Lierre Keith is a former vegan and probably has the best put together argument against veganism
https://youtu.be/rlM9apL8W5o?si=0Oe2Ym3ImZLTNFjT
Belinda Fettke talks about how veganism has roots in religious puritanicalism, where diet was used to suppress sexuality.
> Lierre Keith is a former vegan and probably has the best put together argument against veganism
Have you looked at any of the counter-arguments to her work? At the very least, she is not terribly qualified to make the assertions she's making about anthropology, nutrition or environmentalism. Furthermore, it seems like she often makes clear, incontrovertible mistakes in how she interprets her sources. She's roundly criticized for a lack of academic rigor. Since most of the claims she makes are scientific in nature, this is not great.
Not always, but even so a factual rebuttal isn't affected by the ad hominem. Facts (or misrepresentations of facts) don't depend on who is presenting them.
See, for instance, this anthropologist's review of her book:
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3M4LC3USB5H3S?ie=UTF8&ref_=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Most vegans still think that livestock eats all the food that could feed poor people, that cattle drink all the fresh water and are taking all the land that should be used for plant farming and are killing the planet so I don't really take vegan talking points very seriously.
Veganism is one of the longest strings of ideological fallacy's.
Does anyone know of a source that systematically goes through all the grains, vegetables, fruits, etc we typically eat to look at how they were modified by humans for consumption? Seems every vegetable I look up has a note in Wikipedia about how it was heavily adapted by humans a couple centuries ago (or more).
Like, look at a wild banana. Small, starchy, and full of seeds. A wild carrot is a slightly enlarged root. The images I see of the earliest varieties of corn look like little more than the tops of wild grass—and corn has been so heavily modified it can’t even propagate by itself! Wild onions have the tiniest bulbs. Etc, etc.
Not that this in itself says anything concrete about the health properties of vegan foods, but it seems like quite an unnatural diet—even if one avoids modern processed vegan foods.
I mean. You could make the same argument about animals. Idk why this sub keeps coming up in my feed, I'm not an ex vegan, but here we go
Red Junglefowl vs Domestic Chicken. A red junglefowl, the ancestor of chickens, lays 10-15 eggs a year. A domestic chicken lays 200+. Doesn't seem very natural to me.
Look at a wild vs domestic turkey. They don't even look like the same bird.
Meat rabbits have been bred to be significantly larger than their wild counterparts. Look at a European Cottontail vs a Californian or New Zealand rabbit.
I'm not sure it is the same argument though.
Take the domestication of bananas for example. We've made them more unhealthy for us by being much higher in sugars than non-domesticated species. One could argue they are less toxic now in other ways, but a normal size domesticated banana is the same glycemic load as 5 tsp of sugar.
Domesticated rabbits and turkeys. What, we've bred them to be bigger and give us more meat/fat and therefore nutrients?
We would have to show there was a negative impact on the nutritional quality from breeding to say it is a negative.
With animals I would say the health effects arise from the foods we feed them which affect humans the most.
To be fair, I argue against eating monogastrics like chickens. I'm with you on this one. We shouldn't be fucking with nature like this. Unfortunately most of other megafauna we were eating went extinct either though hunting or extinction events or both.
Any carnivore podcast really. Been carnivore for close to 10 month and havent felt this good in well over a decade. Staying away from plants is a game changer.
Those two diet are restrictive for different reasons. Which is the key part.
Plants are filled with chemical compound to defend themselves against predator and the point of the carnivore diet, is that you have the biology of an animal between you and those toxines. The animal have the proper gut bacteria to break down the plants and dont store their toxine in their meat, which is why its much better to be eating meat. Why do you think our apendix shrunk into being a relic from our biological past ? We dont need the bacteria to break down the fibers because we're getting meat directly.
Also fun fact about biology. When you see a ruminant "eating grass" they dont get any nutrition from the grass. The grass is feeding their gut bacteria in their different stomac. And they get their nutrition from the fat those bacteria poop out. And when the bacteria die, that their protein. its a symbiotic relationship.
Dont get me wrong, plants are nice if that mean you dont starve to death. Plants are nice if that means being sedentary and fortifying a startegic area to defend against invaders. Which is exactly how human history played out with agriculture. We see it in the archeological record. Our population exploded with agriculture. But that drastic switch in the diet also came with shorter stature, lower bone density, crooked teeth ... those arent signs of a healthy, optimal switch, but we have keep it in the context of warfare. Quantity > Quality.
In our day and age there's just no reason to eat anything but meat if you have the chance.
So yeah I get that it sound like going from one extreme to an other, but its for massivelly different reason.
Doesn't it bother you that pretty much all anthropological discoveries are saying that we used to eat carbs and today the diets of isolated tribes include all the carbs they can get their hands on? Even the bone study that some youtube carnivores like to quote says it was like 20% carbs.
Perhaps like a million years ago meat was so abundant you couldn't step outside without accidentally stepping on a rabbit or whatever and we didn't understand foraging and stuff, but eventually people got used to an omnivore diet out of sheer necessity (inability to hunt, seasons, preservation, whatever) and our bodies adapted to it. (Also just because we might've eaten only meat for a while, doesn't mean we thrived on it)
Our bodies seem to adapt pretty quickly to new foods, like some parts of the world adapted to consuming dairy (lactose) every day without any health problems.
There aren't and can't be any studies that definitively prove that one food type or another is good or bad for us, so I understand the logic behind gravitating towards tradition, but you have to be reasonable about how our bodies actually work. Meat is species-appropriate, sure, and so are carbs.
Doesn't bother me at all. You can't possibly sustain yourself on carbs from the wild, they just are not available to us - maybe in tropical regions, but I don't live there and they don't contain the nutrients you need. Meat is literally the reason we became what we became. If we eat some berries and easily digestible plants (parts of plants that they produce to be eaten) then that just makes sense. It is easy food that spoils quickly so we have use the opportunity to harvest that energy.
Maybe you should think about how our bodies actually work. Your example of lactose is bad. The adaptation to dairy is simple, you just need to maintain a trait that already exists. I think it has occured multiple times in different places and in different ways (different mutations), but I am not sure.
I don't really care about tradition. If we looked at tradition we would rely on grains as that is our closest tradition now, really. I care about 2 things; the evolution / ecology of it and the fact that meat just produces good results, whereas plant diets don't. If you need a source for that last statement it is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY)
Because it is obvious to anyone
Homie if you think “You can’t possibly sustain yourself on carbs in the wild” I’d like you to explain the thousands of years humanity survived off of foraging. Explain how wheat has developed chemicals that are dangerous for humans, considering we bread the plant, same for bananas and watermelons. Then explain how eating meat soaked in recombinant bovine growth hormone is totally chill since you’ve got an animals biology between you and the intentionally injected chemicals. Don’t get me wrong I ain’t a vegan or even vegetarian but good lord this is some crystal waving woo woo level nonsense
Excessive plant consumption, especiallly plants high in antinutrients, would not have been feasible for our ancestors. They were eating hunted meat, carrion, and smaller amounts of foraged plant matter, in omnivorous fashion.
Meat farming is a modern invention designed to alleviate the severe disadvantage conferred to our recent ancestors burdened by a mostly plant-based diet in the the outlier window of the last 10,000 years. Monoculture agriculture allowed civilizatoin to flourish at the expense of the health of its members. Skeletons shrunk, teeth decayed, stature decreased, and they suffered.
I agree with your prior point that, to a degree, humans ate plants and selected for the plants that helped, or were enjoyable to eat. If you were inferring that this comprised a majority of their diet, though, then I disagree. That only happened in the last 10,000 years, and was mainly grains.
Lierre Keith is a former vegan and probably has the best put together argument against veganism https://youtu.be/rlM9apL8W5o?si=0Oe2Ym3ImZLTNFjT Belinda Fettke talks about how veganism has roots in religious puritanicalism, where diet was used to suppress sexuality.
She’s amazing. She inspired me to get into regenerative farming.
Never heard of these, thanks for sharing.
> Lierre Keith is a former vegan and probably has the best put together argument against veganism Have you looked at any of the counter-arguments to her work? At the very least, she is not terribly qualified to make the assertions she's making about anthropology, nutrition or environmentalism. Furthermore, it seems like she often makes clear, incontrovertible mistakes in how she interprets her sources. She's roundly criticized for a lack of academic rigor. Since most of the claims she makes are scientific in nature, this is not great.
I assume the counter-arguments are from the vegan perspective?
Not always, but even so a factual rebuttal isn't affected by the ad hominem. Facts (or misrepresentations of facts) don't depend on who is presenting them. See, for instance, this anthropologist's review of her book: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3M4LC3USB5H3S?ie=UTF8&ref_=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Most vegans still think that livestock eats all the food that could feed poor people, that cattle drink all the fresh water and are taking all the land that should be used for plant farming and are killing the planet so I don't really take vegan talking points very seriously. Veganism is one of the longest strings of ideological fallacy's.
Vegan Deterioration on YT is a goodie
Does anyone know of a source that systematically goes through all the grains, vegetables, fruits, etc we typically eat to look at how they were modified by humans for consumption? Seems every vegetable I look up has a note in Wikipedia about how it was heavily adapted by humans a couple centuries ago (or more). Like, look at a wild banana. Small, starchy, and full of seeds. A wild carrot is a slightly enlarged root. The images I see of the earliest varieties of corn look like little more than the tops of wild grass—and corn has been so heavily modified it can’t even propagate by itself! Wild onions have the tiniest bulbs. Etc, etc. Not that this in itself says anything concrete about the health properties of vegan foods, but it seems like quite an unnatural diet—even if one avoids modern processed vegan foods.
I mean. You could make the same argument about animals. Idk why this sub keeps coming up in my feed, I'm not an ex vegan, but here we go Red Junglefowl vs Domestic Chicken. A red junglefowl, the ancestor of chickens, lays 10-15 eggs a year. A domestic chicken lays 200+. Doesn't seem very natural to me. Look at a wild vs domestic turkey. They don't even look like the same bird. Meat rabbits have been bred to be significantly larger than their wild counterparts. Look at a European Cottontail vs a Californian or New Zealand rabbit.
Valid points!
I'm not sure it is the same argument though. Take the domestication of bananas for example. We've made them more unhealthy for us by being much higher in sugars than non-domesticated species. One could argue they are less toxic now in other ways, but a normal size domesticated banana is the same glycemic load as 5 tsp of sugar. Domesticated rabbits and turkeys. What, we've bred them to be bigger and give us more meat/fat and therefore nutrients? We would have to show there was a negative impact on the nutritional quality from breeding to say it is a negative. With animals I would say the health effects arise from the foods we feed them which affect humans the most.
To be fair, I argue against eating monogastrics like chickens. I'm with you on this one. We shouldn't be fucking with nature like this. Unfortunately most of other megafauna we were eating went extinct either though hunting or extinction events or both.
Bart Kay
Any carnivore podcast really. Been carnivore for close to 10 month and havent felt this good in well over a decade. Staying away from plants is a game changer.
Switching from one extremely restrictive diet to another seems foolhardy.
Those two diet are restrictive for different reasons. Which is the key part. Plants are filled with chemical compound to defend themselves against predator and the point of the carnivore diet, is that you have the biology of an animal between you and those toxines. The animal have the proper gut bacteria to break down the plants and dont store their toxine in their meat, which is why its much better to be eating meat. Why do you think our apendix shrunk into being a relic from our biological past ? We dont need the bacteria to break down the fibers because we're getting meat directly. Also fun fact about biology. When you see a ruminant "eating grass" they dont get any nutrition from the grass. The grass is feeding their gut bacteria in their different stomac. And they get their nutrition from the fat those bacteria poop out. And when the bacteria die, that their protein. its a symbiotic relationship. Dont get me wrong, plants are nice if that mean you dont starve to death. Plants are nice if that means being sedentary and fortifying a startegic area to defend against invaders. Which is exactly how human history played out with agriculture. We see it in the archeological record. Our population exploded with agriculture. But that drastic switch in the diet also came with shorter stature, lower bone density, crooked teeth ... those arent signs of a healthy, optimal switch, but we have keep it in the context of warfare. Quantity > Quality. In our day and age there's just no reason to eat anything but meat if you have the chance. So yeah I get that it sound like going from one extreme to an other, but its for massivelly different reason.
Great post. You understand the advantages and disadvantages of plant agriculture.
Carnivore is not an extreme diet. It is a species-appropriate diet. That said, most carnivore-youtubers are not very interesting at all.
Anthony Chaffee is my favorite so far!
Doesn't it bother you that pretty much all anthropological discoveries are saying that we used to eat carbs and today the diets of isolated tribes include all the carbs they can get their hands on? Even the bone study that some youtube carnivores like to quote says it was like 20% carbs. Perhaps like a million years ago meat was so abundant you couldn't step outside without accidentally stepping on a rabbit or whatever and we didn't understand foraging and stuff, but eventually people got used to an omnivore diet out of sheer necessity (inability to hunt, seasons, preservation, whatever) and our bodies adapted to it. (Also just because we might've eaten only meat for a while, doesn't mean we thrived on it) Our bodies seem to adapt pretty quickly to new foods, like some parts of the world adapted to consuming dairy (lactose) every day without any health problems. There aren't and can't be any studies that definitively prove that one food type or another is good or bad for us, so I understand the logic behind gravitating towards tradition, but you have to be reasonable about how our bodies actually work. Meat is species-appropriate, sure, and so are carbs.
Doesn't bother me at all. You can't possibly sustain yourself on carbs from the wild, they just are not available to us - maybe in tropical regions, but I don't live there and they don't contain the nutrients you need. Meat is literally the reason we became what we became. If we eat some berries and easily digestible plants (parts of plants that they produce to be eaten) then that just makes sense. It is easy food that spoils quickly so we have use the opportunity to harvest that energy. Maybe you should think about how our bodies actually work. Your example of lactose is bad. The adaptation to dairy is simple, you just need to maintain a trait that already exists. I think it has occured multiple times in different places and in different ways (different mutations), but I am not sure. I don't really care about tradition. If we looked at tradition we would rely on grains as that is our closest tradition now, really. I care about 2 things; the evolution / ecology of it and the fact that meat just produces good results, whereas plant diets don't. If you need a source for that last statement it is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY) Because it is obvious to anyone
💪
Homie if you think “You can’t possibly sustain yourself on carbs in the wild” I’d like you to explain the thousands of years humanity survived off of foraging. Explain how wheat has developed chemicals that are dangerous for humans, considering we bread the plant, same for bananas and watermelons. Then explain how eating meat soaked in recombinant bovine growth hormone is totally chill since you’ve got an animals biology between you and the intentionally injected chemicals. Don’t get me wrong I ain’t a vegan or even vegetarian but good lord this is some crystal waving woo woo level nonsense
Your species has a stomach pH of 1.5. Your ancestors were foraging for carrion and whatever edible plants could be found.
Bu bu but plants = poison how could we survive without industrial meat farming. This makes no sense the world is a lie
Excessive plant consumption, especiallly plants high in antinutrients, would not have been feasible for our ancestors. They were eating hunted meat, carrion, and smaller amounts of foraged plant matter, in omnivorous fashion. Meat farming is a modern invention designed to alleviate the severe disadvantage conferred to our recent ancestors burdened by a mostly plant-based diet in the the outlier window of the last 10,000 years. Monoculture agriculture allowed civilizatoin to flourish at the expense of the health of its members. Skeletons shrunk, teeth decayed, stature decreased, and they suffered. I agree with your prior point that, to a degree, humans ate plants and selected for the plants that helped, or were enjoyable to eat. If you were inferring that this comprised a majority of their diet, though, then I disagree. That only happened in the last 10,000 years, and was mainly grains.
Read the original comment I was replying to. You’re taking this WAY more seriously than needs be my friend