Veganism 'the healthiest diet?'

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Vegan diets may indeed be healthy. I'll try eating roast vegan for a couple of months to see if I feel any better.

Boru

[Doubting Thomas]

Vegan diets may indeed be healthy.  I'll try eating roast vegan for a couple of months to see if I feel any better.

Boru

Vegans always taste a bit too smug for me.

[BrokenQuill92]

Veganism is all well and fine but for those who can afford it. But let's be honest most people can't afford to be vegan.

[Edwardo Piet]

Yeah. My family are getting preachy and I find it very depressing. I want love from my family not moralizing.

[bennyboy]

I'm vegetarian, sometimes with stretches of vegan, and I can say-- if you have to try THAT hard to stay healthy, it's probably not the diet that people were meant to have.

Clearly, a mixed diet favoring vegetables, fruits and nuts but also including some animal fats and proteins is the most viable diet for good overall health.

As for ethical issues: vegetable food sources, especially grains, if mass produced, involve huge machines that churn up dirt and grind up plants, and plenty of little critters are gonna get mulched. So unless you are hand-picking food from plants grown lovingly in your family's own shit, you're probably not really doing the environment any favors. I'd say the best overall approach would be to hunt out-of-control wild species for food, currently very much deer in the US.

In the long run, though, I think algae and bacterial foods could be grown out of waste, and be genetically modified to be super-rich in nutrition, including the Omega oils and so on, and textured to be pleasant enough to eat. There is SO much we could do to recycle the resources that we use, and that would not only minimize our impact on other living things, but could keep the air and water cleaner as well.

[The Grand Nudger]

People overthink this subject.

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. - Michael Pollan
http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archiv...ppy-meals/

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. 

It's a long article, but worth the time.

[Doubting Thomas]

Don't get me wrong, I think animals should be treated humanely and slaughtered in a manner as to cause minimal suffering, but this whole idea of "We shouldn't eat eggs because it's taking away from the chicken." Hey dumbass, chickens normally lay one egg a day, whether it's been fertilized or not. If it hasn't been fertilized, it's going to sit and rot. So someone may as well get some nutrition out of it.

[The Grand Nudger]

Chickens aren;t super concerned about their precious little eggs in the first place.  You can put a bunch of plastic eggs down to replace them and keep her laying in the same spot (makes it easier to collect free range eggs) and she doesn't seem to notice the difference.  Take the plastic eggs away and she'll just plop another real egg out.  Rinse and repeat for her entire life.  If I had to put a prioritized list of things chickens seem to give a shit about together, their eggs would be dead bottom.  

It;s not as if there would -be- many chickens in the world if we didn't domesticate them for their eggs.  It's what we'd call a symbiotic relationship between any other species.  We eat their eggs, they get to live. Sounds like a fair trade to me. The alternative is my frying pan.

[Edwardo Piet]

I must say I am extremely disappointed in the majority of my family who have turned into moral crusaders to such an extent that rather than simply being vegans for moral reasons they're happy to filter the facts to match their agenda for the 'greater good'. Nothing is worth sacrificing intellectual honesty. I'm very disappointed. But I'm happy that my brother Owen is more realistic.

[The Grand Nudger]

I have my own little rule about meat, particularly in the context of the vegetarian/vegan question...which I get asked alot.  If you wouldn't do it, don't eat it.  Go watch a deer get dressed.  Watch a cow (or a pig or a chicken or what have you) get slaughtered.  Watch someone kill and fillet a live fish.  If you -wouldn't-, I mean flat out wouldn't...not couldn't because you don't know how, or you think it's gross, or you'd rather have someone else do it...-wouldn't- do those things......well, maybe you shouldn't eat them. I can understand that, entirely, and it leaves the onus on others to decide their own level of dietary willingness, rather than pulling the "hur dur, animal killer" routine. Yes, OFC I'm an animal killer........is there any doubt about my being a human being, lol? I'm okay with it, warts and all.