Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

Some good, mostly bad. Why is it that 'ethical omnivores' always happen to forget the death involved in their lifestyle, not to mention the moral and ethical implications of choosing to kill versus choosing not to?

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/eating-animals/250179/#.TvCaDW5Q1K0.twitter

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Vegan-organic farming and permaculture can grow abundant food without the need for farm animals. Soil fertility is increased - especially with permacuture. An experiment in a middle eastern desert showed that soil can be made from sand and plant compost. When the project was over and the land was more or less left to its own devices, the fertile soil continued to be created and the area expanded further into the desert. If it had been managed, the transition would have been greater. I don't advocate turning deserts into farms because plants and animals that live in them have a right to continue living in them but it shows what can be done.

A well managed, vegan-organic farm will have natural 'pest' management because the animals that eat marauding insects and slugs will be attracted to it.

Organic farm animals might lead good lives but the end is always the same - a bolt shot through the head or a blade to the neck. There is nothing good or ethical about this.



He complains about rabbits being minced, deer being shot and woodchucks getting through fences. Humans stole the land of these animals as we expanded like a disease across the planet. Or we imported rabbits to be used as meat and then complained when the rabbits escaped and started eating. But breeding cattle, sheep and pigs and then killing them won't make those other problems go away. It just means more animals being killed. As a vegan diet requires much less land and fewer crops, there won't be as much to defend against deer, greenfly and woodchucks. There won't be a need for so many combine harvesters because grains won't have to be grown to feed chickens and cattle.

Some meat eaters preach about 'grass-fed beef' as if it is the answer to all the planet's ills. But do we want to see the world turned in a giant prairie to house all these cattle? Cattle cause pollution and churn up the soil. They will have to be transported to where they will be killed or sold. More predators will be attracted to all these vast herds. The predators will have to be killed. Other animals, who eat grass, will have to be killed. Even more so as their predators will have been killed to stop them eating the animals that eat the grass these other animals want to eat.

The only answer is veganism. Most people wouldn't want that but it is the only answer. There are too many humans and they can't all exist on a meat-based diet. We will see even more problems as the Chinese and Indians begin to eat more meat as they become financially better off.



He seems to forget the cruelty at the end of the whole process. These people seem to think that humans have a right to do whatever they want to other animals. White people used to think that way about black people. Slavery was successful in building huge fortunes for individuals and countries but only when a few people owned slaves. Not everyone could have had a slave. Not every human can eat meat in the quantities that are eaten in rich countries. It won't work. As the climate changes and sea levels rise, there will be even less land to waste on making meat. Seven thousand million people cannot eat meat. But they can eat a vegan diet. They can choose meat and cause more destruction, misery and death or they can choose veganism. I think many humans will hang on to their lust for meat, though, because their bellies rule their hearts and their heads.



I and many others get all our B12 from supplements. It clearly is possible to get enough. We can get enough iron and zinc form plant foods.



Eating cholesterol can lead to increases in blood cholesterol if cholesterol levels are already high. Modern blood cholesterol increases and increased heart disease could be explained by the fact that modern humans sit around all day. And they eat highly processed foods.

That PDF says: (gatherer-hunter) 'groups studied during the last century were the best, if imperfect, surrogates for Palaeolithic humans. Their subsistence patterns, obligatory physical activity and biomarkers (serum cholesterol levels, blood pressure, glucose responsiveness, BMI, etc.) can be considered representative of those for humans living 50–25 kya. Proximate analyses of the game animals, fish, shellfish and uncultivated plant foods consumed by HG provide further information concerning nutrient intake of those ancestors.'

You can't use modern human groups to deduce what humans ate 30 thousand years ago. These groups are spread all over the world and contend with different climates, plants and animals. They have different levels of physical activity and different cholesterol levels. And one of the tools of anthropologists for assessing the contents of diets (radioisotopes) can lead to wrong conclusions. A recent analysis came to the conclusion that some group were heavy meat eaters because the isotopes in their bones suggested they ate animals. But someone else pointed out that the same isotopic signatures would be found in people who ate the same plants that those animals ate.



This is a stupid and callous argument. People get murdered, raped and robbed. Why don't we all go out murdering, raping and robbing, then? It would be ethically defensible as long as we did it kindly.



No, it doesn't make more sense to encourage people to be omnivores. There have been religious and political attempts to stamp out crime and wars. But crime and wars persist. Is that a reason for us all to become criminals or warmongers? These three meat-apologist, ex-veggies are just trying to justify their own weak-willed surrender to the desires of their bellies.



They are as hypocritical as the slave owner who might have said that slavery could continue as long as the slaves' rights were respected and they were treated nicely.

I believe our very distant ancestors - not sure if they were human or prehuman - ate a largely plant-based diet. Earlier ones will have been almost exclusively plant eaters like our chimp cousins. The fact that we can live on a plant-based diet now shows that we can live on a plant-based diet now.

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. When it comes to health- the ingestion of any dietary cholesterol is terrible for your health and will eventually lead to health problems. It doesn't matter how you got your animal products, they're still the only source of dietary cholesterol. We aren't made to eat these animal foods. It isn't natural to eat eggs from a hens menstrual cycle, it isn't natural to drink milk from a mother cow that would otherwise go to feeding her babies. And it isn't natural for human beings to kill and eat animals. We aren't carnivorous, have you ever seen a lion cook his kill over flame till it was just right? No, they eat it raw. Something their intestines were made for. So go try to eat a bunch of raw meat. See what happens to your body.

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My goal is to become the biggest and best natural bodybuilder of all time, and I'm gonna do it vegan.

Hmm this took a few minutes to copy and paste, but hey, important issue, so I thought I might as well copy these replies of mine for posterity, rather than let them be lost in the internet black hole of back issues of the Atlantic :/ I certainly got a bit acerbic at times, but it was hard to resist... some award-winners from the omnivore debating society:


Yes, the benevolent Creator designed animals to be eaten.

And He designed factory farms to appear in the 20th century, so animals could be eaten on a larger scale. And He also designed humans to be eaten, by the powerful aliens who are fattening us up for the slaughter unawares as we speak. And in His all-seeing wisdom, he designed the Common Cold, so that we would more keenly appreciate our health. And moreover, He designed the Appendix and Tonsils, in His infinite glory, so that surgeons might have a more stable income. Furthermore, He designed deadly Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Infant Mortality, Birth Defects, Old Age, and those Akward Middle School Years, so that, well there is certainly an important Reason for these phenomenon, which, in His Infinite Glory, he has kept from us, because if we knew it, then there wouldn't be any more mystery....


I used to use that same reasoning with my vegetarian sister when I was 12.

But you could also say, could you envision a world without underage sex slaves born into brothels? Would you prefer they just be let to die, instead of being kept alive by their captors, who are actually doing these enslaved minors a favor?


I keep hearing the same fallacies repeated in different ways.

By that logic, we musn't attempt to reduce suffering, because we cannot reduce it to zero, and because we cannot be 100% sure of the consequences of our actions.

That sounds like nihilism, and a pretty weak argument against veganism and in favor of the status quo.

It's like saying, well, game theory indicates that we are all f-cked, so let's hurry up and get ours whilst we destroy the planet quicker. Is that really the person you want to be?


Plants do not have brains. They don't have pain receptors, nervous systems, or sense organs. That is why we distinguish them as "plants."

And we're back to the perfectionist argument... nobody can be perfect, so let's not even try to improve ourselves one iota!

Again, I have much more respect for someone who simply admits, I kill and eat animals, I don't care about them, than for someone who tries to prove that caring is wrong.

We care, get over it. Most people who didn't have some hidden guilt wouldn't be on a message board arguing with vegans...


Yes, and two hundred years ago you would have had a "right" to own slaves. Does that mean it would have been ethically desirable, all things considered?

As for what is accomplished by one person being Vegan, what is accomplished by one person voting in an election? Not much. Is that a good argument against voting? No. Because society is made up not of one person, but of many. Most large-scale human phenomena are composed of the smaller effects of many individual choices made by individual people.

I used to eat meat, some of my family members and many of my friends and coworkers eat meat. Custom is very powerful, and most vegans myself included do not go about life with some self righteous or holier-than-thou attitude.

But if you bring up the subject, yes, we will explain our reasoning, as I have been doing here.


True. Vegans still are complicit in the death of animals. Therefore, they should revert to eating meat, and killing more animals.

By that logic, nobody should ever do anything to try to improve anything, because they cannot be perfect. That makes sense....


Plants don't have brains, awareness, senses, or pain receptors, genius.


It's a chemical reaction. What, you think they decide in their nonexistent sunflower brains, hmm i was just hanging out here in this field, but wouldn't it be nice to follow the sun? Where were you people in Biology 101?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 836AAbAAVP

(In reply to someone who wrote "I value Human life more than Animal life")

Valuing human life and valuing animal life are rarely mutually exclusive.

If we value sentient life in general, we will try to preserve the Earth for our children and their children ad infinitum, not destroy it in an orgy of excess. This planet is our life raft.

Farming grain to feed livestock is incredibly wasteful, with 7 billion people on the planet, many of whom aspire to an animal-heavy Western-style diet.

"The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7600005.stm

(In reply to someone who said "I won't apologize for my ancestors hunting and gathering nor should anyone be attacked for carrying on the tradition of something that's obviously working. Evolution makes no moral judgements, only that you survive long enough to pass on your genes to the next generation or not.")

There is a strong evolutionary basis for Rape, as well. Sure gets the genes passed on to the next generation!

I won't apologize for my distant ancestors practicing Rape. But personally I tend to view Rape as barbaric.

Reductio ad absurdum...

(In reply to "Domesticated livestock that actually cannot survive without human intervention are hardly comparable to child sex trafficking.")

Why not? Children can't survive without human intervention either.

We all have brains and 5 senses. Where do you draw the line? We all draw it somewhere. Europeans used to believe aborigines weren't human, that it was ridiculous to draw a comparison between a Native and a White Man, and so we could do what we wanted with them- kill, enslave, exploit.

How about the disabled? Is it cool to kill a mentally retarded person because he couldn't survive without human intervention? How about a great ape, our closest relative?

Dogs, cats?

Again, we all draw the line of empathy or identification somewhere, Vegans just take it a bit further than Carnivores.

Good points. Arguing with meat eaters on forums is an interminable process. You no sooner answer a question when someone else asks the same one in a different way. You put someone right about something and show the studies and then someone else starts a thread about the same thing and it all kicks off again. Do you often get involved in online debates?

I keep copies of debates where I have posted important info. One epic one went on for about 100 pages. I have it all saved.

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