I genuinely don’t think humans were meant to be vegan.
This is not a matter of me trying to “shame” anyone for their dietary habits, this is my attempt to analyze the vegan diet from a biological and evolutionary perspective.
First, the vegan diet is only really feasible with the advent of modern lifestyles and food processing. If you consider the products that don’t require any processing that are vegan, that limits you to fruit, legumes, nuts, and vegetables. The only calorie-dense option here are nuts, which can be quite difficult and time consuming to scavenge. Cashews, for example, come from the cashew apple, and each cashew apple yields 1 cashew. Consider how long it would take to consume enough to feed one person or a FAMILY (which is often the case in a hunter-gatherer scenario). Fruit and vegetables are not energy dense and could not feed a family either. You can only eat so many bananas, mangos, etc. without being completely bloated from eating a ton of fruit. Meat is the most calorie dense, readily available option. If we were looking for enough food to feed a family, that’s really the only choice that makes sense.
Additionally, I’ve yet to find many people who are able to sustain a vegan diet in the long term without some type of deficiency. Many vegans find that their hair grows thinner, their nails more brittle, and they feel fatigued or suffer from memory loss. If you have to go out of your way to add a ton of supplements into your diet to compensate for the lack of minerals from your diet, are you really eating in a way that is ideal for your health?
Just something to consider. I’m open to hearing counterpoints to my arguments as well, but I’m not very keen on vegan diets even though many devout vegans tout them as being optimal for wellness and vitality.
@acti-veg is always up for counter arguments 👍 which is good because I can never be bothered
First of all, I find it interesting that you are clearly approaching this question from a rational perspective, yet you are also using the term “meant.” What do you mean by “Meant? Doesn’t “meant” require intention and direction, who “meant” us to eat animals? A creator? The chaotic and non-linear process of evolution? Humans aren’t “meant” to be anything, we are just the result of adaptation to our environment. By this logic, humans aren’t “meant” to live to an old age, or to survive a heart attack, or to correct our vision with lenses or glasses. Hell, we certainly aren’t “meant” to industrially produce trillions of farmed animals for the sole purpose of human consumption.
I actually disagree that a vegan diet wasn’t possible until the advent of modern technology, not to mention the fact that our modern meat eating diet would be absolutely impossible without modern technology, but realistically that’s debate is a waste of time both of our time because it’s a moot point either way. The fact is, we do live in an age of modern technology which does allow us to be vegan, so whether or not we could if we lived in another age without this technology is completely irrelevant. Modern living in general wouldn’t be possible without technology, nor would sustaining populations of our size in dense and often naturally uninhabitable areas, but we still do it.
Your points may have some salience of veganism were about health, or living close to how our ancestors did, but it’s not, it’s about ethics. But if you do want to go down this road, let me give you some non-anecdotal evidence to the contrary. The National Health Service and the American Dietetic Association, both world health authorities, tell us that vegan diets are nutritionally adequate and healthy for all stages of life, including infancy. A growing body of research also suggests that a vegan diet appears to be useful for increasing the intake of protective nutrients and phytochemicals and for minimizing the intake of dietary factors implicated in several chronic diseases. Vegans also have lower serum cholesterol and blood pressure, have reduced rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes and a substantially lower risk of cancer. Even when compared with other vegetarian diets, vegan diets tend to contain less saturated fat and cholesterol and more dietary fiber. This may be because vegans generally consume substantially high quantities of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, soy, and nuts, which are rich in fiber, folic acid, antioxidants, and phytochemicals, which are associated with lower blood cholesterol concentrations, a lower incidence of stroke, and a lower risk of mortality from stroke and ischemic heart disease. Current data also suggests that diets lower in meat consumption are also associated with greater longevity.
So in light of all this data and all these years of longevity studies, your own limited experience of meeting vegans in day to day life (while somehow diagnosing their health issues and knowing without doubt that it is related to veganism) is not particularly convincing. I can honestly say that, living in the working class area that I do, I’ve yet to find many meat eaters who are living healthy lifestyles either. Does that mean that you can’t be healthy and eat meat, just because most of the people I personally know aren’t? Of course it doesn’t. You can be healthy or unhealthy while eating animals, just like you can be healthy or unhealthy while being vegan. There is no vitamin, mineral or protein you can’t get as a vegan, and the things we supplement, like B12, are added artificially to cow’s milk and injected into farmed animals too. None of us get it naturally in our modern diet, so how is it any more natural to filter your supplements through someone else’s body?
What all of this comes down to is the fact that it is irrelevant whether or not we could live this way without technology, or whether we were “meant” to live as vegans; the only thing that matters is that we can. It is undeniable that in our modern age most people can be perfectly healthy without ever eating any animal product. So if you can choose live a lifestyle which causes less harm to our world and those who live within it, then why wouldn’t you?
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