After we did the one on carnivore and the benefits of eating meat and sharing some of the thoughts of Dr. Anthony Chaffee and Szofia Clemens from the Hungarian clinic, I felt maybe it would be good to talk a little bit about why the vegetarians and vegans feel very strongly about their position, just so that we can understand and decipher whether we’re missing something. Or is there some knowledge that we can attain to find a happy medium?
Cons of plant based diet
Ep 4 – “Plant Based” Diets – Are They Saving the Earth?
Read full details below, transcribed. Therefore the wording often appears as it is spoken by our hosts: Please listen to above podcast for full value.
Is there a balance between eating meat and plants?
What we have to look at to determine what’s right about food.
Is there a balance between maybe eating some plant based and some animal based? I know what your answer is going to be. And I’m really interested in hearing that. But in my research, I was trying to find an expert, who is recognized and would be taken seriously by the vegetarian and vegan end of the conversation.
So there was this woman named Dr. Joanne Kong. And she was speaking on TEDx. I thought she would be a good reference for us. She’s already had a million views on TedX for this subject. So obviously, she’s well regarded. In doing a little bit of research, I found that she definitely is a well regarded spokesperson for the position of plant based eating. But, oddly enough, she is a doctor of musical art from the University of Oregon. So she’s not a the type of doctor that I thought she was going to be.
Nevertheless, she makes very strong arguments, and people seem to really appreciate her being that voice for plant based diets. So she makes a lot of points in this talk. For example, she says, animal agriculture as the raising of animals for food has grown to become one of the most damaging industries to our planet. And we hear that a lot. I know that you’ve done some studies on this.
What’s your opinion?
When plant based advocates say that we must eat fruits and vegetables and grains and nuts, rice, lentils, etc, because the animals are hurting the planet.
They actually need to understand how plant crops are hurting the planet. And animals are actually good for the planet and environment, not to mention our own health. I think today, you have in the US for example, millions and millions of cattle.
Less than 100 years ago, when the Europeans arrived in the US, we had 100 million bison. They knew the buffaloes were regenerating the soil.
We know today too, that the topsoil on our planet is really the fertile part, and it was created by animals. It is a circle of ruminant animals that goes into this wonderful system where bacteria is actually transforming the plants and the cellulose of the plant in particular into saturated fat and that the animal is absorbing that.
Then you have the manure that goes into the soil and is putting back into it the nitrogen that is necessary for any life on the planet.
For our sake, put things in perspective
What the planet really requires. The truth.
We have an overblown perception of the impact of humans on this planet. Regarding the production of CO2 or methane you have to put things into perspective. If you take termites they produce as much co2 as all human activity combined.
We need to understand that CO2 is the food of the plants.
Is human and animal activity really the culprit related to any impact on the climate?
This is debated.
Right. So you’re saying that without animals, we wouldn’t have a planet we wouldn’t have the topsoil that we require, we wouldn’t have the quality of the planet that we require. Fair enough.
And she’s talking about raising animals for food. So she’s talking about farming animals for food and the conditions in which we farm them and the usage of the grains and the feed. She says that we have to grow more crops for animal feed. And of course they do emit their own gasses, which of course human beings do too. And that’s just a fact of life. And that’s probably at 0.000 1% factor into into the gas emissions.
But she makes those points from the perspective of of farming animals for food. So is there a difference in your mind as far as whether we’re farming them for food, or whether we’re just letting them run and roam free and natural. She believes free is how animals should be.
Keeping animals happy
What they eat and how it benefits the world.
I think over the years, it has been recognized that intensive farming is a bad thing. And let’s say from a sensitivity perspective, you cannot deprive animals from the natural way of life. And many farmers know that if a cow is not happy, it will not produce milk.
If an animal is depressed and deprived of sun, it will not be healthy. And you will spend a lot of money in curing, so preventing disease is better. It’s just like human beings, all animals, all living organisms, they need to be, quote unquote, happy in order to live and to deliver. People who are blaming animals do not usually point out to the fact that 95% of all animals are in a prairie eating grass.
A lot of them are only given grains, corn, or some cereal, but in the few last months of their life.
And these grains are making them fat, just as they do for humans. Like us, they’re mammals, but it is really a question that is the practice of 5% to the whole thing. So, in general, it is estimated that maybe 10% of the plant production is used to feed animals. Putting the blame of animal raising is misinformation.
Most of the plants that animals consume are plants that humans cannot consume. Why doesn’t anyone talk about that? The end of the day, the cow is a wonderful machine that is upcycling proteins in plants that we cannot otherwise benefit from unless we get it from the cow’s meat – that’s the only way to get this high nutrition from plants. Eating these plants directly will kill us.
So the best way to get your vegetables is by eating a cow because the cow is processing the vegetables that one would eat in a more beneficial way. They actually extract the nutrients for us.
Most people haven’t learned that plants actually contain anti nutrients and they’re not healthy for us. Eating plants is not a way of getting the nutrients that a plant may hold. People must understand this for their own good.
But if we want to set the discussion straight, we need to understand that we have a body that is part of the mammal world. And we need protein. We also need fats and do not need external carbohydrates.
Why not just take a bunch of supplement pills and call it a day?
Plants are not the plants of earlier generations. They were aggressively mutated by humans.
Exactly. The thing is, we have a very poor understanding of how this machinery operates – our body. These are very complex systems within systems within systems. It’s beyond comprehension for all.
We have in each of these living organisms, interactions of systems that science just barely starts to understand at the moment. In a piece of meat, we have so many things we don’t know. Yeah. So for now, unfortunately, all we can rely on is experience and the results.
What we see constantly throughout history is that people in general in the Middle Ages in Europe, for example, peasants or even normal people were complaining when they had only vegetables or plants to eat. Because it was deemed to be a failure of those in charge. It would be a time of scarcity. It is a full backup diet for poverty.
Not to mention, the plants of today are not the plants of previous generations. So they have had a form of mutation, and they have been handled and manufactured really differently than they were ever produced in the past. Isn’t that correct? Yes, it is absolutely correct.
Since the introduction of agriculture, about 12,000 years ago. Humans have been coerced to select plants. We went from non sugary, very fibrous to sugary and tender. They picked the ones that are more palatable or more easy to store for long periods.
When they would prefer this tree and replant it again and again. And this made the selection over time. In all eras, you have plants and fruits that appear that did not exist previously.
For example, all the kale family, brussel sprouts, where did they come from? Well, they started really a few hundred years ago but they all come from one herb. So they are all a modified selection of parts of one herb – which is the wild mustard
Cons of plant based diet - Getting your head around it
How do we know it’s good for us.
A friend of mine who really had a tough time with my ideas on eating meat based food, kudos to her, she stayed open minded and her own research. And she’s coming around. She sent me a post where she said, I just can’t believe the picture of a banana of the past. It doesn’t look at all like what the banana looks like today. She said, I’m having a heart attack, because I never factored that in.
The idea that these are not the same plants our ancestors were eating, if they were at all.
- So how do we know they’re good for us?
- What historical evidence do we have?
None, because they aren’t the same plants at all.
Well 99.9% of the plants in this planet will kill you directly.
Why do we think that the different plants that we find in a supermarket will actually be good for us?
Absolutely.
Right, because a lot of the doctors that I’ve been following, and I’ve been doing a lot of independent research as well, in addition to some of the stuff that you’ve been teaching me, is consistent with that. They’re all saying that plants will kill you. Plants are poisonous for human beings.
And we have to be very careful when we try to develop our understanding around plants. We have to understand what the danger components are. That no matter how much you cook them, or eat them raw or whatever, they are going to hurt us.
The science of preparing plants is an ancestral knowledge. And we’ve lost it.
Our ancestors knew such and such plant you couldn’t consume it without preparing in such a way. Whether cooking it or fermenting it. And today, we know for example the peel of the potato, people in Poland knew, was absolutely toxic.
Today, we’ll say all the vitamins are in the peel. So there was a science to the fermentation of fruits and vegetables, which we don’t do anymore. We don’t know how to prepare our fruits and vegetables, we’re coming back to a time of ignorance. But even then did we really need to eat fermented fruits and vegetables?
Again, it was understood in all cultures, that the plants would be a complimentary food to the real food, which is the meat or the animal product. The optimal was always the fatty meat based diet.
Animals are not destroying our planet.
Waking up to the real concern. It can be promising.
Coming back to the remark of this wonderful lady that is doing this Ted talk about animals destroying the planet, it is actually quite the opposite. If you break down the truth, you will see that agriculture, mono cropping and the tilling of the land over the past 200 years actually created deserts of our lands.
These were fertile lands, right?
Nothing is growing there anymore. In England, in France, or in the US we can’t grow anything without artificial fertilizers. And this is very worrying. Our soils are dying and this is the real danger for the planet. Because if the Soils are dying, the plants are dying, there will be no more plants, hence animals.
Under all circumstances, we as predators, will be deprived of any consistent source of food. My conclusion on this issue is to put back ruminant animals everywhere. We could solve all our current problems with soils and land in 10 years. Wow, that’s really promising.
So coming back to some of the points that she made in this in this talk, she said going green in diet is critical to our planet’s sustainability.
She said, our diet is the biggest cause of death. And I think you would agree but it is the plant based diet, that’s the biggest cause of death.
There was an expert pathologist who was called The Man of 1000 Autopsies. At the end of of his life, he was asked, according to your experience, what is the weapon that people use the most to end their life? And he replied: “The fork”.
Wow.
She says scientific evidence links, meat and meat products to numerous diseases. She blames that since meat consumption has skyrocketed, we have so many problems.
You know, these reports can be so funny. Because you can pull out a report to justify any position, no matter how ridiculous or how valid that position is.
Studies, how do we trust them?
Getting things equal on all fronts, understanding the measures.
Well, the thing is, this is old fashioned propaganda. The studies that concluded that meat is a health hazard were all badly constructed. They’ve also conducted many studies to prove that was not the case. And we heard in that Dr. Chafee interview that publishing a study on meat is impossible.
No one accepts it if the results are positive. And that constant rejection makes it one of the most difficult things to break through.
So what does the science industry that’s a proponent of meat based diets do in that case?
They don’t have anywhere to go, you need to understand.
In this case, it’s not a study on meat, it’s epidemiological studies.
Which is that you separate two groups right?
- One consuming meat, but this meat is a hamburger or sausage in a gas station every day, which is very bad quality, that is not even meat, but some processed meat-based something.
- And you have another group that doesn’t eat this crap. Yeah. vegetarians or vegans, usually these people are unaware that when they go the plant route, they may fee better temporarily because they’ve just cutting out junk food when they started eating plant based.
And usually they drink less, they party less, they take less stress in, they do more exercise, right. So you’re on this group that mostly health conscious. Right or wrong way, but they they try to take care of their health.
On the other side, you’re the typical American or European who doesn’t care about his health, smoking, drinking, drugs, and eating crap all day long. And you isolate within the diet of the bad health conscious people that have this meat, right, and this is their measure.
But then you have organizations like the World Health Organization that say that meat and process meats are as dangerous as cigarettes and asbestos. Meat is the new tobacco, they say. That’s what she shared in her talk.
So when you’ve got huge organizations that have a lot of influence on people’s health and people’s minds, can convince people on what’s dangerous. To the point, yes, that it’s equal to tobacco and asbestos.
And it is these people, the same organization that said that smoking was so good for pregnant woman but years ago. And these are the same people that said, asbestos was no problem.
Yeah, so the thing is, if I want to be ironic, I would say, why would suddenly meat be bad for us when our ancestors relied on meat exclusively for 2 million years?
Have animals evolved too?
What we know about the study of diets.
But would they ask the valid question, haven’t animals also changed and evolved over the years, just like plants have changed? So our agriculture is no longer the same agriculture of previous times. But are animals also different?
We know that’s not the case. We know for a fact, because, for example, we can find mammals of 50,000 years ago, frozen in Siberia. And we can eat their meat. Yeah, they were just frozen.
And when you get to them, it’s exactly the same meat, whatever changes because a DNA change, or digestive system change, it takes hundreds of 1000s of years, if not millions, to evolve along with them.
They have the exact same impact on our bodies. So we know it’s not the case that animals have changed on us. And we know for a fact what our ancestors were eating mostly meat until the introduction of agriculture. We know for a fact that this agriculture was invented. A study of the bones of ancestors, will confirm to you that their best diet was animal food.
She also argues that there is beneficial fiber only found in plant foods, as well as antioxidants, and hundreds of 1000s of chemicals that protect the body and support good health. Yes, this is an idea that’s floating around. So fiber is a molecule of sugar that is NOT going to be digested by us. Why would they say that is good for us? It is not.
In fact when people are suffering for constipation, doctors in general recommend that you take fiber. Yet it’s proven that the fiber is such a pain to the digestive system. It is such a hindrance that your body will try to eliminate it as fast as possible. So it’s the fiber that will get out. There are studies that prove when people don’t consume fiber, they have healthier digestive tracts than those that eat fiber. Constipated? Cut out the fibers.
I often tell doctors to look at the facts. Our digestive system is the one of the wolf or the lion. It’s exactly the same. And they will say, No, it’s not what I’ve been taught. And I ask them to go into the physiology of it and look deeper. When they start to see it, I feel for them. Because they realize they must unlearn a lot in order to get their head around this. I am sure this woman also believes what she is saying, but whoever looks deeper into this, knows it is not true.
But she says vegetarians have longer life expectancy, and lower rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and she said a few more. They genuinely believe that vegetarians live longer and have lower rates of these diseases, these very serious claims.
It is absolutely not true because vegetarian countries like India have the lowest life expectancy.
So many preconceived ideas with Indian people out of India, misrepresenting what’s happening in India. When we actually talk to people who are Indian, we are horrified by the denial of animal protein to the population. That is leading to so much disease, diabetes, and early death.
70 to 75% of Indians currently are eating meat as a result, contrary to what we’re been told. But they are limited by the availability. By the cost and by the political pressure, because now it’s a kind of marker between Hindus and Muslims.
If you eat meat, then you must be with the Muslims. Ironically, in the Veda, meat is highest form of food. So if you look at the Veda itself, it tracks the quality of the food and the red meat is the highest food for humans.
And yet Hindus allow themselves to be vegetarian. Yet their Sacred Scriptures are very clear.
But since there was a deviation in observation, probably 2000 years ago or so, led them to believe that they should be vegetarians. Well, they really should not have been, they just have been consuming meat.
Cons of vegetarian diet - So many misconceptions about how we should eat
Better to take control of ourselves before we lose it.
Cattle, the production of milk, and soy, ghee, yogurt, etc. All of which is good for us and their fat is healing for us. But you have to understand that agriculture appeared with the formation of big cities, and governments, and biases, right.
We know there is a strong association between the submissiveness of human beings and their diet. And when people are mostly eating plants, they become more complacent, and more controllable through emotions.
This is a mental tool that was used by Russian special forces. When you want to interrogate a suspect, you make the person vegan for 15 days in the prison cell. And after these 15 days, you can start to ask the questions.
Their mind, their will power is shattered. They break down. They are very emotional and they break very easily. And because we know so many plants are hallucinogens, you can alter people’s mind with them. Yeah. And you see that from Hollywood to governments to even the local guru in India, they love the followers to be plant based, because now they have more control.
She claims that leading research journals all support claims of plant based diets. And she confirms the vegetarians do not get diseases according to these journals. And we need to take these journals seriously but all these journals must be tied in with some of these agendas. These bigger ideas of trying to get people to obey.
There’s also what Big Pharma wants. So if you understand that your health is mostly driven by food, if what you eat gets you sick, it opens a new and very big market for Companies. I’m not talking about only doctors, etc.
They all want to sell you the magic pill that will manage the issue, instead of addressing the cause, and thinking through what food got you there. And they are the financing these journals.
Anything that shows the opposite, would just be denied publication. But things are changing. More and more people are waking up. Even Harvard did a study in 2021, showing that people six months on the plant free diet, 80% of them resolved all problems, metabolic problems.
She argues that the progressions of diseases by eating meat can be halted or reversed as quickly as two to three weeks of just eating a plant based diet. So if you just leave your meat diet, and just eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, will lead to a healthy you.
So when you have proponents talking like this, the picture becomes clearer. She hasn’t given adequate sources. This just causes a lot of confusion.
There is not one single population on this planet, that could be found to be okay, when they have no access to animal flesh. Yet it was a great hope for these people to find the primitive tribe that was thriving on a pure plant diet, and it doesn’t exist.
And it’s nice that we hear about how important animals are for the health of the planet and the soils. Yet animals are blamed for all of the soil erosion, the climate change, the deforestation, the global warming, depletion of our world, species and habitats, ocean dead zones, water and air pollution is all attributed to meat based diets.
She argues, that because of all these things we cannot put off dealing with these things. She says, we face catastrophic damage. So that’s a very strong and scary message. And it would scare anybody out of eating meat based food.
She is saying two things, that you adopt a diet for your own health and the diet you adopt to save the planet. So, some people are denying themselves the human diet, because they are convinced that this will be an ethical thing to do. This is a trap. Because what she’s stating is absolutely not true.
What is causing the land erosion is the production of all these things that the vegans and vegetarians are eating from, like weeds and cereals, etc. You have to kill all living creatures, and use acres of pesticides. All in order to get your daily bread.
Pulling at heart strings
Separating a story from what’s pertinent to know.
This is quite a job in spinning, and she did a very good job at this. If we don’t stop eating meat, she said, the cost of reversing the damage to our planet will be tremendous. There is one thing, she says, that is a major cause of all these global problems and that is animal agriculture. Here are a few facts, she says.
- Animal agriculture accounts for 51% of greenhouse gas emissions.
- It’s the number one cause of species and habitat loss due to deforestation and grazing and growing animals for feed crops.
- It’s the main cause of water pollution.
- It uses half of our water 70% of our grain and 80% of our agricultural land to raise the 10 billion land animals that are killed every year for food.
Wow, that’s pretty devastating, she says. You can cut your carbon footprint in half by going vegetarian. All journals pretty much reflect this, including the United Nations Environmental Program says that a worldwide diet change needs to take place to fix the problem.
What do you make of that?
Is it totally made up?
Yeah, this is what we deal with when meat based proponents aren’t even allowed to conduct and publish their studies.
I mean, you have a so called great environmentalist who absolutely has made up this Powerpoint presentation , numbers that are put together by marketing firms in order to sell an idea that will sell more breakfast cereal, for example, people who will make a lot of money by replacing nutritious food with empty crap that will lead you to be sick.
From very good researchers, we see there is a serious research that the World Health Organization has published. Where they acknowledge the dangers of plants and plant based foods. It’s on one of their web pages, they have a page on the natural toxins in plants.
But it would not be taken seriously since it gets no exposure. Why? It just doesn’t fit the agenda. They prefer lies like saying animal agriculture causes 56% of all greenhouse gases, when in fact in the US, it is I think 3%.
Yeah.
So, there is a lot of flaws, a lot of ideology in these numbers that are actually not true. And you have very good sources of information that are correct and based on the best methodologies.
Basically, I think it was calculated that if you killed all cattle in this planet, you would reduce the co2 emission by 0.3% or something. Oh, my God, you know, it’s ridiculous.
And why would anybody consider killing any of the cattle on this planet?
I mean, they’re there for a reason. There’s a purpose for everything. And there’s a purpose for plants if we just recognize what category they belong in.
With plants, they have this monopoly at pulling at the heartstrings. In her talk, she tells a story of an animal in a factory farm. It’s a sow and she goes after people’s emotions with this story.
She says, I am a pig confined in a cage. I suffer from depression, frustration and neurotic behavior. My limbs are swollen, I have open wounds. I’m forcibly impregnated then slaughtered at the age of three to five years old by being stunned and lowered into boiling water.
I mean, that whole thing is so graphic that it would turn anybody off of eating animals. She goes on, I have a sense of self. I am intelligent and a social creature. I have memories and I can recognize myself in a mirror just like you.
I actually know that I love to play even computer games just like you. That seems really is far fetched, but okay. I cling to my babies during nursing, I am someone. I am not food.
She says, if we love our pets and family members, then awaken your realization that animals we eat are also very special. They deserve our love and compassion by not eating them. Psychic numbing, she says, is what’s happening to us these days pertaining to the loss of life at a mass level.
And we are psychically numbing ourselves. We avoid the pain of empathizing with this type of animal treatment. And it’s a type of denial, she says. Can’t think of those animals as individuals is most convenient. So she says, plant based eating is one of the top global trends going on. And we need to take it seriously.
Wow, she really knows how to present this.
Emotional manipulation is not cool
This appeal to emotion is just a tool to manipulate the minds. It is really meant to convince people who are totally disconnected from nature. Because in this world, everything lives out of something else.
And yes, we should cherish and respect the animals. But by treating them correctly. Yeah, and by appreciating that when we are taking a life, it’s not a light gesture.
That’s why as Muslims, we have the halal way of treating animals as food. It is the humane way.
Yes, the concept of Halal in Islam. Absolutely. Which is to respect. Respect to the development of the animal all along its life and the slaughtering of the animals. That’s a struggle, in being grateful, even to the animal. This animals function is to nourish a human. Right.
And if you think you’re going to live without taking a life, you’re totally disillusioned. As Muslims we know that everything in this universe has consciousness.
What does it mean for a cow to be in a video game?
It’s a Disney propaganda where the animals are so cute, that you just can’t think of them as food. This is a mentality of people from the cities that do not know what natural harmony is. Everything is living off something else.
I think after this at some point we need to talk about drinking water and how much water we need. That’s an entirely different subject and we’ll get into that but this really leaves me with a lot of food for thought. No pun intended.
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