I do believe "not eating meat" is appealing simply because of the incredible virtuousness such adherents take upon themselves for so doing.

If I had a grass-fed ribeye for every "I'm almost vegetarian" I've run into who practically breaks their soft bones by patting themselves on the back... I'd need a chest freezer.

That really had me wound up when I watched Forks Over Knives. When they showed people eating fast food and talked only about the meat and fat, I was yelling, "What about the bread? The fries? The soft drink? The milkshakes?"

Too bad my husband was the only one who could hear me.

I don't want regular commercial TV very often, but when I do see those fast food ads, I make a mental game of separating out the "real food" from the wheat, starch, and sugar.

You wind up with very little actual food.

But then, veganism has become a religion -- it has dogma and beliefs and lets people feel righteous for following it. Science and fact has nothing to do with it.

It's easy to become a zealot. When I first went low carb I was picking carrot shreds off salad bar salads because they had carbs.

PJ

Yeah, I feel the same way about all the stuff on "low-carb can cause issues with gut biome due to a lack of dietary fiber." Yeah maybe, but we have an entire culture that is HARDLY living on serious fiber from any source. Modern food has incredibly little of it.

I wrecked my gut biome perfectly well, I'm pretty sure, while living on the SAD. So I keep running into refs that blame LC for not having enough "fermentable" carbohydrates for the colon but many low-carbers eat more fibrous fruits and vegetables than anybody I know who doesn't actually live on vegetables as a main food group.

Somehow it's the whole "induction step" and nearly zero carb that is getting interpreted as LC again...


I am always offended when I see pie, cake, donuts, trans-fat-killer, processed grain crap lumped in with "meat" in nutrition stuff, because somewhere, someone has a shred of grain-fed meat inside a processed hamburger bun or processed tortilla. It makes absolutely any study doing that into nothing but a joke IMO.

Ironically, the documentary (which was a joke itself in some ways) "Supersize Me" accidentally sort of made this point, without realizing it. There was this older guy in McDs who had come and eaten a burger every day for like a zillion years. Bun? Yep. But he didn't have french fries, or upsize, or soda, or anything else. Just a burger. He was still plenty lean and seemed reasonably healthy. If it were the meat that was dangerous, surely that guy, eating dominantly meat there and every day for decades, should have keeled over long ago.

The meat they put in a jar in that film turned gross, of course. The french fries, eons later, looked just like when they went in. Frightening.

PJ

Indeed. And meaning the opposite of what they were trying to say?

As my household has journeyed away from processed food and into actual food, and then, actually organic food, our garbage has gotten stinkier and stinkier. And I think that's a good thing. It needs to be digested, and if it resists digestion, is it really food?

My husband washes the dishes, and noticed that the grocery cat food leftover in the bowl was virtually indestructible. It had been turned into these little rubbery pellets that wouldn't dissolve, wouldn't rot, wouldn't change at all. We got rid of that brand, and our biggest cat's occasional gut issues went away, too.

How many grass-fed vegetarians to you run into?

Okay, so I have a motor oil funnel and a pair of embroidery scissors handy. I'm willing to give the whole pouring-meat-into-my-arteries thing a try. Everybody wish me luck.

The one thing I'm sort of bummed about is that I won't get to actually taste the meat this way.