Philosophical Vegan Forum

Hello everyone,

this is my first time opening a Subject on the Forums.
I am curious about, what vegans think of my lifestyle, especially how i am eating.
I have developed this style of eating/cooking over the past 4 years and i think i am moraly not that "bad".
2,5 of these years, i lived vegan. Just as an experiment and i liked it. I felt more energetic and healthier overall.
But after these 2,5 years i really wanted to eat meat again, though not they way i ate it before.
I'd say my current meat to vegetables ratio is about 1/9 (meat/vegetables).
The meat i consume though, is not meat from any supermarket or fast-food (Don't eat it at all anymore)
It is the meat i get from my local butchery, which get's it's meat from a local farmer, that i can visit anytime i want and look after the cows, pigs, chickens that live there. It follows the german "Demeter", "Naturland" or "Bioland" standards. Look them up what they are about.
The animals are held in the best way possible in my opinion, that is allowed by the possibilities of the land and the farmer. He also has not many animals; around 40 cows, 20 pigs/chickens.
I still condemn abusive meat consume and really don't like eating a lot of it.
But for me my current lifestyle feels the most natural i can think of, at least from an evolutionary standpoint.
Living completely vegan is a little bit unnatural in my opinion, but definetly better than 50% of the western world is living right now (i have no actual numbers, just an estimation)
So i still feel really healty and quite happy about my current lifestyle and way of eating. What do you think?
How morally wrong am i for doing so?

Gadian wrote:Hello everyone,

this is my first time opening a Subject on the Forums.

Hello Gadian, welcome to the forum. Do you live in Deutschland? Are you Deutsch yourself, or are you from somewhere else? I speak some Deutsch myself.

Gadian wrote:I am curious about, what vegans think of my lifestyle, especially how i am eating.

OK, sure. We can give you our thoughts on this. I'll start.

Gadian wrote:I have developed this style of eating/cooking over the past 4 years and I think I am morally not that "bad".
2.5 of these years, I lived vegan. Just as an experiment and I liked it. I felt more energetic and healthier overall.

More energetic and healthy? That's great! When you say that you lived vegan, do you mean in terms of diet? Or did you also avoid clothing derived from animals, and other products tested on animals? It seems odd to me that you would do something for so long if it was only "an experiment". This isn't bad, of course, I'm glad to hear that you enjoy cooking, and no doubt gained much experience with preparing vegan foods.

Gadian wrote:But after these 2.5 years I really wanted to eat meat again, though not they way I ate it before.

Are you eating far less than before you went vegan? I assume you know that meat is rather unhealthy; that it is high in saturated fat and cholesterol, and promotes chronic diseases. Fish-meat is healthier than meat from birds & mammals, but beans/nuts/whole-grains are much healthier still. A diet with a small amount of meat is healthier than one with lots of meat, but a diet with no meat (nor dairy/eggs) is healthier yet (so long as you have a large variety of plant-foods).

If you'd like to discuss nutrition, then perhaps other (more knowledgeable) forum members could discuss it with you.

Gadian wrote:I'd say my current meat to vegetables ratio is about 1/9 (meat/vegetables).

Good to here that you eat lots of vegetables. I hope that you eat plenty of beans and whole-grains as well. The meat in your diet is still a little problematic for health-reasons, and perhaps more so for ethical-reasons, which I will discuss.

Gadian wrote:The meat I consume though, is not meat from any supermarket or fast-food (Don't eat it at all anymore)
It is the meat I get from my local butchery, which get's it's meat from a local farmer, that I can visit anytime I want and look after the cows, pigs, and chickens that live there.

During those 2.5 years that you said you were a vegan, did you avoid animal-food/clothing/products for ethical reasons? I'm not sure what exactly your reasons were. From my own experience, and other vegans I've spoken with, I can describe some of the reasons that we have for being opposed to eating animal-derived foods, even from "humane" farms. Ethical veganism, (as opposed to dietary veganism), is a moral philosophy about avoiding harm towards animals as much as we practicably/possibly can. Our avoidance of animal-products is done in order to respect the will of animals. Animals are interested in avoiding pain, not being confined, and continuing to live. Because of this, we don't support industries any industries that hurt, confine, or kill animals.

I'm glad to see that you care about animals. Enough so, to seek out specific farms which are more respectful to the will of animals, than many others are. There are still some ethical concerns that I'd like to point out, so that I can explain why I'm still opposed to supporting these farms that you describe.

Gadian wrote:It follows the german "Demeter", "Naturland" or "Bioland" standards. Look them up what they are about.

I've visited their respective websites*, and looked for what I could find about their animal welfare standards. According to the rules of Demeter, animals may not be be dehorned, debeaked, have wings clipped, or tails cut. This is good. Birds must have room to move around, and "some access to outdoors". This is better than most chicken/turkey farms, but is unfortunately rather vague. "Some access to outdoors" could simply mean that they have a very small enclosure with some sunlight, but overall little room to run around.

Bioland standards appear to be quite similar, with standards for living space, and against mutilation. From what I saw about Naturland, it sets rules for aquaculture, but I didn't see anything about land animals on their website.

Unfortunately, some of the most severe ethical problems, common within animal agriculture, still appear to be permissible under the standards that you mentioned. Obviously, farms which raise animals for meat will kill them. As for dairy farms following these standards, are calves separated from their mothers and denied their milk? Are the male calves killed for veal at a young age? Are the mothers killed at around 6 years old, when thier milk production declines to much to be profitable? Regarding egg-laying chickens: Are males killed soon after hatching? Are females killed when their production is too low?

Even if the animals within these specific "humane" farms have completely painless and unforeseen deaths (which even that, I think, is very unlikely), their deaths are still violations of their will to continue living. Humans are not the only animals who have interests, aside from merely "not suffering." Many animals greatly value their lives; and will strive to continue living even if they must go through a great deal of suffering.

To a sentient animals who wishes to live, killing it is inherently problematic, especially when we know that we have zero nutritional requirement to consume anything derived from their bodies. It's important for us to realize that the conflict between humans and animals is not "humans' lives vs animals' lives", but rather, "humans' palate pleasure vs animals' lives."

Gadian wrote:The animals are held in the best way possible in my opinion, that is allowed by the possibilities of the land and the farmer. He also has not many animals; around 40 cows, 20 pigs/chickens.
I still condemn abusive meat consume and really don't like eating a lot of it.

If these farms do follow the demeter & bioland standards, then they are better than most, but they likely do still inflict death upon animals, which we cannot ethically justify. Additionally, meat/dairy/eggs from such farms, likely are much more expensive than your typical factory farm stuff, and require more resources. I doubt that these products are economically & environmentally feasible for the majority of humankind. Vegan diets are far more economically feasible, and environmentally friendly, for the majority of humans. They're also healthier for us. Fully vegan diets are good for our health and the environment, and are the least harmful to animals. A win-win-win solution, really.

Gadian wrote:But for me my current lifestyle feels the most natural I can think of...

This is an appeal-to-nature fallacy. If it is more "natural" than a fully vegan lifestyle, then this says nothing about how moral it is. How natural or unnatural our lifestyles/actions are, has no bearing on how moral they are.

Gadian wrote:...at least from an evolutionary standpoint.

Also irrelevant. Consumption of cooked foods was beneficial to our ancestors. Eating cooked meat was likely also beneficial, from an evolutionary standpoint, because this allowed more food options (at times when plant foods were scarce). It improved their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce. The health problems caused by meat-consumption affect us at later ages than when we typically reproduce. So for meat to have been beneficial in the distant past, from an evolutionary standpoint, does NOT demonstrate that it is good for our long-term health.

Eating meat was likely necessary for some of our ancestors to survive in the distant past, but that is no longer the case for most of us today. We have access to plenty of plant-foods (and in far greater variety) that can meet all of our nutritional requirements. Even if some distant ancestors needed meat to survive, this doesn't justify harm towards animals within a modern context.

Gadian wrote:Living completely vegan is a little bit unnatural in my opinion...

Like I said before, this is irrelevant. You asked about the morality of harming animals for the sake of food.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature

Gadian wrote:...but definetly better than 50% of the western world is living right now (I have no actual numbers, just an estimation)

Possibly true. Your lifestyle is likely more moral than what others support, but that doesn't demonstrate that it is as respectful to animals as they actually deserve. I hope that your moral goal is not merely to be better than other people, but to show animals the level of respect that they really deserve, and to minimize harm towards them as much as possible.

Gadian wrote:So I still feel really healthy and quite happy about my current lifestyle and way of eating. What do you think?
How morally wrong am I for doing so?

If we care about animals, then we should focus on the morality of our actions towards them, rather than looking for excuses to hurt them (but to a small enough extent to still be "good people"). I'm not especially interested in judging your character. Even if you do enough good to qualify as a "good person", that could still mean that some of your actions are harmful and avoidable. I suggest focusing on the morality of actions rather than on the people who commit them.

Supporting these farms of yours is likely better than supporting most others, but not enough to be morally justified. It still involves needless harm towards animals. I do highly encourage returning to a fully vegan lifestyle.


*http://www.demeter-usa.org/learn-more/a ... elfare.asp
http://www.naturland.de/en/
http://www.bioland.de/infos-fuer-verbra ... ennen.html

Hello Gadian, welcome to the forum. Do you live in Deutschland? Are you Deutsch yourself, or are you from somewhere else? I speak some Deutsch myself.

>Yes i am German and i live in Germany right now

More energetic and healthy? That's great! When you say that you lived vegan, do you mean in terms of diet? Or did you also avoid clothing derived from animals, and other products tested on animals? It seems odd to me that you would do something for so long if it was only "an experiment". This isn't bad, of course, I'm glad to hear that you enjoy cooking, and no doubt gained much experience with preparing vegan foods.

>To be honest with you, yes it was "just" an experiment to see if there was something on it or if it was just some movement that will be forgotten after a short time. For conext, we lived a maybe above average live in terms of food and cooking, i would say a bit healthier than the average but not much. My mother always had a tendency to try new stuff in terms of food and cooking, but she would discard most of that after like a year or so. But never the less something from that always stuck with her. We were pretty uneducated in terms of vaganism. We heard like all the stuff that you hear in the normal media, that you need supplements, you can't do it for a long time etc. But she came home with a book from "Brendan Brazier" who is a vegan Triathlete and Ironman winner and she thought if it works for him it should work on us as well. So we started the "experiment" on ourselfes. I was a bit concerned because i did like 30hrs of sport a week, but it seemed to wirk fine, so i stuck with it. It was just our diet though, nothing really more.

Are you eating far less than before you went vegan? I assume you know that meat is rather unhealthy; that it is high in saturated fat and cholesterol, and promotes chronic diseases. Fish-meat is healthier than meat from birds & mammals, but beans/nuts/whole-grains are much healthier still. A diet with a small amount of meat is healthier than one with lots of meat, but a diet with no meat (nor dairy/eggs) is healthier yet (so long as you have a large variety of plant-foods).

If you'd like to discuss nutrition, then perhaps other (more knowledgeable) forum members could discuss it with you.

>I am in fact eating far far less meat, than before. I forgot to include fish-meat in my first post. I also eat some fish, here and there, but in general i'd say i eat way less meat than before. I currently eat vegan, until i think like "I really want to eat some chicken". Then i look up where i can find a local, high quality piiece of chicken, buy it (expensive as heck tough) prepare it the way i like it and eat vegan after that again for like a week or so. As far as i know about "meat beeing generally unhealty", that is in fact true for any low quality meat that you find in 95% of stores in those little packages. But for a high quality piece of meat, which also is considerably more expensive, that doesn't apply. At least far less. If someone can correct me on that please do so, im curious. For whole grains, i try to avoid them as much as i can, but some black rice here and there is ok. What i found out while beeing vegan for those 2.5 years is that my body doesn't crave for calories when it is hungry 9/10 times. But the fact that i am hungry is because some nutritional aspect was missing. So i kond of managed without them, nuts and beans (red ones) are fair game though, because they don' fall into the same family as grains.

Good to here that you eat lots of vegetables. I hope that you eat plenty of beans and whole-grains as well. The meat in your diet is still a little problematic for health-reasons, and perhaps more so for ethical-reasons, which I will discuss.

>I'd say my diet is pretty healthy and well rounded at the moment. So time to discuss

I've visited their respective websites*, and looked for what I could find about their animal welfare standards. According to the rules of Demeter, animals may not be be dehorned, debeaked, have wings clipped, or tails cut. This is good. Birds must have room to move around, and "some access to outdoors". This is better than most chicken/turkey farms, but is unfortunately rather vague. "Some access to outdoors" could simply mean that they have a very small enclosure with some sunlight, but overall little room to run around.

Bioland standards appear to be quite similar, with standards for living space, and against mutilation. From what I saw about Naturland, it sets rules for aquaculture, but I didn't see anything about land animals on their website.

Unfortunately, some of the most severe ethical problems, common within animal agriculture, still appear to be permissible under the standards that you mentioned. Obviously, farms which raise animals for meat will kill them. As for dairy farms following these standards, are calves separated from their mothers and denied their milk? Are the male calves killed for veal at a young age? Are the mothers killed at around 6 years old, when thier milk production declines to much to be profitable? Regarding egg-laying chickens: Are males killed soon after hatching? Are females killed when their production is too low?

Even if the animals within these specific "humane" farms have completely painless and unforeseen deaths (which even that, I think, is very unlikely), their deaths are still violations of their will to continue living. Humans are not the only animals who have interests, aside from merely "not suffering." Many animals greatly value their lives; and will strive to continue living even if they must go through a great deal of suffering.

To a sentient animals who wishes to live, killing it is inherently problematic, especially when we know that we have zero nutritional requirement to consume anything derived from their bodies. It's important for us to realize that the conflict between humans and animals is not "humans' lives vs animals' lives", but rather, "humans' palate pleasure vs animals' lives."

> For the concerns in the first paragraph, i can see that it is a vague description on that specific farm, chickens can just run around on the property as free as they want. That may sound weird but for some reasons the chicken don't run away or something along those lines, they have somewhere to spend the night and be protected from rain, but they can move over the proerty as much as they want, visit the cows the horses etc. The only confinement is the property itself.
I chose those 3 because they are very similar and overlap in 99% of their standards. Besides Naturland which also covers aquaculture.
Breeding mothers and calves are not beeing separated.
As far as i know he doesn't kill the male calves but sells them to other farms in the region for breeding, but that is all i know for my extent.
The farmer sells no dairy, so i don't know the precise age when they are killed. Could ask him though.
Male chicken are either sold, or left alive. He has a lot of them running around, they might have been sterilized though, i don't know.
Same for the female chicken as for the female cows, i don't know when they will be sent off to die. Can ask him though.

If these farms do follow the demeter & bioland standards, then they are better than most, but they likely do still inflict death upon animals, which we cannot ethically justify. Additionally, meat/dairy/eggs from such farms, likely are much more expensive than your typical factory farm stuff, and require more resources. I doubt that these products are economically & environmentally feasible for the majority of humankind. Vegan diets are far more economically feasible, and environmentally friendly, for the majority of humans. They're also healthier for us. Fully vegan diets are good for our health and the environment, and are the least harmful to animals. A win-win-win solution, really.

>The thing with that farm in specific but als with two other farms in the region is that all of their resources are localy grown and produced. Local in this context means all happens in a circle around the farm that is allowed to be 30km at max. That is a agreement of some local farms in my region. And they get their stuff all year round from that "constricted" room. The price tag on the other hand on the final meat product i find justifyable. The eggs on the other hand are not more expensive than those you can buy a your local store. At least not here.

If we care about animals, then we should focus on the morality of our actions towards them, rather than looking for excuses to hurt them (but to a small enough extent to still be "good people"). I'm not especially interested in judging your character. Even if you do enough good to qualify as a "good person", that could still mean that some of your actions are harmful and avoidable. I suggest focusing on the morality of actions rather than on the people who commit them.

Supporting these farms of yours is likely better than supporting most others, but not enough to be morally justified. It still involves needless harm towards animals. I do highly encourage returning to a fully vegan lifestyle.

>I am skipping the above things you answered on my post, because yeah, that was unrealted to the topic, but thanks for that logical fallacy link, really interesting. So, i guess the fact of killing, is still there for me. But i tried to eliminate all "harmful" factors during the life of the animal. So what other things are harmful and avoidable in this context. Taking those i mentiones out? If i missed something or made a faulty claim feel free to tell me

Hi Gadian,

Gadian wrote:As far as i know about "meat beeing generally unhealty", that is in fact true for any low quality meat that you find in 95% of stores in those little packages. But for a high quality piece of meat, which also is considerably more expensive, that doesn't apply. At least far less. If someone can correct me on that please do so, im curious.

That's a myth and a marketing gimmick. Meat, regardless of how it's raised, is unhealthy. An animal locked in a box and tortured for two years is as unhealthy as an animal who was a loved pet and pampered for two years.

Grass fed meat has slightly more ALA (and CLA), but these aren't good sources since it's only like half a gram of ALA per kg of meat (a trivial amount). Instead of meat, just eating a few walnuts which have 2.6 grams of omega 3 per ounce (28 grams) is much more useful (over 90 grams per kg).
In terms of CLA, if you want the supposed benefits of that (which are speculative), you need to take a supplement; meat contains very little of that too.
None of these things make the special meat meaningfully "healthier".

All of these meats are high in saturated fat and cholesterol, high in methionine, contain large amounts of heme iron (also bad), contain no fiber and virtually no antioxidants, and are rich sources of carcinogens (particularly when you cook them).

The only animal products which are less bad for you are certain kinds of small fish or oysters, since they are low in saturated fats and have DHA/EPA (which comes from the algae they eat).
I say small fish, because they must be young and low on the "food chain" to avoid bioaccumulation and biomagnification of heavy metals and other toxins.
http://mercurypolicy.scripts.mit.edu/blog/?p=499

Oysters are probably the healthiest meat there is, since they are very low in toxins due to being at the bottom of the "food chain".
Also, as a bonus, oysters are probably not sentient, AND rope grown oysters are probably good for the environment (as opposed to other meat, which is harmful to the environment).

So, if you choose to eat meat, I recommend you stick to rope grown oysters.

I recommend you read these articles:


http://sentientist.org/2013/05/20/the-e ... d-mussels/

http://sentientist.org/2013/06/15/oystersmusselspt2/

Gadian wrote:For whole grains, i try to avoid them as much as i can, but some black rice here and there is ok. What i found out while beeing vegan for those 2.5 years is that my body doesn't crave for calories when it is hungry 9/10 times. But the fact that i am hungry is because some nutritional aspect was missing. So i kond of managed without them, nuts and beans (red ones) are fair game though, because they don' fall into the same family as grains.

Why do you avoid cereal grains?

It is true that beans and nuts are healthier than grains, but grains like oats are actually pretty good. There's no reason to avoid them so much (just don't eat too many of them).
Only rice and corn are grains with low nutrient content, so I just avoid most rice and corn.
As you said, black rice is more nutritious than other rice. Blue corn is also more nutritious.

Grass fed meat has slightly more ALA (and CLA), but these aren't good sources since it's only like half a gram of ALA per kg of meat (a trivial amount). Instead of meat, just eating a few walnuts which have 2.6 grams of omega 3 per ounce (28 grams) is much more useful (over 90 grams per kg).
In terms of CLA, if you want the supposed benefits of that (which are speculative), you need to take a supplement; meat contains very little of that too.
None of these things make the special meat meaningfully "healthier".

>On your first sentence, i couldn't find any viable diagrams on that claim, so i need you to show me your source of that. And i also couldn't find any good source for ALA/CLA ratios in meat. So i would like to have your source again.

All of these meats are high in saturated fat and cholesterol, high in methionine, contain large amounts of heme iron (also bad), contain no fiber and virtually no antioxidants, and are rich sources of carcinogens (particularly when you cook them).

>Saturated fats and cholesterol are essential to the human body, in a low dosage. Methionine is an essential alpha-Aminoacid. And i didn't find any source that specificly said, that heme-iron, compared to normal iron, is worse. Excess iron consumption is bad though i konw that. But for a fact, you yourself have a considerable amount of heme-iron in your blood, due to it beeing the element that docks to hemoglobin and restrucktures it to be able to transport Oxygen. That is also where the name derives from. But if you have a source that is reliable and tells a different story, tell me about it. The fiber and atioxidants fact is undeniably true, but those two things are only aviable in plants, so that argument is kinda, weird in my eyes. Carcinogens are only in meat when they recieved, industrial prepared food that are high in sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate. Which as i said, the animals get nothing of.

The only animal products which are less bad for you are certain kinds of small fish or oysters, since they are low in saturated fats and have DHA/EPA (which comes from the algae they eat).
I say small fish, because they must be young and low on the "food chain" to avoid bioaccumulation and biomagnification of heavy metals and other toxins.
http://mercurypolicy.scripts.mit.edu/blog/?p=499

>Little to no doubt on that one, 'cause it's correct. But do you mean human food chain or the natural food chain in this example?

Oysters are probably the healthiest meat there is, since they are very low in toxins due to being at the bottom of the "food chain".
Also, as a bonus, oysters are probably not sentient, AND rope grown oysters are probably good for the environment (as opposed to other meat, which is harmful to the environment).

So, if you choose to eat meat, I recommend you stick to rope grown oysters.

I recommend you read these articles:


http://sentientist.org/2013/05/20/the-e ... d-mussels/

http://sentientist.org/2013/06/15/oystersmusselspt2/

> Good articles, but for a fact oysters are impossible to come by where i am living right now, without them beeing processed in any way. But thank you nontheless for your reply.

Why do you avoid cereal grains?

It is true that beans and nuts are healthier than grains, but grains like oats are actually pretty good. There's no reason to avoid them so much (just don't eat too many of them).
Only rice and corn are grains with low nutrient content, so I just avoid most rice and corn.
As you said, black rice is more nutritious than other rice. Blue corn is also more nutritious.

>I try to avoid Carbonhydrates and added sugar as much as i can. Just because i noticed an even bigger difference than when i went vegan for the first time. Artificial sweeteners have bee nnone exsistent for 10 years in my family now. Those substances are ugly. So that is that, just trying to avoid them. And i still do 9 hours of gymnastics a week and 9 hours of volleyball, both in a league. And i can do fine without them for some reason. That is all there is too it

Gadian wrote: >On your first sentence, i couldn't find any viable diagrams on that claim, so i need you to show me your source of that.

I don't know what you are asking.

Gadian wrote:And i also couldn't find any good source for ALA/CLA ratios in meat. So i would like to have your source again.

You can't easily find a source about that because most meat has virtually no ALA or CLA. It's not a good source, so it's unlikely listed on any databases.

There have been a couple studies on this. This site is a pro-meat site which recognizes that grass-fed meat is not better:
animalscience.tamu.edu/2013/12/07/ground-beef-from-grass-fed-and-grain-fed-cattle-does-it-matter/

The internet is awash in websites proclaiming the nutritional benefits of ground beef from grass-fed cattle. However, researchers in the Department of Animal Science at Texas A&M University have published the only two research studies that actually compared the effects of ground beef from grass-fed cattle and traditional, grain-fed cattle on risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and type II diabetes in men. Was ground beef from grass-fed beef actually more healthful?[...]
there is no scientific evidence to support the claims that ground beef from grass-fed cattle is a healthier alternative to ground beef from conventionally raised, grain-fed cattle.

All of the claims about meat with special diets being healthier are bullshit. It's just marketing.

All tetrapod meat is bad for you, as demonstrated overwhelmingly by the evidence on heart disease, and growing evidence on diabetes and cancer.

Gadian wrote: >Saturated fats and cholesterol are essential to the human body, in a low dosage.

That's bullshit too, promulgated by dishonest marketing. Your body makes ALL of the saturated fat and cholesterol it needs. You do not need to -- and ideally should not -- consume any more of it. It's not practical to consume no saturated fat, since even plants have a tiny bit, but we should limit as much as possible, and since animal fat is mainly saturated fat (and also comes with cholesterol) it should be avoided completely.

The only fats you need to consume are called "Essential Fatty Acids", which are polyunsaturated fatty acids. These mainly come from plants and fish (which have them from the algae they eat).
By definition, saturated fats are not essential in the diet, and are not useful to the body except as a source of empty calories which by comparison to unsaturated fats promote heart disease.

Read this article:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-h ... d-and-good

Gadian wrote: Methionine is an essential alpha-Aminoacid.

That doesn't make it good for you in high amounts. Animal products contain too much methionine.
Unlike saturated fat and cholesterol, you need to eat a little bit of methionine, but plant products already have plenty of it in them.
Animal products contain an excess which is harmful to health.

Research "methionine restriction". Eliminating excess methionine, and sticking to low levels, helps fight cancer and extend lifespan.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24373243
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/starvin ... striction/

Ideally, limit your methionine consumption to the minimum your body needs, and don't consume extra methionine (which will shorten your life and feed cancer growth).

Gadian wrote:And i didn't find any source that specificly said, that heme-iron, compared to normal iron, is worse. Excess iron consumption is bad though i konw that. But for a fact, you yourself have a considerable amount of heme-iron in your blood, due to it beeing the element that docks to hemoglobin and restrucktures it to be able to transport Oxygen. That is also where the name derives from. But if you have a source that is reliable and tells a different story, tell me about it.

Your body makes all of the heme iron that you need from non-heme iron, as long as you eat enough iron.
With other iron sources, your body can upregulate or downregulate absorption based on need more easily. With heme-iron, too much is absorbed, and your body ends up with an excessive iron load which is bad for you, in addition to harmful effects of that iron type generally.

You can see this video:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-saf ... heme-iron/

All sources are cited in the description on the page:

W Yang, B Li, X Dong, X Q Zhang, Y Zeng, J L Zhou, Y H Tang, J J Xu. Is heme iron intake associated with risk of coronary heart disease? A meta-analysis of prospective studies. Eur J Nutr. 2014;53(2):395-400. doi: 10.1007/s00394-013-0535-5.

A Fonseca-Nunes, P Jakszyn, A Agudo. Iron and cancer risk--a systematic review and meta-analysis of the epidemiological evidence. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2014 Jan;23(1):12-31. doi: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-0733

M Hoppe, B Brün, M P Larsson, L Moraeus, L Hulthén. Heme iron-based dietary intervention for improvement of iron status in young women. Nutrition. 2013 Jan;29(1):89-95. doi: 10.1016/j.nut.2012.04.013.

J Hunnicutt, K He, P Xun. Dietary iron intake and body iron stores are associated with risk of coronary heart disease in a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. J Nutr. 2014 Mar;144(3):359-66 doi: 10.3945/jn.113.185124.

T K Lam, M Rotunno, B M Ryan, A C Pesatori, P A Bertazzi, M Spitz, N E Caporaso, M T Landi. Heme-related gene expression signatures of meat intakes in lung cancer tissues. Mol Carcinog. 2014 Jul;53(7):548-56. doi: 10.1002/mc.22006.

A V Saunders, W J Craig, S K Baines, J S Posen. Iron and vegetarian diets. Med J Aust. 2013 Aug 19;199(4 Suppl):S11-6. doi: 10.1016/j.ijcard.2013.12.176.

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Gadian wrote:The fiber and atioxidants fact is undeniably true, but those two things are only aviable in plants, so that argument is kinda, weird in my eyes.

Not at all.
If you're eating meat, there is an opportunity cost.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp

If you're eating meat, it means you are NOT eating as many beans instead. You can't eat an unlimited amount of food.
People who eat meat eat fewer beans and veggies. People who don't eat meat eat more beans and veggies.

If you stopped eating meat and replaced it with more beans, you would get more fiber and antioxidants. Do you deny this?

With antioxidants, while there may be diminishing returns at some point, more is better. You are costing yourself the opportunity to eat more health-promoting things by eating an unhealthy thing instead.

Gadian wrote:Carcinogens are only in meat when they recieved, industrial prepared food that are high in sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate. Which as i said, the animals get nothing of.

This is again false. Are you making this up, or do you just believe everything the advertisers tell you?

There's an amino acid in meat called creatine which reacts when cooked at high temperature to form extremely carcinogenic compounds.

http://nutritionfacts.org/2013/07/04/av ... rcinogens/
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/reducin ... eateaters/

Even if you only boil your meat, potentially cancer promoting compounds are also formed during digestion and fermentation by gut microbes:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/carniti ... onnection/

You can find all of the sources cited.

You can partially avoid this effect by eating animal products less frequently so that your gut microbes are not adapted to metabolizing the high amounts of carnitine, choline, etc. in these products into harmful substances.

Gadian wrote:But do you mean human food chain or the natural food chain in this example?

I don't know what you're talking about.

All animals accumulate toxicants over their lives as they eat and breathe. It doesn't matter if it's organic or not: "organic" products contain toxicants too (sometimes more toxicants). When you eat the animals, you consume all of the toxicants they have accumulated in their lives, and those build up even faster in your own body.

The best way to avoid filling yourself with these is to eat plants, and avoid eating animal products. You will still accumulate some toxicants, but it will be a much slower process.

Gadian wrote:> Good articles, but for a fact oysters are impossible to come by where i am living right now, without them beeing processed in any way. But thank you nontheless for your reply.

Then I recommend that you choose beans instead, and do not eat any animal products.

If you want to eat oysters, you can order them frozen or freeze dried from the internet (these contain no additives or harmful processing).

With regards to 'humane meat', the illogic and self-defeating reasoning of it is apparent at a glance.

Three things to consider when 'weighing the morality of meat' is*:
- the treatment while alive of the animal
- the method of murder (quick, 'painless', etc)
- the act of taking a life, from a consequential approach

If the livestock from where you get your meat from is very happy whilst alive, regardless of whether the death was painless, the act of taking the life is immoral because the animal was very content and enjoying life. I do not believe that factory farmed meat could ever be humane, but more farfetched scenarios such as hitting a deer with your car and eating that might be of less moral weight, yet it still could be argued from a consequentialists POV that the intent is not what matters, but the outcome (the unnecessary and accidental death of an animal, in this case).
I do however believe animal by-products can be sourced ethically, but is it simply too infeasible to suggest that these more ethical methods could sustain the gargantuan demand from the public.

Ofcourse, this is from merely an ethical stance and I don't think you need informing on the terrible environmental effects of animal agriculture (even 'cruelty-free' vegetarian diets would not be sustainable), nor about the far researched detrimental health impacts of regular meat consumption.

What do you think? Perhaps I am missing something and there are genuinely ethical ways to kill an animal for food?

*Credit for wording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XFVS2S1fN0

Archtype wrote: *Credit for wording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XFVS2S1fN0

That's clever. I'd be interested to see how that works in practice.

However, a carnist might argue that it was good that the animal had a couple years of good life instead of none. If the animal were not farmed, the alternative would be not existing.
An interest based, rather than hedonistic, argument probably works better for this.

brimstoneSalad wrote:a carnist might argue that it was good that the animal had a couple years of good life instead of none. If the animal were not farmed, the alternative would be not existing.
An interest based, rather than hedonistic, argument probably works better for this.

Whilst the point is valid, I do not see how this refutes what I said - if anything, it strengthens the point; let the animal live out it's full years if it is in good health and enjoying life. Ending its life prematurely merely to eat it, if there are so many viable alternatives, in my opinion is immoral.
I feel like I might have misinterpreted/miscomprehended your argument, so if I have please let me know or you could elaborate a bit more?