Arguments against Veganism

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Opening statement by Jazmella:

Sir Stabsalot wrote:

I dated a vegan. Misery I tell you...

The first question one usually asks when confronted with the phrase, 'Studies have shown...' is - who carried out the studies? What was the study design, what was the sample size, and what was the RAW DATA obtained? Was the data published, and WERE THEY PEER-REVIEWED? I have scoured Vegan sites all over the internet, and what struck me was that there were never any real scientific justification (summaries or sentences like 'studies have shown that n% of people' etc do not count, because they do not provide adequate information for scientists to repeat the experiments/studies or to scrutinise the design to see if it's biased or properly blinded) or referenced articles from respectable scientific journals (ie. those that make it on the PubMed/MedBioWorld/Ovid/SpringerLink), nor were there any to scientific journals of any sort. (and perhaps the most interesting question is: if you can derive so much nutrition out of non-meat products, why are there so many digestion supplements in the direct sales market for vegans? )

And Jardel - yes, people are largely unable to digest raw cellulose-based organisms, although it has been demonstrated that some bacteria in the colon are able to extract some glucose from veg before it is voided from the body (Cellulose being the component that makes up the cell walls of plants. If you can't break down the wall, you can't get what's inside). The only creatures around who actually profit from eating grass/veg/etc are ruminants - cows/sheep/etc - and that's ONLY because they have bacterial partners in their gastrointestinal tract to digest the material. (No macroorganism has this capability; cheers to microbes) There's a great deal of difference between biochemically analysing a given compound by feeding it into a spectrophotometer or burning it in a calorimeter, and the body being able to extract or process it with the resources it has.

(At any rate, where would you get cholesterol from (outside of the body) other than meat? Contrary to all those health-food fads, we need cholesterol for our bodies to produce hormones, and not all cholesterol can be produced by the human body. I don't recall plants manufacturing it)

And now, for the question of the day. If it is wrong to eat animals because they have a right to live in an environment free of abuse and torment, why is it ok to eat plants and microbes? Is it justifiable that plants and microbes do not have central nervous systems and are thus unable to feel pain, or that plants and microbes have no faces or sensory organs that resemble ours, and therefore it's ok to eat them? Or is our definition of sentience too anthropocentric, that we have excluded other possibilities just because they do not exist for us (eg. if you were to define communication as talking in words or gestures, plants and animals would be considered incapable of communication; and yet they have highly developed chemical-based communication systems that enable them to not only communicate with members of the same species, but with *each other*)?

(God forbid that I be president for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables, though. I just raised the question for the sake of equality. Myself, I eat microbes because they're good creatures)

Thought for the day from a microbiologist: there is no such thing as a food chain; it is a food ring. And even if there were a food chain, those at the top would be microorganisms, not humans and big predators.