Issues with Mic. the Vegan

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brimstoneSalad
neither stone nor salad
Posts: 10273
Joined: Wed May 28, 2014 9:20 am
Diet: Vegan

Issues with Mic. the Vegan

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Anybody know how to contact Mic. the Vegan? I'm hoping he's open minded to a productive conversation.

Mic. has a number of great videos.
His stance on and recommendation of B-12 are good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3j80WpjM0M
On plant pain, not bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRfX4X0V54A He should not have used the word "intelligence" to refer to plants near the end (is baking soda 'intelligent' because it knows how to foam when you pour vinegar on it?), but otherwise pretty good.
He's not a nutty antinatalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBuZQy69gvI Very practical and reasonable perspective.

His video covering Cowspiracy could have been better done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpmTiHjUEBU In terms of official estimates, it's important to point out possible conflicts of interest, but those have to be demonstrated better, and it doesn't negate the credibility of a study entirely (otherwise those done by vegans wouldn't have credibility either). There are a number of instances of double counting which I think are important to own up to in terms of greenhouse gas emissions if you read the whole report.
I talked about this here: http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2167&p=22579&hilit=cowspiracy#p22579 and cited a better article on the subject. It's important to engage better with criticism of exaggeration.

This oil video is partially true, but cherrypicked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbtwwZP4Yfs
"processed foods are processed foods" but not all unhealthy. Processing is not the problem in itself (foods like hummus are processed by blending, for example, so are smoothies, and so is whole wheat bread). The problem is adding empty calories, reducing nutritional content, and adding harmful substances like saturated fats.
The problem with coconut oil is the high level of saturated fat, the same is true for palm oil. Even olive oil is relatively high in saturated fat. Soybean oil is a poor choice for other reasons too: the very high level of Omega 6.
There are specific reasons why certain oils are less ideal, and he painted all of them with the same broad strokes. He didn't deal with any studies on canola oil, for instance.
Yes, nuts and seeds are better, and it's good to recommend them instead, but it makes veganism more difficult for people when you scare people off oil entirely. A limited amount of healthier oils probably isn't going to kill you, and a diet rich in healthy fats may be better than simple carbohydrates (which come with their own risks).

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/04/13/ask-the-expert-concerns-about-canola-oil/
Although care must be taken in handling and processing of canola oil and other vegetable oils, canola oil is a safe and healthy form of fat that will reduce blood LDL cholesterol levels and heart disease risk compared to carbohydrates or saturated fats such as found in beef tallow or butter. Indeed, in a randomized trial that showed one of the most striking reductions in risk of heart disease, canola oil was used as the primary form of fat (8). Whether using cold pressed canola oil provides some small additional benefit is not clear.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/low-carbohydrate-diets/
The low-carb diet was most beneficial for lowering triglycerides, the main fat-carrying particle in the bloodstream, and also delivered the biggest boost in protective HDL cholesterol.
[...]
Research shows that a moderately low-carbohydrate diet can help the heart, as long as protein and fat selections come from healthy sources.
  • A 20-year prospective study of 82,802 women looked at the relationship between lower carbohydrate diets and heart disease; a subsequent study looked at lower carbohydrate diets and risk of diabetes. Women who ate low-carbohydrate diets that were high in vegetable sources of fat or protein had a 30 percent lower risk of heart disease (4) and about a 20 percent lower risk of type 2 diabetes, (34) compared to women who ate high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets. But women who ate low-carbohydrate diets that were high in animal fats or proteins did not see any such benefits. (4,34)
    [...]
  • Similarly, the small “EcoAtkins” weight loss trial compared a low-fat, high-carbohydrate vegetarian diet to a low-carbohydrate vegan diet that was high in vegetable protein and fat. While weight loss was similar on the two diets, study subjects who followed the low-carbohydrate “EcoAtkins” diet saw improvements in blood lipids and blood pressure. (36)
There is growing evidence that EcoAtkins; a lower carb vegan diet rich in healthier plant sources of fats and low methionine plant proteins may be optimal for heart health and overall health and longevity.
Making strong claims against ALL oils is weak sauce when you cherrypick the worst ones to do it.
If you're getting your calories from rice or dates instead of canola oil, you may not be doing your body the favor you think you are.

I want to encourage Mic. to not take such a strong stance against all oil (or high fat macronutrient profiles in general) when the Jury is still very much out on this topic. Show both sides, and let people decide what works for them on the spectrum from Vegan EcoAtkins to HCLF Vegan (with adequate protein, EFAs, and micronutrients: which can be a challenge with high carb), or even down the triangle to junk food vegan if they're putting ethics rather than health as their top priorities.

These videos have more issues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWDznkdUjb0 Veganic is nice, and people should totally have veganic backyard or patio gardens using compost, but profitability is not the most important metric: the food they produce is too expensive becuase it requires too much human input and yields of staple crops without modern farming methods are poor. The affordable alternative to Organic is conventional agriculture, which just uses synthetic fixed nitrogen. We need to get off fossil fuels to produce that synthetic fertilizer: that is a more realistic goal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gWCdC7-3AQ This is the worst video I've seen of his. The Anti-GMO position is harmful to veganism.
There are too many issues for me to cover in this post (I'll probably follow up soon). I'll just drop a couple links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH4bi60alZU (mediocre video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpD4PXg_BKg GREAT analysis

Why Vegans must be more positive about GMO:
http://www.vegangmo.com/?page_id=655
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brimstoneSalad
neither stone nor salad
Posts: 10273
Joined: Wed May 28, 2014 9:20 am
Diet: Vegan

Re: Issues with Mic. the Vegan

Post by brimstoneSalad »

"breeding is different from genetic modification"

Transgenic foods, yes. But trivially so. Crossbreeding can result in deadly plants, even within the same species.

http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg/genetic_engineering_not_significantly.htm
Every form of plant breeding has unknown outcomes. Conventional breeding of wheat will result in a plant with about 3,000 alien genes. The breeder does not know where the vast majority of "alien" genes are or what they might express. This has been done safely for thousands of years. Sometimes the products of conventional breeding have to be withdrawn because of excessive production of toxins. Recent examples include potatoes, celery and squash.

A year ago in New Zealand, there was an outbreak of food poisoning from a "killer zucchini" that hospitalized a number of people. Environmentalists jumped all over the story until it was determined that the culprit was "organic" zucchini. Plants are chemical factories that produce a multitude of toxins that protect them. An outbreak of aphid infestation had minimal impact on conventionally grown zucchini. The more vulnerable "organic" zucchini was genetically inferior because of inbreeding. They expressed dangerously high levels of the toxin curcubitan. Had this been a transgenic plant, we would be hearing about it ad nauseam, but being that it was "organic," it was quickly consigned to an Orwellian memory hole.
This is not the equivalent of the argument "but what if plants feel pain too?", obviously farmed animals eat plants so the harm is magnified. This does not stack. Transgenics can be used instead of chaotic crossbreeding and inbreeding needed for tiny changes: the dangers are not accumulating from both in a linear fashion. And the genomes and expression of transgenic plants are much better studied.
There's just no evidence of a greater danger from transgenic methods than conventional methods.

Scishow already covered this, and the facts of radiation breeding, and I think chemical mutagens. I linked it in the last post, and I'll link it again because it's concise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH4bi60alZU

This is just a bad argument, and without evidence it's just stirring up fear and making what amounts to an appeal to nature/tradition fallacy, where nature is replaced by historic convention of the agricultural era (and if you eat modern veggies and fruits, even from organic farms, frankenstein radiation and chemical mutation conventions invented in the 1900s).



Golden rice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
In 2005, Golden Rice 2 was announced, which produces up to 23 times more beta-carotene than the original golden rice.[4] To receive the USDA's Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), it is estimated that 144 g of the high-yielding strain would have to be eaten. Bioavailability of the carotene from golden rice has been confirmed and found to be an effective source of vitamin A for humans.[5][6][7]

Although golden rice was developed as a humanitarian tool, it has met significant opposition from environmental and anti-globalization activists. Studies have found that golden rice poses no risk to human health, and multiple field tests have taken place with no adverse side-effects to participants.[8]
The reason Golden rice has had so much trouble is the anti-GMO fear mongering... things like this [Mic's] video.
You can't use the blockage anti-GMO lobbyists are causing as evidence GMO is bad (or to counter its benefit). That's like using the fact that people are resistant to going vegan as evidence that veganism is bad.

Tested on Chinese Children?
It was a perfectly safe trial; the rice was safe and ready for human consumption. The question was whether the beta carotene was bioavailable in people. The test wasn't to see if it would kill them, it was to see if it did what it was supposed to, which was cure their vitamin A deficiencies.
The criticism was over parental consent, nothing else.

http://retractionwatch.com/2015/07/30/golden-rice-paper-pulled-after-judge-rules-for-journal/#more-30806

It's barely controversial at all. The fear mongers at Greenpeace made it so. If you read the statement, it will only show how rigorous ethical standards are.
Tufts spokesperson wrote:We are aware that the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has retracted the paper “β-carotene in Golden Rice is as good as β-carotene in oil at providing vitamin A to children”, published in its September 2012 issue by a team led by a Tufts researcher. The journal indicated that its retraction was based on the fact that the authors were unable to provide sufficient evidence that the study had been reviewed and approved by a local ethics committee in China and that parents and children involved in the study had been provided the full informed consent form as well as eligibility issues identified in regard to two subjects in the study. No questions were raised about the integrity of the study data, accuracy of the research results or safety of the research subjects. The decision to retract a paper is ultimately a matter between the journal and the authors, and we must respect an academic journal’s editorial process and decisions.
Have you ever heard anti-vegan propagandists ranting about how vegans are experimenting on their children? It's a low blow, and one designed to appeal to emotion.
The fact is that research on all kinds of things is retracted all of the time for perfectly harmless minor violations of standards; that keeps the standards high.
If a study on vegan nutrition was retracted for some technicality of consent details, would that be evidence that veganism is bad? No, no it wouldn't.
This was controversy generated by the dishonest propaganda machine of Greenpeace.
It shouldn't be a big deal, it was handled, and it shouldn't have featured in the video as an emotional appeal or some kind of consequence of genetic engineering.

"All that Money could have just been spent on an educational campaign to cook carrots with your rice for vitamin A"

How about some evidence for this claim? It sounds like when carnists argue that vegans should just put all of our effort into happy meat and speculative carbon capture technology; It's a misunderstanding of outreach and efficacy, and kind of the whole point of things.

Carrots do not grow well in all of these regions, they do not yield well, they don't provide a high calorie density, nor do they store or ship as well as rice does. Rice is a humanitarian staple for good reasons.
You can't just make up alternatives without being familiar with the reasons rice was chosen to begin with.

Maybe there are other options, but you need to back that up, not just speculate based on ignorance.

A giant campaign to get people to eat the yellow rice wouldn't be needed if there wasn't so much anti-GMO propaganda. They already eat rice in many of these regions, they already know how to cook it: it's all pretty simple minus the fear mongering.


I'll try to start with #1 later. Although if somebody else wants to cover some of these too, that would be great.
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