Javizy wrote:

I asked you the question because I thought maybe you had some evidence. The detrimental effects of pesticides are well documented. Just type the word into the New Scientist search. Notice how many of the studies are about long-term exposure. Why are they documenting these things after the FDA-approved tests you have so much faith in have already been carried out?

I typed in "pesticide" in NewScientist and paged all the way through to page 10 (around 2004). I spotted 2 (maybe a 3rd) articles dealing with pesticides and negative effects on humans. In both articles the effects were the result of consistent direct exposure to large amounts of pesticide. Basically people that were farmers or gardeners that used pesticides. This is basically the same thing as taking mice and giving excessive doses of something to see what happens. In the most recent article there seems to be a link between pesticides and Parkinson. A finding like this might predicate the need for some study to see if minor exposure would pose a risk (ie: Exposure that a normal consumer would get). As I said, the FDA may be aware of these kind of effects and deemed it safe since it would require more exposure to the chemical than most consumers will ever see. In much the same way many drugs you induce might cause nasty problems if you suddenly decided to take 20x the recommended dose every day. Especially if the drug is additive in your system and isn't broken down and removed from the body.

What are the other things that tax the body just as much? If I were able to, I'd put only clean food and water into my body, since that's what it was designed to run on.

Junk food. But even eating too much of other stuff (sodium, fats, carbs) will tax the body and lead to health problems. Thats what I meant by "other things taxing the body;" not just man made stuff.

You seem to think it's fine to consume a variety of toxins as long as they don't ostensibly harm you, or at least haven't yet been proven to, whereas I'd rather avoid anything that doesn't benefit my health and question those attempting to force junk into the food chain and environment.

This is a pretty nonsensical statement.
"Its ok to eat arsenic as long as it doesn't apparently hurt you, or hasn't been proven to hurt you." is what you essentially said. When you call something a "toxin" you are stating that you already know it is dangerous. The definition of "toxin" is "a poisonous substance." So its ridiculous to say "apparently proven not to harm or not yet proven" if you are already calling it a toxin.
So lets remove the loaded word here "Its ok to eat something as long as it doesn't apparently hurt you, or hasn't been proven to hurt you."
Why yes! I actually do believe its perfectly fine to eat stuff that I don't think is harmful to me and hasn't been proven to be harmful to me yet.

I don't know what media movement you're talking about, and I don't like arguing in extremes.

Fox news.

We shouldn't have to use words like cancer and immunodeficiency to say these things aren't good for our health. Health shouldn't be defined as the absence of disease, it should be a state of wellness, and there are few synthetic substances that can contribute to this. Milk used to be toxin-free and loaded with vitamins, enzymes, probiotics and healthier fats. Maybe a move away from that was inevitable for socio-economic reasons, but that doesn't mean everything that's happening to our food is above reproach and should go unquestioned because the FDA approved it.

Please define "state of wellness" because I seem to define that as "not being sick."  If it inevitably comes that 90% of food needs to be grown and nurtured using homegrown man-made science stuff to make sure we have enough affordable food for people, and said food that you consume, doesn't make you sick. Where is the problem?

Last edited by vix86 (2012 February 11, 4:28 pm)

Aijin wrote:

Instead, I focused on the reasons why many people stop drinking milk which most of the time is for the benefit of their health. The truth is, eating meat and dairy is linked to heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, and even impotence.

[source needed]

Seriously though, we had a thread about this a while back and the main findings we dug up from meta-analyses etc was that EXCESSIVE meat/dairy/egg consumption is linked to negative health impacts, but there was no huge difference between people who eat moderate amounts of these foods when compared to vegetarians when other factors are controlled for. Maybe the studies carried out so far haven't been powerful enough to find differences that actually exist, but at least they don't seem to be as big as they are often made out to be by pro-vegan arguers.

Even though I'm not a vegetarian myself for a number of reasons, I think it's great that more and more people choose to eat more vegetarian/vegan food as long as it doesn't hurt them. However, blanket statements that can't be backed up very well and also phrased in a way that tries to evoke guilt/unreasonable fear from people "on the other side" is detrimental to the vegan/vegetarian cause in my opinion. It mostly leads to the non-vegetarians feeling insulted and becoming overly defensive and it hampers the debate. I might be wrong and in that case I'm sorry, but it seems to me like there is a very strong tendency for Americans to resort to these overly aggressive tactics. So often people are focusing too much on just saying that the ones who disagree with them are flat out WRONG and become more preoccupied with proving that instead of actively promoting change in the best way possible. It easily happens that it seems like you're trying to boast about how you're on the moral high ground and looking down on/insulting the ones who aren't already there, like you're "bullying" people into joining your cause (and the ones who do fall for that are much less likely to stay with the cause because they don't feel like their decision wasn't really their own).

Aijin wrote:

Many people don't understand that humans aren't meant to drink milk.

Most humans have been drinking milk for many generations and a considerable proportion of us carry alleles that have been selected for because they made it possible for us to drink milk well into adulthood. So speaking purely biologically, yes, many of us are "meant" to drink milk, we are prepared for it. That doesn't mean that we must drink it or anything, but saying that drinking milk is only a societal trend that is working against what is "natural" is, I would say, a mistake. This is again an example of claiming that the behavior of whoever disagrees with you is totally and utterly wrong. Besides, similar claims have been made about vegetarian foods that have become more popular recently (eg oat), that have been said to only suit some purely herbivoric animals and that they are examples of us forcing our omnivoric, human bodies to deal with more fibers etc. than is "natural".

The truth is, there are plenty of foods that some of us can eat and some of us can't, and many many foods that at first won't work for a person but that our bodies can learn to become accommodated for. Trying to get a monopoly on what is "best" and "most natural" for us in terms of diet is a futile task, at least right now, it's better to stay more balanced and promote consumption of the core foodstuffs that you think are beneficial to almost anyone's health. When criticising other diets than your own it's usually best to not be too extreme and qualitatively dismiss foods, saying something about the quantities of foods consumed usually makes more sense and will be more accepted by whoever you're arguing with.

I mean, it would obviously be better for the US or any Western country to have 50% of the population replace half of all their meat consumption with vegetarian foods than to have another 5% of the population to drop their meat consumption completely and live as vegetarians. Extremist views might be more likely to bring along the latter, but they aren't very effective for achieving the first. So as a vegetarian, saying that people are either with you or against you has a seriously negative impact on people's fondness of vegetarian foods and it won't do much for improving the meat:non-meat food ratio in the world, which reasonably ought to be your main goal.

I didn't mean to make a strawman out of Simmons' full message, I only picked out these two quotes to make a point and explicate on what I think is a big flaw in his style of argumenting. I'm not really against him and what he's trying to say, I hope it didn't sound that way.

Last edited by Surreal (2012 February 12, 5:26 am)

vix86 wrote:

I typed in "pesticide" in NewScientist and paged all the way through to page 10 (around 2004). I spotted 2 (maybe a 3rd) articles dealing with pesticides and negative effects on humans. In both articles the effects were the result of consistent direct exposure to large amounts of pesticide. Basically people that were farmers or gardeners that used pesticides. This is basically the same thing as taking mice and giving excessive doses of something to see what happens. In the most recent article there seems to be a link between pesticides and Parkinson. A finding like this might predicate the need for some study to see if minor exposure would pose a risk (ie: Exposure that a normal consumer would get). As I said, the FDA may be aware of these kind of effects and deemed it safe since it would require more exposure to the chemical than most consumers will ever see. In much the same way many drugs you induce might cause nasty problems if you suddenly decided to take 20x the recommended dose every day. Especially if the drug is additive in your system and isn't broken down and removed from the body.

Might predicate a need? Again we need to be sure these things cause a serious, life-ruining, irreversible disease before we start worrying, right? There's no midpoint between health and Parkinson's or whatever other diseases end up being linked to these things when scientists eventually get round to it.

vix86 wrote:

Junk food. But even eating too much of other stuff (sodium, fats, carbs) will tax the body and lead to health problems. Thats what I meant by "other things taxing the body;" not just man made stuff.

A small amount of education would overcome this example. I have no choice but to buy the majority of my wholefoods non-organic. Do you think junk food is pesticide free anyway? There's literally no escaping them, so I'd really like to be as positive as you.

vix86 wrote:

Why yes! I actually do believe its perfectly fine to eat stuff that I don't think is harmful to me and hasn't been proven to be harmful to me yet.

Well, there you go. That's your choice. Why am I not allowed to object to the inclusion of antibiotics, pesticides, hormones, steroids and other drugs, viruses etc in milk? You haven't done anything to show that they're beneficial, which is what I want from my food, and the "evidence" that they're not harmful is their FDA-approved testing that can't possibly gauge their long-term impact on health through the very nature of the methodology. This isn't good enough, and I'm allowed to say that even if you're completely content with it. It's not going to stop me buying certain products containing these things though, because I have no choice.

vix86 wrote:

Please define "state of wellness" because I seem to define that as "not being sick."  If it inevitably comes that 90% of food needs to be grown and nurtured using homegrown man-made science stuff to make sure we have enough affordable food for people, and said food that you consume, doesn't make you sick. Where is the problem?

What society are you living in? Fatigue, muscle aches, skin problems, heartburn, constipation and god knows what else are part of every day life for "healthy" people. They don't have diabetes, heart disease, cancer or some other diagnosable disease, so they're healthy. The toxins we've been discussing don't, as far as we know, cause any diseases, so they're compatible with health as it's currently perceived. My problem is that I don't want to be "not sick", I want to feel good.

kainzero wrote:

i don't think you can look at any food in life and say it's designed by nature to eat though. nature is terrible and awful. some things taste delicious and have terrible toxins in them. why would nature do that to us?

Ignorant.

kainzero wrote:

it is difficult to cook all the time for yourself though. it's so convenient to grab food from fast food joints or restaurants. cooking requires going to the store, deciding on buying ingredients, storing it properly, processing/preparing it, cooking it... etc.

and then to be socially responsible, i have to go to specific stores (farmer's markets/fish markets, whole foods, trader joe's etc.) which aren't as convenient in terms of hours or days open as conventional supermarkets. i can also find specific restaurants which could be even more of a hassle and with even higher prices.

Lazy.

kainzero wrote:

on top of that, there's the fact that i'm carrying the burden of society and it's not fair that i'm doing that while my neighbor next to me buys cheap food, has more money to spend, and in the event of organic/"good" food becoming cheaper due to my patronage, they will be around to benefit from it without having to have had invested in it.

Stupid.

You're not carrying any burden.  In today's world, organic food is a privilege.  It is harder to grow food organically for the current market system.  If you have the money to go to the top-pick and organic markets, then I don't see why you're complaining.  More thought, labor, and land has to go into producing organic food, and in the end, the consumer has to pay for it.  The food that your neighbor is eating is not as good, and they know it.  Hell, if your neighbor wants to eat cardboard boxes for every meal and saves money that way, what right do you have to tell him not to? 

kainzero wrote:

it's too much to ask from for an individual. i'd like to see more government policy on the issue.

I'd hate to see the day I can't *individually* choose what I want to eat, or the food I want to buy.  That people like you can vote is frightening.  I realize that you're trying to help, but please, don't help us out of our rights.

vix86 wrote:

@Surreal:
Without intellectually dishonest arguments though the vegan/vegetarian movement doesn't stand a chance at trying to win masses over to their cause.

What intellectually dishonest arguments are you talking about? While health arguments are more subjective since well balanced omnivore diets are certainly healthy when one takes care in where they purchase their foods from, the environmental and ethical reasons for opposing factory farms are huge. There is nothing "intellectually dishonest" about the hard science and statistics supporting the benefits of reducing our meat consumption in favor for plant-based foods. Does that mean that everyone has to go full vegetarian or vegan? No, but doing things like replacing foods high in saturated fat (meats and dairies) with ones rich in polyunsaturated fats (seeds, nuts, vegetables oils), (here's a recent study by Harvard on that: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/inf … ed.1000252)  and adding more plant foods (high in nutrient density, fiber, and phytochemicals) into our diet are unarguably beneficial to our health.

Then just consider the environmental impacts of meat production:

-A single lb of beef requires around 1,800-2,500 gallons of water to produce. Poultry is around the 700 gallons range, but even that is significantly more than plant foods.

-According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, and their massive multi-hundred-page report on the environmental impact of our meat industries, meat production is more responsible for global warming than world transportation as a whole (yep, eating beef has worse of an impact than all the cars, planes, trucks, and boats on the planet combined). For more on the environmental impacts, and all the research backing up those claims, you can read the full report at  http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

And then we get into the issues of pollutants, severe ecosystem damage, and other ills of the modern animal industries. These are not "intellectually dishonest arguments" but black and white facts. Whether or not consumers care about how their food choices impact their health, the health of the environment, and the health of the billions of animals consumed each other, is entirely up to them. But millions DO care, and want their daily choices to have as little of a negative impact as possible, so they do make the change and either reduce their consumption, or eliminate it all together. There is nothing intellectually dishonest about that, and the arguments are entirely valid and rational.

As for lesser developed nations: if anything the meat consumption in many of these countries is less than that of the developed world, since meat is less accessible and more expensive than things like grains. India has a huge vegetarian culture (some estimates say that nearly half the country is lacto-vegetarian) and has had it since ancient times.

Javizy wrote:

Well, there you go. That's your choice. Why am I not allowed to object to the inclusion of antibiotics, pesticides, hormones, steroids and other drugs, viruses etc in milk? You haven't done anything to show that they're beneficial, which is what I want from my food, and the "evidence" that they're not harmful is their FDA-approved testing that can't possibly gauge their long-term impact on health through the very nature of the methodology. This isn't good enough, and I'm allowed to say that even if you're completely content with it. It's not going to stop me buying certain products containing these things though, because I have no choice.

So everything that goes into food must ALWAYS produce a net-positive in what it does. Simply producing a net-neutral isn't good enough. If I add something to the food which doesn't change anything about the food and to the best of our knowledge doesn't cause the food to be dangerous, that isn't good enough? That's ridiculous.
But hows this for a benefit. The food probably won't kill you but it doesn't make you 'fly as high as a kite' or 'lift cars with one hand' or 'live to be 300;' but it does allow me to buy affordable produce and still have enough money to do other things. I'd call that a benefit.

My problem is that I don't want to be "not sick", I want to feel good.

Then maybe whats needed in your food is some cocaine or something. But none of the food I really eat makes me "feel good" or like superman, but it doesn't make me feel like I ate something dieing or that I'm going to catch cancer.

The thing is your arguments basically amount to just not trusting the system. You don't believe the FDA is being truthful or at the very least not doing a good enough job in its testing. At best you are coming off to me as a 'concerned party' and at worst as a conspiracy nut that believes vaccinations will give kids autism, 9/11 was a govt. conspiracy, and the moon landings were faked.

---

Surreal wrote:

... I do believe that you completely misinterpreted my post and I don't even feel compelled to answer your post since it's so far off from being a sensible critique of vegans and vegetarians as a group, it's reducing them to some crude extremist caricature. Also, there are "less developed countries" and countries with vegetarian cultures that go way back and were vegetarian before industrialism even took hold, eg some groups in India.

Well obviously you know what your post meant, best. So if I misinterpreted it then I misinterpreted it. I was merely pointiung out that your post critiqued Aijin on his wrongful claim about "meats being harmful and unnatural to humans" and I was commenting on this fact.

I didn't mean my post to be a critique of the right or wrongness of the vegan/vegetarian movements. I meant my post to point out that arguments like the above are what get used as a way to try and sway the masses to vegan/vegetarian ideas. Could you argue that the movements are healthy? Yes, but I have never ever met any vegetarian trying to strongly sway people, trying to sway them because of their health. Animal rights were always the overarching cause.

India is actually the only country I am aware of that fits that bill and even then I believe they had people eating chickens and what not. But to what degree I'm not sure, I know at present, for instance, that McDs doesn't sell hamburgers but they do sell chicken, fish, and soy based products.

----

@Aijin:
Alright, saying "adding more plants to your diet is healthier" is great, I can get behind that. However the unspoken is also that "You can also still eat meat in moderation and it won't ruin you."  Its dishonest though to use it though like: "Plants are a million times better than any meat you stuff in your mouth; so we need to legislate against the consumption of meat." I've heard it phrased like this many times and I do find this intellectually dishonest (Supplementing aspects of a vegetarian diet can make you healthier but that does not mean meat is any less healthy). There is truth in the statement but its being construed in such a way to try to sway judgement and affect votes.

The figure on water use is pretty crazy and tabbing through the FAO article it would seem at least on the surface that there are some majors issues present with water use in animal production. Its an obvious though that animals will use a lot of water (compared to plants), but its not as if water is used and then disappears. It does flow back into the system. The paper mentions there are issues with this plus water pollution, but it also mentions that there are a number of things that can be done to mitigate and improve the situation instead of treating it like "business as usual."

On the point of global warming though. Could you point me at the place in the article where it says outright that animals contribute more than cars, planes, and human use. Because I've found lines here and there that suggest that really animals on the whole only add a small percentage to the overall carbon footprint. Whether this is reason enough to come down hard on curbing the production of animal produce or not is a separate issue. You could just as easily say your efforts are better focused on trying to cut back on fossil fuel use in cars and what not, or combating a bigger issue in global warming which is poorer countries burnings loads of coal.

Pollutants. Again, same as above, plenty of ways to curb and mitigate it. Then the question of is it reason enough to completely curb/cut animal production?

Surreal wrote:

Either way, my main point, which I think you agree with, was that there are people who are born with certain attributes that enable them to drink milk when they are adults and so the statement I was quoting, "Many people don't understand that humans aren't meant to drink milk.", is false, unless you really bend your interpretation of it, and at that point you'd still have to admit that Simmons made a mistake at that part by being so unclear.

Icecream posted the subject I was looking for When I asked for the research I didn't mean to come off as sounding that it didn't exist, I just couldn't think of the term for it. But as that Wiki page shows, while certain populations have grown adaptions for consuming milk, the majority of the world population is still lactose intolerant. I still feel that the statement that humans aren't meant to drink milk is fair, since most of the planet remains intolerant to it, and it's only by forcing it upon generation after generation that the body has been able to adapt to it. But humans have adapted to other foods as well that were initially problematic health-wise, so the question of what we are/aren't meant to eat/drink is definitely highly debatable. My personal stance is that milk of for calves, not humans, but I definitely see validity to the argument that if humans have come to continue producing lactase into adulthood through biological adaptation then it's now a food natural to consume.

Surreal wrote:

I hope my motivations for writing the first post have become more transparent now!

Thank you for the clarifications I agree with pretty much everything you said, and it is very unfortunate that some individuals try to use aggressive propaganda to convert others, or look down on others as inferior just because they don't follow the same ideologies. I certainly understand why environmentalists might get very ticked off when they see someone throw away a glass bottle right when there's a recycling bin right there, or when people concerned about animal welfare get irked when people buy from McDonald's rather than a local farm, but anger doesn't change the other party's mind. Leading by example, and politely informing people, is the best way to social change, I think. Sometimes large scale change just takes a lot of time, can't try to change the world in a day. I mean just look how long it took to eradicate slavery, introduce democracy, and women's rights. Thousands of years! Hopefully people wake up to the realities of our food industry sooner than that, though, since we won't have much of a planet left if it takes us that long

kazelee wrote:

kainzero wrote:

to buy 100% grass-fed meat i have to go the farmer's market on saturday early in the morning or pay jacked up prices at WF. (and generally grass-fed meat can be $4-$5 more per lb, without the "WF tax").

I don't think that's jacked up. I consider it inflation adjusted. The cost of meat (or pretty much anything) either lowers, stays the same or goes up more slowly due to cutting costs wherever they may lie.

nah, i think it's just whole foods. they're not called "whole paycheck" for nothing.

farmer's market is a lot cheaper.
you can also order from the farms directly. most of them sell only in bulk though, so you need freezer room, which i don't have.

IceCream wrote:

re: lactose.

Actually, most Europeans have the gene necessary to break down lactose into adulthood, so that argument doesn't really work for Europeans and those of European descent.

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

This wiki page also suggests that these genes have been selected for precisely because milk IS beneficial to health into adulthood.

I don't think it necessarily follows that because it was selected for at some time in human history, that it therefore necessarily is good for us, or even not bad for us.

Just to get an idea of time spans, wikipedia tells me that anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil record starting about 195,000 years ago, and diverged from neanderthals about 500,000 years ago. primates began appearing around 65,000,000 years ago. The genes for lactose tolerance have only been selected for for the past 10,000 years coinciding rather nicely with the agricultural/neolithic revolution. So over 185,000 years of no milk, and just 10,000 of milk. That is a tiny amount of time in evolutionary terms (I think I can safely say we're still in beta phase). It seems (to me at least) that the mutations for lactase persistence could have been selected simply because they would a) allow for a greater calorie intake and b) allow you to live longer and healthier within a society that drinks a lot of milk. If it's milk or nothing, either because of famine/drought or simply because that's where the productive resources were directed, then yeah being able to drink milk is a good thing. At least it keeps you alive long enough to reach primary reproductive capacity (16 - 30?). But we've only had 10,000 years to iron out a lot of the bugs, and that's if you're european.

vix86 wrote:

If you are going to argue over anything it should be over whether milk is healthy or not for humans. Arguing over the merits of whether prolonged milk consumption should or shouldn't have been evolutionary selected just seems asinine. Either milk is good for you or it isn't (or at the very least it won't kill you).

I think nadiatims is simply making the point that just because something has been selected for doesn't ipso facto make it good for you.

kusterdu wrote:

I think nadiatims is simply making the point that just because something has been selected for doesn't ipso facto make it good for you.

Ah, true enough.

There is a theory that lactose tolerance evolved in northern Europeans because at northern latitudes, there just isn't enough vitamin D available through sun exposure alone, and to get enough vitamin D northern Europeans needed to supplement with dairy products. Pale skin is also an adaptation to get more vitamin D. (I know this because I was diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency last year. Even though I'm very pale-skinned and I do eat dairy products. Bodies are weird.)