are evil (that is not to say the whole person is evil) you're undermining the argument for change of mind and behavior. Or maybe you don't think people can change?
Thanks for the thoughtful replies, well argued as always. I have put myself in the awkward position of devil's advocate for a devil I don't particularly wish to defend. But you can't beat a devil you don't understand, so I'm trying to see this from that point of view to find some kind of justification for it. People can and do change; the question here is what would it take to make them do it.

At this point, people can't claim complete ignorance; they know there is some measure of wrong in animal agriculture. They can't just fall back on id or ego or habit, as you say, they have to accept responsibility at some point. I don't argue against free will. We also have to consider peer pressure, which is the primary culprit in blocking change. We know peer pressure will cease to be a problem once enough people in the group learn to behave differently and stand up for it.

But if we take all of that into account, there is still the question of prioritizing. What matters most? Making a living? Saving the planet? Technological progress? Social justice? Animal suffering? People can only focus on so much when addressing future shock, and making a living is usually near the top. I think progress of vegan philosophy is kicking into high gear and I expect it to become more mainstream. The trick is finding reasons for people to make it a priority. The Chinese are doing it for health reasons. Climate change advocates are ignoring it, so far as I can tell. I haven't seen any mainstream articles about it, even though it has been claimed it is the primary cause of climate change. So we could get more people on board if scientists would talk more about that and less about fossil fuels. Animal suffering... it's not that people don't care, but for most they can't care enough to make it a priority. They should; not saying they shouldn't.
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Steve Wagar
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Re: Hi, I'm Steve and I now call myself a vegan too.

Post by Steve Wagar »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:48 am Given we have yo-yoed between vastly different diets as need arose, it is evolutionarily advantageous to keep those genes around.
Some genes are kept around though not needed, though future need can't help a gene stay around. I will grant you some genes we needed but hadn't used for a while might have come in handy. We mostly covered this topic elsewhere. The topic in intrinsically speculative on both our parts.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:48 am
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmScience tells us that every chronic disease is like an animal in a zoo we can study and master, and it's such a great thing we now have science to do that. Ideally, it then produces a pharmaceutical to cure every ill. (sorry, that was a low blow, I'm sure you don't promote pharmaceuticals!)
That's not how it works. We're doing a lot of work to look at dietary factors today, and mainstream scientific bodies make recommendations on plant based diets to do just that (not pills).
No, that is exactly how it works. We have big organizations that study diabetes but ignore diet as being relevant. All these diseases are studied very carefully and at huge expense and with the creation of many pharmaceuticals, at huge expense. It's great that we study these things and make pharmaceuticals, but the motivations are skewed by money and it corrupts much of the enterprise.

At the same time a very small amount of scientific study is being done into dietary factors, by comparison. Of course, it is a lot, just small by comparison. As we know, doctors receive little to no nutritional education. While there are great scientific recommendations for plant based diets, there are also lots of great scientific recommendations promoting other diets, so people are still unsure who to believe.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:48 am
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmBad diets will still adversely affect younger people, e.g. making them feel tired, getting them sick with colds, etc.
Only very bad diets. Humans are remarkably flexible.
And Americans have very bad diets, and young people are often tired and get sick, despite their great flexibility. Yes, any deficiencies of any diet you or I would propose (and neither of us can be certain about a perfect diet) are unlikely to actually make young people tired or sick to an appreciable degree.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:48 am
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmIf aging could be cured, we could keep eating bad diets for much longer before noticing any ill effects, and could probably do a number of unhealthy things indefinitely and completely cure them along the way. So aging just amplifies the effects of bad diet.
Not really. Things like heart disease actually take a long time to build up; it's not just because you got older but because the plaques had to form.
Cancer is the same way, it's a lottery, not an issue of breakdown in repair mechanisms. Some people lose the lottery as children.

Your understanding of disease is quite off base.
Heart disease is, of course, the biggest cumulative disease, and curing aging won't forestall it forever, but I am pretty sure plaque buildup gets worse as we age, so without aging it would take longer to become a problem. Cancer starts as a lottery (cancerous cells pop up all the time), but the body then fights it. When we are young and when we have a good diet, we will usually beat it before it spreads. When we are old or have a bad diet, it will get worse. Age and diet are not guarantees, but they are big factors.

It hurts my feelings to hear you say my understanding is "quite" off base. I would not say that of your understanding though I consider it to be off base as well. ;)
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:48 am There's also the high concentration of methionine (where restriction has been shown to increase longevity in many animals), the high levels of iron which are carcinogenic themselves (heme iron) and facilitate the replication of pathogens, and the fact that when your food is made from the same stuff you are (meat) your microbiome is fine tuned to digest you from the inside out (a disturbing prospect).
Ok, thanks.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:48 am
Steve Wagar wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:50 pmThe green revolution feeds the planet, but at the cost of killing it.
How is that?
I'm just alluding to the prevalence of unsustainable and ecologically destructive aspects of factory farming.
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