Saturated Fat Controversy

[FlatAssembler]

I am a native english speaker. I suspect my english comprehension exceeds yours.

Well, reading comprehension depends on a number of factors. Have you published some academic papers in peer-reviewed journals? I've published a few academic papers about linguistics, so I probably understand academic papers better than most of the people.

So you claim without evidence.

Michael Greger's blog posts (on nutritionfacts.org) usually include a huge list of references, if that's what you mean by "evidence".

No, you are committed to the religion of veganism.

Well, one obvious difference between veganism and stuff that are usually called religions (Christianity, Islam...) is that veganism talks about stuff that's demonstrably there. There are the animals that are being kept in small and dirty rooms because people are eating meat. There are slaughterhouses in which animals are being slaughtered in very inhumane ways, primarily so to meet the halal standards. There are stupid laws that require drugs to be tested on animals, despite there being little to no evidence that they make us safer (they may even make us less safe, because, if you invented penicillin these days, it will probably be banned because it's deadly to hamsters), and despite the obvious animal suffering they cause. Cows these days often suffer from B12 deficiency -no need to imagine it, it's there. There are studies that show that cow's milk causes heart disease in humans. And they are backed up by very hard science, calcium supplements also lead to heart disease if you don't take Vitamin K (which cow's milk contains very little) - there appears to be no way a reasonable person can deny that. You might say the claims that saturated fat leads to heart disease or that it's the factory farming that causes antibiotic resistance require some degree of faith to believe, but that certainly requires way less faith to believe than to believe in global warming, yet alone in a religion such as Christianity.

So?

Sorry, what were you saying? I thought you were saying meat was the cheapest way to get enough B12.

The fact remains that copious B12 is obtained from meat in far more quantity than vegan diets allow. This is incontrovertible.

I don't understand what you mean here. Do you mean that B12 deficiency isn't common among farmed animals today? It is very common, especially in cows and sheep. On some farms, the food for cows is supplemented with cobalamin preventively because of that, ask anybody who has studied agriculture. Or do you mean to claim you can get B12 from meat from the animals that are deficient in B12? Well, keep in mind you need to take a few times more B12 than your body actually needs to make sure your body actually absorbs that amount.

Evolutionary biology is "speculative", is it?

"Scientific" study of what our ancestors were eating tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago and what nutrition-related illnesses they were getting because of that is a lot more speculative than nutritional science is. With nutritional science, you can make an actual study to see if calcium supplements without Vitamin K supplements lead to heart disease. With studying what people were eating hundreds of thousands of years ago, in most cases, you can just make guesses. At best, if there are remainings of food in the fossils, you can be reasonably certain what that individual last ate before he or she died.

Who cares which superstition "vegans" adhere to?

Claiming that B12 supplement is more unhealthy than meat that contains B12, despite there being no evidence for that, is just as much of a superstition as anti-GMO nonsense is.

It is telling that you have your views defined by YouTube videos.

What does it tell? Why is it bad to listen to what YouTubers who (at least mostly) adhere to mainstream science have to say?

Why did you introduce that strawman?

A strawman would be if I assumed you advocate the paleo diet. I didn't assume that, in fact, I assumed you despise those who advocate paleo diets more than you despise veganism.

Cuba is poor because we in the west have made it so.

It's a combination of factors, of course. They have been going from one dictatorship into the other. The Castro brothers overthrew the dictatorship by Fulgencio Batista, who didn't support economic and social freedoms. Unfortunatly, the Castro brothers also didn't support economic and social freedoms. And the economic sanctions put by the US certainly aren't helping, they are affecting the country the same way anti-sweatshops movements do: they are hurting exactly the people they are supposed to help.