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When somebody asks why you're a vegan
(lemmy.sdf.org)
An online space for the vegans of Lemmy.
Rules and miscellaneous:
being omnivorous doesn't mean we have to eat meat, it means you get to choose, which is like, the entire point?
Do you think you would die or be unhealthy if you stopped eating meat and other animal products? If that's what you think then say that so someone has the opportunity to rebut you.
Because it's unclear what you're trying to imply by saying "we're omnivorous".
We don't need to cook the meat before eating.
But doing so lets us get more from the meat than if we don't.
Humans (or rather what we were before homo sapiens) ate raw meat for a long time before using fire for cooking was invented.
It's the sugar and (to a slightly lesser extent) carbs combined with a lifestyle that presses us into eating quick processed low quality food while not being conducive to exercise that makes Americans fat.
Sashimi exists.
And that’s probably not the only example.
Steak tartar is another easy one. There are a lot more, including the fact that rare steak is basically uncooked inside, just warmed up.
Dunno about them but I need a balance of meat and vegetables in my personal diet to be healthy.
I am curious, can you please offer your rebuttal on how a vegan diet can be as healthy as a balanced low processed food omnivore diet.
Diets with vegan restrictions consistently perform better than nonvegan diets in studies. Not all of those studies account for UPF consumption among other things, in which case vegans might just perform better because they are a more health conscious demo, but there are those that do account for that as well as interventional studies where participants do not choose what they eat.
Consumption of animal products is associated with some of the most frequent causes of death such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. One explanation of this are SFAs which have been heavily researched on their own, and are known to cause health issues even from plant sources like coconut and palm oil, but are found in most animal products whereas in most plant foods they are found only in small quantities. In addition you have animal proteins which have been shown to trigger the production of certain health negative hormones, likely do to their amino acid composition or just their quantity of protein in general, tbh I have not looked into the nuances of a excessive protein omni diet vs one with no animal products. You also just have the fact that many animal products aren't as (micro)nutritionally dense compared to many whole plant foods, even high calorie ones like pulses.
I'd be curious though as to know why omnis, especially scientifically minded ones, don't default to eating in line with vegan ethics. Since the vegan argument is an ethical one it should be on those who think we need to eat animal products to show why that is the case, animal products should have to be extremely necessary for our own survival to justify the harm we do to animals.
So much of that is misplaced anthropomorphism though. Throughout history hundreds of millions of people have wrung the neck of a chicken or dropped a lobster into boiling water. Almost none of them have cried.
TV melodrama is a weird way to decide which actions have moral weight. We're particularly sensitive to the deaths of mammals because we see human qualities in their suffering.
And i actually have a running hypothesis in my head that the whole term "anthropomorphism" is a false concept based on human's endless capacity for hubris and arrogance, like "manifest destiny". In my view 'anthropomorphism' as a term defining human traits in animals requires one to first have faith that traits such as "thinking" and "feeling" are limited to humans.
If you believe in evolution how realistic would it even be that we are alone in being able to reason? We're full of ourselves the moment we forget we're simply monkeys with the most powerful combination to come out of evolution so far: written language so that we might retain the lessons of generations past, and hands to build tools.
Who said anything about us being alone in reasoning? Sheep not driving cars and chickens not keeping diaries have better factual basis than the west being destined for white men, so I don't see the analogy except that they both involve exploitation.
I dunno I'm exposed to way more people who do cutsie voices for their "fur babies" than people willing to argue that our murderous, destructive species is exclusively superior. But then I guess that's because I spend more time with IRL friends than on vegan forums, which I imagine attract edgelords looking to troll.