Revolting Vegans in Veganuary

This months episode talks about how Vegans are starting to revolt over the cynical commercialisation of their dietary and spiritual beliefs by the meat and food industry world wide. It talks about how a proper Vegan diet can save you from disease and help to heal the planet and how we should be encouraged to make the transition, but how hard it is to make the changes.

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https://www.veganricha.com
https://minimalistbaker.com/recipes/vegan/
https://www.medicalmedium.com
https://www.foodotomic.com
https://www.forksoverknives.com
https://nutritionstudies.org/the-china-study/
http://www.worldpeacediet.com/

Transcript

Veganuary January and revolting Vegans

Good morning and welcome to the end of a delightful month in which we have all been encouraged to become Vegan for a month.

For those of you who have missed the now annual Veganuary marketing, this is a month in the year where specially in the UK we are all encouraged to eat Vegan food for a month in an attempt to encourage us to change our dietary habits.

For the record, I am a Vegan or at least this is a useful badge that should by all accounts adequately describe my dietary and philosophical approach to life. Indeed until relatively recently it was an adequate description and everyone knew that Vegans were weird sorts that only ate plants in order to save animals. Bizarrely we were quite happy with that label as it didn’t really matter that much to us what people thought.

More recently though the world has been encouraged to eat less meat in an attempt to save the planet. The reason for this is that we don’t have enough arable land in the world to feed the global population and one of the reasons for this is that we have to grow so much feed for the animals we farm that it is competing with land we need to grow crops for people. As an aside from this there is also the fact that livestock produce a lot of methane which has upto 80 times the climatic warming power when compared to CO2 as an emission. There is then the matter of the water footprint that the livestock industry occupies per KG of meat produced as compared to arable farming in a world increasingly short of water. 

Finally then there is the animal welfare claim that intensive farming methods used in some parts of the world leads to pollution, animal harm, the overuse of antibiotics, and provides an great environment for the generation of potentially lethal bugs and viruses that can harm humans.

All in all there is quite a persuasive argument for people to eat less meat, and this is what Veganuary is all about, and I whole heartedly support people eating less meat, not only for the reasons I mentioned just now, but also for health reasons too. Now before you get all hot under the collar, I am not saying that eating meat is inherently unhealthy, I am saying that the amount of meat we tend to eat in the industrialised world is unhealthy, and to be more precise I am drawing special attention to the processed meat industry which the European Union has classified as in the most part carcinogenic.

In simple terms eating preserved meats or highly processed meats is cancer causing and eating large amounts of animal protein in general is a certain route to cardiovascular disease on account of the saturated fat content within. Animal protein is also inflammatory to us as humans. The largest health study ever undertaken in the world of health called the China Study has shown conclusively and with follow up research that those countries that eat little meat as a percentage of their diet and in the majority eat whole foods rather than refined foods, have almost none of the modern day diseases that we see in the west such as heart disease, cancer, autoimmune, obesity, diabetes and a plethora of others.

So there we have it, Veganism saves the planet and it saves us, so really, if you care about yourself or the planet or even both, you should be trying very hard to give up all things animal related.

But this is where the problems start.

Firstly, it’s really hard to become a vegan, because none of us have been taught how to cook vegan food. This alone is a major problem as it requires us all to relearn some basic skills in the kitchen. Okay you might say, I can do that, I just go online and Bosh, I get a recipe and I’m away. Well it’s not quite that easy. What most people don’t realise is that there is a large amount of Dairy in most of the products you think are Vegan. In many parts of the world we think bread must be vegan, but it contains dairy protein, we would think that a vegetable stock cube has no Dairy, but many do, we think that a pack of pre-fried rice has no dairy but often it does. Honestly when you get down to it, egg protein, dairy protein, butter fat, shortening, you name it, there is a hidden animal product in an amazing array of processed foods.

You might say, “well thats a bit extreme isn’t it?” we are after all just trying to cut down on animal products. But wait a minute if 60% of products on the shelf contain dairy, and you use them you are in effect supporting the existing industry and its ecological footprint, so you are not really making any difference. So yes it makes a difference if we cut these products out too. This is why learning to cook becomes a major hurdle for people, because the food industry uses so many animal products in every day items that we use to cook. So when we start to make the change to veganism, we find that we are short of a lot of the every day ingredients that we are used to cooking with, this is why this is the first major hurdle we need to over come on our way to eating less animal products.

Secondly, it tastes weird and doesn't fill you up. This is also true, meat has an incredibly strong flavour compared to vegetables and when you first make the transition two things happen. Firstly your food tastes very different to what you are used to, secondly you have only cooked the normal amount that you would eat if you were eating normally and thirdly there is likely not to be a great deal of fat in the food. So you end up eating something that tastes odd, there isn’t enough of it and you are hungry 10 minutes after you have finished. I can quite understand why people don’t last very long as a starter vegan.

The answer is as follows - it takes about 6 weeks of eating vegan for your tastebuds to start to change and for you to start enjoying the new flavour profiles of the food you are eating. Secondly when you first move over to a vegan menu you have to eat load, probably 4 times the volume you normally eat at a sitting, this is the only way you will feel full and not be hungry 10 minutes later. The good news is that you can eat 4 times more because the calorie density of the food you are eating is less than half what you have been eating so you won’t get fat.

I need to clarify a point here and it will bring us on to the next subject shortly, the type of food I am talking about here as a vegan is plant based and whole food. That means unprocessed fruit and vegetables. So no burgers and chips or vegan chicken nuggets for example, just shopping from the fruit and vegetable isle of a supermarket.

A lot of people think vegans are weird and vegans get a lot of stick from those around them with comments like “where do you get your protein” and “how do you stay healthy with such a limited diet?”. I like to think of it another way. If you imagine the standard food pyramid that we have been taught as the correct way of eating food categories in varying quantities with dairy, meat and processed meats being the smallest quantities recommended at the top of the pyramid. Well veganism just cuts out the smallest part of the pyramid. The problem we all have is that we eat more of the top of the pyramid than we should.

Here’s a test for you and this is one that I did on myself when I started my journey to veganism years ago. At the time the advice that I had been brought up with had been that we should all eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. When I was just moving across to veganism the advice changed to 12 portions. At the time I was between diets you could say and I was intrigued as to what this new advice meant in practise, so i decided that for a week I would layout 12 portions of fruit and vegetables a day as per the instructions and eat that for a week to see what it meant in reality. Well, let me tell you, for someone transitioning from a typical western diet of meat and dairy and potatoes, i honestly didn’t think I could eat 12 portions a day. My brain said there isn't room for my meat amongst all of this and that is where the revelation came to me. If you are to eat healthily, there really isn't room for animal products in your diet in any great quantity.

At the time of this realisation I was to say the least rather unhealthy. I had beet trying a vegetarian diet for 6 months in an attempt to reduce my cholesterol from unmeasurable, in the sense that it floated on top of my blood samples rather than needing advanced technology to find it in my blood, to a normal measurable level. I was having no luck in changing this key health metric. So with the realisation that 12 portions of fruit and vegetables meant I had to cut out everything else, It suddenly dawned on me that if I did this I would become a vegan. So I tried just eating plants and vegetables for a week. It just so happened that at the end of the week I needed to have another blood test. I had already resigned my self to the inevitable result as 6 months had not produced any change in the results so far. To my surprise and the total surprise of my doctor, my results were completely normal! One week of being wholly and purely vegan had completely reversed my blood cholesterol. Something that vegetarianism had not done or anything else I had tried.

My doctor had to test it again as he thought there must have been a mix up at the laboratory. But even the second test came back with completely normal levels. 6 days is all it took. To test this, my doctor even ran the same experiment on himself and go the same sort of result. He had been a vegetarian for a few years and couldn’t believe the difference.

So why am I focussing on the health benefits of veganism.

Well there are two reasons, firstly is that veganism has been hijacked by the food industry. Veganism is the new organic, it is a virtuous marketing tool for all foods labelled under its banner. But this is where the sleight of hand comes in. It is the Alternative meat industry who have skewed the message - companies that produce the impossible burger or the beyond burger. They have produced a very nice tasting alternative to meat and one that uses a fraction of the water to produce compared with traditional livestock. All of which will make a substantial difference to the amount of livestock we rear on the planet as this sector grows. But they are selling virtue over health to us as consumers. These products are not healthy, they lack the same nutrition that real meat has and they are highly processed results of food chemistry. They are about as far from real food as it is possible to get. This is why I am focussing on the health benefits of Veganism or more precisely Plant based whole foods, something I learned from a great documentary called Forks over Knives and I will always be indebted to Dr Colin Campbell both for this film as well as the China study which he conducted.

Some of you might be thinking that eating alternative processed proteins is a good thing for the environment and should be encouraged. My point is really a simple one. Why bother creating an unhealthy alternative to an unhealthy product in the first place when you can eat healthily instead?

The point is this, Veganism is about a lot more than just a diet, it is founded in a principle called Ahimsa from Jain the jain religion and it is the principle of “doing no harm” that is behind it. On the face of it we are familiar with this idea as we come across it in the medical profession in the phrase “first do no harm”. But to the Jains, this is a pretty fundamental philosophy and they try as best they can to live their lives according to it, to the extent that the more pious amongst them even sweep the path clear before them as they walk in order not to crush any insects in front of them and wear face masks in case they might inadvertently swallow an insect. The principle behind this is all founded in Karma. The Jains believe that karma is created by invisible particles of positive or negative energy in the universe and when you do harm, negative energy attaches itself to you and the more Karmons you accumulate the more suffering you incur to the point that if you are overwhelmed with negative karmons you will be reincarnated as a lower life form in the next life.

When you think about the current food industry and alternative protein within this context it is hard to see how creating meat alternatives meets the criteria of doing no harm. We already know that intensive monoculture is a disaster for  soil health and the wider environment in terms of pesticide and fertiliser use. We also know the for the most part the high yielding modern strains of wheat and other crops are nutritionally much poorer than the native strains. we are even finding that they don’t necessarily yield higher under modern farming techniques either. So here we are transitioning away from animal protein to plant based protein which will mean an increase in demand for intensive monoculture of a few key arable crops all in the name of doing less harm to the environment. In my view we are just swapping one sort of harm for another, and may be even creating more harm if we encourage people to eat more of these highly processed foods.

There is really only one way out of this and that is to become what I now refer to myself as “a herbivore”. Unfortunately due to the mass advertising and mislabelling of new vegan foodstuffs in the market place, I have had to ditch the vegan label and go for something more descriptive.

Just last week there was a  news story where many people were getting upset because PETA (people for the ethical treatment of animals) had called out Kentucky fried Chicken for saying that their new vegan chicken nuggets would be fried in the same oil as the chicken was fried in. This is the purile level that the food industry is operating at at the moment. To anyone who is eating vegan, and even eating vegan junk food, the taste of animal fat and protein is quite overwhelming and disgusting when you haven't been eating it. So just on that basis alone, one wouldn’t want to share a fryer with a chicken. If you then realise that many vegans are transitioning away from an omnivorous diet because they are starting to understand the cruelty of intensive farming methods, why would they want to even set foot in a KFC at all.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the labelling of plant based protein of Alt meat as vegan, has nothing to do with vegans at all but everything to do with removing livestock farming and persuading the omnivores that they can continue with their omnivorous diet and just substitute meat for Alt meat. This means that the meat industry manages to overcome a couple of problems that they have at the moment - the first one being an inability to eliminate e coli from the supply chain and the lack of profitability they currently suffer from. Alt meat fixes these two things as well as helps deliver the UN agenda on sustainability. It is a win win for the food industry and the planet, but it has little to do with veganism, health or the principles of Ahimsa.

So you see now why I have a problem with the current vegan bandwaggon that is rolling out all over the world. Many of us celebrated a few years ago the move by the alt meat industry when we thought that we might actually start to find places to eat when we went out, but all that has happened is that there has been an explosion of vegan fast food in the market place.

So if I can leave you with one simple piece of advice for your own health and that of the planet it is this.

Veganism is a very simple idea from a dietary point of view. You can eat fruit, vegetables, staples, pulses, nuts and seeds. That’s it. believe me when I tell you there are some superb vegan cooks out there with amazing recipes for you on the web and if you take the time to relearn how to cook, you will never consider going back to an omnivorous diet. If you do just this alone, you will be actively helping to reduce carbon and methane emissions in the world, helping to end intensive farming methods and the cruelty to animals that entails, you will be saving our most precious resource - water, and helping the soils to recover, preventing rainforest from being cut down, helping to feed your fellow human beings and lastly an no less importantly, saving you from over 80% of all modern diseases we suffer from in the world today.

Thats quite a lot of socially powered climate activism in just one plate of veg isn't it, when you think about it like that. In fact it's an enormous contribution, that each and every one of us can make on behalf of the planet and each other. I am going to leave you with something a read the other day which I think is worth holding on to.

The single biggest thing I learned was

from an indigenous elder of Cherokee

descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded

me of the difference between a Western

settler mindset of "I have rights" and an

indigenous mindset of "I have obliga-

tions.

" Instead of thinking that I am

born with rights, I choose to think that

I am born with obligations to serve past,

present, and future generations, and the

planet herself.