Anti-Vegan Youtube Comment

[TheVeganAtheist]

Periodically I get these passionately anti-vegan commenters who think they can debunk veganism. Here is the most recent:

+TheVeganAtheist (Vegans please read) Ok, so here is my complete thesis into why being Vegan is a flawed concept (side note - I have studied nutrition at masters level at a top Uk uni, i've also studied dietary history & evolutionary biology) I apologise if this gets a bit lengthy.

Veganism is a deeply flawed concept, both environmentally & dietarily and future generation will laugh at this stupid diet, why?

1) Veganism is a flawed concept. Why? Vegans, amongst other reasons, don't eat animal products to avoid the death of animals. But agriculture destroys more animals and the environment more than any other method. Growing tropical fruits destroys rain forests, shipped from across the planet. Is this really sustainable? A single cow can feed a family for a year if frozen correctly. Vegan ruins the environment more than ANY OTHER DIET!

2) Guess what? Over 70% of the foods we eat today did not exist before the industrial revolution. From an evolutionary perspective, there is simply no way for our bodies to know what to do with these “foods” (which, as we all know, aren’t real food at all) If you're from Europe, is it preferable in your genetic makeup to eat bananas that grow in the rainforest????

3) Broken down by nutrient ratios, what we feed cattle (that isn't grass fed/pasteurised) to “fatten them up” is almost identical to the government-sanctioned food pyramid for a “healthy” diet! Is it any wonder we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic??

4) It was only when we started eating animal foods/fish that our brains doubled in size, this is a proven scientific fact, allowing for the modern human and all our advances. Interesting irony that the very capacity for making an argument for a plant-based diet comes from our ancestors’ move away from a plant-based diet! Ah, evolution wins EVERY time!!!!!!!!!

5) A recent Australian study was done with a group of aborigine who had grown up in a traditional hunter gatherer environments, and then moved into urban environments where they adopted modern diets. Alas, lifestyles and (unsurprisingly) health concerns such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease arose. They returned to the outback & their hunter gatherer ways for a seven week period. They lost 25 pounds each and all their health markers (insulin resistance, blood pressure, cholesterol levels ect) normalised. Red meat, poultry, vegetables and seasonal fruits where plentiful for these men, I wonder what this study proves???

6) Another interesting point, are humans digestive tracts designed to eat meat?? Vegans say no, other people with working brains say YES - it turns out that much differs among animals, the markers lay in the composition of the digestive tract! Animals have evolved digestive tracts and livers to transform diverse food inputs into the uniform set of nutrients that they need for optimal health. Herbivores have foregut organs such as rumens or hindgut chambers for fermenting carbohydrates, turning them into fats and volatile acids that can be used to manufacture fats. Carnivores have livers capable of turning protein into glucose and fat.The truth is that humans are omnivores, despite what some vegan proponents would have you believe. We function best eating BOTH animals and plant together!!!! (Great study - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10702160)

7) Guess what? Meat/fish is VERY nutritious!! Did you know, that high quality, unprocessed meat is among the most nutritious foods in the world?! A 100 gram portion (3.5 ounces) of raw ground beef contains large amounts of Vitamin B12, B3 (Niacin), B6, Iron, Zinc, Selenium and plenty of other vitamins and minerals (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/bee ... cts/6193/2) Vitamin B12 is particularly important because it can not be obtained in ANY amount from plants (arguably some sea veggies contain small traces) Studies show that most vegans who don’t supplement with B12, 92% are deficient in this critical nutrient (http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/10)
Unprocessed meat is also loaded with healthy fats, but meat from grass-fed animals contains up to 5 times as much Omega-3 as meat from grain-fed animals!!!! (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18641180) But the nutrient composition of meat goes WAY beyond all the macro- and micronutrients that we are all familiar with! - CREATINE forms an energy reserve in the muscles and brain and is found only in animal foods. Vegetarians are deficient in creatine, leading to reduced physical and mental performance (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/di ... id=8207518) CARNOSINE functions as a powerful anti-oxidant and provides protection against many degenerative processes. Carnosine is only found in animal foods (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15872311) DHA and EPA are the active forms of Omega-3 in the human body and found primarily in animal foods. The body is inefficient at converting ALA (the plant form of Omega-3) to the active forms (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11083485)

8) Humans have been eating fish for millions of years, some cultures SURVIVE solely on fish and have zero disease. Studies show that regular consumption of fish fights

Alzheimer's
Polyunsaturated fatty acids found in many fish may prevent damage to brain cells. Eating fish can also dramatically reduce the risk of high blood pressure, which is linked with dementia. A French study of 2000 people showed that those who ate seafood at least once a week had a significantly lower risk of dementia over a seven-year period than those who didn't.

Cancer
A Swedish study of 6000 men over a 30-year period showed that those who didn't eat any fish had between double and treble the risk of developing prostate cancer, compared to those who ate moderate or large amounts. Shellfish, such as crab and lobster, also contains selenium, thought to have cancer-fighting properties.

Depression
It's been reported that fish can help to ease depression. Again, it's down to omega-3 fatty acids, which are believed to raise levels of the brain chemical serotonin.

Arthritis
Population groups that eat a lot of fish - Inuits in Greenland, for example - have low rates of inflammatory conditions such as arthritis. Studies have also shown fish oils to be useful in relieving the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

Social benefits
According to research carried out in Mauritius, children given lots of fish from the age of three are less likely to have criminal records by the time they reach 23.

EVEN Skin
According to dermatologist Nicholas Perricone, author of The Perricone Prescription, a salmon-packed diet can help smooth out age lines.

9) TESTING - The Vegan diet is rather new in terms of modern human diets. We haven't tested the vegan diet long term, I would bet all the money in the world in 10 years we will not be eating vegan. We will know the dangers & this stupid method of eating will be obsolete.

10) This idiot does not know anything about nutrition. Eating 50 bananas a day like some vegans do is VERY bad for you, thats a lot of fructose/potassium and your organs will suffer. They come from a eating disorder background and obviously sits around all day obsessing over diet and body, that alone is not healthy. You may argue some vegans look in good shape, so would you if you worked out all day like most do?

[brimstoneSalad]

I try to avoid reading the comments section on Youtube videos.

[Neptual]

I'll second on brimstone's comment, they often make me sad to see the stupidity in people and the quantity of the people makes me want to stop using the internet.

[thebestofenergy]

I try to avoid reading the comments section on Youtube videos.

I was once reading them, always tried to argue, and saw that everybody there was always getting angry and never open to change. When I was trying to use rational arguments, no matter how nice I was, they were always getting on the defensive, starting to use logical fallacies and misinformation. Of all the times I tried, not once I saw someone changing his/her opinion. Be that it's just Youtube comments, and people don't take them seriously, be that the people I was arguing with already decided that they didn't want to change, it was a waste of time.
If you want to find one of the worst place on earth to debate, where most people are closed-minded immature idiots, go to Youtube comment section. You might find 1 or 2 that are willing to listen to what you have to say, but the other 200 are not.
I stopped trying to argue actively there, for my sanity's sake. It's too demoralizing, sometimes depressing.

[Humane Hominid]

I revealed him to be a plagiarist and a liar. Large chunks of his screed were cut and pasted from various websites; I tracked them down and posted links, showing him and any other readers exactly how dishonest and lazy he was being.

I don't think you'll be hearing from him again. But maybe he's a masochist.

[Humane Hominid]

I see he posted this screed on several different comment threads. For those interested, here is the full exchange between him and me, so far.

After the screed above, I replied as follows:

+Graham Frost
You may have studied uni-level nutrition, but you sure as hell did not take an evolutionary biology class. Of, if you did, you didn't pay very good attention and got, at best, an average grade.

I know this for a fact, because there are several "tells" in your rants about evolution, which indicate to someone who actually HAS studied evo-bio, and gotten perfect marks in it, AND helped teach it at the uni-lvel, that your grasp of the subject is, at best, remedial.

Try again.

His retort was:

+HumaneHominid Debunk my conjecture, you simply cannot. 

Well, he asked for it, so I laid a little trap for him:

+Graham Frost I can demonstrate your lack of uni-level study by asking a single question. Your answer will reveal your level of knowledge.

Are the omnivorous characters of humans plesiomorphic or synapomorphic?

His responses after this point have since been deleted, so I'll try to do them justice. In response to my question above, he basically yammered out a bunch of Googled definitions of the terms, then repeated my own question back to me using layman's language, saying it was a more interesting and important question than the one I'd asked him; he didn't realize, though, that he was simply repeating my question back to me. He thought he was being clever, so I decided to give him the spanking he'd been begging for:

+Graham Frost Well, that was a nice try with the Googling of definitions, but you fell right into my trap, in two specific ways.

1) You're still confused about definitions. By asking me the question, "A more important question would be to discuss wether omnivorous characteristics are ancestral traits, unique derived traits and/or shared derived traits?," you are simply repeating my question to you. But, you seem to think it's a different question.

2) You didn't recognize that I was asking you a trick question. "Omnivorous characters" or "omnivorous traits" are largely meaningless terms, since omnivory isn't a trait or specific suite of traits unto itself. That is, it's not a synapomorphy, a plesiomorphy, or an autapomorphy. It's just an informal description for any animal that isn't a specialized herbivore or carnivore. It applies to most animals.

If you tried to use omnivory as a phylogenetic tool in an actual evo-bio setting, you'd at best get a lot of raised eyebrows. It's not a recognized diagnostic character or suite of characters. And it certainly isn't used in primate cladistics.

The fact that you didn't instantly recognize this as a trick question debunks your claim that you've studied evolutionary biology at the uni level. This stuff is covered in freshman- and sophmore-level evo-bio classes. So, there's no need to "debunk your conjectures," as I can easily debunk your claim that you've studied this material at the uni-level.

Now, for your edification, here are the "tells" from your original post, that revealed you have no uni-level background in evo-bio.

-- Your point number 2 contains two of them: "Guess what? Over 70% of the foods we eat today did not exist before the industrial revolution. From an evolutionary perspective, there is simply no way for our bodies to know what to do with these “foods” (which, as we all know, aren’t real food at all)"

--- Urm, nope. We have manipulated these foods to be MORE adapted to our bodies. That's the actual problem. As animals, we crave fat, salt, and sugar, for perfectly understandable evolutionary reasons. We have thus cultivated a number of food organisms to contain more fat, salt, and/or sugar than their ancestors did. And we did it so well, that these foods are making us fatter because they interact with and fool our energy storage metabolism so well.

-- "If you're from Europe, is it preferable in your genetic makeup to eat bananas that grow in the rainforest????"

-- This one displays your lack of understanding about the concept of ancestral (plesiomorphic) traits vs. derived (autapomorphic or symapomorphic) traits. Europeans are not a separate species of H. sapiens. Whatever their regional genetic variations are, they still retain all the ancestral traits as other humans. Thus, yes, Europeans would do just fine on fruits from the rainforest, as would all other humans. We are all the same species. We retain the underlying digestive physiology and anatomy of hominoids going back 22 million years. Nature didn't completely redesign our digestive systems from the ground up when H. sapiens emerged. It just made a few tweaks here and there, and kept everything else more or less the same. That's how ancestral traits work; there's usually no need to modify them, so they don't change very much over evolutionary time. This is why, for instance, H. sapiens cannot produce vitamin C endogenously and must get it from food. That's a plesiomorphy we inherited from distant hominoid ancestors in the Miocene, who were primarily fruit-eaters.

-- Then there's your point number 4: "It was only when we started eating animal foods/fish that our brains doubled in size, this is a proven scientific fact, allowing for the modern human and all our advances."

-- You are referring here to an idea called the expensive tissue hypothesis, first formulated by Aiello & Wheeler in 1995. While there are some problems with the idea, I won't go into them here, because it isn't necessary. You got the hypothesis backwards.

The ETH does NOT say that meat-eating doubled human brain size. it says that an increase in brain size necessitated a dietary shift to more calorie-dense foods, in order to compensate for the caloric demands of said bigger brains. In other words, bigger brains led to more meat-eating, not the other way around. The evolution of bigger brains came FIRST, followed by the increase in meat-eating.

And further, while Aiello & Wheeler postulated that meat was the most likely candidate food, they were clear that ANY calorie-dense food source would have sufficed. They specifically cited fruits, tubers, and oil-rich nuts and seeds as other potential candidates.

-- Your point number 6 again displays an ignorance of the concept of ancestral vs. derived traits. The human digestive system, in both its anatomy and physiology, retains the template laid down among the hominoids 22 million years ago. It is a modified omni-frugivore digestive system, not something totally new. Calling us "omnivores" is redundant, since all primates are to some degree or another; it doesn't distinguish us from other primates all that much, and certainly not from our closest relatives among the apes.

-- Finally, your entire post displays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution itself. Human biology has not remained static since the Stone Age. There is no reason, evolutionarily speaking, why it would. The idea that evolution stopped working on us 10,000 years ago is nonsensical, and it's a notion that's only really found among pseudo-science hucksters like the paleo and low-carb diet gurus, and not among any actual evolutionary anthropologists or biologists.

So, it's pretty clear to me that you have not studied evo-bio at the university level. It's best that you just admit you lied about this, rather than trying to continue with your Google- and Wikipedia-based shell games. Most of what you wrote looks like it could have been copy-pasted from some paleo-diet website or forum, and for all I know it was. It wouldn't be the first time someone tried that stunt one of these comment threads.

Well, he was having none of this. He retorted about how foolish I was, how I failed to cite any sources, and that he was about to obliterate me with the power of his mind and education. He urged me to prepare myself.

Not to be cowed, I took his spanking to the next level:

+Graham Frost
Oh, Oh, I'm shaking in my boots! Will your devastating rebuttal include more copy-pasted text from authoritynutrition dot com?

You're not fooling anyone, poseur.

And:

You plagiarized Point number 7 from this website -- authoritynutrition.com/7-evidenc ... -eat-meat/

And you plagiarized point number 8 from this website -- http://www.saga.co.uk/health/healthy-ea ... gfish.aspx

It's always like this with you clowns. You steal other people's words and try to pass them off as your own, sometimes pretending to possess "educations," all while forgettiing that the rest of the world knows how to use Google, too, and can easily discover the sources of your ass-hattery.

Seriously, Graham, if you're going to plagiarize, at least make an effort to hide it. 

That's when the bulk of his responses were deleted, or at least are no longer visible in my feed.

[TheVeganAtheist]

good job Humane Hominid. You have more patience then I

[PrincessPeach]

Very nice replies HumaneHominid you schooled him very well!

One up

[brimstoneSalad]

Well done with the trick question, that was clever.