Why be vegan?

[nale2221]

Despite what seems like an antagonistic title, I'm actually very curious. I know almost nothing about this topic, so I would like some education on the subject.

What I think so far:
I'll start with our roots as humanhumanshad to hunt to sruvive and thrive as a speices, though nowadays the process of getting meat seems pretty grim. Would the fundamental thing be that because we have so many other options for food as a society at this point, that ending the life of an animal is unnesecary for our survival?

Let me know!

Nale

[thebestofenergy]

Hi, Nale. Welcome to the forum

I'm happy to hear you're open minded regarding veganism - which is quite rare.
I could tell people what they're doing wrong at their daily exercises, or how to cook a certain meal in a better way, and they'd be pretty happy to hear me out and consider my suggestions.
But telling people what they should/shouldn't eat basing my arguments on morality, it's almost a waterproof way to get them pissed off or really emotional - mostly because of how much people are attached/addicted to their food, and are too lazy and unwilling to change their way of life.

Why go vegan? It wouldn't be difficult to write pages about this topic.

There are mainly three reasons as to why people go vegan: morality/ethics, environmental issues and health - although all three of them could be included in the ethical side.

Some concepts sum up the moral side of it;

-Animals are sentient (sentience is the ability to feel physical pain and have emotions, and being aware of your surroundings), while plants aren't.
Plants don't have neurons (without which they can't possibly have cognitive capabilities) nor a nervous system - so no plant can be sentient.
Animals are sentient, but the amount of sentience in a certain individual depends on its cognitive capabilities - that's why a human has a stronger/bigger emotional complex and generally higher intelligence than a dog, which has higher cognitive capabilties than an insect.
There are a few exceptions of animals who aren't sentient, like sponges and and some insencts not usually visible to the human eye, and some are in a grey area, like oysters - but all farmed animals are fully sentient.

Since animals are sentient, and plants aren't, it follows that avoiding to eat animals and eating plants instead inherently causes less harm.
Animals have wants - including the one to live and not to suffer - while plants don't.

-The cruelty of the meat and dairy industry.
Most farmed animals live in horrible conditions, as it has been documented many times.
Catlle is property, and it's also treated as property.
There are many documetaries you can watch regarding the subject - if you have the stomach.
Earthlings is probably the most well known one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce4DJh-L7Ys
This is quite an impactful presentation too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6U00LMmC4
If you have some free time, I highly recommend you to watch them.

Most of the cattle - which amounts to billions of animals - is caged in spaces that are too small for most of their lives, have their babies taken away from them and are killed prematurely.

As an example, cows are forcefully impregnated as often as possible, and their babies are immediately taken away at birth - so that we can steal their milk. The babies go to the slaughter, since they aren't of any use. When the cow can't give milk anymore, she's taken to the slaughter too.
This is the most common way of doing it. Some countries, like India - where cows are considered sacred - treat them differently.

-Hypocrisy and consistency.
We usually think of dogs and cats as animals who have a higher value than pigs and cows, but they actually don't.
It has been demonstrated that pigs have higher cognitive capabilities than dogs - they are as smart as a 3 year old child.
Cows are intelligent too; they're very friendly and they can form strong bonds with eachother - they can even have a 'best friend' in their group.

To be consistent, by loving your pets you'd also have to not disregard the welfare of other animals.

Regarding the environmental issues;

-Greenhouse gas emissions, and this one is very big.
The meat and dairy industry are at the top of greenhouse gas emissions - no other industry beats this one, not even cosely.
There are many articles documenting this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmen ... etarianism
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-scien ... ustry.html
http://na.unep.net/geas/getUNEPPageWith ... icle_id=92
etc. etc.
You get the idea.

-Huge waste of water, food, space and deforestation.
To keep billions upon billions of animals going, they need a huge amount of food and water.
It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons, and it takes up to 13 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of meat: more than 70% of crops in the USA are fed to livestock, which is a stunning number.
We'd have much more food without having billions of animals to feed.

Of course, it requires a lot of space to have a such a big amount of crops.
Raising animals for food - including the area to grow crops - occupies 30% of Earth's land space, and that leads to the need of having more space: hence the deforestation.
More than 260 million acres of USA forests have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed to farmed animals - which adds up to the global warming problem with greenhouse gas emissions.

If you want more informations:
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/549
http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/environment.html

And lastly, regarding health;

This would be a really long matter if someone were to go into details.
To sum it up, since a plant based diet has zero cholesterol, significantly less saturated fats and no antibiotics/vaccines they give to farmed animals, it's usually healthier.
Of course, only a well balanced and tought out vegan diet is really healthy. You won't be much healthier if you go on a junk food vegan diet full of fried foods.

It's proven that heart disease and cancer (the main causes of death), would be much less worrying if the world was on a vegan diet. And that is just scratching the surface.
I really recommend this video to get some basic knowledge on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30gEiweaAVQ

The only supplement you need to take if you go vegan is B12.
B12 is a vitamin made by bacteria. It's ideally found in water and dirt, where farmed animals would take it from - I say 'would' because most of the times even animal stock is supplemented with B12.
But you can only find it in little amounts in meat, and most of it is destroyed by heat; everyone should take a supplement of B12.
250 mcg of cyanocobalim daily is perfect - the cheapest and most effective form of B12.

Then there's also vitamin D, but that is necessary with every diet (most people are deficient in it), unless you take enough sun.
Everyone should atleast take 1000 IU of cholecalciferol (vitamin D3) daily - especially in winter.

Just vary among vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes and grains - avoiding junk foods.
Things like broccoli, dark leafy greens and legumes in general are really healthy.


I tried not to dwell too much on things, but it still came too long.

If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to ask.

If you want, go to TheVeganAtheist's channel, and check his playlists: you can find more presentations on veganism there.

In the Vegan vs. Non-vegan debates forum section, there are plenty of arguments and debates, while in the Vegan support forum section you can find everything you need to know to become veg*n/try out veg*nism - from diet avices, to recipes, to how to get started.

[Jebus]

Excellent answer.

[EquALLity]

Excellent answer.

Yeah, that was great. I don't think it's necessary to add anything.

[nale2221]

Hey thebestofenergy,

Thanks for the reply; your points are compelling and have philosophical value, which I greatly appreciate. Frankly, I love cheese to death, but I could probably do without meat, honestly. My biggest enemy right now is carbs (bagels, ect) and I usually default to these things for breakfast. I'm currently 5'10" and 270lbs, which is actually considered obese; I'm not very self-conscious about my weight though, I'm more concerned with personal health and well-being.

I have a few questions about the vitamins, and I'm also going to play devils advocate, if you don't mind

In regards to the vitamins: how much do these things go for? I'm sure I could afford them, and I already take a vitamin B complex for mental health purposes.

Playing Devil's advocate: As far as I can tell, our bodies are designed to eat meat... Nevermind. I sort of just destroyed my own argument after thinking about it for two seconds.

Lastly, what can I eat that's tasty? What can I eat that's easy to prepare?

Get back to me,

Nale

[Sakana]

Cool, there are a lot of easy ways to be vegan ^_^

I'm pretty lazy myself when it comes to cooking, so I eat a lot things that take minimal effort to prepare, like beans and lentils out of cans, oats with soy milk (vanilla), peanut butter on rye bread, premade salads with vinegar and a bit of oil, bananas, etc. Meat substitutes are also, generally, very tasty these days.

I take a special vitamin pill for vegans to ensure I get whatever I need.

If you want to get rid of a cheese addiction, the best way is probably to find out what cheese is and how it is made. If you research the topic, you will probably come to view cheese as very unappetizing. Most people know what cheese, but I'd argue they don't really know what it is. When I used to drink lots of milk every day, I knew it came from a cow, but I don't think I really comprehended what that meant. I didn't really understand that I was drinking the lactations of a cow, a member of a different species, and that this milk is intended for a weaning calf -- a calf that has been either killed (if male) or forcefully seperated from its mother. The dairy industry is decidedly evil, and dairy itself is also bad for your body in a number of ways. People usually have a hard time quitting cheese. I believe this is because of a strong trifecta of addictive compounds: milk sugar, fat and caseo-morphines keep your brain hooked. You can also ask yourself if you'd eat cheese made from the milk of a human, cat or dog (assume it tastes exactly the same as cow cheese). If that sounds disgusting to you, you should consider how you have come to view cow cheese as appetizing in the first place!

But don't despair, there are good vegan cheeses. I hear that a brand called Daiya should be especially good, though I can't buy it where I live : (

[brimstoneSalad]

I'll start with our roots as humanhumanshad to hunt to sruvive and thrive as a speices,

It depends on how far you go back. Our original roots as microorganisms may be been simple lithotrophs. Drawing any random line after that is really arbitrary, since "species" are only a thing in retrospect, arbitrarily looking at what we can breed with, and yet "we" have always been closely enough related to our ancestors to breed with them, if you continue to group anything we can breed with as "we". There is no point at which one species changes into another in evolution.

Throughout the history of life, and our lineage, we have been all sorts of things, from probably lithotrophic or chemosynthetic, to possibly photosynthetic, to herbivorous, to carnivorous, swapping DNA with other microbes and even being injected by ancient viruses with new DNA.

The sheer number of ways it's possible to fuel life are mind boggling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis

It's not very useful to look back on our ancient history to figure out what we should eat today, otherwise I might make a compelling case that we should be eating rocks.

There may or may not have been a point in recent 'human' history, where what we were would be recognized as human, where we had to hunt to survive; that may never be clear though. Too many "what ifs", and too many gaps in the historical record. We know that at least some of our ancestors hunted, and that's about it.

What is clear is that we as a society didn't really know for sure that we didn't need to consume animal products thanks to science until around the 1950's
This was when B-12 (the final "missing link" in nutrition) was at last produced in wide scale from bacteria and used to treat deficiency (before that it was only isolated from liver).

Before the 1950's, although people couldn't assert that meat was required for health, it was possible to say that something in animal products that we didn't understand seemed to be needed (at least in the developed world).

though nowadays the process of getting meat seems pretty grim. Would the fundamental thing be that because we have so many other options for food as a society at this point, that ending the life of an animal is unnesecary for our survival?

Methods of production notwithstanding, though they are cruel, yes, it's not necessary to kill for survival today. Although it also hasn't really been necessary for thousands of years.
People knew pretty well that they could be consistently lacto-vegetarian without apparent B-12 deficiency. So, at least since the development of agriculture, meat has not been necessary for survival.

And before that, well, our ancestors practiced coprophagia. An icky, but probably viable source of B-12 (along, possibly, with contaminated/pond water, etc.). Remember, B-12 comes from microbes.

People should probably have at least been vegetarian (though maybe not vegan) until the 1950's when B-12 was finally produced commercially. But could have been vegan before that too.

Anyway, the point was not need in actual fact, but knowledge of need -- which is what we resolved in the 1950's.

If you sincerely believed you needed to eat human infants to live, and you had a good reason to believe this, it completely changes the ethical dynamics of baby eating.
Even if you didn't really need to eat them, as a matter of actual fact. The reason is that we aren't omniscient, so we have to base our actions in the world on reasonable knowledge (upon which science has a monopoly).

The trouble today is that nobody has a good reason to eat meat in the developed world, so advocates are just making stuff up now. You can make up all kinds of reasons to eat babies, or murder apostates from your religion, or whatever else you want to do. The morally relevant distinction is whether somebody is just arbitrarily rationalizing what they want to do, or basing belief on legitimate objective knowledge (science).

The fundamental thing is that now we know better, and know that we have other options (we probably always had them but now we have proof of nutritional knowledge, which makes it reasonable/viable).

It's been over 60 years, and people are still making stuff up, even as more evidence against the moral and nutritional qualities of animal products are pouring in (it has only quite recently, in the last decade or so, become unquestionably clear that the vast majority of animal products are injurious to health).
People will always have an inclination to choose ignorance over knowledge when that knowledge inconveniences them, or contradicts something they would prefer to believe. We see plenty of that in religion.
Those who have the strength of character to choose knowledge, even when it's inconvenient or requires they change something they wanted to believe, are the people worthy of admiration.

[thebestofenergy]

If you're addicted to your food, and you don't think you can make it if you switch to veganism in one day, then you should take it slow.
For example, one week eliminate eggs from your diet; the next one take stakes and sausages out; after that all other meat products; then it's the turn of milk... untill you get rid of every animal product.
Even though it's going to take you longer, this way you make it easier to switch diets by taking your time and using your own pace - a lot of people quit being vegan after a couple of weeks because they find it too hard.

Frankly, I love cheese to death, but I could probably do without meat, honestly.

For me it was the opposite; I remember when I was 10 and I quit eating meat overnight - before that, I was eating meat at pretty much every single meal. So it hasn't been easy to stay true to my ideals for a month or so. Sailing smooth after that.
If I knew there was 'fake' meat I could've eaten instead - a product made out of vegetables, that has a similar taste and texture to meat - it'd have been much easier.

Same goes for cheese.
Fortunately, there are different type of vegan cheeses you can replace dairy cheese with - that you can buy or make for yourself.
Some examples you should check out: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-rec ... socks-off/ (just click on the type of cheese you're interested in, and it'll give you the recipe)

and http://www.buzzfeed.com/leonoraepstein/ ... .spL1nO31R

As you can see, there are many options: even if you don't like some of them, it's really likely you'll find at least a couple of vegan cheeses that you really like.

A lot of vegans either stop eating pizza, or they order a vegan pizza.
Having vegan cheese, you can put your own cheese on it, so you don't give up anything - or prepare your own pizza with cheese.
Personally, I love rice covered by vegan cheese, calzone (a type of pizza that is folded in half before cooking to contain a filling) full of it, and pasta with vegan butter.

Of course, vegan cheese is also healthier, since it doesn't have any cholesterol.
You don't have to think 'Oops, that's meaby too much butter in my sanwitch'.

I usually use rice cheese and soy butter. My suggestion is to try out as many as possible to find the ones you really like.

My biggest enemy right now is carbs (bagels, ect) and I usually default to these things for breakfast. I'm currently 5'10" and 270lbs, which is actually considered obese; I'm not very self-conscious about my weight though, I'm more concerned with personal health and well-being.

If you go vegan and you don't eat too much junk food, weight won't be a problem anymore.
You'd be surprised how much fat you take out by eliminating animal products.

Regarding carbs, they don't have a main role in making someone overweight, and you don't need to reduce the amount of every carb.
There are three types of carbs - sugar, starches and fiber.
You shouldn't worry about starches and fiber, and it's quite easy to spot most sugary foods in your diet - try to limit/avoid stuff like sweeteners, drink powders/sweet drinks, cookies/cakes, jams, sauces, cereals, yogurts and generally junk foods.

If you're looking for vegan bagels' toppings: http://www.peta2.com/lifestyle/best-veg ... -toppings/

In regards to the vitamins: how much do these things go for? I'm sure I could afford them, and I already take a vitamin B complex for mental health purposes.

It highly depends on your diet.
If you eat a different vieriety of healthy foods (from broccoli, to dark rice, to legumes), your ratio of omega3/omega6 is good (eat plenty of seeds, leafy greens, beans and berries) you only really need to take a vegan supplement of B12 - and you can find it really cheap.
This would be ideal.

If you don't have the possibility to get everything you want through food, and you prefer to take a supplement that covers everything, then you can take vegan multivitamins like: http://www.amazon.com/Deva-Vegan-Vitami ... B001GAOHVG - lasting for 90 days, it'd be $ 0.2 /day.
And as you can see if you check the supplement facts, it has everything - http://www.devanutrition.com/multivitamin.html

Lastly, what can I eat that's tasty? What can I eat that's easy to prepare?

Think about anything that's tasty and easy to prepare. If it's not vegan already, you can likely make a vegan version of it.

Here are some tasty things:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/eas ... .gb05mrx5M
http://www.babble.com/best-recipes/20-v ... egan-curry

Here are some easy/fast things to prepare:
http://ohsheglows.com/categories/recipe ... ck-n-easy/

I don't know know/have your taste though.
If you want to look for new things yourself, here you can find pretty much any vegan recipe: http://www.vegweb.com/
and here too: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/everyday- ... ian/vegan/

You should also check out this thread: http://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewto ... ?f=20&t=31

Personally, I usually can't be bothered to cook anything elaborate.
When I want something fast, I usually have things like pasta, legumes, vegetables or fruits - or meaby get something ready to eat somewhere, like vegan kebab (with falafel instead of meat), or vegan pizza.
My favourite/most eaten meals are probably lentil curry with onions, rice with chicory and melted vegan cheese, and tofu with curry sauce.