Why veganism is not the answer

I passionately believe in the importance of animal rights and environmental issues. It's somewhat understandable that, knowing this, people assume I'm vegan.

They are mistaken.

But this is not only an incorrect conclusion about myself. It is an incorrect conclusion about veganism, animals, and our environment.

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Since animal rights issues have become entwined with veganism, I wish to explain my conviction that such a partnership is not compatible.

In fact, it is actively detrimental.

It's bad for cats. My favorite pet is an obligate carnivore. They will die if they do not eat animal products. If the embrace of veganism becomes part of the cause of animal rights, cats become targets for mistreatment.

There's already a movement afoot to blame cats for the decrease in bird populations; even though the decline is actually because of habitat destruction and other environmental damage. It's simply so much easier for humans to not change anything about themselves... when they can blame cats, instead.

Because they are predators, cats are painted as "killers." This makes our efforts to get cats better societal treatment even more difficult.

It's bad for animals. Aren't we showing how much we love animals by choosing not to eat them? Isn't veganism the highest moral choice? Isn't this the way to stop animal cruelty?

It sounds so good, doesn't it? But like a lot of well-meaning ideas, (Communism, industrialized food, and low-rise pants,) it turns out that it doesn't work in the real world. Not only that; it makes things worse.

If we do not support animals any more, what will become of them? We have created them in their current, domesticated, dependent on humans, state. Some extreme elements of the animal rights movement characterize them as "slaves to be set free." But these are no longer wild animals. If they are "set free," they will suffer, and die, and then, die out.

Is that really the right path for "animal lovers" to take?

It's bad for humans. We still have domesticated animals, and still eat some of them, and we always will. Because it's a fantasy to think there is another way of handling the Cycle of Life.

Just like cats, we also need animal products to live. Vegans like to claim the way they eat is the healthiest. In My Health Is Better Than It Has Ever Been, a young woman describes the turnaround in her well-being... when she becomes an ex-vegan.

What about science? Studies show that vegetarianism suppresses the immune system. The China Study turned many people towards vegetarian diets for health reasons. Except the data, accurately examined, turned out to show the opposite.

Orthodox Hindus who emigrated to Great Britain started coming down with megaloblastic anemia; caused by a B12 deficiency. How could this be? Their religious traditions had made them vegans for centuries without these health problems!

Turns out, the food they ate in India had insects in it, an animal product that was enough to stave off the deadly anemia. In Britain, the cleaning standards were much stricter... and they lost this protection.

So I'm not surprised that, in a 2003 study:

Of self-defined vegetarians, nearly 2/3 (214/334, or 64%) ate a significant quantity of meat on at least one of the two days for which their dietary intake was surveyed!

When I speak with vegetarians, it often turns out they have meat "once in a while," or "when I get cravings," or on "special occasions," or simply don't consider fish to be "meat." As science shows, even a small amount of animal products can safeguard our health.

But we must have that small amount.

It's bad for the environment. It's become "accepted knowledge" that grazing animals are bad for the environment. They eat the happy plants to death, and trample down the soil, and toot out killer quantities of methane!

Except... none of that is true.

In High Priest of the Pasture, Polyface Farm demonstrates that plants and animals work properly in symbiosis; a mutally dependent relationship. After all, the buffalo and the grasses of the Great Plains got along for millenia. Yet, in a few short decades, monocultural farming practices created the Dust Bowl instead.

Many countries are reclaiming arid, ruined land... by pasturing animals on it. How did the land get ruined? By intensive agriculture, and its attendant irrigation and petroleum-based fertilizers. Our current farming practices are not self-sustaining. And we all pay a terrible price.

The way to stop animal cruelty is to stop animal cruelty.

By focusing on veganism and not wearing leather, people feel they are actually doing something for animals. But the eating of animals and the utilization of animal products goes on... because it must go on.

Nature is unavoidably structured so that predators eat prey, who eat plants, who need animals to return vital nutrients to the soil. Break this chain at any point, and none of it works.

When feedlot farms are run on mistreatment and antibiotics, the real cruelty is in the animal's life.

Not their death.

This recent TED talk, Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change is an excellent summing up of some of my points about environmentalism. Please share!

The wrong fuel

We have almost fifty years of research telling us that animal fat will kill us and whole grains are the path to health. Why, then, have we spent the last fifty years getting fatter and sicker?

We are told what food is

Because it has all been based on humans eating an Industrial Diet. This is like a big distorting lens placed over everything we see.

If we take it as a given that we have to eat grains, we have completely left out the possibilities that might happen if we don't eat any grain at all.

If we are sitting on the beach, but eating sand, it really doesn't help us to know what kind of sand does the least damage to our teeth and stomach, does it?

We need to know that we should not eat sand.

Likewise, it doesn't help to know that whole grains have more vitamins than bleached and processed grains... if meat has more vitamins. If meat has more protein. If meat is actually better for us.

Imagine that cars started having to run on different fuel than we have now. It's not as filtered, it's not as concentrated, it's not an optimum fuel. But this is what we have available.

We would take that as a given. We would work around it.

We would put extra filters in the cars, to take the gunk out of this fuel, and we would get used to changing them every few months. We would let the car "warm up" for a longer time. The fuel would not be as powerful, so our tires would be lighter and wear out sooner. We would replace the fuel injectors at so many thousands of miles, because "that's what you do."

Because everyone's car was like this... because that was the only fuel we were told was the right one to put in our car...because every mechanic would truthfully tell us this is how it works... we would keep patching and replacing and putting up with it. Even when our cars wouldn't last more than a few years.

Because we wouldn't know any better.

How calories count

Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, likes to point out, "When you are cutting calories, you are also cutting carbs."

I was reading this article in the NY Times where he discussed a recent study. People ate the same number of calories; only it was three different compositions. One was low fat/high carb, one was low glycemic, and one was low carb/high fat.

All lost weight. They were lowering their calories, after all, and that generally works for anyone... at first.

Calorie comparisons miss an important point.

But the low carb folks lost the most weight. They had their metabolisms slow down the least from the loss of weight. And they had the greatest lost of actual fat tissue; not lean mass.

The participants reported that low carb was the easiest to stick to because they weren't hungry; the only one of the three diets tested to work this magic.

From my perspective, the Way of Eating that allows a person better health, better body composition, and not suffer from hunger... has to be the way we are supposed to eat. Don't you think?

How can eating fat make us burn fat?

It's a puzzle which can create a barrier; why do low carb eating plans encourage us to eat more fat? Don't we have more than enough of that already?

This is not a math equation. It's a word problem.

This is what comes of seeing our bodies as spreadsheets. This is why thinking of our bodies as spreadsheets does not work.

For instance, I lose best when I do 80% fat. Not everyone is going to like that, or do well on it; I average 1850 calories a day when I eat that way.

But when you consider I used to eat low fat, averaged 1200 calories a day, and couldn't lose weight for weeks on end, we see that our bodies are chemical factories; not spreadsheets.

Eating fat encourages our bodies to burn fat; that is where the food energy is coming from, so our body shifts its chemical factories to burn fat as fuel.

If we eat large amounts of carbohydrates, our body sets up the chemical factories to burn carbs; only, unless we are marathon runners, we cannot burn up that many. The body then cannot burn fat because all their "factories" are set up for carbs.

If we cannot burn up all those carbs; we're stuck with them. The body has to get those sugars out of the blood, using insulin.

So the body turns them into... FAT.

That's how we got fat in the first place. It was never from eating fat.

Planet of the Vegans

One of the complaints about low carb or Paleo-style eating is the emphasis on meat. Even after we get past the health objections, which turn out to be misplaced, we can be confronted with the ethical considerations.

How can we support eating meat when factory farms are filthy places which treat animals so badly?

This is not the answer.

This is, however, a false equivalence. The answer is not "stop eating animal products," which are, in any case, vital to keeping us alive.

The answer is to support sustainable farm practices, and humane animal handling. Far from being dangerous to the environment, animals can survive on lands that are unsuitable for farming, and even reclaim land that has been destroyed by large-scale agriculture.

How can we claim to revere life, and then ignore our own, and that of our friends and family, and that of the earth itself? We cannot.

This is why vegetarians, and vegans, despite wide-ranging mainstream support that includes medical and nutritional authorities, still feel embattled and isolated about their food choices. If they do not feel better once the honeymoon is over, if they re-commit and revamp and take more supplements and just rearrange everything, they will have that good feeling back again.

But that "good feeling" that so often results from switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet is not because meat is so bad for us; it often comes from getting rid of many junk foods, or taking up exercise at the same time, or completing other health goals as part of our transformation.

Because, despite the claims of those who embrace it, vegetarianism is not an universal answer to health. And veganism is downright dangerous. Long term lack of minerals and B 12, and has led to many prominent vegans declaring they had to be less strict for the sake of their health. Recently, they have started to promote more protein and fat than they used to, but these are often from soy and seed oils, which have their own health quandaries attached.

The question of living an ethical life is not something that can be solved by opting out of ethical questions by using avoidance.

Pretending there is no Cycle of Life is in itself life-denying.

Eat more fat

What is the key to successful low carbing? Simple!

Eat lots and lots of healthy fat.

If that sentence made your brain explode, I understand. We've spent the last few decades being told that the DEADLYFATZ is the cause of all our woes, and what will eventually kill us. Yet, as I have explained in a previous post, the science behind fat avoidance is highly suspect.

So our biggest obstacle to low carb success can be our own brains. What we are asked to do seems so difficult; yet, once we are past our prejudices, it turns out to be incredibly easy.

Isn't this a treat?

It's so easy because this is how the way our body wants to eat.

For instance, I just had lunch. It was ham, a broccoli/cauliflower/carrot mix, all covered in this cheese sauce.

I made the cheese sauce with cheese, cream cheese, heavy cream, and butter.

Yummy!

Everyone agrees that it is yummy. But we've been told it is also so very bad for us.

But it's not. Fat, especially natural sources like dairy, are very good for us.

Many of the studies that have demonized fat used suspect sources; such as inflammatory seed oils, or sources loaded with transfats, such as hydrogenated fats. These are unnatural sources we are not used to digesting, or using in our bodies.

Every one of our cells is surrounded by a membrane made of fat. Our brains are 60% fat. This is not something that is bad for us!

The key to losing weight with low carb is eating lots of fat. This keeps us full, longer; that lunch I had will last me 5-6 hours. Also, fat has no impact on our blood sugar.

It's not fat that makes us fat. It's high blood sugar.

The Weight Loss Olympics

If there were a Weight Loss Olympics, I'd have a hundred gold medals around my neck.

If we look long enough, that's a ice cream cone.

Shakes 'n' Bars - I invented the Figurines & Tab diet.

Prefab Plan - I went long, assembling my meals from those frozen dinner boxes.

Sports enhancing drugs - You don't test for Dexatrim, do you?

The Calorie Count - Once upon a time, I could eyeball a whole meal and get within 50 calories.

Leaving it in the training room - Ninety minutes a day, floor calisthenics and aerobic machine, every goldurn day for years.

Portion sizing - My palm, my scale, my doll-sized plates.

Starvation Marathon - Five days with nothing but water and B complex pills. Bring it!

In this contest, you win... by losing. And I was a winner. I lost and lost and lost and lost. But the weight always came back, with friends.

That is because I was not addressing the actual problem. The actual problem was that my metabolism was not designed to handle the flood of carbohydrates the "nutritional experts" were pushing on me. I'm a bright girl, I do system processing, and I actually did put together low fat meals with lots of healthy whole grains which fit within their calorie guidelines. And exercised. A lot.

But as I neared forty, the stupid weight started creeping up again... and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't exercise enough, or eat as little, as my body apparently wanted in order to not gain weight. So I did.

It doesn't matter how much we apply ourselves if we aren't doing it right.

No, I'm not deprived.

People find out the way I eat. First, they are stunned. I can see the gears turning as they try to imagine it.

If they are successful at imagining it (and some cannot do this very well) they are then amazed. 95% of the time, they say, word for word, "Oh, I can't live without bread!"

I know they probably won't listen from this point on; changing their diet has just, so to speak, left the table.

But either way, they always ask me, "Don't you feel deprived?"

I'm so deprived!

That's a fair question. I answer it with a question.

I ask them, "When's the last time you had bacon? Salad with real dressing? A steak with garlic aioli? Coffee with heavy cream? Vegetables with butter?"

Their eyes start glazing over and they get this faraway look. Because they rarely eat those things.

Those are "treats." They are indulgences that happen on rare occasions. Daily life is different.

Every day, they eat bread, with fake butter. They drink coffee, with powdered creamer. They eat naked broccoli and skinless chicken breasts and fat-free yogurt.

Either they eat things that have been rendered "health-safe" by taking foods that are supposed to be rich and creamy and luscious and making them cardboardy and watery and tasteless. Or they eat things that are already considered  "health-safe" like whole grains and starchy vegetables and sugary fruits that drive up their blood sugar and lead to metabolic syndrome.

I gave up certain stuff, and it improved my health, and now I don't miss those things.

They gave up different stuff, what they eat now is making them feel sick, and they still miss the stuff they gave up.



They are "deprived" far more than me.

The Holiday Trap - starches

It must be admitted. The long winter holiday season, with its emphasis on "the feasting, the whole feasting, and nothing but the feasting" is the biggest part of the backsliding on a low-carb Way of Life.

Year after year, people do wonderfully with cravings and weight control... until the holidays, when they fall back into bad habits. From being driven by sentiment, to wanting to be polite, and the fact that "those foods" are now "made special," people slide into making one exception after another.

One temptation category is known as "comfort foods." These starches are the base for tasty toppings in almost infinite variety.

But the puzzling part is that this base is the least appealing of all foods.

Found in nature, but not alive.

Pasta, mashed potatoes, bread... these are not tasty foods.


If a part of our brain is protesting this cannot be, this was the exact thing we were craving, does that mean we would eat plain boiled pasta, an unadorned baked potato, or a naked slice of bread?

Nobody means that. Nobody does that.

Because they have no flavor.

How can we crave foods that have no flavor?

What we are craving is something else that starchy foods give us; something that is only coincidentally a matter of taste. The starch breaks down in our bloodstream as a "sugar rush."

At first, having abundant glucose in our blood perks up our brain. We feel sharper. Then, as the first release of insulin reaches our blood, it signals our muscles to relax and take in sugar. We feel more relaxed.

So when we realize it is the emotional effects of these foods we are craving, we can see them differently.

If this is the only way we know to reliably bring about this state, this kind of feedback is impossible to give up. The body must have relief from stress. It will come up with a million ways to get us to eat that.

However, starches have certain qualities that can be duplicated with vegetables; with better health results. Spaghetti squash is a well known example, but there's also zucchini, cauliflower, and mushrooms as healthy support for sauces. This will not push-crash our blood sugar.

Once we realize what is going on with starches, we find that the aftermath is also reliable. It leads to wild swings in our bodies and we become exhausted from trying to bring the body "out of the swerve." We ache from increased water, we feel queasy from the low blood sugar and we are dazed from the effects of the high end.

As we wonder what was so great about these foods, we get the breathing room to realize: we now have better ways of comfort.

Forget everything you thought you knew

One key to success with this new Way of Eating is quite simple; though difficult.

We have to forget everything we ever learned about food and health and losing weight.

Because it was all wrong.

There is no string

If we are told over and over how to lose weight and we try over and over to do that and we find it incredibly difficult but somehow manage to stick with it for a long period of time and then we find out it doesn't work, we don't do the sensible thing.

We somehow miss concluding that we are being told all the wrong things.

Like a child who feels they have no power, we instead decide that somehow, we missed a step in this process that we are told over and over is how it works and here is how to eat and be healthy even though it is a constant struggle and not only do we not lose weight we are also unhealthy but it has to be our fault because that is also what we are told over and over and over that the fault lies in ourselves and that is why we are this way and if we only do it right, if we only stick with it until the very very very end we will get what we want.

Only, we never do.

When I started low carbing, I confided to a friend that I felt so confused and uncertain about it, because "everything I've been told about food is being turned inside-out and upside-down."

But since I had learned a lot of stick-to-it-iveness from my previous weight loss attempts, I could do no less with this plan, despite the dire warnings of how i'm-gonna-drop-dead-any-minute. I've tried the meal replacement bars and diet soda plan, the eat every other day plan, and I've been know to fast for as long as five days! Eating crazy doesn't scare me.

Only... I felt good.

I didn't need willpower. I liked eating this way. I wouldn't be hungry for hours and hours. I slept well, I thought well, I felt well. And the weight went away with less effort than ever ever ever in my life before.

Seven years later... I still eat that way.

Category Killers

I do think the most astonishing thing about my Way of Eating, to most people, is the categories of food I don't eat any more.

Ever.

Part of this is a misconception about what these categories are. "Wheat" is only one word... but it encompasses a huge percentage of what most people eat on a daily basis.

 

Poison is a category.

I think back to my three squares of the past; toast and cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, and something with noodles or pasta followed by pastry.

Yes, when you take out wheat, what is left?

It's something I now call "food."

Meat and vegetables and diary and nuts and fruits; these are my new basics. No longer merely standing around in ornamental and condimental states, these "foods" are my new foundation.

When we flip the lens of our perception to take out all grains, what is left seems too small to sustain life. It is akin to a magic wand being waved over our bedroom, removing all the cotton cloth. We are left with scraps of elastic, most of a linen suit, and that polyester shirt we kept because it doesn't need ironing.

But that is not so. What is left has actual nutrients our bodies can use. Grains actually have a lot of phytates, which are nutrient-blocking substances. All those B vitamins in grains? They do us no good if we can't use them. Likewise the protein; we have to eat more of the grains to get the same levels of usable protein.

This leads to the "health" recommendations of soaking and cooking grains; this ancient processing methods help remove the phytates which block absorption of nutrients.

This is one of the keys to low carb living; we actually eat less. Because our food is more nutritious.

Why low fat doesn't work

The conception that fat in our diet leads to fat on our bodies is spectacularly wrong.

I use the word "spectacular" because so much of our body consists of fat. Yet we act as though the extra padding on our bellies and behinds is the only place fat turns up; and we usually don't want it there.

So if we simply starve our bodies of fat, they will use up the "extra" and behold! New wardrobe.

Of course, the whole "fat is bad for us" theory didn't start out this starkly stupid. Because this is not how our diet experts treat protein.

This is good for us.

They recognize that protein is a vital micronutrient, and that we need a constant supply. Opinions vary on how much, especially if these opinions have a vegetarian slant.

Ideologues differ between cutting down on animal products for health reasons or humanitarian reasons. However, the assumed consensus that fat and protein are actually bad for us springs from the fact that both are much more abundant in animal sources.

An excellent series at The Hungry Cow blog states that a typical hunter-gatherer would have consumed 55-65% of his calories from meat and fish. We did gather plants; but this was pre-agriculture. None of those healthy whole grains showed up for many millions of years. This is how we evolved our big brains; with protein and fat.

Humans crave fat because we need it just as much as we need protein. Our brain? 60% fat. All the insulation that runs along our nerves, making sure they don't short out like a bad toaster? Made of fat. Our cell membranes, the stuff that keeps us from melting into a puddle of soup? All fat.

So compliance on low fat diets will always struggle between poor and terrible. Not only does our body crave animal fat, fat itself is important to a feeling of satiation.

Without it, we are always hungry, and always wanting to eat.

One bad idea leads to another

When it comes to understanding how people jump to the wrong conclusions, I'm fond of the saying:

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Once enough influential bodies accepted the lipid hypothesis, both nutritional theories and their real world applications had to conform to its conclusions.

Low-saturated fat diets were recommended for heart patients. Then these same diets were considered a good idea for people who wanted to avoid becoming heart patients. Since overweight was a risk factor for heart attacks, it only made sense to recommend these same nutritional principles to those seeking to lose weight.

As the media and the food corporations began picking up on this message, it became even more simplified... and distorted. From "lower your saturated fat" the message became "fat is bad." That was easy to splash across a box or bag, so food manufacturers began touting their low-fat products.

Since so many outlets thought fat was bad, the general public internalized these messages. In the 1980's, it was repeated over and over that cutting fat from one's diet lowered the calories, and since "everyone knew" lowering calories was the way to lose weight, it made a relentless kind of sense to the embattled victims of overweight.

Naming your elephant Rover will not make them a dog.

The low fat/high carbohydrate diet was born. Nutritionists were quick to plug any holes in the dam by explaining that of course we had to exercise, too!

If it didn't work, it was our fault. It must be because we were still eating too much and not exercising enough.

The latest wrinkle in trying to make it work is the admission that processed carbohydrates are nutritionally empty and should be "eaten in moderation."

That also led to enshrining the unprocessed version of carbohydrates as the centerpiece of our daily intake; thus the emphasis on "healthy" whole grains.

All along, this officially-embraced, heavily-promoted, staked-a-reputation-on-it lipid hypothesis led to cholesterol-lowering drugs, the idea of very low fat diets to reverse heart disease, and a higher health reputation for vegetarianism. As a nation, we dutifully lowered our fat and increased our exercise.

Except none of this makes any of the science of the lipid hypothesis actually work.

The wrong road

Dr. Ancel Keys was actually the "K" in the famous K-rations used in the military during WWII. He did experimental research on the minimums required to keep the flame of life alive in human beings during times of food scarcity. (The resemblance to the "starve yourself" advice given by modern weight loss gurus is merely an eerie coincidence.)

Keyes lived long -- but not well

Keys, seen here shortly before his death at the age of 100, formulated the "lipid hypothesis," which theorizes that eating saturated fat leads to the clogged arteries of atherosclerosis, which in turn leads to heart attacks.

He was not a medical doctor; he received a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1930. But his human nutritional studies had led to a great deal of institutional respect. When he concluded, based on data from the European nations dealing with rationing as a result of WWII, that it was their lowered saturated fat intake that led to a lowered rate of heart disease; he was listened to.

His Seven Countries Study was the first study to systematically examine the relationships between lifestyle, diet, coronary heart disease and stroke in different populations from different regions of the world. It pointed clearly to saturated fat intake as a driver for heart attack incidence.

Except... he actually had data from twenty two countries. He left out all the countries which did not support his hypothesis.

This, in science, is known as "cheating."

In the words of a ground-breaking NYT article, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?":

Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health ... is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed. 

He says that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''