phileas007 wrote:Here is a link for starters for you to see what I'm on about:
The link you provided had nothing to do with brain development.
I know what you're actually on about (which has nothing to do with that link), and like I said, it's pseudoscience. Not only did you get the original theory backwards (and ignore the fact that it only referred calorie dense foods, such as meat, but also possibly fruits, tubers, etc.), but the theory itself has been disproved.
The original theory (which you bastardized and corrupted
almost beyond the point of recognition) is called the expensive tissue hypothesis.
Humane Hominid already addressed one of those here in a discussion he had with somebody:
http://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewto ... 3221#p3221
Humane Hominid wrote:-- Then there's your point number 4: "It was only when we started eating animal foods/fish that our brains doubled in size, this is a proven scientific fact, allowing for the modern human and all our advances."
-- You are referring here to an idea called the expensive tissue hypothesis, first formulated by Aiello & Wheeler in 1995. While there are some problems with the idea, I won't go into them here, because it isn't necessary. You got the hypothesis backwards.
The ETH does NOT say that meat-eating doubled human brain size. it says that an increase in brain size necessitated a dietary shift to more calorie-dense foods, in order to compensate for the caloric demands of said bigger brains. In other words, bigger brains led to more meat-eating, not the other way around. The evolution of bigger brains came FIRST, followed by the increase in meat-eating.
And further, while Aiello & Wheeler postulated that meat was the most likely candidate food, they were clear that ANY calorie-dense food source would have sufficed. They specifically cited fruits, tubers, and oil-rich nuts and seeds as other potential candidates.
If you're not completely committed to being an ignorant tool, read this:
http://paleovegan.blogspot.com/2011/11/ ... issue.html
If you do, you will learn something important.
phileas007 wrote:All I'm saying is that if you take care of your diet, you can still enjoy meat, fish and dairy products without totally screwing up your health in the process.
You don't understand how cancer works.
Have you heard of the game called "Russian roulette"?
Did you know that, played in moderation, you can still enjoy the occasional game of Russian roulette without blowing your brains out?
Well,
sometimes anyway. Sometimes you play once, and you die.
That's how cancer works.
Carcinogens work in a statistical way.
For everybody who has ever gotten lung cancer, they got it from ONE particular cigarette (the straw that broke the self-replication inhibition's back). It's the way they bounce around in your body causing DNA damage. Sometimes they cause cancer, and sometimes they don't. There are just a few key mutations that have to occur, which happen randomly, and then -- cancer.
There are two issues with animal products; one is cumulative, and that is true for saturated fats and arteriosclerosis. You can eat a
little saturated fat, and your body can heal from that. And I really mean just a tiny bit.
With carcinogens as are prevalent in meat in much higher concentrations than in vegetables (vegetables that inhibit cancer far more than they cause it), you're playing a fool's gambit.
There are a small number of carcinogenic vegetables too, and I would also suggest avoiding those. Tobacco is a good example (even if you chew it instead of smoking it).
If you care about your health, just avoid carcinogens as well as you can -- that means no smoking, no animal products, and unfortunately for some of us,
maybe no avocados (I just learned that one recently -- the jury is still out, but I'm off avocados until we get more information).
Luckily, there are loads of yummy foods that inhibit cancer rather than cause it, like garlic, broccoli family foods, and most vegetables generally (with few rare exceptions).
phileas007 wrote:
Not an expert on this, but is seems that the real problem is the charring that occurs when proteins are being heated. This is not per definition inherent to meat, if you throw vegies on the BBQ and overcook them, you have the same issue.
False.
Look up the protein called Creatine.
That may be the main culprit; when it is heated, it is chemically altered and becomes carcinogenic.
Then there's also this:
http://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewto ... f=22&t=652
We don't even know all of the ways that meat causes cancer. The bottom line is that it does, because when you look as associations between meat and cancer, you find strong correlations that (by statisticians who understand this stuff better than you do), are also found to be causative.
You really shouldn't grill your veggies black
either, but that isn't the issue at hand. Meat is inherently bad for you for many other reasons.
If there's an exception to that, it's a rare exception (
maybe certain kinds of herbivorous fish, raised in clean water, eaten raw -- but only maybe), and it's not what you're eating. Oysters have been proposed as healthy, and that may be (very simple organisms, very low on the food chain, and they are said to actually help clean the water and improve the environment).
If you want to look on the fringes, at the rare exceptions, we can do that, but it isn't what you're eating now, and you'd have to admit you have some changes to make.
phileas007 wrote:
however for example in beef you have also the good stuff - the anti-carcinogens.
Really? Because I know what you're talking about, likely carnosine (which may inhibit telomere degradation), and the human body MAKES it on its own.
Most of the "good" stuff in meat is also made by the human body. And do you know why? Because we ARE meat.
We're very closely related to all of these other animals, and anything 'good' in those products we produce on our own in more than adequate amounts.
One of the issues with supposing the carnosine in meat is health promoting is that the half-life (do you know what that is?) in the body is very short. That is, you eat it, and your body gets rid of it pretty much right away. The antioxidants in vegetables are not made by the body, and their half lives in your system are much longer. They get to stick around to do good.
The 'good' in meat is vastly outweighed by the bad, and in terms of health, it is not health promoting in the way vegetables are.
If you're starving to death, in that context, obviously meat is better than swallowing air. But when you have available, as you do in the first world, ample vegetable sources of protein and calories, you'd have to be delusional or addicted to choose the meat instead. If you really want extra carnosine, you can also just supplement with it.
phileas007 wrote:
Absolutely, but that's not what I meant. I was referring to the conditions of livestock and agriculture.
Then can you rephrase your claim?
phileas007 wrote:
First of all it's not an addiction (at least not for me), I don't feel any urge to eat animals for the sake of satisfying a physical desire, as a matter of fact I can easily go on without meat and I certainly don't like too much of it.
That's good news for you, it means you can just stop eating it.
phileas007 wrote:
Secondly you are defending your position with a rather arrogant presupposition of moral superiority, i.e. I can easily turn the argument around and explain to you how easy it is to quit the "religion" of vegetarianism.
It's not a presupposition, and vegetarianism isn't a religion. This has been demonstrated. It's a matter of empirical fact. Some things are harmful. Somethings help others. It's not up to some idiot's opinion to decide what is good or bad; things just are good or bad based on how they help or harm others.
I never said all vegetarians are more moral than all meat eaters. I wouldn't even say all non-pedophiles are more moral than pedophiles. Whether you're a good or bad person comes down crudely to the sum of all of your good and bad actions in life.
It's easy to find a number of other terrible actions somebody could do that would make them bad people despite neither eating meat nor molesting children (like blowing up a building), some actions, however, are harder to make up for than others.
Pedophilia is a bad action. It's deeply harmful to children. There's nothing good about it.
Eating meat is a bad action. It harms animals, it harms the environment, and other humans. There's nothing good about it.
You might also volunteer to care for orphans, or do something else decent in your life, and that would be a good action. Does it balance the scales?
Maybe the pedophile is a doctor, and goes to Africa every year and saves a thousand lives. Does it balance the scales? Hard to say.
If you do those bad things, you've done something bad, and that does make you a bad person if you can't make up for it in some other way. But that's a little more complex.
Or do you think it's all just an opinion, and we should leave pedophiles alone to practice their sexual orientation as they see fit?
It sounds like that's what you're saying:
phileas007 wrote:My position is very simple: to each his own!
Let's try a slight change on that latter part:
phileas007 wrote:I don't have anything against non-pedophiles or any other sexuality, where I take a stand is when you try to convey a sense of guilt onto pedophiles and moralize OUR conscience for doing wrong. And this is simply not the case! You can psychologically scar or physically abuse children regardless of whether you have sex with them or not!
And I don't feel ashamed for not being one of you!
Yes, it's true, there are many many other horrible things you can also to do children that are not having sex with them. Does that make pedophilia OK, because there are bad people who aren't pedophiles too?
No. It does not.
Yes, there are a few vegetables foods that are also unhealthy. Yes, there are other ways to destroy the environment if you try hard enough, and even other ways to torture hundreds of animals every year. That doesn't make eating meat, which does all of those things very efficiently, somehow OK just because there are other ways to also do horrible things.
If you see a non-pedophile abusing children, tell them to stop too. If you see a vegetarian eating palm oil, or lighting a bonfire, also tell them to stop.
Anybody doing bad things should just stop doing those bad things. It's not a difficult concept to understand.