This post is a response to a video posted by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell youtube channel: Why Meat is the Best Worst Thing in the World. This video begins by demonstrating the catastrophic effect the animal industry has on the environment, brushes over the ethical considerations, completely avoids the health considerations and then proceeds to offer some compromise solution because meat just tastes too good apparantly so much that immediate taste pleasure is more important than saving humanity and the animals.
It’s very simple, even if you’re not vegan but you agree factory farming is unethical both for the animals and for humanity to have any kind of future, then the solution is not to keep on eating factory farmed meat every day and wait until lab meat comes too late to save humanity from itself… but to buy meat rarely only from a farmer that you know treats the animal in a standard that you think is ethical. Like, once a year for thanksgiving or for your birthday or better yet: NEVER!
Some scientists estimate that all marine life may be dead by 2048 at the current rate! See this article for many references regarding this topic: http://www.bitesizevegan.org/bite-size-vegan-nuggets/main-nuggets/empty-oceans-is-the-world-running-out-of-fish/
…or view the video documentary form of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW9fOEJ0vEs
…and when the oceans die, a few years shortly after – we die. We are running out of time to turn this boat around, people! We need to get everyone on the planet to consume as few calories from animal food as possible which for the vast majority of people is zero, as many of the most scrutinizing nutritional academies state that properly planned vegetarian and vegan diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704
As a vegan, I’m an abolishionist, i.e. I am against all forms of animal exploitation for profit that are practically possible to avoid and consistent with the ethics I hold against exploitation of humans, but I’m just saying that if you are not vegan but you *are* against factory farming then put your money where your mouth is and don’t buy factory farmed animals, period.
We don’t need to eat animals for health, something this video completely ignored, and certainly eating animal derived foods every day raises cholesterol and we’re having people get more and more heart attacks because they are eating more meat, dairy, fish and processed food instead of more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes because their taste palettes are basterdized from all the processed and animal based food so they can’t enjoy a salad with some lentils and buckwheat boiled in water without oil.
Most people would rather die than have such a bland food as their staple, but if they gave their taste buds a few weeks abstinence from processed and animal foods and replace them with such staples as a big salad that is half raw vegetables and half starches such as sweet potatoes, buckwheat and lentils and allow themselves the 2 to 3 fold sized portions needed for satiation as opposed to processed/animal foods that are more calorie dense – they would adapt to enjoy it and they would see how much better their health could be, possibly motivating them to put the new general well being they might experience for the first time in their lives above immediate taste pleasure, and lose weight while eating more healthy food so they feel full but unconciously consume less calories so they lose weight without trying to starve themselves or count calories.
Some people might benefit from a more gradual transition to a whole food plant based diet. They might need time to adapt to the higher fiber content of whole plant foods or might need to soak their legumes before cooking and gradually raise the ratio of unprocessed plants in their diet.
Some people in the comments of the video said “just don’t be fat”. I am sure fat people notice they are fat and most of them wish they weren’t no matter how much people try to push fat acceptance. I don’t think anyone honestly likes to be obese at the very least and have trouble walking and breathing. Telling them not to be fat isn’t helping.
They need to limit and/or abstain from animal derived and processed food because they are addicted to the higher calorie density (same as most of the thin or average or mildly overweight people btw) to get back the sensitivity of their taste palette so they can not throw up when they eat a vegetable and it’s very hard in the highly processed highly advertised junk food culture we live in, very, very hard. You need to become a hermit sometimes to be able to do it and even then they get you through the internet because all around you people are talking about pizzas and bacon and cheese and steak and it’s all calorie dense saturated fat and cholesterol filled cooked in oil crap that clogs your arteries and does no favors for your health, humanity’s future or animals. Google The Pleasure Trap books and videos by Alan Goldhamer and Doug Lisle such as this video for more details about this subject than those provided in this post.
Some people have highly fat conserving genes that drive them towards eating the most calorie dense food in the environment more than others or they just store fat more efficiently by virtue of their genes. These are not the weak people. These are the people who in an environment of scarcity preserved their calories the most efficiently and lived to reproduce while the less efficient fat storers died. They are being made fat and sick because of the horrible environment we are creating for them, and they are just following their instinct which is supposed to override your rationality btw for you to survive in an environment of scarcity, to eat the most calorie rich food in the environment. If your hunger did not override your rational fear of predators in the wild, we wouldn’t be here because our ancestors would starve hiding in their caves instead of out gathering or hunting. Now we don’t have predators, but we have junk food and advertisements preying on our instincts and we all buy into it, literally and figuratively… and instead of changing the environment to promote health and fitness, we blame fat people and put more junk food and more advertisements for junk food in the environment and talk more about eating fat filled animal products and processed food and make it more and more engrained in our culture and instead of providing the actual solution – let’s change our environment to promote eating healthier food, we have all sorts of diets and futile attempts at starving ourselves.
…and just because you are not fat does not mean you are not also almost equally if not equally susceptible to heart attacks, strokes, dementia, diabetes and cancer – if you are eating the same animal based and processed food based diet everyone else is eating. It just means you have WORSE genes at fat storage and WORSE genes at driving you to eat the most calorie rich food in the environment. The inherently genetically thin people are historically the ones with the weaker genes and weaker absorption, it’s just that relatively recently we have been making an environment with increasingly bastardized food that the naturally thin people’s genetic disadvantage becomes an advantage, at least socially and cosmetically – and almost no one or perhaps no one would be obese or overweight if they ate a diet consistent with our natural history – absolutely no processed food, the vast majority is unprocessed plant food and meat is a tiny minority of it, an occasional treat when the tribe managed to kill a beast in the wild and they divvied it up between the entire tribe because there were no freezers to preserve the meat for later consumption – and you could do just as well or even better without any meat or animal derived food at all.
