[funchy]

Originally Posted by Ryan Bailey

My belief is most vegetarians I have worked with in the past have been no healthier than the people eating all the poisonous meat and processed dairy products.

How did you come to this conclusion?

How do you define "healthy"? Can you prove these people would be healthier by replacing some of their veg-based calories with meat?

If you eat 4-8 servings of mostly raw, organic or biodynamic vegetables a day and eat a large variety of seeds, nuts, beans and legumes you will still be low on the amount of protein the human body needs to repair everyday and perform at high levels. Most people I know, especially young men and women, are not educated enough to follow a proper vegetarian diet.

In those two sentences you seem to have contradicted yourself: You seem confident that you know what a proper vegetarian diet is. Then you turn around and say it would be deficient in protein. If it's proper, why is it deficient?

Let's try to put things in more objective terms: WHY do you believe a vegetarian cannot get enough protein?

Protein is simple an organic molecule made of amino acids. Our body breaks down and re-assembles the amino acids as needed. It's not true that if we need to grow skin cells we must eat the skin on our chicken; we synthesize the proteins we need from amino acids from all sorts of sources. Some American seem to equate protein with pure nutrition, and that is simply not true. Complete nutrition is a balance of all necessary food items: fats, proteins, carbs, vitamins, minerals, adequate water.

If we needed animal protein to be healthy or grow muscle, it would be impossible to be a weightlifter or professional athlete on a low or no meat diet.

Consider what happens when one doesn't get enough protein. When you go without enough protein to make you sick, you'll look like a swollen-bellied African starvation case. There is NOT a single case of protein deficiency in modern America.

PCRM, an org made up of doctors, has a site specifically to educate people on the dangers of the meat-protein diets:
Atkins Diet Alert / Neal Barnard, M.D., president / a PCRM site

Yes they may not agree with the way we treat and raise many of the animals in the U.S and or other countries, but this also does not mean that it is all or nothing. There are plenty of farmers who raise animals humanely and provide the animal with a diet that they are designed to eat by Mother Nature.

That is a different topic, but I will address it as well. I am going to disagree with this idea.

Meat farmers start out with breeding toward extremes. For example, dairy cows (eg Holsteins) are bred for more and more milk production, exceeding any normal level a mother cow would produce for a calf. It's such a high level it leaches nutrients from the mother. There are reports of bones of slaughtered cows snapping and crumbling when older dairy cows are sent to slaughter; their bodies are so worn out from the demands humans put on them when we bred them this way and milked them year after year. This applies even to "organic" cows.

It's true grass-fed beef exists if you're willing to look for it, pay more, and forego almost all restaurant food. However, we're still starting with animals bred to bulk up as fast as possible without regard to the quality & health of the resulting animal.

For poultry, farmers have created chickens so distorted and sickly some have so much meat/weight on such tiny feet, they literally can not stand up under their own weight when they hit adulthood. They're bred for growth of meat over everything else.

Mother nature also didn't design commercial animal feed, either. Swine are fed human food trash and not allowed to forage for the roots and other natural plants they should be eating. Cattle are eating massive amounts of corn and soy. Poultry eat ground, processed grains; commercial poultry farms don't let the birds out into the grass to peck at insects and natural plant seeds.

I live in a farming area. I don't know if a single farm, not even the one "organic" specialty meat farm, which let the animals live and in a way similar to what mother nature intended. It's impossible.

Consumers won't stand to pay for what it really costs to humanely & properly produce animal products. We start out with taxpayer-subsidized livestock feed crops. Then we add more subsidies and price controls to keep dairy and meat artificially cheap. And the farmers themselves can't stay in business if their animals were always all free-range, drug-free, diet free of grains, and healthy. And the more we push people to eat lots of meat, the more large-scale production of meat is needed. Bulk meat means quantity not quality. It means stressed who are animals, animals who are shipped longer distances & sold in bulk, and the requirement we stick to grain-fed beef.

The very nature of your argument (Americans should all consume lots of meat) does not go with your arrangement that meat can be raised in a healthy, humane way. The more demand there is for meat, the more the market cuts corners to produce an affordable product. In other words, we can't have both and still feed 300 million people.

I can sum this up in a few points that I am sure can be battled till the day ends, but this is what my journey has led me to at this point and what resonates with me and follows the laws of Nature, which to me is more powerful than any law created by a human to decide never to eat meat for what ever reason.

The laws of nature gave us all the traits of an animal which eats little to no meat. Our teeth, digestive tract length, ability to eat raw meat (not!), lack of claws, lack of hunting instincts, lack of good nose to track prey, and pretty much everything else about us screams : NOT a predator.

But not the free-range, grass-fed beef from the local farmer that our bodies are designed to eat and thrive off of!

Can you cite some scientific studies that show grass-fed beef is a better diet than one rich in all other foods except meat?

My local farmers sell to the open beef market. In other words, they're using the same milled feeds, the same extremist breeds, and the same production timetables as the bigger farmers.

We need to put into perspective what is causing the major source of dis-ease in our country. If meat and animal products were the culprit we would be healthy by now. Why? Meat, dairy and butter consumption has gone down in the last 50 years.

I disagree. We eat as many animals products as ever, and consumption of protein per (typical American) person is 2-3x what is needed. Yes, maybe we're eating less butterfat or red meat, but it's being replaced with plenty of seafood products, poultry, low-fat dairy, and other meats. Our calories are going up. Our fiber is so bad some people have to take fiber pills. Most americans think eating catsup with their McDonald's french fries counts as a vegetable?!

Cardiovascular disease and cancer are top killers of Americans. Both are clearly linked to high meat (& lower veg) diets.

And if our population keeps growing, we're going to have a serious problem. Meat takes 7-10 times the amount of land as it takes to produce the same number of pounds of non-meat foods. Estimates to produce a single pound of beef is 2,500 gallons. The next big world shortage is going to be clean drinking water. Already there are American disputes over who can use water in rivers such as the Colorado. How can we afford to throw so much of this precious resource at producing what amounts to a luxury item?

About 70% of the food America grows is tossed in front of a pig, cow, or chicken to eat.... what a waste.

We could literally end all world famine: just stop throwing food to animals to eat and instead safely deliver it to 3rd world nations. Livestock feed is greatly subsidized by US taxpayers anyway, so why not let taxpayers decide where it goes? It saddens me to know American pigs gorge on cheap subsided food but kids in Africa and parts of Asia are dying from malnutrition.

While sugar, flour, corn and corn derivatives have increased by hundreds of percent. So here is the deal if we look at a simple fact of what we had to eat 10,000 years ago. It would not be a vegan diet with soy milk and grains. There were no soy, wheat, corn or any grain crops. We did not even domesticate animals at this point. So therefore we were not even drinking milk or any other processed dairy crap foods you can think of. We had wild meats that we hunted as nomadic people. We had wild berries and nuts along with some veggies of the wild sort. We did not farm and we did not have animals that we raised ourselves.

I am not sure what the conclusion I should be drawing is? Humans also died at an average age of 25, so how could this be the ideal way to live?

And the very beginnings of civilization wasn't the first guy who stabbed a rabbit with a spear. It was with agriculture, for without it we could not have permanent settlements. Without settlements we cannot have cities, which in turn give us civilization. So shouldn't we be thanking plants not animals for bringing us out of the caves?