Philosophical Vegan Forum

I did a presentation on the health aspects of adopting a WFPB diet to a group of about a dozen friends a couple of weekends ago, who were very receptive.

I'd emailed them all with Dr Greger's 'How not to die' video a few days before the weekend, and followed it up with a couple of handouts - one of Greger's Alzheimer's video and one on arthritis (we're pretty much all retired). One of the guys was so impressed by the video that he printed off copies of 14 pages of the 'How not to die' transcript.

I went through the science about what happens to the vascular tree when the body is faced with excess cholesterol - linking heart disease to ED, Alzheimer's etc, and gave them the link to Esselstein's 'Reversing CAD' info.

I've since heard that one of the guys was given a copy of 'How not to die' by one of his sons - another has emailed to say how impressed he was by the info and is implementing lifestyle changes. A couple of others had already begun to make changes to their diets after an earlier presentation. With the rest of them, it's more about planting the seed, I guess.

On the premise that if I have some useful information, I should share it with the rest of the guys, I intend to follow up with further videos from Greger and also from Neal Barnard.

I shall also widen the topic out to include effects of climate change (Conspiracy, etc) and, of course, animal welfare.

Any suggestions of links I should be sending to my friends would be gratefully received.

Cowspiracy is a pretty good documentary, but has some errors in it. I would include a caveat, maybe a print off of the analysis I linked to here:

http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2167

It's not 50% of global warming, BUT it is the biggest source we can easily do something about (by small diet changes, which also benefit our health).

Normally I would say we should promote veganism on the basis of its main arguments, ethical and environmental issues, rather than health issues where the benefits are more debatable and perhaps less important.

However for people at retirement age, that may be different. People are less open minded to changing how they view the world after a certain age.

Also, the health benefits of veganism, such as longer lives, less cancer and heart disease, are particularly beneficial to older people. However many older people are already deficient in B12 before even starting veganism. I reccomend you take particular care to stress the need to supplement with vitamin B12. Find some print out from a medical authority stressing the need for all people of a certain age to supplement B12 so they know it is not just a problem caused by a vegan diet.

Cowspiracy is a good movie. Most of the claims I've checked with other studies and books, at least qualitatively. I don't know ahout precision accuracy of specific numbers but broadly speaking the claims are accurate and I reccomend showing the movie. The focus too much on the claim that 51% of global warming is from animal agriculture, other studies put it more in the range of 10%-30%, so I would tell them about this, but apart from that, the movie stands alone well and doesn't require much further explanation.

Thanks, for this Jamie - your post slipped by me until now!

And thanks again, brim.