Beautifully put, Bob. It's a cycle of life.

But I've decided what we are dealing with here is not a science. It's a religion. So they feel free to lie and make up facts.

Yep - a cult.

I remember getting a pamphlet that described how the farmer used to live in harmony with his livestock but never ate animal products. And on the cover was a cartoon drawing of a barn and a farmer dancing with a pig, cow, and chicken. Wrong.......

1) We were eating meat before we were homo-sapiens - 2.6 million years ago pre-human apes http://www.nature.com/scitable/know...umans-103874273

2) If the animals served no use on the farm other than a dance partner, they wouldn't be on the farm (we know cows don't keep good rhythm anyway <wink/grin>)

3) There is a lot of evidence that eating cooked meat is what elevated our brains from one not much different from the other apes to one more capable than the other apes. Cooking the meat gets much more nutrients out if it, and eating that cooked meat probably made us human

Of course that's controversial (3), but look at the difference between carnivores and herbivores - even with uncooked meat.

Do you ever say sly as a cow? No, it's sly as a fox. Are zebras smarter than lions? Rabbits smarter than wolves? Squirrels smarter than dogs?

Some (definitely not all) vegans think they are in a 'better-than-thou' cult.

And then there are the wanna-be people that pretend to be in the cult and eat eggs, dairy, and/or fish and call themselves vegetarians. Hmm, just what vegetable did that egg or hunk of cheese grow on? And the fish? Is it in the same family as kelp? No, you aren't a vegetarian, you are an omnivore.

End of rant...

Bob

Brilliant! I'm adopting this as a mantra . . .

To be fair, lacto- ovo- pesci-vegetarian are all legitimate terms, because those modifiers are in there. Calling yourself just vegetarian and then later on, saying oh yeah, but I drink milk would be deceptive, though. Personally, I'm a lacto-ovo-pesci-carni-vegetarian. But I never shorten that down to "vegetarian."

Great! May I steal this?

Then I'm a lacto-ovo-fisho-porko-beefo vegetarian.

I know they have become legitimate terms, but I think that is language abuse. Finicky omnivores is what I call them.

Not that I'm against whatever they want to eat, it's just calling yourself a vegetarian when you eat animals or animal products is as bad as calling me a carnivore when I eat animal and plant products. Isn't eating both animals and plants an omnivore? Why does that have to be hidden - or ignored?

I'm a finicky eater and an omnivore. There are lots of foods I don't eat for different reasons, some I don't think are good for me, some I just don't like the taste of.

Bob

I think vegan like lowcarb is initially better than the SAD and so looks and feels great at first.

I think you can do as much harm to your body by eating LC poorly as by eating Vegan poorly, but perhaps I should modify that to say 'also do harm' since it would be tough to do as much harm as starving yourself of any critical amino and B12 combined likely do to someone, let alone lots of them.

Most vegans I know went vegan due to bleeding-heart sympathies with animals -- I was a vegetarian for the same reason once -- and they are often young (like that political truism about how a young man who is not a liberal has no heart) and still lean. Most lowcarbers I know went lowcarb due to wanting to lose weight. This already changes the initial population and weight bias in the groups.

Nearly every very-fat person I have known was a vegetarian or vegan for some period of time. Suggesting not only that the lifestyle didn't work for them over the term but that their metabolic health clearly wasn't fixed by it, if anything the opposite.

I tend to think the far more significant and obvious effect you see in vegans -- enough that it is becoming a stereotype -- is that clearly it has some very dangerous hormonal effects. The emotional rollercoaster they seem to live on, and obscure health issues (nearly all of them I've known have 'allergies' and rashes and more to the extreme), obviously this varies in degree and by person but it's so common and so obvious that it's visible even in people one only encounters virtually on the internet. Not that other people never have this (particularly anybody eating grains, let alone half living on them), it's just nearly overwhelming in that population.

I tend to pity vegan men. I have only known a few, they were all very young and seemingly fairly healthy when it began, and they were all shockingly "feminized" when I saw them years later. I actually have no idea what might cause this because I know zip about the hormonal stuff but it was enough to make me think the results might be even worse for men than for women.

But then -- perhaps what we are really seeing is simply a whole culture of people who have no idea how to do it properly. Maybe 'done properly' (whatever that is) veganism would be just as healthy as anything else. As mentioned even LC/VLC can be done badly (I did it badly, because I focused on carbs and weight loss, without regard to apparent serious NAFLD issues and decades of cumulative malnourishment instead).

It's a shame that it's used like some kind of marketing arm for teens though, that if you go vegan you get thin. It's not just that most of the "older vegans" and "older people I know who are vegans" are actually overweight. It's that a number of them had children with major birth defects along the way. Which of course everyone insists are completely unrelated to the diet, despite that statistically the quantity of pre-3 babies/toddlers with issues in meat eaters I've known is different enough for the difference to be astronomical. (I say pre-3 because at that age vaccines kick in, and regular food has been in awhile, both of which can have profound effects on them -- maybe, I'm not saying I know either way but I'm open to at least considering it so.)

So the young age 20-30 enthusiasm for be-vegan-its-healthy-and-skinny is a little frightening in that regard. It would be so nice if they could do the childbearing thing and then be free to wreck their health in a way that was not going to screw up someone else's whole life too.

PJ

> lacto-ovo-pesci-carni-vegetarian

Well teaser that covers everything, with the carni in there! Funny!

PJ

Bob I love the iguana story!

Maybe we should be eating iguanas. For their own good.

PJ

Not the Marine Iguana, but in the Caribbean they do eat the Green Iguana. They have them here in South Florida too, and I would suspect they are hunted and eaten here as well.

The Green Iguana is a herbivore, and has a voracious appetite. If they weren't hunted and eaten by humans and wild carnivores, they would be quite a nuisance. Fortunately the carnivores and omnivores keep their numbers in check.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have two vegan friends - the non-preachy kind. I don't know and never asked why they are vegetarians and they never offered. They never asked why I don't eat fruit smoothies either. When we go to dinner together, we choose restaurants that serve both vegan and omnivore meals. They know we are low-carb, we know they are vegan, and that's all we need to know.

As far as not killing the furry critters, that doesn't bother me.

If it weren't for me and people like me, they wouldn't have been born. Around here the steer graze in open fields, free from predators, and have nothing to do but laze around, graze, and chew their cud. We do that for them by eventually eating them. Then at the end of their life, they go to a feed lot (I don't approve), and gorge themselves on corn, which to them seems like a an endless banana split to us. Then thanks to people like Temple Grandis, they get led down a non-scary pathway and instantly killed out of sight from the next animal. I've seen films of this, they literally don't know what hit them. I don't think that's cruel.

Now I do avoid food that I think are tortured. Chickens in small cages, lobsters in tanks with their claws tied, and so on. I guess I'm a softie, and don't want to be responsible for a terrible life.

But I sincerely believe that omnivores and carnivores are part of the balance, and in an oddball way, defenders of the plants. After all, if it weren't for us, the herbivores would eat up all the green on the planet.

And I believe that for humans, being an omnivore is better for our bodies and our brains (they sell the amino acid l-carnitine as brain and muscle food, and it's been proven that our parent's "fish is brain food" mantra was right).

If you want to be a vegan because you don't want to harm the furry critters, that's fine as long as you don't condemn others for doing so. If you want to go vegan because you think it's healthier, I think you are wrong, but that is only because of what I have chosen to believe. I could be wrong too. The only thing that bothers me about it is the propaganda industry. And for the most part, I just choose to ignore it.

Bob

I was vegetarian for 30 years and raised my children vegetarian. Slow weight gain and struggle, constant fatigue, fasting blood glucose trending above 100, roll around the middle even though I'm an athlete. Daughter struggled with weight gain and sugar cravings.

When we went keto we never looked back. Weight normal and effortless for both of us, more energy, food tastes better, work outs phenomenal, superior biometrics. What's not to love?

Vegetarian didn't mean weight loss for us. It meant a struggle against the blood sugar roller coaster, constant hunger and cravings, and fatigue.

Actually, I'm mostly Lacto-ovo-fischo-porko-beefo-poultryo -- what was that other thing???

That pamphlet with the farmer living in harmony with his livestock and never eating any of their products -- good grief !!! The scary thing is that people believe this stuff. The even scarier thing is that they vote!

I was mostly vegetarian for 20 yrs, 2 of them vegan, and that is how I became obese, fatigued, depressed, stuffed up in the sinuses, and pained in the joints. Becoming a born again carnivore was the only cure.

I'm mainly an ovo-fisho-poultryo-beefo-bisono-elko-porko-vegetarian

I gotta agree with that. People are pretty easily convinced of most anything. Both Fox and MSNBC "news" have been proven by independent college studies to be truthful less than 10% of the time (Fox 8% MSNBC 9%) and yet so many people make their voting decisions from the propaganda they get from those stations. That's even scarier.

I quit poultry and egg yolks because they are very high in Arachidonic Acid, which irritates arthritis and bursitis. I've read (unconfirmed) that fowl is so high in AA because of the feed, mostly corn.

Anyway, I had inherited bursitis so bad that I couldn't drive the car without a 'blue ice' pack behind my hip because it hurt to press the gas pedal. I thought I was going to be a candidate for hip replacement so I started looking for alternatives.

A doctor said to try the arthritis/bursitis diet before I did anything drastic. So I did. (If you want that diet, let me know but it's off topic for this thread). Now the pain is just a distant memory.

Some of the vegan propaganda is good, but others like the farm animals not eaten and the "Humans were not meant to eat meat" are easy to see through - the problem is, like TV news, people just believe it.

TV, magazines, radio all tell us to eat more grain. Big Ag has a lot to do with this. And that makes the vegan propaganda even more easy to swallow.

If you are vegan because you don't want to hurt the critters, that's your choice. I guess sacrificing your own health for the sake of others seems noble. But those critters wouldn't be alive if we didn't raise them for food. But it's OK if you don't want to be part of that. Who am I to judge? I am not the arbiter of morals.

On the other hand, if you are vegan because you think it's a healthier way to eat, I think you are mistaken. But then I might be mistaken about low carb - time will tell.

Bob

Now that I think of it, I can't really think of any vegans who have lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off. Not in my personal life, or a public figure/celebrity type of person. Not more than 20 pounds at most anyway. I know and know of plenty of already thin people who claim they are so because of a vegan diet, and use that as a reason others struggling with their weight should do so as well. Maybe I'm forgetting somebody noteworthy, it happens, I don't watch TV or pay much attention to that kind of stuff. I am 99.7% sure that anybody I know personally of that persuasion has already been and stayed thin, or gained weight while eschewing all animal products.