Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[KichigaiNeko]

This fellow's bio might be of interest too jacob
http://beyondveg.com/holman-r/bio/holman-r-bio-1a.shtml

[James2014]

You might find this fellow's experiences helpful Jacob.... I find the whole site an ahteistveg*n site

http://beyondveg.com/esmay-d/bio/esmay-d-bio-1a.shtml

I HAVE LONG HAD what I feel to be undiagnosed hypoglycemia. All the symptoms were there for many years. I have also been struggling with my weight for many years. My wife was diagnosed years ago as a "borderline diabetic" (fasting blood glucose of over 150) and has had chronic, lifelong weight problems and fluctuating energy problems worse than my own.
I spent a few years as a dedicated low-fat dieter. Yet there was a problem. I suffered from constantly fluctuating energy levels, moodiness, heart palpitations, racing pulse, very low HDL cholesterol, and moderately elevated triglycerides. All this despite watching my calories within reason, strictly limiting fat intake just like I read everywhere was supposed to be healthy, and exercising both aerobically and with weights on an almost daily basis. I lost about 20 pounds on such a program, but slowly, over time, watched it creep back on, despite continuing to rigorously limit my fat intake and continuing exercise. <snip>

I have absolutely no argument with people who say they feel better and are measurably healthier eating a vegetarian diet. Hell, I have no problem with anyone who eats nothing but Pop Tarts and beer all day so long as by all medical tests he's perfectly healthy and he says he feels good. Individual experiences are not "anecdotal" if they've taken the time to get the medical tests and can show empirically that they, personally, are healthy. I definitely am. So is my wife. So are hundreds of other people I know. And it's high time the world at large acknowledges that there is no dietary panacea, no "perfect" diet that fits everybody perfectly all the time.

In the world of nutrition, there are not as many hard and fast rules as most people (including doctors and professional nutritionists) like to think. For example, read an article I wrote not long ago called The World's Biggest Fad Diet--it may surprise you. But don't take what you read there as gospel; it's just an example to show you that what you think may be indisputable about a healthy diet isn't so indisputable after all. Remember always to read as much as you can, and most importantly, to think for yourself as much as you can. And in finding a diet, remember that finding something healthy that you can stick to for life IS the goal you should have--but in your journey to find that diet for yourself, you should remember that the goal is always to find the diet that WORKS FOR YOU, not to find a way to force yourself into anyone's One True Paradigm (including mine).

Good luck in your personal search for health.

l agree that there is no one perfect diet, e.g. a vegan diet that contains nuts will be very bad for someone with nut allergies. That doesn't mean that meat ever has to be part of anyone's diet. I find that site a bit ridiculous, it highlights a whole load of fallacies some vegans use, and then after rightly criticising them goes on to use the same fallacies to support a Paleo diet.

[Jacob(smooth)]

Anecdotes are not data to be sure, but it's an interesting cautionary tale.

I think it's certainly possible to eat a balanced nutritional diet without meat, although it seems easier to do it WITH meat. The question remains why should we. After all, one of the freedoms we all enjoy is to kill ourselves with whichever poisons we like at whatever speed we choose.

We thus return to the ethical side of things, and the question of how far we extend our empathy and to what degree we legislate personal morality.

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Sorry enrico. We have some intelligent and informed vegans making good and rational arguments on this thread. You're not one of them. You're an amusing sideshow but not really worth the time . Maybe when the grown ups are done having a sensible grown up debate someone will play with you OK?

[KichigaiNeko]

Anecdotes are not data to be sure, but it's an interesting cautionary tale.

I think it's certainly possible to eat a balanced nutritional diet without meat, although it seems easier to do it WITH meat. The question remains why should we. After all, one of the freedoms we all enjoy is to kill ourselves with whichever poisons we like at whatever speed we choose.

We thus return to the ethical side of things, and the question of how far we extend our empathy and to what degree we legislate personal morality.

I am to understand that while yes, this is anecdotal "evidence" it should not be dismissed out of hand but applied to the individual following any form of "dietary restrictions/ modifications"

As I have been saying all along, if it works for you great!, for some the diet works & for others it is an abysmal failure and can be life threatening. To elevate dietary choices to the level of religious "ethical" observance is flying very close to mental illness and eating disorders.

[Jacob(smooth)]

Anecdotes should never be dismissed because they show what CAN happen. One just has to remember that they are often anecdotes precisely because they are outliers.

Although this one, two week fasts?! Sounds like crazy to me.

[KichigaiNeko]

Anecdotes should never be dismissed because they show what CAN happen. One just has to remember that they are often anecdotes precisely because they are outliers.

Although this one, two week fasts?! Sounds like crazy to me.

I think if you read to the end this is exactly what the conclusion the author came to. So far the author has found that happy balance.

[James2014]

We thus return to the ethical side of things, and the question of how far we extend our empathy and to what degree we legislate personal morality.

I would argue we should extend empathy to animals on the basis of logical consistency. All ethics start with an assumption that something is of value, as there is always an impenetrable barrier between is and ought. However if one applies ethics without being logically consistent, one must have made an error somewhere.

When we extend empathy to humans, and not animals, most will do so on the basis of our ability to reason, use language have culture etc. But there are also some humans that do not have the ability to do this, and yet we would certainly extend our empathy to them. To be consistent one must either then extend empathy to animals or conversely not have empathy for disabled humans.

[là bạn điên]

The idea that Animals cannot reason is also flawed parrots have been shown to reason like 3 year olds http://www.livescience.com/22178-parrots...-olds.html.

Shown this the omnivores switch the goalposts and then claim that It's all about 'self awareness' but then there are self aware animals too http://listnation.blogspot.com/2012/03/9...aware.html

Why having reason or self awareness should be criteria for NOT having suffering forced upon you is also never explained. It is completely arbitary, just as arbitary as claiming that people with black skins have no souls and can be enslaved.

However the argument from reduced capacity is one that the omnis have never been able to answer, they generally avoid the question like the plague or come up with some religious influenced bullshit to defend their position.

[bennyboy]

We thus return to the ethical side of things, and the question of how far we extend our empathy and to what degree we legislate personal morality.

I would argue we should extend empathy to animals on the basis of logical consistency. All ethics start with an assumption that something is of value, as there is always an impenetrable barrier between is and ought. However if one applies ethics without being logically consistent, one must have made an error somewhere.

When we extend empathy to humans, and not animals, most will do so on the basis of our ability to reason, use language have culture etc. But there are also some humans that do not have the ability to do this, and yet we would certainly extend our empathy to them. To be consistent one must either then extend empathy to animals or conversely not have empathy for disabled humans.

I've thought about this a lot, and it's been nagging at me. If the anthropocentric argument is based on qualities of humans, like the ability to suffer, or to think, or to feel, then what should happen to humans who do not think, feel or suffer as others do? We don't just kill handicapped people, or highly autistic kids, or even sociopaths (usually). But given a raving Charles Manson on one side, and a cow peacefully chewing its cud on the other, I have to favor Manson as the organism who should be getting the bolt to the head. In terms of brain function and capacity to interact with the world, my senile old Grammy-Grams is no less a candidate for a slit throat and a sledge hammer than your average cow. So what exactly is so special about humans that JUST BY BEING HUMAN, some organisms deserve protections or considerations that other organisms do not?

I can only see two answers:
1) DNA
This is irrelevant, because DNA is not a person-- it can't feel, or think, or bear moral responsibility.

2) A SOUL
And there it is. The idea that something is INTRINSICALLY special about people, and not about other animals (even high-functioning mammals) is a vestige of religious thought. Once that magical God-given "special snowflake species" status is stripped away, there's really nothing left to separate us, in moral terms, from other organisms-- except maybe an overinflated sense of our own worth. In this thread, I've been called a religious nut, precisely because I DO NOT recognize that humans deserve a special status "just because." But in rational terms, that's bass-ackwards.

[Minimalist]

The paleo diet seems to forget that life expectancy in the Upper Palaeolithic was around 30. Nothing to write home about.