Response to misleading vegan information

People are free to choose their own diets (if they're lucky enough to live in a place of abundance). If you wanna be vegan/veggie that's fine by me. People should always be free to eat what they want. I eat meat.

This is my response to an article published by @apolymask --
Are those who kill and eat animals more manly and are those who choose not to do that more feminine

The problem is there's an awful lot of misleading info out there, encouraging people to go vegan. I'm not saying @apolymask is trying to mislead anyone but if, like the old me, they bought into the vegan agenda, they are passing on information they believe is true. The article references another piece which makes lots of claims that are based either on dodgy scientific studies or just pulled out of thin air.

The Vegan Machine is tweaking your vanity, health-consciousness, morality, ethics, even your sex life! It's attacking at every angle. I hope my response will help to even the balance a bit.

I was vegan/veggie for 17 years and it seriously damaged my health.
Humans are not herbivores. We may have empathy for sentient beings but our bodies require the nutrients contained in their bodies, just as plants rely on the decaying flesh and bacteria of animals.

are those who kill and eat animals more manly? And... those who choose not … more feminine?

I'm not more manly because I eat meat (I'm a woman).

… they think our Paleo ancestors … lived … off of hunting when the fossil evidence actually shows they ate almost entirely plants and rarely ever ate animal products.

That's inaccurate. The timing is a bit off. The precursors to humans ate veggie, but around 2.3 million years ago our human ancestors started eating meat. We evolved. Eating meat caused us to:

• grow larger brains
• evolve teeth better suited for eating meat and less efficient for chewing hard nuts/tubers
• shrink our gut size

The fossil record is packed with evidence of meat-eating. Whenever they find human remains, they always find animal bones that show signs of butchery or chew marks nearby. If you look at cultures living in ways their ancestors did, you will see they subsist on mostly animal products because these are abundant, year round. They're not seasonal, like fruits and veg.

not hunting or killing sentient beings unless you absolutely have to for survival

We do need to eat animals for survival. Studies show that vegans are more likely to be infertile – not good for the future of the species. Nobody has ever discovered a vegan culture on this planet. If they ever existed, they're long gone and so are their genes. All primitive cultures, living as their ancestors did, rely on animal products to survive and thrive.

The massive food industry has a lot to answer for in its treatment of animals. You'd have to be a total psychopath to condone their methods. Proper farms (being squeezed out of existence by Big Food in collusion with Government) treat their animals well.

It's not exploitation. It's a symbiotic arrangement. The animal is fed its natural diet, given shelter and healthcare, and provided a safe area to roam. In the wild, prey animals nearly always die painful, long-drawn-out deaths as a result of predator attacks (predators have no empathy for their prey in nature). Farm animals are humanely killed. Most animals are rendered unconscious first or the death takes a couple of seconds – a better death than many humans can ever hope for.

why kill another sentient being if you don't "need" to?

This rubs both ways. More animals are 'needlessly' killed in agriculture, where they grow veggie crops. They spray the fields with chemicals, which decimates the insect population, and small animals (mice, rabbits, moles, etc.) are chewed up in their combine harvesters as they reap the crop. Not only this, but the large fields destroy ecosystems and cause mighty damage to the soil -- an environmental disaster looming. Also, these veggie-friendly crop farmers pay the evil factory farms (where they torture and slaughter these animals) for tonnes of animal shit to fertilise the soil. So, the veggies you eat aren't exactly cruelty-free.

find another alternative with overwhelming plant options

Unfortunately, there are no alternative options. Essential nutrients are found in abundance in animal products. Essential is essential. Plants contain only some of these. And they're difficult to assimilate because our bodies are not designed to process them. We need other animals to process the plant matter into something we can efficiently digest and utilise. Our bodies are not designed for it. If you feed any species an unnatural diet, its health, and the health of the species, will deteriorate.

Improving our health and the health of our families is manly.

In Italy, they're in the process of passing a law that will make it illegal to feed a child a vegan-only diet because the evidence shows it endangers their life. Kids have died!

Vegan Men Have a More Attractive Scent

Lol. I used to hang around with vegans. I can testify that they sometimes smell terrible, fart too much, and tend to block the toilet.

Vegan men have higher … testosterone

Not true. In order to maintain good hormone balance, you need saturated fatty acids which are found primarily in animal fats. Cholesterol is an important factor in testosterone production. Cholesterol – it's not the bad guy. Vegan diets are woefully low in good quality fats, consequently inhibiting the availability of testosterone (and other manly hormones). Link to study on steroids and sex hormone-binding globulin levels in adult men – veggie vs omnivore.

Plant foods such as soy, tofu, fake veggie meats, certain beans, beers... contain high levels of phytoestrogens which lower testosterone and boost estradiol. The more of these products you consume, the more likely it is that your male body will exhibit signs like man boobs (MOOBS), reduced sperm quality/quantity and testicle shrinkage. It's especially dangerous for boys to overload their diet with phytoestrogens while they're still developing.

Vegan Men Live Longer

No. The study your guy is probably sourcing was done on Seventh-Day Adventists. This is a skewed study because these guys also exercise more than the general population, avoid smoking and drinking and are usually more health conscious. All these other factors play into their slightly longer lifespan.

An Australian study (done properly – adjusting for factors like smoking, BMI, lifestyle, etc.) of over a quarter of a million people found that vegans and vegetarians do not live longer than anyone else. There was another study done here in the UK on about 60K people with the same outcome.

Vegan Men Have Less Erectile Dysfunction

I don't know about erectile dysfunction -- I never tested all of my friends -- but lower testosterone negatively affects the sex drive.

Skin: again, I've seen evidence of poor skin in vegans and vegetarians too. You only have to look at YouTube and scour a few vegan channels to see they are often emaciated, with dark circles under their eyes, aged, and looking a bit off-colour.

Vitamin A and D affect skin hormones – eat more liver (Vitamin A) and get more sun. You also need a good balance of essential fatty acids to overcome problems with inflamed, dry or itchy skin. Our omega-3/omega-6 ratios are out of balance in the west. In primitive cultures, eating their natural diet, there's no acne.

Studies show that vegans are usually deficient in Vitamin B12 (OMG where to start with the negatives of this – brain shrinkage, depression, cardiovascular problems, blood clotting disorders), calcium, iron, zinc, carnitine, carnosine.

Look younger. FUN FACT Did you know – red meat is high in compounds such as carsonine and carnitine that inhibit glycation (damage to proteins including skin proteins). These compounds slow the ageing process. Actually, they do a lot more but I'm already getting wordy.

I'm not saying I don't care about animals. I do. I like animals. I want them to be happy and healthy and live a good life, free from fear and pain. But I also need to eat them. Please be careful with information you find published by vegan or vegetarian societies. They are very liberal with statistics and the truth.

You can find lots of useful information about nutrition here. Thanks for the link @sift666

All pics are freely available online (pixabay and wikimedia) and labelled for reuse