Philosophical Vegan Forum

Over the past 8-or-so years, I gained a lot of experience doing vegegelicism. I still don't know what's the best way of doing it, however, I've noticed that many people (including myself in the past) are doing downright dangerous things when doing vegegelicism. So, I've written a blog-post about those things. Here are those things:
1) Don't yell unrelated fringe claims, such as Flat-Earthism, radical anarchism, global warming denialism, and so on. In my opinion, those things are actually, when analyzed more deeply, incompatible with veganism, and I explained why.
2) Don't be anti-supplements.
3) Don't demonize protein intake. Lysine deficiency is a common and a serious condition (especially when one needs a good immune system, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic), and people demonizing protein are contributing to it becoming even more common.
4) Don't claim that methionine is the real enemy of the heart health.
5) Don't claim that following some weird diet is better for managing type-2-diabetes than insulin is. Chances are, your weird died idea has been tried before insulin was invented, and it didn't work (at least not nearly as well as insulin does).
6) Don't claim that some diet which doesn't cut the calories is going to help you lose weight.
7) Don't claim that sugar doesn't cause type-2-diabetes. As far as I understand it, it's every bit as crazy as claiming saturated fat don't cause heart disease, not the least because their main arguments appear to be basically the same.
8) Don't propagate coconuts as healthy food.
9) Don't claim that eggs are worse for heart health than meat is.
10) Don't fight for the rights of animals that are probably not sentient, such as fish. Understand that fighting for the rights of fish is not only not morally virtuous, it is also morally objectionable: it diverts the resources from what they should be spent on (on fighting for human rights and rights of sentient animals).
11) Don't claim that cats shouldn't be kept as pets because they would murder their owners if given a chance to.
12) Don't imply that milk only started to be unhealthy when we switched from grass-fed cows to grain-fed cows.
13) Don't use the rhetoric "If everybody had to kill to eat meat, everybody would be a vegetarian.".
14) Don't claim rice milk is better for climate than cow's milk.
15) Don't claim that meat is kept artificially inexpensive by government policies. Claiming that those policies work goes wildly against mainstream economics, even more so than radical anarchism does.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm 1) Don't yell unrelated fringe claims, such as Flat-Earthism, radical anarchism, global warming denialism, and so on. In my opinion, those things are actually, when analyzed more deeply, incompatible with veganism, and I explained why.
2) Don't be anti-supplements.
3) Don't demonize protein intake.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm Lysine deficiency is a common and a serious condition (especially when one needs a good immune system, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic), and people demonizing protein are contributing to it becoming even more common.

That's a questionable fringe claim, or at least related to one.
Try instead: Don't fixate on panaceas.

Lysine has been touted up there along with vitamin C. The reality is that sub-clinical "deficiency" or non-optimal levels are complex.
Protein is frankly more important for satiety and thereby reducing obesity rates. It also correlates in whole foods to a broad array of micronutrients. Lysine is one benefit, but the effects are modest and controversial.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm 4) Don't claim that methionine is the real enemy of the heart health.

Where did you hear that? I don't think people do this but maybe it's a new thing.

Methionine and other limiting amino acids promote some cancer growth (not formation, but growth when it does happen). They may also accelerate ageing by many mechanisms themselves related to gene expression (it may signal a state of nutrition vs limited intake, the latter of which slows things down).

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm5) Don't claim that following some weird diet is better for managing type-2-diabetes than insulin is. Chances are, your weird died idea has been tried before insulin was invented, and it didn't work (at least not nearly as well as insulin does).

You could state this more generally as not contradicting prescribed medicine as treatments.
Obviously doctors love to get their patients off medication of reduce doses when indicated; claims to the contrary are conspiratorial.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm6) Don't claim that some diet which doesn't cut the calories is going to help you lose weight.

I think you've mistaking claims re: not counting calories and ending up following a lower calorie diet by "accident" as a consequence of low calorie density foods vs. not actually eating fewer calories.

Freeleeesque claims of actually eating huge calorie surpluses and losing weight are I think not common enough today to mention.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm7) Don't claim that sugar doesn't cause type-2-diabetes. As far as I understand it, it's every bit as crazy as claiming saturated fat don't cause heart disease, not the least because their main arguments appear to be basically the same.

Obesity does, in so far as sugar causes obesity (and there's a good reason to think it broadly does). Metabolically, the conversion of sugar into fat for storage might also be a problem. I don't think this is well enough studied to say. Eating the sugar and then burning off ALL of those extra calories may not contribute, this is less well studied than links to obesity which are non controversial.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm8) Don't propagate coconuts as healthy food.
9) Don't claim that eggs are worse for heart health than meat is.

Who is doing those things?
Egg yolk may be worse for some people who are hyper responders. This may need more qualification.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm10) Don't fight for the rights of animals that are probably not sentient, such as fish. Understand that fighting for the rights of fish is not only not morally virtuous, it is also morally objectionable: it diverts the resources from what they should be spent on (on fighting for human rights and rights of sentient animals).

Another fringe claim Teo, you're at it again.
Stop confusing mammalian nociception for sentience. Fish respond to pain differently. They definitely see, smell, hear, and taste things among other senses. They have experiences they like and those they do not like, as indicated by their ability to be trained. Senses = sentient. Pain is one of many senses (and they do have it too, FYI, in the colloquial sense).

This would be better put as not devoting disproportionate resources to animals of likely lower sentience.
Wild caught fish are an important case, because unlike farmed animals, it doesn't harm the environment as a consequence of producing food to farm them or from methane production released in their burps and farts.
The point should be to recognize an uphill battle, and not trying to die on hills like that where there aren't enough intersecting arguments to make it an easy win.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm11) Don't claim that cats shouldn't be kept as pets because they would murder their owners if given a chance to.
12) Don't imply that milk only started to be unhealthy when we switched from grass-fed cows to grain-fed cows.
13) Don't use the rhetoric "If everybody had to kill to eat meat, everybody would be a vegetarian.".

12 is another fringe claim, just group that in there with 1. 11 and 13 should be grouped together under arguments from bad rhetoric.

Shortening the list and consolidating like things can help a lot if you want this to be useful.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm14) Don't claim rice milk is better for climate than cow's milk.

It likely is, on account of there's not much rice in it.
The margins on plant milks vs. cow milk are less dramatic simply because milk is more efficient than meat, not so much because plant milks are bad in some way.

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:41 pm15) Don't claim that meat is kept artificially inexpensive by government policies. Claiming that those policies work goes wildly against mainstream economics, even more so than radical anarchism does.

Teo, we've been into this before.

Government subsidizes a number of agricultural products in different ways.
If feed is cheaper, then that means the meat is cheaper.
Your corn tortillas are cheaper too, as well as your soy milk, but these products are already extremely cheap and are made with less corn and soy than meat is and more mechanical inputs (cooking etc.) which are not subsidized, so the subsidization lowers the price of meat more so than the other consumer items that derive from those products.

In terms of how one of the most common forms of subsidy works, perhaps you just don't understand the economics.
If the government buys up, for instance, cheese when the price drops too low due to oversupply (which would harm those companies), it protects the industry's otherwise irresponsible production levels which --generally-- keep the price rock bottom at a just barely sustainable point.

It may not make sense to you that artificially raising the price lowers the price, but that's how it works. It's a guardrail that allows industry to crank out as much product as they can at razor thin margins and be protected from the widescale losses in profit that can result from overproduction.

Teo, you just have to stop assuming that because you don't understand how something works that it's wrong or goes against your incorrect understanding of economic theory (or thermodynamics, optics, etc. as in your flat Erath days). You can't assume your grasp on economics is sound enough to contradict pretty well known trivia that somehow nobody noticed was backwards.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Where did you hear that? I don't think people do this but maybe it's a new thing.

Well, I was claiming that on another Internet forum. And that's literally what Gary Yourofsky's "Animal protein causes heart disease." means, right? Protein in meat contains, on average, more methionine than protein in plants. The problem with that claim is, like I've explained on my blog:

https://flatassembler.github.io/vegegelicism.html wrote:It's true that methionine raises your cholesterol levels. However, people who say that don't seem to understand the scale we are talking about. The food that's highest in methionine is sesame seeds. Do you realize how much sesame seeds you would have to eat to raise your cholesterol levels by 5%? The answer, if the studies on rodents are anything to judge by, is around 300 grams per day. Hardly anybody eats that much methionine. For comparison, a diet rich in saturated fat can easily increase your cholesterol levels by 30%.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Obesity does, in so far as sugar causes obesity (and there's a good reason to think it broadly does). Metabolically, the conversion of sugar into fat for storage might also be a problem. I don't think this is well enough studied to say. Eating the sugar and then burning off ALL of those extra calories may not contribute, this is less well studied than links to obesity which are non controversial.

As far as I understand it, "Sugar causes type-2-diabetes." means "Fructose causes the liver to ignore insulin.".

brimstoneSalad wrote:Who is doing those things?

Well, on another Internet forum, I was claiming eggs cause heart attacks, and linking to epidemiological studies that supposedly show that. I was explained that what those studies actually show is that people tend to eat bacon with eggs, which is high in both saturated fat and salt.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Egg yolk may be worse for some people who are hyper responders.

What do you mean?

brimstoneSalad wrote:They have experiences they like and those they do not like, as indicated by their ability to be trained.

Look, as far as I understand it, claiming that sharks feel pain means rejecting basically all neuroscience, as sharks do not have nociceptors to even potentially feel pain. As for higher fish, it's slightly more complicated, but they almost certainly don't feel pain either (unless you assume that type-c-neurofibres aren't necessary for pain, and not only nociceptors).

brimstoneSalad wrote:12 is another fringe claim

I don't think it is, I often hear it. The problem with it is, as I explained:

https://flatassembler.github.io/vegegelicism.html wrote:Although commonly repeated, that claim is almost certainly wrong. Milk from grass-fed cows does contain omega-3 acids, however, the type of omega-3 acids that it contains, the ALA, is almost undigestible by humans (human liver can only convert around 5% of ALA to DHA). Around 90% of omega-3 acids in milk from grass-fed cows is ALA, and human beings can only use DHA.
And you need to understand that, while DHA does raise your HDL cholesterol, the evidence that it translates to lower risk of heart attacks is very thin. A lot more thin than the evidence that saturated fat cause heart attacks.

brimstoneSalad wrote:If feed is cheaper, then that means the meat is cheaper.

No, it doesn't. Price is determined by supply and demand, not by labor it takes to produce something. Look up "labour theory of value". You are doing the same mistake early economists such as Adam Smith were doing.

I added the 16th don't:
16) Don't advocate for governments to ban meat because of pandemics. Please understand that it being illegal to eat bats in China didn't stop COVID-19 from jumping from bats to humans. In fact, it arguably made it more likely to happen, because the bats which were eaten weren't receiving basic veterinary care (as it was, well, illegal).

teo123 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 8:37 am

brimstoneSalad wrote:Egg yolk may be worse for some people who are hyper responders.

What do you mean?

Egg yolk is high in cholesterol. Most people find diminishing returns from cholesterol consumption -- unless they're vegan and eat none at all, a little cholesterol will get absorbed and a lot will not be. So eating a tiny bit of cholesterol is about as bad as eating a large amount. If one bite of meat maxes out your daily absorption, eating an extra dozen eggs has little impact. So saturated fat is the main factor for those people.
For some people, they're "hyper-responders" and their absorption is more linear. So these people need to watch their intake even more. They have no cap as such, so each extra egg is a big deal.

teo123 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 8:37 am

brimstoneSalad wrote:They have experiences they like and those they do not like, as indicated by their ability to be trained.

Look, as far as I understand it, claiming that sharks feel pain means rejecting basically all neuroscience, as sharks do not have nociceptors to even potentially feel pain. As for higher fish, it's slightly more complicated, but they almost certainly don't feel pain either (unless you assume that type-c-neurofibres aren't necessary for pain, and not only nociceptors).

Teo, you're completely ignoring what I've said once again.
No more fish pain or consciousness talk from you.

Fish are sentient. You DO NOT need "pain" to be sentient. There are people who have congenital insensitivity to pain. Those people remain sentient, because sentience is about sense experience. They're conscious, thinking, feeling beings, as are fish. This is not controversial.

The theoretical reason fish lack SOME of the same kinds or density of receptors land animals have is because they don't need to limp in the water to avoid additional tissue damage. They do a lot less touching of things, and they don't put the same kind of stress on limbs. A fish with an injured fin is not particularly benefitted from chronic pain as a result; the fin can heal with relatively normal usage.

Despite this, the consensus is thus far that fish in general can experience some degree of pain in the sense of nociception.

I understand you have some personal biases that make you want to believe pain is the same thing as sentience (false), and that fish don't feel any pain (false). You're simply fractally wrong.

Stop wasting people's time with this. It has been explained to you multiple times by now. The small differences in degree and location of receptors doesn't change the fact of the matter that fish experience some kinds of pain to some degree and it affects their behavior. And aside from that, nociception pain isn't even necessary for sentience.

teo123 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 8:37 am

brimstoneSalad wrote:If feed is cheaper, then that means the meat is cheaper.

No, it doesn't. Price is determined by supply and demand, not by labor it takes to produce something. Look up "labour theory of value". You are doing the same mistake early economists such as Adam Smith were doing.

Other things being held equal Teo, obviously. And also not being in a monopoly, which should go without saying.
I explained every substantial aspect of how the subsidies work to lower the price of meat. They work to increase supply which forces prices down and demand up slightly until it reaches a cheaper equilibrium where more meat is being produced and sold at a lower price point than it would be without the subsidies.

The whole point of the subsidies is to do just this -- create an abundant supply of cheap meat for the public -- so if it isn't working then you're alleging a vast conspiracy theory across world governments, and that basically all of the farmers and economic advisers who craft these policies don't understand economics as well as you in your infinite wisdom do.

teo123 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2024 4:15 am I added the 16th don't:
16) Don't advocate for governments to ban meat because of pandemics. Please understand that it being illegal to eat bats in China didn't stop COVID-19 from jumping from bats to humans. In fact, it arguably made it more likely to happen, because the bats which were eaten weren't receiving basic veterinary care (as it was, well, illegal).

Do you think small animals being eaten in China are receiving any kind of veterinary care? This is a stretch Teo.

A black market might be marginally dirtier (this is debatable in these cases), but it's also smaller. So at worst there's negative and positive pressure on disease transmission. You'd have to find evidence to say which is higher. We can figure out how much the market contracts. Assessing how much closer to human habitation the remaining black market animals become and how much more disease they transmit is much harder.

brimstoneSalad wrote:if it isn't working then you're alleging a vast conspiracy theory across world governments

No, I am not. Most of the countries have minimum wage laws and quite a few have rent ceilings, which aren't working. That doesn't mean those governments are in a conspiracy.

brimstoneSalad wrote: basically all of the farmers

Whether or not agriculture subsidies benefit the farmers is debetable. They probably do short-term, but, in the long run, they are probably increasing the price of the arable land and agricultural machinery (by increasing the demand for those things). But it's not as if farmers can see what happens in the long run because of the government subsidies, because farmers are not economists.

brimstoneSalad wrote:economic advisers who craft these policies

The vast majority of economists are against agricultural subsidies. The consensus that the US should end its agricultural subsidies programs is even higher than the consensus that minimum wage causes unemployment, right up there with the consensus that rent ceilings are harmful. And there are three reasons for that:
1) Agricultural subsidies almost by definition mean higher taxes. Higher taxes ought to be justified.
2) Agricultural subsidies don't appear to achieve their stated goal of decreasing the price of food. For example, when Argentina recently ended its agriculture subsidies programs, the food prices went down, rather than up.
3) Agricultural subsidies, in the long run, hurt the farmers by increasing the price of arable land and agricultural machinery.

Milton Friedman clearly believed, when making this video, that subsidies increased the price of food. I am not sure that makes sense either. Subsidies should, as far as I understand it, have no consistent effect on prices. Prices are determined by supply and demand, not by something else.

A related question is: "Does it make sense to blame rising prices on the raising of minimum wage, as many conservatives and libertarians do?". The prediction that minimum wage leads to unemployment does follow from the economic theory, but the prediction that it will lead to higher prices... I am not sure it does. The logic is that, for example, if the bakeries need to pay bakers more because of the minimum wage, they need to charge more for bread. But, like I've said, price is determined by supply and demand, not by the labor it takes to produce something.