Intro post: diets and veganism

I'm planning on returning to the highly controversial topic of diets. This brief intro post is just to start things off and say a few things that have been on my mind, mainly about the nature of veganism.

Whenever you mention the subject, it usually devolves into some kind of furious seething online debate, because the vegans bring an insane level of hostility (it's also like this with drug legalization, which I'm going to cover in future posts, and the two cults seem to overlap). I'm going to try to refrain from posting any schizo slop, though, and just try and look at things in a more neutral way.

I also want to make it clear that I'm posting and writing for the normies, bystanders, lurkers, and others who are neutral on this subject-- there's no actual point in trying to get through to vegans, and (even if I'm crazy in other ways) I'm not delusional enough to think that "arguments" and "reasons" etc will make them change their minds. 

You can try to help people that are mentally ill, but often times the best you can do is simply give them a cautious warning-- which they'll just dismiss, maybe even snicker at you for good measure, while doubling down on their insane bullshit-- and it's only after they've suffered the natural and foreseeable consequences, that you can offer them advice.

Like libertarian economics, veganism seems to be of those things that fails just about every single time it is attempted. However according to them it's not veganism that's the problem, but rather it's reality that is wrong (for not proving them to be correct).

Having known a handful of vegans IRL, and observed many more on the Internet, the way it always seems to go is something like this: 

-First, they see benefits early on, which they attribute to the plants and vegetables, but are likely the result of abandoning the ultra-processed slop that's in most foods these days.

-Then they reach a point of stagnation or diminishing returns, as the nutritional deficits start to accumulate and they start to receive more and more negative signals from their bodies. They may not be aware of it, but basically what they're attempting is a kind of prolonged starvation / fasting, it's a form of torture.

-Finally, they go into free-fall and just start getting worse and worse in every respect, at which point they either make the sensible decision to return to eating meat and dairy and animal products, or they suffer some kind of mental or physical breakdown.

How long the middle stage lasts seems to come down to how skilled they are at managing, rationalizing, and compartmentalizing the barrage of negative symptoms their body is sending them as a punishment / warning for pushing it in an anti-natural direction. 

Instead of implementing a change, they spend the entire time hyper-focusing and micro-managing and suppressing all the negative symptoms and problems associated with their diet-- but since nothing has been actually solved, the "cured" symptoms come back even harder, or new ones appear, and it becomes a futile game, an endless treadmill of non-solutions, until they hit their breaking point.

The underlying reason for this-- setting aside the sheer arrogance and stupidity of persisting with methods that DO NOT WORK-- is simply because we are not meant to get our nutrition from plants: all vegan diets are doomed in the long run.

Things like vitamin B12, vitamin A / retinol (carrots only have a precursor to it), creatine, heme iron, Omega-3s, and others are just not available from plants, while being crucial for human health.

But even the vitamins and minerals that *are* available from plants are harder for our bodies to absorb, since they are not as bio-available compared to animal products, which means you may wind up deficient even if you're meeting your needs "on paper".

Plants also contain anti-nutrients, which prevent you from absorbing nutrients and minerals. There are ways to get around this of course, but there are no such anti-nutrients in meat or animal products.

These glaring limitations make their diet impossible and unsustainable, and so long-term vegans are forced to become what I'd call hardcore / extreme supplementarians, which means they keep themselves going by taking a trillion pills and supplements a day-- it's essentially the Big Pharma diet, and the plants are there as a decoration.

This reverses the natural process of eating: instead of consuming a nutrient-dense food, and then letting the body's digestive system extract what it needs (with minimal artificial intervention), you eat food that is nutritionally empty or anti-nutritious, and then proceed to supplement every single thing missing on a case-by-case, individual, basis.

The problem with this is that nothing is as simple as a 1-to-1 substitute in a complex system like the human body, which means the work needed to sustain this in the long run is incredibly difficult-- you may not be consuming the right amount compared to what you would find in nature (either too much or too little, both can be harmful), some vitamins are fat-soluble and will not be absorbed otherwise, you need to adjust for bio-availability (which in many cases means taking pills made from animal products, defeating the entire point), and finally it's questionable whether certain pills and supplements are legitimate and effective, depending on what it is you need-- and so most vegans just wind up deficient and unhealthy. 

Veganism is ultimately the quintessential techno-slop diet, where a simple effective process is replaced with an insanely complex ineffective one, for no reason and for no benefit.

Future posts will look at the origins of veganism / vegetarianism (the rise of agriculture and its effects on human health, not controversial but still worth writing about). I'll also provide go into details on the various nutritional problems, with studies and data, as well as look into changes in the American diet over time.