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Veganism

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B12 comes from bacteria, you don’t need to eat animals, my soy milk has it and so does the salt reduced vegemite, 90% of b12 supplements actually go to factory farms.

The most dense sources of omega 3’s are actually vegan, eg flax seeds have 11 time as much omega as salmon, you can put some flax seeds into your morning oats, or pop a flax oil pill.

Going vegan isn’t hard, it’s just different to the norm.

If I can do it any body can.

I mean how hard is it to make baked beans on toast with some avocado for breakfast, or put soy milk on your weetbix instead of cows milk.

If you think it takes a lot of planning you are wrong.

I would say it takes a bit to relearn which meals you like, and build up a few meal options, but once you know what you like and how to make it, it just become normal like any other day.

Putting some avocado on your toast instead of an egg doesn’t take more planing, in fact it probably saves you time.
 

Vitamin B12 I am inclined to agree with. Not sure about omega 3s, I don't think they are as well understood by dieticians as we are lead to believe (or they believe). Nutritionists bang on about the importance of some things despite them not being the main issues we actually see in people.

Vegans do tend to have deficiencies, especially after the first few months, and it's not usually related to these two things.

Going vegan isn’t hard, it’s just different to the norm.
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This is so far from reality it's laughable, and shows you are either disingenuous or delusional.

If I can do it any body can.
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So many have tried as hard as they possibly can, and after years of desperately trying everything they possibly can, they have failed and given up due to various chronic health issues. So, no, not everyone can do it. Partly because they don't have the understanding of how to do it, and probably because people are biologically different and it is more challenging for some people than others, and partly because of the availability of foods to different people. To put it into perspective, even if they knew everything there was to know about nutrition, most people in the world could not survive as vegans, because most people do not live in western countries with all the processed foods flown in from all over the world which are available at Woolies. Without backyard chooks, local fish, etc etc, most people in this world would not be able to remain alive. Even western people almost always have great challenge, and very few are genuinely successful long term.

I mean how hard is it to make baked beans on toast with some avocado for breakfast, or put soy milk on your weetbix instead of cows milk.
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About as easy as it is to drink a beer, Mars bar and light up a ciggie, but being easy doesn't equate to being good for you.

If you think it takes a lot of planning you are wrong.
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Simply telling someone else they are wrong doesn't make it true and is especially stupid when you are the incorrect one! It is literally not even naturally possible at all. Literally most people who put a lot of effort into trying fail, so to say it is easy is ridiculous.

Putting some avocado on your toast instead of an egg doesn’t take more planing, in fact it probably saves you time.
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When I was a uni student (and actually I ended up liking it so much I continued for about 10 years afterwards) to save time and money I had raw eggs for breakfast every day. It was literally the cheapest and quickest nutritious option I could come up with. But, again, being quick or convenient doesn't equate to being effective long term. Avocado is certainly very healthy, but they don't have anything like the broad spectrum of nutrition we get from eggs. They're also more expensive, seasonal, and a lot of the time I don't bother because they have such a narrow window between being unripe and rotten. I still enjoy eating avocado whenever good quality ones are available, but they are not a replacement food for something like an egg. There's nothing wrong with having both. Put it this way, you are going to live almost indefinitely on a diet of eggs on toast, but you will be dead pretty quickly on a diet of avocado on toast. You can survive pretty well on a diet of nothing but beef, but you will not live very long on a diet of avocado.

Meat and eggs just have such a wonderful broad spectrum of high density nutrition that they easily fill in a lot of nutritional gaps. Eating them literally gives you pretty much everything you need to be healthy, and there is literally no plant which you can say the same thing about. All a person needs to do is consume a relatively small amount of meat and eggs and they ensure they are getting at least a reasonable amount of everything their body needs. There is no plant you can say this about, and to get the same spectrum of nutrients from plants requires multiple different ones and also requires unnatural processing and/or cultivars. This very tangibly makes being vegan a more challenging undertaking, and something less natural.
 
Sdajii said:
This is so far from reality it's laughable, and shows you are either disingenuous or delusional.
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I have no idea why you would say that.

I have been vegan for over 1.5 years now, and genuinely find it easy.

As I said the hardest part is he beginning because you don’t know what to buy and what to cook so you have to learn where a few new restaurants are and some new meals, or ways to alter existing meals etc.

But you only have to learn those things once then it just becomes your life, eg learning which soy milk you like might take a few attempts, but then it’s no harder than picking up cows milk etc.

Being on a few vegan face book pages makes it super easy, there is some really good groups out there.
 
Value Collector said:
Vegan calories are cheaper than meat in general.

It’s a myth vegan food is more expensive that meat.
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I'd believe this at the moment. The meat you get now is terrible cuts as well. The only decent steak I had consistently was at Casino up near Lismore.
My old man became a vegan because the meat here was so terrible.

A guy I know is a pescatarian bodybuilder who eats a lot of farmer beans for protein. Fish when he can afford it. But has trouble with eating enough calories. He is still adjusting but you do have to pack away a lot of food.

I think you mentioned you were SAS before. Do you still train and if so did you notice, or have to change the way you trained once you went vegan?
 

Just to confirm, I wasn’t in the SAS, I was in SOER, which is a regiment that works closely with the SAS.

No I don’t work out as much as I did back then, but I wouldn’t have a problem doing what I used to do on a vegan diet.

In fact back then my post work out mess meal was actually pretty much vegan, every day for breakfast after PT I used to eat 6 slices of toast with baked beans + 2 glasses of apple juice.

Before I left the house to jog into base I used to eat two bits of peanut butter toast, so my work outs were fueled by plants hahaha.

Lunch was generally some sort of curry or something else that likely had meat in it, but I would eat ship loads of mash potato or chips and salad with it.

————
This is the soer if anyone is interested.

https://www.army.gov.au/our-people/...-command/special-operations-engineer-regiment
 

I say that because literally most long term vegans have problems. Doing something which is unnatural and most people find to be hazardous, difficult or outright impossible is clearly not as easy as the default natural option.

If you find it easy, that's great. I woke up one day and without preparing or planning, with no thought about it the previous day, I decided to quite smoking. I didn't use gum or patches or any sort of fancy tricks, I just stopped cold turkey. Most of my friends said it couldn't be done and it's true that most people can't do that, but I had the discipline or perhaps physiology to do it. That doesn't mean it's easy or that everyone can do it.

I'm not saying changing to soy milk (sic) is difficult. I used to drink a lot of milk, I've always thought soy drinks were as disgusting on the palate as they were hazardous to your hormones (after working in a medical research laboratory and learning about what soya products do to you, I wouldn't choose to consume them even if they didn't taste awful), but while I still have no problem drinking milk and I do it once in a blue moon, it's very rare that I buy it these days, simply because I don't even want to. Other than my single dietary vice ice-cream, I rarely consume dairy other than during the 2-4 weeks per year I spend in Australia when I enjoy Australian cheese. Actually, when I was in India last year I did consume a lot of dairy, although for about a week in India when I was in the north west I was mostly vegetarian (that was what most of the food was in the area), although I suppose I did eat a small amount of meat every couple of days. Actually, that region has the only real vegan culture in the world, and I did quite enjoy the food those vegans eat. If I was going to be vegan, that's the sort of food I would be eating, but it's clearly a diet which would be improved with a bit of meat.

I know many vegans, I have vegan family members (well, one who claims to be vegan but cheats, and another who struggled with it for years and eventually gave up and included eggs and dairy because she could no longer deal with the chronic health issues) and I get a fair bit of exposure to vegan culture through them, I get dragged along to vegan restaurants for their birthdays with their vegan friends and I hear all about the cult. Exposure to that insanity and cognitive dissonance always raises eyebrows. I've seen the Facebook groups etc, and only someone batshit crazy could fail to miss how batshit crazy they all are.
 

I wish everyone, everywhere, would stop using the term veganism in such an imprecise manner. Dietary veganism is consuming zero animal products. It might go beyond diet, but one is not a vegan if one eats or drinks any animal products.

Veganism is extremely rare in India, as in all places. They stick ghee in stuff very liberally, for a start.

I don't think there ever really was a truly vegan culture anywhere. I hope there will be.

It is utterly hilarious idea anyone would pretend to be vegan and secretly cheat. It's not a prestigious thing.

In the real world, I certainly try not to bring it up. It can be unavoidable, obviously.
 

There are many (hundreds) of different ethnic and cultural groups in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Jains strive for veganism (though most probably don't actually adhere to strict veganism)

I don't think there ever really was a truly vegan culture anywhere. I hope there will be.
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Naturally, no, there wasn't because veganism is literally impossible without modern assistance. True veganism has only recently become possible.

It is utterly hilarious idea anyone would pretend to be vegan and secretly cheat. It's not a prestigious thing.
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In a world where vegans are well known for bragging about it, literally the stereotype, which largely holds true, of vegans is to constantly shove the fact in everyone's face and act all smug and superior on their high horse, it is peculiar that you would find that hilarious or miss the fact that most people do it with virtue signaling/prestige as one of the main motives.
 

You are saying most vegans have issues.

Yet the biggest killer of Australians is heart disease, caused by saturated fats and cholesterol, look at all the diseases related to non vegan diets, it’s not like the average non vegans is a pillar of health.
 
Yeah VC, although I don't support 100% veganism I do agree that most of us in the western culture eat too much saturated fatty foods unfortunately which comes mainly from animal products. Health concerns are alarming. We are Number 2 in the podium (Just behind America who is Number 1) in terms of being most obese in the world and that's not something to be proud of !

I've been reading the comments from other posters in the last couple of days and some of you mentioned the healthier diets found in India for example. The challenge is to strike a balance between our high calorie / high fat diets and the more healthier Eastern/Indian diets.

I know this is not strictly on the Vegan topic, but I had to mention that because at the rate we are going Aussies are going to overtake Americans to become the world's fattest creatures !
 
aus_trader said:
I know this is not strictly on the Vegan topic, but I had to mention that because at the rate we are going Aussies are going to overtake Americans to become the world's fattest creatures !
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I went to the USA twenty years ago and was amazed how fat everyone was.
I'm sure if I went today I wouldn't be amazed as have probably become inured to fat Aussies.
 
Knobby22 said:
I went to the USA twenty years ago and was amazed how fat everyone was.
I'm sure if I went today I wouldn't be amazed as have probably become inured to fat Aussies.
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That's the thing it happens slowly over a long time but until the statistics hit us on the face we don't realise...

The other thing is in terms of proximity, we are more close to our Pacific/Kiwi and Asian/Indian cousins than the Yanks. Yet I am surprised how Americanised we have become in terms of food, entertainment and even values.
 
It's not so simple, in fact would take a lengthy dissertation to explain the obesity epidemic. But for now let's just say blaming animal protein in isolation is extremely naive.
 

This relates to what I said earlier. Yes, absolutely positively, most western people have terrible diets. What I said earlier is that when people switch to a vegan diet they often feel better in the short term because they cut out a lot of the garbage they used to eat. Processed foods are very unhealthy, especially processed meat products. Processed saturated fats are very unhealthy (any processed fats are unhealthy and vegans tend to eat a lot, but they avoid the worst ones). Cholesterol is a very misunderstood thing and most of what people say about it is completely wrong. As I said earlier I used to eat eggs almost literally every day (well over 100 eggs per month) and after years of it everyone said my cholesterol would be through the roof, but when I had it checked my bad cholesterol levels were so low the normal tests couldn't even detect any. Yes, I was consuming a huge amount of cholesterol, but you don't get high cholesterol simply because you consume too much cholesterol. You get it by consuming bad forms of it (highly processed and fried fats are a good way to do it, and typical vegan diets aren't usually good in terms of cholesterol, they're just a lot better than the diet of the guy eating fried dim sims for lunch and fried bacon for breakfast and fried sausages for dinner every day).

Saturated fats are somewhat similar. Eating bad saturated fats (highly processed and fried etc) is bad, but there's nothing wrong with eating unprocessed saturated animal fat (milk may be an exception) which is not treated with very high temperatures (frying is the most common).

Put it this way. Going vegan makes you feel better in the short term and has the benefit of removing fried bacon, hot dogs, cheese, ice-cream etc etc from your diet. This is a benefit, people feel better for that. It also has the huge disadvantage of excluding fresh unprocessed meat, fish and eggs. Veganism lumps good and bad foods together and eliminates them all. There is no benefit to eliminating the good parts, and the benefits from eliminating the bad parts are wrong seen as being part of the total elimination of all of them. The deficiencies take longer to become apparent than the benefits of eliminating all the garbage from the diet, so in the short term many people think they have made a change for the better, and in a sense they have, but it is generally not long term viable.

Absolutely, eliminate salami, bacon, cheese, dim sims, Twisties etc from your diet. Eliminate refined sugar too. Or there's really nothing wrong with doing what I do and *almost* eliminate them but if someone serves up bacon once in a blue moon feel free to eat it, have your occasional ice-cream binge as long as it's in moderation, and enjoy a few pieces of cheese during your short visits to Australia once or twice per year. No need for fanaticism. But importantly, keep your boiled (or poached or raw or however you like them, but preferably not fried) eggs, your grilled salmon, feel absolutely free to enjoy a lovely beef steak or some squid (again, preferably not fried), etc. Don't overeat regardless of what it is you're eating, and don't eat too much of anything. If you are overweight, reduce the amount you eat. This is far better for your health and far more natural than fanatical veganism.

Eliminating processed and fried foods is tremendously better for you than veganism. For most people in the world, attempting to switch to veganism would be a big problem (actually, most people in the world would literally die within a few years). Eliminating fried and processed foods would be a huge benefit for all people who frequently eat them.
 
SirRumpole said:
True. There are also fats, oils, sugars and salts to take into account.
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Yes agree. It's the whole cocktail of fats and sugars, so I wasn't meant to say animal fats in isolation.

But the issue of putting on is real as a nation. Knobby22 made a very good point about how things have changed in the last 20 years. Like I said it's creeped on us slowly with all the fast foods and somewhat poorer lifestyles compared to those days. It's easy to forget how good we were in this sun-baked nation. Where's Olivia who can remind us... Let me see if I can find her... OK a glimpse from the past:

 

Yep, "Jains strive for", broadly speaking. But not very hard, unless they are actual holy man types.

True veganism would've been tough in ye olde times. If close-ish to equator could be done, though. You'd be ok for vitamin D with sunlight. B12 deficiency would not happen as it was on vegetables etc, from the bacteria in dirt. It needs to be somewhere with decent range of edible flora that was selected over generations for size and taste. The edible plant varieties taken from the Americas made it much easier. Need nuts for protein. Could've worked okay in parts of Mediterranean - and I'm sure it did, but only for special individuals and perhaps sects. European peasants survived on a close to vegan diet at various time and places.

LOL yeah I guess whenever there's a bit of a trend it attracts...trend followers. But my motives are pure, not virtue signalling. It's about the animals. It's about crying YOUNG calves and lambs, terrified, searching for mum, smelling the blood of their mates, and then moments later their own body shredded, blood gushing on steel etc. I completely get that you do not get that. Most people don't. IF it means being a bit careful with diet or being slightly less capable of building (unnecessary) muscle it's well worth it for a clear conscience, for me.

Vegetarian for almost whole life, strict vegan for last 7.5 years. For me it's not about impressing people, but yes definitely hold it to be a morally superior diet in the modern world.

But I despise the meat taste anyway. Were we bombed back to stone age and I had to survive by predating wildlife I'd need to cook that 'roo (or whatever) meat to virtually charcoal to hide the taste.
 

LOL we are bad, but not that bad. US IS consistently worst in OECD. We are not second worst in OECD. But top places in world for obesity are various "islander" nations. I think they report it sensationally as we are getting to US levels and so forth, as if we are directly below them and they are actual #1. We are not.

Like in many things, genetic predisposition plays a part.
 
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