I am interested if you have completely excluded simple sacharides, dairy products, eggs, do you use normal or sea salt, do you eat bakery products or boiled cereals only, do you eat potatoes, do you use wide range of cereals and legumes or just rice, beans and lentils?
Do you eat all kind of fruits or do you hold to macrobiotic rules to eat only foods from your climatic zone and when they are growing only?

Vegans vs Junk food eaters > vegans win.
Vegans vs Soy-Vegans > vegans win.
Vegans vs Heavy meat eaters and milk drinkers > vegans win.

But show me the studies that show that vegans vs moderate meat eaters who consume no processed foods and meat cooked only on the outside (so basically raw, but with surface bacteria mostly eliminated).

As a non-soy vegan, where would you get sufficient amounts of protein? How about Calcium? How much nuts and beans are required for myself (a 72kg male) to meet my requirements of 1,4g/lbs of bodyweight?

Heres a fun fact. I was looking at vegan options for small babies. Vegan sources said that broccoli and spinach were good sources of calcium for babies. I then checked the nutritional requirements of babies and guess what? My friends’ baby who is about a year old needs 17,5dl (2,5dl / cup) of chopped broccoli to meet her minimum requirements.

Try getting a baby to eat that much broccoli in one day (spinach has less calcium). Yes, misinformation really sucks.

Now try looking at studies about soy. And I’m talking about legitimate studies published in peer-reviewed literature that is not sponsored by companies producing soy. Tell me what you discover.

On a positive note, I think its awesome that you accept comments on your blog that try to disagree with what you say. It shows some open mindedness and your achievents in personal growth alot more then many of your blog entries. But I do think its kinda bad that you only answer the comments you can easily knock out but leave the comments with good valid arguments unanswered.

It would be a fun 30-day experiment for you to eat 3 meat meals a week, or one a day or whatever you prefer, but sticking to unprocessed muscles, the most expensive, tender parts of a sheep and so forth.

P.S. I have no problems killing my own meat for eating. That said, I wouldnt go at a pack of sheep with a machine gun and then leave the rotting carcasses on the ground. And I wouldnt try to CATCH the sheep, I’d throw stuff at it.

When I say I “enjoy” meat, I do not fall into the same trap as smokers who “enjoy” their cigarettes too much. As I said, I have lived vegetarian and vegan diets already.

Most of the time, I still eat a pure vegetarian diet.

But I enjoy, yes, *enjoy* the taste, texture, smell… of meat.

It *is* a conscious choice on my behalf, as it is a conscious choice for me to do sports or live vegetarian most of the time.

Maybe this is the point where you come across as diet - fanatic. Did you accept me eating meat, consciously choosing to eat meat? No, you accuse me of being
just another junkie, not willing or able to see past his social conditioning.

Hmm….

@Steve:For large portions of society throughout history, the slaughter of animals for meat was part of every day life. I grew up in a family that farmed, hunted and fished regularly. A great many of my meals consisted of vegetables I grew myself as well as animals I either raised or hunted and directly ended the life of. Learning to humanely dispatch as well as process for eating were part of growing up. Having turkey for Thanksgiving wasn’t a matter of thawing a bird, it was a matter of selecting one from the barn. These things were part of my parents upbringing as well and much of the rural population of their generation and many generations before them. It’s only been in the last 75-100 years or so that the eating of meat has been sourced from a grocery store. However, that’s not unique to meat. Most people have no idea where their food comes from, regardless of it’s membership in the animal or plant kingdom.

I have actually attempted to try the vegetarian experiment and hated every moment of it. I thoroughly enjoy the flavor and texture of meat. I have made choices to ensure that my omnivorous diet is chosen from the best options. As a result, we eat locally raised, grass fed bison instead of beef, etc.

I think most of the controversy here circles around whether *as a species* we are built to eat one or the other. Had the posting explored (like previous ones on this topic) mostly the “try it for yourself”, “here are the benefits of”, “experiment to find the best diet for you” etc. of eating vegetarian, there wouldn’t have been nearly as divided a response. However, by questioning humanity’s biological suitability for eating meat, you raised a much bigger issue than previous postings did.

Thanks for the detailed info! I’ll have to look up the lactose thing and forward it to my mom, as well. Funny thing is, I’m half Dutch. But I guess not all folks of west European ancestry have to have mutated genes.

I’ve been experimenting with Silk soy milk and Rice Dream rice milk. They’re pretty good! And the positive effects on my stomach make them seem even tastier.

Annie,

If you think that’s bad — I recently read a blog where a guy finds weird stuff and eats it. He decided at one point that if his son drinks breast milk, he should at least try it. He even tried it mixed with chocolate.

That kind of goes along with your point, Steve. If even the thought of a human adult drinking human milk is enough to make a human gag… then why don’t we have the same reaction towards drinking cow’s or goat’s milk?

Saying that you enjoy meat too much to stop is saying that you’re addicted to it, is it not? I’ve heard people say the same sentence with “smoking” instead of meat. It doesn’t offend or upset me to see you write that. Imagine what it would be like, however, to be able to eat based on conscious choice instead of social conditioning.

reading this in the light of your last article “Awareness and resistance” has brought a grin to my face.

Ever thought about your own resistance when it comes to “meat” in people’s diet?

For starters:
I do eat meat, but very little. I live a vegetarian diet most of the time, and have lived vegan for some time.

I do however, *enjoy* meat too much to stop.

This is a topic that one can almost *never* bring up with strict vegetarian or vegan people.

Although “living healthy” is often brought into the discussion, I have observed many people’s reason to become vegetarian or vegan to be ethically oriented.

“I want to protect the animals / environment / be nice to animals, etc…”

Health reasons are then sought out *after the fact* to justify this behaviour even more. Sometimes distorting or misusing facts or studies.

for example:
Curiously, a lot of chinese food (depending on region) *does* contain meat.

Well.. to make this topic more controversial, I’ll point you to a site on the (radical?) other side of the argument spectrum and watch you cringe in resistance. As you said, respect goes out to the people who think, really think, about their choices.

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html

Excerpt from the site:
¨ In the first, nutrient intakes in ninety-four Japanese centenarians investigated between 1972 and 1973 showed a higher proportion of animal protein to total proteins than in contemporary average Japanese.

¨ The second demonstrated that high intakes of milk and fats and oils had favourable effects on ten-year survivorship in 422 urban residents aged sixty-nine to seventy-one. The survivors revealed a longitudinal increase in intakes of animal foods such as eggs, milk, fish and meat over the ten years.

¨ In the third study, nutrient intakes were compared between a sample from Okinawa Prefecture where life expectancies at birth and sixty-five were the longest in Japan, and a sample from Akita Prefecture where the life expectancies were much shorter. It found that the proportion of energy from animalproteins and fats were significantly higher in the former than in the latter.

The alternative to eating animal flesh needn’t be refined soy products, btw. Many of us just eat plants. Nutritionally it’s a lot cheaper and simpler than eating the animals who eat plants, especially given the massive system-wide energy loss involved in eating animals for food.

My body fills its nutritional needs from plants — I don’t need to eat hair or drink blood or anything like that.

In any case, I buy my meat at the supermarket like everybody else, and leave the killing to the experts. For pretty much any creature to live, though, other creatures have to die, so I fail to see how it’s “unnecessary” to kill animals.

Raw animal flesh contains huge amounts of nutrients that are nearly impossible to get in any other way. For example, consider creatine. Sure, your body can make it from other substances, but the conversion is not “for free”; it requires other nutrients. Eating raw meat is cheaper than creatine supplements, but it also includes lots of other vitamins, enzymes, and amino acids that get destroyed by even moderate cooking temperatures. And few of these nutrients are available from any plant source, except by synthesis.

So, from my point of view at least, I don’t believe it’s possible for humans to experience their peak health possibilities without eating raw meat, making it “necessary” in my book. It’s remarkable hubris to think that in the last half-century or so we’ve somehow become smart enough to know better what our diet should be than in the previous 2.5 million years, or to think that we can somehow synthesize everything our bodies need from synthetic foods like soy, when we still have so very little real understanding of how our bodies work.

Yes, what you say is true. But it is *NOT* because of the protein in milk, or the consumption of protein from animal sources, that calcium is leached from the bones; rather, it is the high acidity of our diets overall in the U.S.! One can eat lots of animal protein and keep acidity low simply by eating lots of green veggies along with (which I recommend). Of course, most starchy and processed carbohydrates also contribute to the acidity of our diets.

http://marcussharpe.com/diet.shtml

what I always say is, “Fine, eat meat. But since I stopped I have NEVER EVER felt so good!”

Don’t knock it til you try it.. I feel 10 years younger..

How it all Vegan by Sarah Kramer
Viva Le Vegan by Dreena Burton
Glad Cow Cookbook by Summer Keightley

I’m a cookbook collector so I have tons! But these are the ones I use the most with the best results.

I’d also recommend reading Becoming Vegan by Brenda Davis & Vesanto Melina to make sure you are giving yourself the daily nutrition in the right amounts. It’s easy to slide into being a “pasta and potato” vegan, but it’s not healthy and it’s boring to boot. Once I got on my game and started sourcing nutrients from such a wide variety of foods that I never would have tried before, I realized that I was missing some delicious stuff because I was just put off by weird sounding names! (That’s putting it mildly)

Good luck Vasilis! And have fun! Food *is* fun! If it wasn’t, nobody would congregate in the kitchen during parties or family gatherings!