Why vegan?

/ January 20, 2012 / Comments Off on Why vegan? / Veganism

Before I explain why VEGAN, I should tell you what a vegan is.

A vegan (pronounced VEE-GUN) is someone who doesn’t consume any animal products. So while vegetarians choose to avoid consuming meats, vegans also avoid eating dairy and egg

s, and anything else that was produced of animals. Now you may ask yourself “why would anyone avoid eating animal products? it is outrageous...” and indeed, most of us think of vegans as either weirdoes or hippies. However,

looking through wikipedia’s list of vegans, you’ll see that there are quite a few extraordinary individuals who choose to be vegans despite the way society thinks about it. Below are a few examples.

  1. The singers: Alanis Morissette, Bryan Adams, Fiona Apple, Moby and Thom Yorke from Radiohead.
  2. The actors: Woody Harrelson, Alicia Silverston and Joaquin Phoenix.
  3. The athletes: track and field star Carl Lewis (he started his vegan diet a year before breaking the world record), bodybuilder Robert Cheeke and the ultramarathoner Scott Jurek.
  4. Characters from the past: here it is more difficult to differentiate vegans from vegetarians (as they are no longer alive), but there are reasons to believe that Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, H.G. Wells, Franz Kafka and George Bernard Shaw were vegans, or at least vegetarians.

The complete list is way-way longer. In fact, if you also include people who lived on a strict vegetarian diet you’ll get an even longer list and more impressive list (e.g. with Mahatma Gandhi in it).

So if some people say that all vegans are weird hippies, the first two items on the list prove the contrary. Other people say that one cannot be a vegan and be healthy, but then the third item on the list shows that you can even be a vegan and a healthy super-athlete. And yeah, one might say that human beings need animal products in order for our brain to function properly: this, of course, is nonsense considering the last item on the list.

So let’s go back to the original question, why would anyone avoid eating animal products?

Different people would give different answers to this question. I would like to start with what made me realize that there is something terribly wrong with what we eat. That’s why I’ll concentrate mostly on the most innocent of all animal products, and possibly the most deadly one: MILK.

Milk? What’s the problem with milk? Aren’t we human beings mammals? Mammals are supposed to drink milk! Ever since we were little we were told that it has a lot of protein to build muscles and calcium to make our bones stronger! Milk is great for you!

This is an example of what I usually hear when I tell people that I don’t consume dairy products. For me, it is the tragic proof that in todays world, companies that are loaded with money can manipulate the media, the medical system and us to make more money. So why shouldn’t we consume dairy? There are many reasons...

Common sense

Yes, we human beings are mammals. And yes, mammals drink milk. After all, that’s a part of the deal of being a mammal. So just like the calf drinks the cow’s milk, a human baby drinks his mother's milk. However, unlike cows (for example) who consume the diary only while in infancy, we consume milk our entire life! In fact, we are the only mammal who consume milk throughout its life. Not only that, we are the only mammal who consumes another mammal's milk!

Did you think about that? We are the only mammal who drinks the milk of another mammal, in this case, a cow! The cow produces the milk for her calves, but we humans use it for ourselves... To understand how distorted this is, think about it: have you ever seen a dog in nature drinking monkey’s milk? Or a pig drinking human’s milk? The mere idea sounds ridiculous, outrageous and kind of disgusting, and yet, we human-beings drink cow’s milk! What kind of sense does that make?

You may see:
"Well, we human beings are unlike other mammals. We are special."

Hahahaha sure we are. If that’s what you think, then go for it, and enjoy cow’s milk, after all - it is delicious. However I would suggest reading the next items on the list beforehand.

Health

I am not a doctor nor a nutritionist therefore I would not ask you to trust me about these matters, and you should definitely not. You should read books about nutrition that were written by experts that spent their entire life studying it. I think that the most comprehensive study on the subject can be found in the book “The China Study” by Dr. T. Colin Campbell. He knows what he is talking about way more than I do, as he is one of the leading nutrition experts in the world.
In short, the book shows and discusses hundreds of correlations between consumption of animal products (in particular diary and meat) and pretty much any deadly disease that will cross your mind! This includes but not limited to cancer, heart attacks, diabetes and even osteoporosis! Yes, there is strong evidence showing that milk, the one food that is claimed to be good for our bones by the milk industry is one of the main reasons for osteoporosis. As an example to some of the claims I made here look at the figure on the right, which shows the correlation between consuming animal protein and hip fracture incidence (which is usually due to osteoporosis.) Unlike what we expect, more animal protein means higher chances of suffering from osteoporosis! Moreover, most cases of cancer, heart attacks and diabetes are due to consumption of animal products.

The poor cows

“Oh my god! He is going to preach about animal rights now!”
As a person who used to be a passionate meat eater that’s what I used to think to myself when someone talked to me about animal rights. I mean, we all know that there is a food chain. Human beings are above all other animals in the food chain, therefore we eat animals and use their by-products (such as milk.) This is how mother nature functions!
In most circumstances I could not agree more. After all, that’s the way I used to think about it myself. Nevertheless, we have separated ourselves from the food chain as far as we could possibly go. Humans are no longer hunter-gatherers. In 99+% of today’s world, we go to the supermarket and purchase food. The animals (i.e. the food) go through an agonizing process, in which they grow in inhumane conditions. They no longer wonder around in nature until a hungry hunter runs after them to catch his next dinner. They are grown purely to be used for our needs, in industrial mass-destruction factories. We all criticize often the social injustices in various parts of the world (no examples needed), but this is nothing in comparison what happens with animals. Today, about
475,000,000,000
land animals are killed by human beings every year! This is not a typo at all. This number is absurd! It means that for each person who died in either first or second world war, more than 13,000 land animals are killed in only one year! And this number does not include any seafood or fish.

Our home

Let me just quote Peter Singer (1990) on this:
"[T]hose who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests.…"
Indeed, livestock itself is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions and 64% of anthropogenic ammonia emissions (ammonia kills humans...). In fact, take all the corn and soy beans used to feed animals around the world, and you have enough food to make sure there will be no more hungry men, women and children in the world. Enough said?
So with that said, what can you do?!
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