It's funny how in these type of threads people like to play dumb.
Obviously no one is saying vegans live forever. It's not what this is about. Even if we all die eventually, why not have the best quality if life possible and have as few health problems possible, if any at all?
Vegans look like cancer patients and are slowly dying, and vegan celebrities are lying. These are some bold takes.
A simple Google search will tell you vegans actually have a longer life expectancy (among other health benefits). Although it's not totally clear why this is.
So maybe the vegans who look like cancer patients to you are in fact old healthy vegans ;-)
Just walk into any significant veg(an) restaurant at a busy hour and look around you. You' might even find the opposite of what you are made to believe to be true.
But no matter what, I'm afraid you will convince yourself you don't have the obligation to adjust any corrupted views, but do the opposite because you can't handle the reality. And sadly you're far from alone.
And actually I get it. It's not easy to open your eyes and acknowledge your part in the (largely unnecessary) immense suffering we bring to billions of animals each year, and the destruction that comes with animal agriculture.
But please don't make it harder for the people who are trying to change things a bit, and stop spreading your made up stuff and ancient myths.
For me all this BS is the only actually difficult part of being a vegan.
They will not literally die but they will not be healthy at all, many of them will likely live less than non-vegans. It is a dangerous lifestyle motivated by poor reasoning.
How do we explain the vegans and the vegetarians who still get plenty of heart disease? If veganism were a silver bullet, I'd be the first one to jump on that bandwagon, today.
Yes exploiting animals for eggs and milk (and all the death that accompanies it) isn't moral when it's for pleasure and not for staying alive. No a plant based diet is not deadly, in fact vegans tend to live longer healthier lives. The longest lived population studied was essentially (over 95%) vegan.
correct. my vegan in-laws, have been vegan for 40 years now and they are in very good condition for their age. Saying it's "unhealthy" with no nuance is a ridiculous statement. It is in a no-way a fact. People that speak like this give people that speak in facts a bad name.
It is impossible for me to say this person is "wrong" but I figure I may as well throw my data points into the graph - I've been vegan for 11 years and I am more healthy on every level than I've ever been. I went vegan in my late teens when I was done growing, my younger brother went vegan at 12 a year after me and is now taller/broader than me. I know many people who have been vegan over 20 years who are in great health.
Obviously that doesn't just apply to vegans but regardless, the secret is this: you have to hack your diet! You have to learn about nutrition in general and then in relation to YOUR body and experience. There is no silver bullet and I am glad there isn't: life should be a constant practice of critical thinking and mindfulness. "Practicing" veganism is a great way to constantly engage with the world in an active manner.
Well, statistically speaking, vegans live longer, right? That does not necessarily imply that all the benefits come from the diet, and it certainly does not say that going vegan is guaranteed to make you live longer, but it does mean that if you choose a random vegan they will be healthier than a random omnivore.
So I think if you have to choose between the statements "vegans are healthy" or "vegans are unhealthy," there's not a lot of evidence to argue for the latter.
Vegans disagree. We live. We thrive. We have fun. And we do not inflict suffering on individuals of other species as far as reasonably possible (thus allowing for pest control and some animal testing of essential drugs).
Well, if you can't understand, I guess you should hear some counterpoints.
1) Quite a lot of time, we will hear from the vegan/vegetarian community that humans were not designed to eat meat, we were only designed to eat in a vegan/vegetarian manner. This is done by selectively ignoring a lot of evidence. This pisses people off when it is caught.
2) We have some real-life study evidence that vegans/vegetarians live less long than people who have some meat. There's a sweet spot on the curve between deep-fried steaks every day and no meat ever. And yet the veggie crowd will over-simplify and say that their diet is the way to go if you want to live longer. Again, it's another case of manipulating the evidence and this also pisses people off when caught.
Basically, the whackadoo types are running (and ruining) public relations for this kind of thing and that isn't working out.
I trust my observations of people I know more than the claims of celebrities. The vegans I've met have pallor skin, very low muscle mass, and look 10-15 years older than they really are. Vegan diets are very often deficient in various nutrients so their bodies start to cannibalize muscle mass and skin tissue, leading to weakness and premature aging. That's what my observations and intuition tells me.
If you don't want to eat cute animals that's fine, I think you can be reasonably healthy eating a mostly vegetarian diet with some eggs and small fish. But complete veganism is slow death, I won't go there.
First: veganism does not protect against the vast majority of diseases. There's only a few. Furthermore, vegans are famous in medicine for developing weird diseases. How ? They forget, in their diet, something essential, which often first results in reduced immune response, which results in a weird infection, which results in severe symptoms. And to add a cherry on that cake: when you start being vegan there are many things you can do without for years, so you can't easily compensate for it: the actual problem occurs many months to years after going vegan, and occurs very suddenly.
Vegan patients are also famous for not believing the diagnosis, and after specific pills fix the problems, they get released, start the same vegan regimen again, and have the same problem again months later, only usually worse.
Also, about screwing ... you realize this means that in 10 years or so screwing, having sex with multiple partners, will be like Russian roulette, right ? Almost all diseases are sexually transmittable and if a few dozen of the easier to transmit ones become incurable ...
Here's reason #4. You'll look younger, have better skin, and live longer. Vegans typically live 15 years longer and don't have many of the degenerative diseases which are caused by meat and dairy.
I was pushing my parents to let me become vegan when I turned a teenager. I stopped eating meat on my 16th birthday despite their assertions that I would die. Gave up dairy a few years later, which I only ate because the dairy industry's advertising is so damn strong.
I'll turn 46 this summer, so it's been almost 30 years, and people think I'm 10-15 years younger. Teenage girls still try to pick me up. My fiance has been vegan for something like 20 years and is 40 this summer. Last year, two high school kids invited her to the prom.
And reason #5, which was the primary reason I went vegan, followed by having a sense of ethics and feeling it was wrong to enslave, torture, and murder animals, because meat is yummy: Eating rotting corpses is pretty gross when you think about it.
Obviously no one is saying vegans live forever. It's not what this is about. Even if we all die eventually, why not have the best quality if life possible and have as few health problems possible, if any at all?
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