veganism

It's fitting that we'd follow up yesterday's interview with a read question about how to transition to meat eating:

I'm hoping you can help me though, cause I think you have a unique perspective on this.  My girlfriend has been a kind-of-vegetarian/overall-horrible-eater most of her life - we're talking grilled cheese and french fries for dinner.  We've been together 3+ years and she's been eating healthier and healthier, but she still won't really cross that line to eating meat on any regular basis.  She's been talking to me lately about wanting to incorporate more into her diet for health reasons (I've been paleo for 4 months, she's seeing the results and is intrigued), but she says she just doesn't like the taste of meat. I think that's an overly broad statement to make, but I was hoping you'd be able to shed some light on that, as an ex-vegan.  When you switched over, what meat did you 'like' eating?  I'd love to help her and will make any accommodation I can, but I've been a meat eater all my life and have no friggin' idea how I would help someone start to eat meat.  Any help would be appreciated!  =)

I think it depends where your coming from. I was an ultra-health conscious raw vegan, so I had a different experience than someone coming from grilled cheese. It was very hard to add meat to my diet though because I didn't know much about it. As a sad survey of my early paleo fridge shows, I ate mostly fruits, vegetables, and fish. I hated fish to death and pretty much had to bury it in sauce, but I really did believe it would make me feel better...and it did. It took me over a year to get into grease, braising, and offal. I was a faileo, but it was a start.

I've also had junk food eating boyfriends and while my current boyfriend is fairly health conscious, when we met he was mostly vegetarian and his staple meals were canned lentil soup and pasta. He said he really just didn't like most meat. But now he's happily ordering grass fed steak!

I think the most important thing is replacing things like grilled cheese and french fries with any healthier alternative, meat or not. Baked sweet potato fries dipped in homemade mayo are one of my favorite snacks. I also recommend kale chips.

If you cooking varied meals you can also let her try things. That's how I got my boyfriend to eat steak. I would make it for myself and offer him a bite. It was actually raw bison that was one of the breaking points and he realized he just likes his red meat kind of raw. Also, grass fed meat is more palatable to former veg*ns beccause it's lower in fat.

With fish, I could milder fish like striped sea bass and make good sauces to make the food more attractive. Also going together to a good market or getting a tasting menu at a restaurant that really knows how to make things taste amazing can help expose you both to new foods to try. Some of my first exposures to things like bone marrow were at top restaurants.

Also, if you are interested in improving her diet, the onus is on you to cook delicious meals. My boyfriend eats paleo....because who refuses free homemade food? 

So there my secret has been betrayed: tasty paleo snacks, homemade delicious meals, and simple exposure to new foods. And remember everyone has to start somewhere. My pathetic salmon and chicken breast opened up a world of lamb shanks.

Whenever I see an online argument between animal rights vegans and apostates/omnivores, they animal rights vegans claim that it's possible for anyone to be healthy as a vegan. I definitely think it's possible for many people to do veganism and I know several vegans who look and feel fine after doing veganism for several decades. But I know just as many who suffered on a vegan diet no matter what they did.

For an animal rights vegan you just have to keep trying because meat is murder and it's just not acceptable to eat even if you are sick. Whenever you present the list of things that just aren't in a plant based diet they retort that you can easily supplement those things.

Nutritionism at its finest. I respect nutrition science, but it's really in its infancy. There is so much that isn't known. Real whole foods are complex and synergistic. I'm happy there are now supplements to help those who chose to be vegan, but I refuse to accept the notion that veganism is the optimal diet that works for everyone. Maybe in the future when we know everything about nutrition and can put it in a pill, but that's not now.

Things have gotten better for vegans, but that speaks much to the juvenile status of nutrition research. Two decades ago the only supplement that was a known need was b-12, now thanks to scientific research we now know that vegans should supplement DHA as well. Who knows what the next discovery is? (ironically, all these discoveries were made at least in part by animal testing). If you are a vegan now, who really knows what you aren't getting? I think the best strategy for vegans is to supplement everything that is found in meat and that is not found in plants or that is found in lesser quality/quantity. whether or not the research is yet ironclad.

But my own goal has never been to just feel fine. I wanted to heal my illness, which I did on paleo and which was miserable on veganism. As a humanist I also wanted a diet that made me feel really good as a human. I confess I never was a animal rightist, which I feel to be a anti-humanist philosophy. As a humanist, I will always pick humans, like my grandmother who is alive because of a pig valve, over animals. Technology might someday replace the need for animals, but that's not on the radar right now.

I also would like to have truly healthy children and I think the research on prenatal nutrition and veganism is very small, but already points to serious problems. I'm going to place my bets on millions of years of human evolution rather than the tip of the iceburg we know about nutrition.

The nutrient I would like to feature today is taurine. Vegans say that the human body does a good job of synthesizing it and indeed we are able to make it ourselves. But is everyone able to make it in the correct quantities? And is the average amount we can synthesize enough? I would say definitely no on the first count and perhaps no on the second.

What is taurine? This article has a great summary. Taurine is an amino acid which is actually the most abundent intracellular amino acid in the human body. It is involved in many important and varied roles in the body from the metabolism to the blood to skeletal muscles to the heart. Here are a few:

• Taurine promotes the flow and production of bile, which is the fluid produced in the liver that is essential for digesting fats. It prevents the condition known as cholestasis where the bile flow is blocked.
• Taurine comprises 50% of the amino acids in the heart. It is important for maintaining proper blood pressure and rhythm.
• Taurine is important for brain development and neurotransmission. Recent research has shown low levels in people with seizures.
• Taurine is important in the eye's retina. People and animals with deficiencies often display retinal degeneration and lesions.
• Taurine modulates insulin activity and the metabolism of fat and glucose. Preliminary research hints that high cholesterol might be caused by taurine deficiency that reduces synthesis of cholesterol into bile acids.
• Taurine also shows activity as an antioxidant and early research shows it might play a role in male infertility, psoriasis, and depression. It has been shown to help heal colon cells and ulcers in animals.

Some scientists consider its consuming essential, other do not since healthy adults seem to be able to make it.

The average daily synthesis in adults ranges between 0.4-1.0 mmol (50-125 mg)1; under stress the synthesis capacity may be impaired; therewith some authors consider taurine as a conditionally essential amino acid, whereas for others it remains nonessential

Interestingly women synthesize it less efficiently and have higher incidences of conditions that may be caused by taurine deficiency like gallstones.

Taurine seems to be especially important for developing fetuses and infants

In the embryo, taurine deficiency has been associated with various lesions, e.g. cardiomyopathy, retinal degeneration and growth retardation. Taurine is probably an essential amino acid for neonates; due to enzymatic immaturity they have a limited capacity for its synthesis, and due to the immature kidney there is a relative inability to conserve taurine.

Other people who are probably not able to synthesize it include those with kidney and liver diseases and dysfunctions. It's not conditional for these people, it's essential. More research needs to be done on the effect of other illnesses on taurine synthesis.

What about healthy adults? This interesting study shows that even they might be affected by low taurine levels. Apparently vegetarians often have some "platelet hyperaggregability" which is a risk factor in thrombosis (dangerous blood clots), episodic vertigo, dizziness, and sudden deafness. This make sense, as platelets are rich in taurine. The authors say "Taurine is just one of a number of nutrients found almost solely in animal products – “carninutrients” – which are rational candidates for supplementation in vegans." Studies on vegans show that their taurine levels are much lower (earlier studies showed normal levels, but they made lab mistakes that messed up the data as explained here, which invalidates this study on taurine metabolism during reproduction), but I wonder if many omnivores are also too low on taurine as well.

The best sources are dark meats, with higher levels in raw meats, and seafoods like mussels and clams. Many omnivores don't eat these things. Growing up, I certainly didn't. Personally, I think it's an extreme stretch to give rights to mussels, so if you object to meat, why not eat those? Even Peter Singer admits that eating things like scallops might be OK.

Supplementation of taurine might be advisable, but there is some evidence that the supplement can exacerbate Psoriasis whereas the ingestion of taurine rich foods like turkey has not been shown to cause this problem. It shows the weakness in studies that just use isolated nutrients and also points to the fact that while suppplements can help people who want to do sub-optimal diets, there ain't nothing like the real thing...yet.

Addendum: Here is an interesting study that shows idiotic bias towards veganism. The summary reports vegan breast milk has similar (but still lower) levels of mean taurine as omnivore milk. But if you download the whole article you get a different picture. First of all, it seems they make a pretty idiotic mistake in their charts and I'm surprised it got published- the chart for breast milk claims to be in nmol/l contrasting with other papers that use nmol/ml. It makes their values basically nonsensical. Either way, the omnivore mean is 427. The vegan mean? 227, which is a statistically significant difference. Wanna bet the authors of this paper are vegan? The problem with vegan studies is there aren't many done, there aren't big populations of vegans, and the papers and studies done tend to be authored by vegans. Another major problem is that some scientists don't recognize that things like ADHD and crooked teeth are possible caused by poor prenatal or early childhood nutrition, but as science bolsters this connection perhaps we will see more interesting studies. 

Another thing to think about is what the omnivore women were eating. If they were eating a standard American diet perhaps they were taurine deficient compared to women eating real foods. In this other paper, Relationship between fatty acid compositions and taurine concentration in breast milk from Chinese rural mothers, it states that breast milk concentrations of taurine in Swedish and Ethiopian mothers was 761 and 667 respectively. The Chinese rural mothers had levels lower than the vegans in that study. The same was found in rural Mexican women.

I would venture to predict that if there ever were second or third generation vegans, their breast milk would have much lower levels. There is strong evidence for transgenerational effects of taurine deficiency, which also points to the fact that vegans aren't the only ones who should be thinking of taurine.

 The sense of human alienation from nature, so prevalent in contemporary American culture, is in some ways the shadow-side of the Edenic wilderness myth. In light of the obvious damage we have done to the nonhuman environment, it is tempting to adopt a hands-off attitude and entertain the fantasy of nature's returning to a pristine state. The idea of "letting nature be nature" arises, however, from secondhand knowledge and nature-romanticism; it does no work in practice. Ultimately, we are all implicated, for better and for worse, in the fate of the natural world of which humanity is, in fact, very much a part. As native and traditional cultures help to show, hunter-awareness provides a crucial way of coming to terms with the extent to which each individual life is founded upon the deaths of vibrantly alive others. 

Consider the following excerpt from an obituary of a suicide, published not long ago in a radical environmental journal "Tony was a passionate man who felt the earth's distress acutely. In a letter he left to some of his friends he explained his reason for departing. He stated his life had never been better personally. He didn't want people to be sad for him. He checked out as a response to the overwhelming toll we humans are extracting from the planet. His strategy was to lighten the load....

It's hard to imagine more graphic, in some ways chilling, depictions of the alienation of humans from the rest of nature....some revolutionary activists see the eradication of humanity from the "earth-organism" as the only cure to the global environmental crisis....the popular fiction is of a "balance of nature" in which the non-human world, left to its own wisdom and devices, reverts to equilibrium and harmony. It is a fiction that more than once has masqueraded as science in the shaping of wildlife management. 

From Mary Zeiss Strange's Woman The Hunter, which does an awesome job of laying bare the true anti-humanistic nature of ecoveganism. Humans ARE nature and many animals we hunt have evolved with us as predators. It is very sad how some parts of the environmental movement see the need to denigrate us as a species and deny that we are worth much. 

Recently a vegan blog I read for the recipes did a post equating women's rights movement with the animal right's movement. It brought to mind this quote by Peter Staudenmaier:

The central analogy to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf. Both movements were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, “We’re sentient beings too!” They argued, “We’re fully human too!” Animal liberation doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it.

A girl who used to live in my apartment left behind a subscription to Self magazine. Self actually used to be one of my favorite magazines when I was in high school and my early college years. I even did the "Self Challenge" to lose weight. It challenged you to go the gym and eat lots of healthy whole grains. Not surprisingly, my daily servings of Kashi honeyed cereal and treadmill plodding did nothing to fix the spare tire I had around my waist and my chronic stomach aches. These days when I read Self I want to laugh at all the plugs for skim milk, yogurt smoothies, egg white omelets, and whole grain cereals...but really, this is a magazine hundreds of thousands of women take seriously, so I just feel sad. I was even sadder to see an ad for a weight loss product that supposedly "cleanses" you from the toxins you supposedly acquire from eating unhealthier. 

Uh, nothing makes me angrier than the "dirty" narrative many vegans particularly in the raw community subscribe to. According to it, meat and other naughty foods "putrify" in your colon, making it a toxic environment and causing pretty much every single problem you can think of. To atone you most scour your intestines with copious amounts of fiber to remove any traces of it and eat only "clean" and "pure" plant juices and salads. If you are sick it's YOUR fault for eating dirty foods. These myths, which have absolutely no science behind them, are perpetuated in popular books like Skinny Bitch.

The idea of the wrong diet being both physically and spiritually "unclean" has its roots in religion. Early pioneers of vegetarianism like cereal magnate Dr. Kellog used high fiber grains to cleanse the body of supposed impurities. It makes sense that such plenty proponents of vegetarianism also proscribed sex. Their mission was to separate people from their dirty Earthly bodies and desires. One of the reasons Kellog recommended vegetarianism was to reduce sexual desire. 

Contrast that with the paleo paradigm, which simply exhorts people to eat foods that are appropriate for us evolutionarily. The paleo approach embraces things shunned by Kellog and his ilk, from dirt and bacteria (which help modulate our immune system) to bone marrow. Cleansing? Guilt-mongering pseudoscience. The hilarious things are that meat doesn't ferment in the digestive system at all! It's starches and other foods that the body can't immediately utilize that ferment. Diets like the Specific Carbohydrate Diet for people with digestive ailments like colitis prohibit those foods because they are part of a vicious cycle.

Bacteria isn't bad, but modern sugary diets can alter the gut flora and upset the gut ecosystem by feeding some bacteria that may not be good to have too much of. Grains and other food that is not what the human body evolved to digest can muck things up, but that doesn't mean you are dirty and toxic. So called "toxic" fat is actually digested very easily and turned into energy by our bodies. Probably the best diet you can eat if you have IBS is one that's the opposite of gut-abrading raw vegetable and grain diets being pushed by making of the quackelite: fermented veggies and plenty of easily-digested fat. Notice how many people promoting particularly raw diets for digestive stuff are still consuming blended fruit goo and complaining about how important fussy food combining is despite being on the "right" diet for so long. Talk about skinny bitch...I found such a diet made me bony and irritable from hunger and malnourishment. 

I found that the diet of fermented veggies and healthy fat put my IBS-attacked digestive system in good enough condition to eat normal foods within months. It both nourishes your digestive tract with important nutrients and stops the cycle of damage induced by inappropriate amounts of gut fermentation and irritating plant fibers and chemicals. 

The truth is that the colon isn't full of toxic plaque...ask anyone who has actually worked on a human body instead of someone who wants to sell detox products: 

Congratulations! You've just necrosed the mucosal layer of your intestinal lumen (English translation: you killed off the layer(s) of cells that line the inside of your intestine). I've been a paramedic for 16+ years, and am now in nursing school, and I've seen what mucosae looks like when it's been chemically abraded with, say, Drano: kind of brown/yellow, stringy, "mucusy," and looks a little like chicken fat. When intestinal mucosa is damaged/killed, it's not uncommon for it to slough off in strips or large sections, and to come out looking as described. Our bodies have mucosae and produce mucus for a reason. While it may be trendy to chemically peel it off and admire it in the collander in which you caught it, you've just screwed with the interface between your nutrients and your body, not to mention that you've given all the bacteria that inhabit your colon a great way to enter your blood and lymphatic fluid. Better hope your immune system is functioning well for the next few days.

As far as I'm concerned, as soon as I see loaded unscientific words like "toxin" and "putrid" I pretty much know the writer is pushing a agenda that has little to do with how the human body actually works. As a free thinker and as a woman, I want to reject this sort of quasi-relgious dogma that makes women feel like their problems are caused by being "unclean" and that the way to cleanse themselves is to torment their bodies with sugary juices and calorie-lacking salads. 

Paleolithic people didn't need to stick hoses up their asses to feel good and digest properly...we don't need these things either. 

Postscript: I also find it hilarious when people brag about going number two 4X times a day or more, like that's a good thing. As far as I'm concerned that's a bad thing to spend so much time in the toilet and have your insides depleted. Eades has a good take on this.