What you’re getting yourself into
An honest explanation of why I constantly talk about vegans rather than just minding my own business and focusing on the gospel of steak.
If you’ve ever peered into the chaos of the social media diet wars, you might be wondering what’s happened to “live and let live”. Rather than accept that we’re perfectly capable of surviving on all manner of diets, we’ve opted to throw shade and ridicule people who dare to follow a different take on nutrition.
I’m no stranger to this, because I’ve been known to occasionally talk about the pitfalls of veganism on this blog, and on social media.
When I say occasionally, I mean all the time, without an ounce of remorse.
It’s not that they’re living rent free in my head. That’s a hallowed spot saved for my bench press 1RM.
I malign vegans by necessity. Because we need to push back against decades of dangerous propaganda espousing the virtues of plant-based diets, and the insidious mechanisms of red meat and saturated fat. Propaganda that has been dispensed amongst the masses while masquerading as infallible science.
1. Making Use Of The Juxtaposition To Carnivore
None of this makes me a conspiracy nut. I’m simply pointing out the makeup of the dietary guidelines, and glaring issues in the epidemiological science behind it.
Vegans don’t exactly exemplify the food pyramid, since they avoid meat entirely rather than limit it. But they do represent the extreme end of that nutritional propaganda. And since the central quest of this blog is to push back against it, veganism serves up a tantilising counterpoint to the cliches of modern dietary and planetary wisdom.
Because if we accept that meat is the root of all that’s evil in nutrition, then it would infer that a diet that’s completely absent of meat would be the ultimate diet for humanity, and our future prospects on this planet.
Meat causes chronic disease – Veganism should cure it.
Meat causes untold animal suffering – Veganism should prevent it.
Meat causes climate change – Veganism should save the planet.
Meat is unsustainable – Veganism should fix the food system.
You need carbs to build muscle – Vegans should be pretty jacked.
You should restrict meat – Vegans should be getting all their necessary nutrients.
High cholesterol leads to atherosclerosis – Low cholesterol diets should lead to longer lifespans.
Meat is morally corrupt – Vegans must be lovely people.
By looking at veganism, you can see that these theories, because that’s all they are, don’t translate all that well into practice. Whether it’s a diet, or a way of life that transcends nutrition, it fails by every measure.
In fact, if you were to create a diet that best fit the objectives of veganism, you’d end up with carnivore. It lays the foundation for optimal health, kills the least amount of animals, and can rescue us from the imminent topsoil crisis. It is the flagship diet for humans, for the animals, and the planet. This is something I’ve already gone through in detail.
To put it simply, veganism is an incredibly effective tool for outlining the benefits of a carnivore diet.
But that’s not the only reason I have a bone to pick with the Garden Of Eden diet.
2. Rejection Of Human Evolution
At the end of my piece on the vapid state of nutritional science, I presented the alternative for deciding the optimal human diet: paleoanthropology. While nutritional science is based on convenient lines traced through cherry picked data plucked from food frequency questionnaires, paleoanthropology provides the hard facts on what we ate across the millions of years of human evolution that stretched before agriculture came knocking.
Across that vast timeline that made up 99.5% of our existence as a species and dictated our biology, we ate red meat, and very little plants. And don’t get angry at me, I didn’t write the facts.
The lack of supermarket sized fruits and vegetables in the paleolithic
The seasonal nature of the few edible plants that did exist
How humans evolved to have smaller large intestines, which limited our ability to digest fiber
While increasing the size of the small intestine, for protein and fat breakdown
The increase in size of the brain, which as an energy hog necessitated a calorie dense diet
The mastery of ketosis by our species, as we could step into it without a calorie deficit
The inability of humans to survive on a high protein low fat diet due to a nitrogen breakdown ceiling
The dominance of megafauna in the paleolithic, AKA red meat
The megafauna being typified by large fat reserves
The convenient extinction of said megafauna in step with human migration to each continent
Establishment of agriculture as a necessary solution to replace the megafauna
We evolved away from monkeys so we could hunt, kill, and digest large herbivores. The sliver of time that has passed since the dawn of agriculture has not been remotely enough to start reversing those adaptations.
Vegans go back and forth between suggesting that our ancestors were plant-based, or that we ate meat but now have the dietary flexibility and compassion to depart from our murderous past. Both are completely wrong.
The last time our ancestors were plant-based was 5 million years ago, and those guys didn’t resemble humans and were perched a long way down the food chain. We are humans because we eat fatty meat, and the reason we have the ability to debate the ethics of different diets is because we’ve been so good at hunting it.
As for our dietary flexibility that has allowed many cultures to subsist on plant-based diets, there’s a big difference between surviving and thriving. We’re not so unique to be the only species without an evolutionary diet.
What we do have, is a tremendous ability to survive in harsh climates and with meager nutrition. That’s what allowed us to span the globe and become the dominant figure in mammal biomass. But veering away from the evolutionary diet has still come at the cost to health, thanks to an assortment of nutritional deficiencies and inflammation from foods we have no business eating.
The solution doesn’t have to be a strict carnivore diet, but it should involve red meat, the elimination of seed oils, and the moderation of sugar.
You’re not checking those boxes off if you’re vegan. A plant-only diet is simply incompatible with the human species. We don’t have the digestive tracts to make it work. Evolution did away with that millions of years ago.
3. The Critique Of Vegan Hypocrisy
We’re all deeply familiar with how vegans brandish their diet against the unwashed masses. There is a deeply religious fervor in the manner in which they propagate their beliefs and reject ex-vegans as “never being vegan in the first place”.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that veganism was first given its wings by religion. And it wasn’t the Hindu or Buddhist texts from a few millennia before that drove this movement. An American cult from the late 19th century known as The Seventh Day Adventists championed the abstinence from meat and the promotion of plant-based alternatives as the solution to disease and the punching of humanity’s ticket past the gates of heaven.
Cults are part and parcel in a rapidly changing landscape where people fumble around to find meaning and certainty. That’s fine, as long as they’re kept where they belong, on the fringes of society.
Unfortunately, this particular cult ended up working its way into determining dietary guidelines thanks to one of its members founding the American Dietetics Association, the largest body of nutrition professionals in the world. Religion became the force behind the nutritional science that propped up the food pyramid.
Despite most modern vegans having no inkling about the origins of their diet, the spirit of the cult lives on in the sanctimonious way in which they present themselves as the saviors of the planet. A vegan is inherently better than a non-vegan, because he or she has seen the world for what it is and decided to do something to fix it. Just by skipping steak, this vegan is morally blessed. That’s all it takes to become the paragon of the human species.
That sanctimony wouldn’t be so egregious if a vegan diet actually backed up its lofty aspirations. But unfortunately, it falls well short.
Causing the least animal suffering? Only if you completely discount the billions of creatures that are killed to protect their crops.
Saving the planet? Only if you persuade the topsoil to grow back while nuking it with tilling and artificial fertilizers.
The best diet for health? Only if you wind human evolution back 7 million years.
The fact is, if vegans really cared about their goals, they’d be eating a grass-fed carnivore diet. And because they do the complete opposite, they have to be called out as hypocrites.
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I admire your energy Sama ????????.
I heard Sara Pugh say the other day she just doesn’t engage with plant eaters anymore, not worth the effort ????
I wouldn’t say I engage with them. I say my piece, then walk away. They only get a reply if I have another point to make.
And I certainly don’t lose sleep over any comments!