If you are a low/no meat eater, how do you feel about meat imitations?

Most meatarians eat a BALANCED diet, not just meat. The vegans (OV's aside) try to exist on a diet exclusively of sticks and stems. The panoptics of B vitamins can only be provided by some meat intake and , as for haem Fe, it is absorbed as Fe ions in the small intestine. It is more dense in Fe availability than are any substitute or fortification with Fe .this is usually done by dosing your veggies with a Fe Carbonate , a residue from iron mining.
An EXCLUSIVELY veggie diet is kinda like "if a little bit helps, a whole lot should help a whole lot".This isnt necessarily true. Mega doses of such things as vitamins A,K etc can be harmful. Its as if someopne who would try to live exclusively on a diet of polar bear is often at risk of dying of overdosing on Vitamin A, or a spinach eater, can OD on the vitamin K component of some dark veggies and stroke out due to clotting of blood.

Gorillas, it can be seen are a "transitional fossil" A species that once was omnivorous (Gorilla poop from deposits in the Pleistocene contain animal bones and hair bits so they were omnivores at one time)but is now evolving into a vegan. Chimpanzees, on the other hand are still omnivores, they really do enjoy meat meals of their own young.

2 Replies

How about if you chill out, FART? I say that you, like most people, don't really realize how food is produced. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and you can't feed six billion people with low environmental impact agriculture--at least not with the state of the agronomic art as it currently exists.

When you eat your stone-ground bread, are you certain that the wheat or rye which was used was produced without the use of commercial, industially produced fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides? You cannot make bread without either wheat or rye, because no other grains will react with yeast to produce gluten which rises as bread doughh does.

You say you buy locally. Have you ever visited Aquia Creek? That's local in respect to DC. I hope that it is recovering over the last 20 years, but the last time i saw Aquia Creek, in the late 1980s, it was slowly being choked to death. It was a lovely bright green, because of a carpet of tiny, tiny acquatic plants on the surface. This meant that sunlight didn't reach the plants which would otherwise naturally occur in the creek, and of course, that meant starvation for the fish species which otherwise would have lived there. Why was Aquia Creek choking to death? Because of agricultural run off. When you eat those tomatoes you love, are you certain that they were grown without the use of commercial, industrially produced fertilizers, herbicies and pesticides? Do you wash them before you eat them? I advise that you do.

So don't tell me to chill out. I don't have a problem with what other people eat, because i know how agriculture works in the real world, and so don't hold against people if they can't guarantee that the food they eat is produced by environmentally low impact methods. So i find it ridiculous for any vegan to tell me about things like locally produced foods, never mind those who are strident proclaimers of their own virtue. That may not be you, but if you ever eat tofu, you're right in there with those ranters in eating in an environnmentally irresponsible manner.

Once again, i don't object to people eating in that way. I do object to those who object to meat eating by citing how environmentally irresponsible it is, or, even more ludicrous, how it is not nutritionally necessary.

1 Reply

@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Most meatarians eat a BALANCED diet, not just meat. The vegans (OV's aside) try to exist on a diet exclusively of sticks and stems.

Balanced, and vegan aren't exclusive terms. Sticks and stems?

farmerman wrote:

The panoptics of B vitamins can only be provided by some meat intake...

I had to look up what you're talking about, and it seems there is a myth that B-12 only comes from meat or else has to be made synthetically into a supplement. There are natural sources of B-12, and surprise surprise, that nutritional yeast that I use to season many food with is an excellent organic source.

It is also present in lesser amounts in lots of over the counter products like cereal and non-dairy milks and large range of other products. To verify this, I just walked to my fridge. My Silk, in one serving has 50% of my DV of B-12.

Other than B-12, I could not find any claim that animal products were it's only source.

I did find a docuument at "beefnutrion dot org" that blatantly claims that B12 is only found in meat: http://www.beefnutrition.org/uDocs/ACF3D4.pdf

farmerman wrote:

...as for haem Fe, it is absorbed as Fe ions in the small intestine.
It is more dense in Fe availability than are any substitute or fortification with Fe .this is usually done by dosing your veggies with a Fe Carbonate , a residue from iron mining.

I'm sorry, you are correct. I was thinking about plant versus non-plant based iron. It had nothing to do with digestion.

I think I was thinking about some other element of our digestive chemistry.

farmerman wrote:

An EXCLUSIVELY veggie diet is kinda like "if a little bit helps, a whole lot should help a whole lot".

No, I'd not characterize it this way at all.

farmerman wrote:

This isnt necessarily true. Mega doses of such things as vitamins A,K etc can be harmful. Its as if someopne who would try to live exclusively on a diet of polar bear is often at risk of dying of overdosing on Vitamin A, or a spinach eater, can OD on the vitamin K component of some dark veggies and stroke out due to clotting of blood.

Being vegan means you still have to watch what yo eat to be balanced. Of course. There are unhealthy ways to be a vegan, you don't have to convince me of that.

farmerman wrote:

Gorillas, it can be seen are a "transitional fossil" A species that once was omnivorous (Gorilla poop from deposits in the Pleistocene contain animal bones and hair bits so they were omnivores at one time)but is now evolving into a vegan. Chimpanzees, on the other hand are still omnivores, they really do enjoy meat meals of their own young.

This only supports questioning why we assume we are omnivores. Human's adaptation to digest meat is an adaptation for survival, not a blueprint for optimal health and nutrition.

There seem to be plenty of myths out about what vegans don't get. People often rush to protein, but protein needs are exaggerated and even with the recommended DV of 50g (2000 Cal diet) I was getting north of 74g on a vegan diet when I was doing daily numbers.

I did have one vitamin out of whack when I went to the doctor: Vitamin D. But that is because I work a shift job. As evidence, I submit from my metrics blog: My bloodwork.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_n3psklkrOgk/S9uEMLl2F1I/AAAAAAAABEM/zB50DkMZj30/s1600/Bloodwork+01.jpg

The numbers refute that a vegan diet in any way has denied me what I need. Of course, this reflects many choices I make on a daily basis. I don't view those choices as difficult.

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There is nothing inherently unbalanced about a vegan diet.

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@failures art,

Theres a whole series of B vitamins .(Thats why theyve given them numbers similar to the works of Mozart)

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@farmerman,

Do we have sellulose breakdown organs or tissues or like three compartment stomachs like most obligate vegetarians?---NO

Do we have a body leanght to digestive tract length like obligate vegetarians?_NO
(we have a body-gut length of about 7:1, compared to 20:1 for cows and 3.5:1 for lions and tigers)
Do we have a cecum for post gut digestion and pellet production like obligate vegetarians?--NO

being omnivore doesnt mean an EXCLUSIVITY of diet. We have means to absorb digest, and process meat and less devices to handle vegetable matter.

A gorilla, eating shoots and tubers, has developed a distended gut that makes it look like a champion beer drinker. ARe gorillas being caught in the act of evolving into a more efficient herbivore? I HAVE NO IDEA BUT I SURE AM GLAD THAT I DONT HAVE TO EAT AND REGURGITATE MY GREENS.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

So don't tell me to chill out.

I will tell you to chill out. Chill out.

Setanta wrote:

I don't have a problem with what other people eat, because i know how agriculture works in the real world, and so don't hold against people if they can't guarantee that the food they eat is produced by environmentally low impact methods.

I don't hold it against people either Set. I am making choices for myself, not for others. I'm not concerned with what you do. Do whatever you wish. I'm concerned about what I do, and working to improve it. I haven't claimed to live 100% sustainable, but that doesn't mean I can't look for more ways to be a better steward of the earth. I don't claim to be perfect, nor that veganism is perfect.

Also, I am quite familiar with industrial farms, because that is the business my father is in and had been for 30 plus years.

Setanta wrote:

So i find it ridiculous for any vegan to tell me about things like locally produced foods, never mind those who are strident proclaimers of their own virtue.

Then find it ridiculous. What am I supposed to do with your opinion here. You seem very concerned with letting people know how uninterested you are with their opinion on your diet. Should I be concerned with your opinion on mine.

Go ahead and think I'm a crazy malnourished hypocrite Set. you'll think whatever you wish of me no matter what I say. Who am I to convince you of anything.

Setanta wrote:

That may not be you, but if you ever eat tofu, you're right in there with those ranters in eating in an environnmentally irresponsible manner.

This is simply a bogus claim. Care to tell me how much of a soy crop goes into making tofu versus making DSP for McDonalds hamburgers and the "ground beef" at Taco Bell?

Setanta wrote:

Once again, i don't object to people eating in that way.

I think you do.

Setanta wrote:

I do object to those who object to meat eating by citing how environmentally irresponsible it is, or, even more ludicrous, how it is not nutritionally necessary.

1 - It is more responsible - Please qualify which diet requires more natural resources? You are very correct in your criticisms of plant crops like soy, but participating in several fewer industries such as aquaculture, poultry, and livestock is a major reduction in use of natural resources. how can you debate that? Your argument is like saying until we can recycle styrofoam, recycling aluminum is meaningless.

2 - It isn't necessary to eat animal products - It is a myth that we must eat animals. I'll put the nutritional challenges of a vegan diet against those of a omnivore diet any day. I have seen nothing to support that we MUST eat animal products.

Object away.

A
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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Theres a whole series of B vitamins .(Thats why theyve given them numbers similar to the works of Mozart)

I addressed this. The only B-vitamin that claims to be meat exclusive is B-12. This is especially false because B-12 isn't even produced by the animal, but by bacteria. Pull a carrot out of the ground, and it's got B-12 on it.

A
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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Do we have sellulose breakdown organs or tissues or like three compartment stomachs like most obligate vegetarians?---NO

Do we have a body leanght to digestive tract length like obligate vegetarians?_NO
(we have a body-gut length of about 7:1, compared to 20:1 for cows and 3.5:1 for lions and tigers)
Do we have a cecum for post gut digestion and pellet production like obligate vegetarians?--NO

being omnivore doesnt mean an EXCLUSIVITY of diet. We have means to absorb digest, and process meat and less devices to handle vegetable matter.

A gorilla, eating shoots and tubers, has developed a distended gut that makes it look like a champion beer drinker. ARe gorillas being caught in the act of evolving into a more efficient herbivore? I HAVE NO IDEA BUT I SURE AM GLAD THAT I DONT HAVE TO EAT AND REGURGITATE MY GREENS.

Do we have acidic or alkaline saliva? I can make plenty of comparisons that demonstrate the opposite. I am a little disappointed to see a "design" argument out of you FM.

Why so hell bent on trying to prove we MUST eat animal products, when the evidence only says that we CAN eat them?

A
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T

1 Reply

@failures art,

failures art wrote:

Setanta wrote:

So don't tell me to chill out.

I will tell you to chill out. Chill out.

I'm sorry, that just reminded me of that SNL skit....

OMG! They're break-dance fighting!

carry on.

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@failures art,

Kiss my red Irish ass with your "chill out," you're the one who needs to chill out with your food production fantasies. I see no reason to assume that your adoption of a vegan diet makes you a better steward of the earth--pumping commercial, industrially produced fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides is not on any reasonable list of environmentally responsible actitivities, and unless you're out there growing your own food, you are not much of a steward. At no point have i stated or even implied that you are malnourished, nor crazy for that matter. I suspect you either ignore the impact of your dietary choices on the environment, or you delude yourself. But your employing strraw man arguments here, you need to chill out. By the way, when you state that you are trying to be a responsible steward of the earth, you are staking out a moral position, whether or not you are willing to acknowledge it. That makes you a legitimate target for the charge of hypocrisy.

Your comment about Taco Bell and McDonald's suggest you think agronomic realities stop at the border. Do you care to tell me how many tofu eaters there are in the world? Across the entire planet? Since the original post was about meat substitutes, do you care to tell me how much of the soy bean crop goes to make those products?

You're taking a selective view of my comments. I don't object to the way you eat, i objecct to the phony moral position implied by saying that you are trying to be a responsible steward of the earth by your eating choices. I don't object to the way anyone eats--i object to the political stances they take based on what they eat.

Your idiotic comment about syrofoam and aluminum is a false analogy, resting as it does on your unsubstantiated claims. How much damage do industrially produced fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides do to the environment--can you allege that it is less of a problem for the environment than the inefficient use of resources you allege are involved in livestock production? How environmentally responsible is it to cut down rain forests to meet the demand for hardwoods by Japan and Europe, then burn off the brush and exhaust the soil in a few years with soy bean farming, thereafter allowing the land to be taken over by the local grassy weeds, after which it is used for livestock production? Do you claim that the only environmentally irresponsible part of the cycle was turning the raped land over to livestock production?

Nowhere have i stated or implied that we must eat meat.

Sure, i'll object away. You didn't have to respond to my remark which you first quoted when you decided to jump in here with both feet. Now you want to whine about the response you get. You're the one who needs to chill out because you're the one who decided to pick a fight over a remark i had made which was not addressed to you and was not made about you. How typical of your paltry rhetorical skills.

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@failures art,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12

I don't know if anyone has found a non-animal source of B12 in the years since I knew about this; doubt it. My old boss was an expert on pernicious anemia as well as ordinary b12 deficiency, p. anemia being an autoimmune hematologic disease, and ordinary nutritional b12 deficiency being just that.

I do tend to buy the generality that vitamins and minerals from plant or animal sources tend to work better in our bodies than pharmaceutical supplements , as I've seen that commented on in a lot of articles, but it would take me hours to scour my saved medical links for those comments.

1 Reply

Just read F.A. on organic yeast as a source of B12, that's interesting.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Quote:

Nowhere have i stated or implied that we must eat meat.

Quote:

I do object to those who object to meat eating by citing how environmentally irresponsible it is, or, even more ludicrous, how it is not nutritionally necessary.

Pick one.

If you don't understand the metaphor about recycling, I'll be more clear. What do pigs, cows, and chickens need to grow? What to plants need to grow? Plant based nutrition is far more efficient in its use of resources like water. Most industrial farms fed their cows what? Grass? No. Corn. So if you want to drive a spear into soy simply because it isn't perfect, then imagine growing a super huge corn crop just to feed the cows. How much water alone goes into that? We haven't even got to the part where the cows get water. So even if soy isn't perfect, it IS better than eating a product that first required a crop. Forget soy for a second, just think corn. How can you argue that eating the corn isn't any better than feeding it to the cow then eating the cow in terms of resource management?

Set, I'm not interested in a fight with you. Quite contrary, I'd say you are looking for a fight and want me to engage. If you could, can you tell me if what I'm saying to you qualifies as "in-your-face?" This will shed light on the previous encounters you've described to have had with vegans.

I stand by my original question about hostility, and my original suggestion to chill out.

A
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T

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@failures art,

To say that meat is not nutritionally necessary (your statement) and to object to the statement is not the same as saying that we must eat meat. If you want to eat a nutritionally deficient diet, that's no skin off my nose. I would consider it a criminal act on your part if you had children and did not let them get all the proteins they need, but it would still not be my business.

So, although your logical abilities don't allow you to see, i'll repeat that i've never said that we "must eat meat."

Your arguments from efficiency with regard to livestock production are meaningless here. What do you propose be done with the land and resources saved by eliminating livestock production, grow more soy beans? I didn't argue that livestock production is not inefficient, i just asked you to compare that environmental impact to the impact of industrially produced fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides--a topic you've done your best to avoid.

You're really so full of ****. If you are not hostile, if you are not looking for a fight, why did you comment on my post? It was not about you, it was not addressed to you--and yet you've commented on it, and prolonged the exchange between us.

I stand by my statement that you came looking for a fight, and that therefore, you're the one who needs to chill out. If you're not looking for a fight, stop responding to my posts.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

In that case, nevermind Set. I don't want a fight. It's not worth my time. Sorry to disappoint. Perhaps someone else will come along that wants that. I just stopped in to say I like black bean burgers and saw some unnessisary hostility. You want to be pissed off about something, and I'm nobody to deny you your indignation.

I'd rather learn about where I can find these corndogs mentioned earlier in the thread. People seem to like them.

A
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@failures art,

Quote:

I am a little disappointed to see a "design" argument out of you FM.

I dont see where you get "design" out of what I said. Structure is what it is, whether or not its "designed" is merely your hard wiring making judgements.

Dentition usually defines diet, However, like gorillas becoming exclusive vegetarians, their dentition will evolve and their guts will become more extended. Itll take several hundred generations (or not), but it will be predictable.

You may wish to revise what you think is , or is not "Design".

I prefer to see that the mountain gorilla (a species that wasnt even recognized to exist until the 1950s) are in the process of taking some adaptive evolutionary jump. In this case its dietary driven. We dont see bones in mountain gorilla poop later than the early Holocene, so this dietary change has had some cultural component. Could it be that man has forced them to modify their habitat location?

Id love to see more rigorous studies of gorillas other than the cutesy Fossey stuff. EO Wislon does lots of studies on ant but he at least comes out with prdictive and evolutionary conclusions.

1 Reply

@failures art,

You're not disappointing me. You're the one who came looking for a fight, not me. I've already pointed out that my remarks concerned militant vegans, and you admitted the type existed. Once again, if you didn't want a fight, you needn't have pursued it as you did.

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@failures art,

failures art wrote:

What to plants need to grow?

among other things - they need fertilizer of some sort - whether that is animal-based or chemical , they need fertilizer

that's one of the reasons I've become interested in learning more about the zero-waste approach - animals/plants/fish/bacteria etc, all working together

If I could find a good Ontario source like Polyface Farms, I'd be a happily smug eater of meat and veg.

The CBC piece I linked earlier in the thread is still my favourite 'bit' about Polyface and Joel Salatin, but this isn't bad coverage of a talk he gave in the area

http://www.jonathanfritz.ca/education/an-evening-with-joel-salatin-of-polyface-farms

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@ehBeth,

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Joel-Salatin-Interview.aspx

more on Salatin

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

ehBeth wrote:
be cautious about using gluten-based products if you're trying to manage your diabetes by diet
With that in mind, what's in gluten that a type-2 diabetic needs to be cautious about, and that is not in its most plausible alternatives?

sorry - big issue in Type 1 (1 in 10 Type 1 diabetics also have Celiac disease, per diabetes.org ) - not as big a problem in Type 2 - still something to be 'cautious' about

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If you are a low/no meat eater, how do you feel about meat imitations?

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