Obvious solution in our face, we fund research to preserve AGW causing industries

[Unabogie]

Exceptions don't disprove the general rule in this case.

I wonder why you don't add Lance Armstrong to that list? It really seems to me like he should belong there, for some reason. I'm not sure why.

"Exceptions don't prove the rule, so let me add an exception as if it proves the rule"?

Got it.

 

[Manopolus]

"Exceptions don't prove the rule, so let me add an exception as if it proves the rule"?

Got it.

It was really more for humor value than anything. I'm glad you got it.

 

[Manopolus]

There's no such thing as a saturated fat vitamin.

More on this:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/food-nutrition/vitamin-supplements/fat-absorb-vitamins.htm

Strange but true: Eating fat-free can lead to health problems. Specifically, it can lead to vitamin deficiencies. That's because some vitamins require fat to be absorbed into the body and to do their jobs, which include providing energy, keeping cells functioning and supporting the immune system, for a start. Vitamins are essential, which means fats are essential, too.

It appears my original comment was more telling than I thought it was. I'm learning all sorts of new things today.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Concerning the hilited area, if people ate a lot less meat, particularly a lot less beef, it would definitely lower the amount of greenhouse gases produced and the amount of energy consumed. So, why is that a cop out?

Because needlessly releasing 0.2X tonnes of GHG is still a big, needless problem even though it is less that X tonnes. There is no reason why 0.2X is acceptable when there is so much reduction that needs to take place. It is like punching someone once instead of twice.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

I'm not the one suggesting a policy change... trying to take the "skeptical" point of view here is a bit disingenuous, don't you think? You're the one suggesting something other than the current "default" and making a positive claim.

I provided evidence, which no one has challenged yet...

My contribution has merely been to voice objections... none have which have come from anything other than my own experience. I claim nothing other than what I have experienced. It is up to you to convince me that this those experiences are invalid... or to overcome those objections. As of yet, I have seen nothing of the sort.

Except for the statements from dietary and nutritional sciences. You hand waved that away because somehow you feeling terrible was caused by not eating meat, but it was somehow not a dietary or health claim. Somehow. In some unexplained way.

It certainly isn't useful for you to try to tell me "no you don't feel different when you don't eat meat, because that's a health claim." Such arguments are pointless. You cannot in good faith tell me what I have or have not experienced.

Correct, which is why I have claimed no such thing. I am saying your experience is just that, a subjective, unreliable experience that is contradicted by science that we should be skeptical of.

It's furthermore rather bizarre of you to make the claim that what I state as my argument isn't really my argument and instead I'm trying to say something else entirely which I myself have not stated. That's so bad that it isn't even good enough to be called a straw man.

You've been backtracking so much from the claims that you have made that I am not sure what your claim "really is" this hour. Care to illuminate?

I think part of your problem here is that even if I can somehow be proven ethically wrong by some standard, I am still perfectly content to be wrong in this case and won't even bother to feel guilty about it. Trying to shame me will get you absolutely nowhere. I don't think that's a particularly uncommon attitude regarding this notion --on the contrary, it seems to be the norm -- which makes it impractical to suggest as an actual viable solution.

Your faith in the moral evilness of humanity is compelling .

In summary, all I've done is inform you that I'm not interested in joining your cult (which is pretty much what I see the vegan/vegetarian thing as), and gave you a few reasons.

Except this is a skeptics forum, and you should be expected to be challenged if your "reasons" are unevidenced assertions. Look, you made another one just now!

Perhaps you should be happy that I even bothered to respond... because I usually don't bother responding to attempts at dogmatic indoctrination of this sort.

Ridiculous. Can you quote any dogma or indoctrination have I posted? Climate and dietary sciences are neither.

Perhaps you'd like it better if I just accepted on faith that vegetarianism will somehow magically prevail and solve all the problems of the world if I'd only give it a try, but that's just not quite my nature.

Again, not something I wrote. Did you read the OP? There is nothing magic but the scientific method, unlike your "experience".

I don't see it as a practical solution, and I don't think that my own particular contribution is even notable in the larger scale...

Composition fallacy.

you've got billions more people to convert than me, and I'm pretty sure that you'll continually fail any attempt to do so.

You forgot "neener neener neener".

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

So...rather than try to transition to a non-fossil-fuel economy, you think the EASIER option is to convince every man, woman, and child on Earth to go vegan?

Not doing something is by definition EASIER than inventing and implementing new technologies to transition to a non-fossil-fuel economy. And no, not "every man, woman, and child" would be necessary to make a larger impact than all of the non-fossil efforts planned thus far.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

And now I'm going to quickly rattle off tons of ways I can think of that different people react differently to various chemicals.

So you've still got no evidence. Got it.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Okay, as far as I can tell, that's just straight up lying.

Vitamins and minerals that vegetarians and vegans tend to lack:

Iron, B12, creatine, carnosine, Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA)

Source: http://authoritynutrition.com/top-5-reasons-why-vegan-diets-are-a-terrible-idea/
(Iron isn't specifically listed that I saw, although I can cite other sources naming it as a common deficiency)

Also, according to that article:



...but ...but if you eat just exactly right, you can avoid this!

Maybe so, but vegans have been shown to tend to be nearly uniformly deficient in these areas. I'd say creatine and/or testosterone shortages are the most likely causes for the effect noted, although I don't presume to know. Nutrition isn't my area of expertise by a long shot... so I have to look somewhere other than my own mind for that information.

It's a little bizarre to claim that having a diet different than everyone else will not produce a biology that is in some way slightly different than everybody else's. Whether you can say those differences are "unhealthy" or not can be a matter of opinion, I suppose, and I'm not even sure that the date when you die is even the only meaningful measure of that. In any case, I'd say that it stands to reason that our bodies (and by extension, our minds) might tend to notice those differences when presented with a new diet... I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption at all.

So you blindly trust that random blog post over the major dietary organisations previously linked to?

This is terrible. First actual claim:

In fact, B12 deficiency is very common in vegans, one study showing that a whopping 92% of vegans are deficient in this critical nutrient (1).

The study actually linked:

Serum vitamin B12 and complete blood count values were determined for 83 volunteer subjects from an American vegetarian society conference (USA). Among subjects who did not supplement their diets with vitamin B12 or multiple vitamin tablets, 92% of the vegans (total vegetarians), 64% of the lactovegetarians, 47% of the lacto-ovovegetarians and 20% of the semivegetarians had serum vitamin B12 levels < 200pg/ml (normal = 200–900 pg/ml). However, their complete blood count values did not deviate greatly from those found for nonvegetarians, even though some had been vegans or lactovegetarians for over 10 years.

Linky.

That's hilarious.

I'm not going to bother which what I'm sure would be an entertaining cherry-pick road.

But I'll just leave this here:

A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that wholesome vegetarian diets offer distinct advantages compared to diets containing meat and other foods of animal origin. The benefits arise from lower intakes of saturated fat, cholesterol and animal protein as well as higher intakes of complex carbohydrates, dietary fiber, magnesium, folic acid, vitamin C and E, carotenoids and other phytochemicals. Since vegetarians consume widely divergent diets, a differentiation between various types of vegetarian diets is necessary. Indeed, many contradictions and misunderstandings concerning vegetarianism are due to scientific data from studies without this differentiation. In the past, vegetarian diets have been described as being deficient in several nutrients including protein, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin B12 and A, n-3 fatty acids and iodine. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the observed deficiencies are usually due to poor meal planning. Well-balanced vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including children, adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, the elderly and competitive athletes. In most cases, vegetarian diets are beneficial in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, renal disease and dementia, as well as diverticular disease, gallstones and rheumatoid arthritis. The reasons for choosing a vegetarian diet often go beyond health and well-being and include among others economical, ecological and social concerns. The influences of these aspects of vegetarian diets are the subject of the new field of nutritional ecology that is concerned with sustainable life styles and human development.

Linky.

 

[Cleon]

Not doing something is by definition EASIER

You're not talking about "not doing something." You're talking about changing the diet and behavior of every single person on Earth a huge chunk of humanity, not to mention radically reforming the entire agricultural sector.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

You're not talking about "not doing something." You're talking about changing the diet and behavior of every single person on Earth a huge chunk of humanity, not to mention radically reforming the entire agricultural sector.

I think I should have included "novel" in there? Yes, it would be a change, but not the same kind as changing energy or transportation to some future technology that would provide us the same/greater power at comparable substantially lower environmental cost. (Maybe it will have to move to the Sci&Tech thread, but I'm pretty sure we don't have that capability now.)

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Dang, you spoiled my plot. Goodly amounts of Marmite (yum) will do the trick, but I was picturing TB frantically googling for vegan B12.

Yes, I'm sure I, the person starting a vegan thread, have never come across the B12 argument .

 

[Manopolus]

The study actually linked:

By the looks of it, I would say that it was a study by a vegetarian for vegetarians to try and prove something other than what the results showed... why else would it have been done at a vegetarian convention?

The thing is, there really aren't that much in the way of studies about vegetarianism that aren't done by vegetarians trying to prove their point (with an agenda). Strangely enough, there's still plenty of data showing that people on vegetarian diets do tend to have some consistent differences in their blood chemistry (like the testosterone thing). Whether that is "healthier" or "unhealhier" is up to interpretation. All I'm saying is, there is a notable difference or two.

Exactly how, pray tell, did you determine that this difference is not something that a person might notice in a way that made him feel like he's not eating enough/eating correctly (and in my case, keep stuffing my face until I'm miserable, and yet still feel like I need to eat something more)? A change in diet of any sort -- even when it's eating healthier -- can have a tendency to do that sort of thing.

Keep in mind that I did not originally set out to prove that vegetarianism is unhealthy. I was merely stating that I personally feel like crap when I don't eat enough meat and you kept saying that somehow that's a health issue (which I did not claim) and that there's no way that would happen, etc. Well, it does happen... when people radically change their diets, they do tend to notice a physical difference.

...and of course what we're ignoring is that those who stick to a vegan/vegetarian diet may have slight physical differences from those who try it and discard it. Those differences may even constitute being able to get a better result from such a diet. It'd be interesting to see the results of a study that looked into this notion, but as of yet, I haven't seen any studies specifically targeted at those who failed to stay on a vegetarian diet.


Oh, on another note, I just went back and read your links. Do you think there might be a reason they read like advertisements and have no actual data? The first time through, I just noted that they were about nutrition and discarded it, since that wasn't really all that pertinent to what you were responding to, anyway.

 

[Unabogie]

By the looks of it, I would say that it was a study by a vegetarian for vegetarians to try and prove something other than what the results showed... why else would it have been done at a vegetarian convention?

The thing is, there really aren't that much in the way of studies about vegetarianism that aren't done by vegetarians trying to prove their point. Strangely enough, there's still plenty of data showing that people on vegetarian diets do tend to have some consistent differences in their blood chemistry (like the testosterone thing). Whether that is "healthier" or "unhealhier" is up to interpretation. All I'm saying is, there is a notable difference or two.

Exactly how, pray tell, did you determine that this difference is not something that a person might notice in a way that made him feel like he's not eating enough/eating correctly? A change in diet of any sort -- even when it's eating healthier -- can have a tendency to do that.

I literally spoke to my doctor about this very issue yesterday. He said that vitamin deficiency usually results from eating vegan fast food as your primary diet, and that even though I've been vegan/vegetarian for 13 years, he didn't really think it was necessary to test. I was doing blood work anyway for a cholesterol test (it's been 8 years since my last stellar test), and so he thought it'd be ok to do a test to see if I was low on anything just in case. I'll post my results.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

By the looks of it, I would say that it was a study by a vegetarian for vegetarians to try and prove something other than what the results showed... why else would it have been done at a vegetarian convention?

You were the one that posted the blog that have conclusions citing this study. I have misgivings of my own, but this accusation of bias is odd on multiple fronts, in addition to you are now saying the blog you cited was citing research poorly.

The thing is, there really aren't that much in the way of studies about vegetarianism that aren't done by vegetarians trying to prove their point (with an agenda).

This sounds like climate denial. You don't get to accuse an entire profession and various science boards of bias and poor research without citing any evidence. Or at least, I get to reject such claims easily.

Strangely enough, there's still plenty of data showing that people on vegetarian diets do tend to have some consistent differences in their blood chemistry (like the testosterone thing). Whether that is "healthier" or "unhealhier" is up to interpretation. All I'm saying is, there is a notable difference or two.

That was not your claim. And those studies were clearly done by biased omnivores .

Exactly how, pray tell, did you determine that this difference is not something that a person might notice in a way that made him feel like he's not eating enough/eating correctly (and in my case, keep stuffing my face until I'm miserable, and yet still feel like I need to eat something more)? A change in diet of any sort -- even when it's eating healthier -- can have a tendency to do that sort of thing.

Keep in mind that I did not originally set out to prove that vegetarianism is unhealthy. I was merely stating that I personally feel like crap when I don't eat enough meat and you kept saying that somehow that's a health issue (which I did not claim) and that there's no way that would happen, etc. Well, it does happen... when people radically change their diets, they do tend to notice a physical difference.

...and of course what we're ignoring is that those who stick to a vegan/vegetarian diet may have slight physical differences from those who try it and discard it. Those differences may even constitute being able to get a better result from such a diet. It'd be interesting to see the results of a study that looked into this notion, but as of yet, I haven't seen any studies specifically targeted at those who failed to stay on a vegetarian diet.

As I have said before, I am not saying your subjective feeling did not exist. You are the one who took it and linked it to claiming that a vegan diet wouldn't work for you and a vast majority of the population.

 

[Manopolus]

As I have said before, I am not saying your subjective feeling did not exist. You are the one who took it and linked it to claiming that a vegan diet wouldn't work for you and a vast majority of the population.

Not really... what I said is that this is what makes me unwilling to even consider it. I did not say that it couldn't "work" for me if someone put a gun to my head or whatever... again, I don't claim to know about nutrition side of it... most of what I do know concerning that is what I've been looking up since being in this conversation.

Basically, I've been there, seen people there, etc... and from what I've experienced and heard from others, I know that I have no interest whatsoever in pursuing a vegetarian diet. That's what it boils down to.

...not that I ever had a problem with eating dead animals or anything anyway. I was personally chopping the heads off of chickens as early as 8 years old because my family raised them for our own meat and eggs (not commercially). I just sort of went out with someone interested in it for a time, and played along. I know exactly where meat comes from, having prepared it from the actual living critters, and have no issues with that part of it whatsoever.

...maybe we could go by "if you can't kill it, you don't eat it." I wouldn't have a problem with that, but some might.

 

[theprestige]

Because needlessly releasing 0.2X tonnes of GHG is still a big, needless problem even though it is less that X tonnes. There is no reason why 0.2X is acceptable when there is so much reduction that needs to take place. It is like punching someone once instead of twice.

Even in a world where the human population totaled 100,000 Stone Age neanderthals living in caves, a certain tonnage of GHG would be released every year. Leaving aside the question of "needlessly", would you say there is a maximum tonnage of GHG that can be released every year without being a "problem" according to however you define "problem"?

 

[The_Animus]

So you've still got no evidence. Got it.

You haven't shown me you even read or understand my claim because every response you've given me is you wanting me to defend a strawman you've made.

If you could restate my claim in your own words I might take you seriously.

 

[Aepervius]

Then they won't be calling you "theprestige, the bridge builder" or "theprestige, the stone mason" anymore.

If he enjoys too much the pleasure of eating they will call him "theprestige, the flesh builder"

 

[Aepervius]

I can base this on the fact that there are no nutrients that are missing in a vegan diet, hence, you feeling hungry is coming from your mind, not your body.

Thanks all the gods that we human are all automaton and taste and pleasure of eating has no place whatsoever in our psychic well being.

 

[Aepervius]

As I have said before, I am not saying your subjective feeling did not exist. You are the one who took it and linked it to claiming that a vegan diet wouldn't work for you and a vast majority of the population.

I have provided two points of evidence that people as a majority do not care or do not want to be vegetarian.

1) market force. Vegetarian/vegan restaurants are the minority. Vegetarian / Vegan mix are sometime added, but they are for the crushing majority of restaurants not the main fare
2) again cantine. Whereas it is true that vegetarian/vegan meal are increasingly proposed , the queues and the demands are on the meat and fish meals.

What you seem to NOT get is that for some people a meal without meat is nourishing but without enjoyment. And yes , at least in western country where food is plentiful, meal enjoyment is a major factor.

You are asking to change something which is deeply ingrained into us as part of our culture and as part of our enjoyment of life. You might as well ask people to give up sex, video game, alcohol, and other life enjoyment (and yes some people will state that they are well without alcohol (me) or without video game or sex --- good for them, the majority will still enjoy those).