‘Eating whole foods, not veganism, is the healthy choice’

Let’s investigate the claims, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph

The bottom line in the op-ed I will critique here is that eating less meat is healthier. One doesn’t need to be a total vegan to profit health-wise. I agree. For the general public, less meat, less milk, etc. is better. But that’s not what the headline says.

The article is written in very pleasant and easy Engels, but it makes many incomplete points and has half-truths and untruths that someone not trained medically and a non-vegan might take for true. Let me help.

In the beginning, the writer promises to bring the results of thousands of scientific studies, but he brings none. Studies often draw contradictory conclusions, and making a summary is for top specialists, not amateurs.

The writer is reacting to people who left negative comments to an earlier column in which he wrote about the advantages of getting our need for protein from plant sources as opposed to animal sources. He even claimed that plant predominance in the diet prevents and even reverses chronic disease. You should know there is no ‘chronic disease’ illness. In Israel, it may be illegal for a non-physician to make health claims about one’s work.

He claims that there is ‘overwhelming evidence based on many thousands of studies that eating real whole foods, mostly plants, and getting the highly processed stuff out of the diet will not only extend your life but bring you good health and quality of life.’ Of course, even if that were true, that’s only on average. There are no individual guarantees. And I dislike the hype against ‘processed foods.’ The problem is not that they are ‘processed’ but that they are ‘refined,’ stripped of fiber. But also putting stuff in the blender (smoothies) makes us drink too much stuff without chewing. And it’s the chewing that is essential for lasting satisfaction.

He pointed out that animal products for protein come with a lot of baggage, like saturated fat and cholesterol, among other problems, whereas plant proteins are free of those. I don’t know why he highlights fats. Obesity might be a prime concern among his readers, but, as a vegan, I see a much deeper fundamental distinction. People often don’t seek among foods what they like but rather pick something tasty to them, irrespective of if it is health-supporting or junk food. Meat is junk food. And when we eat too many calories (sugar), our cholesterol increases too.

Another basic problem with meat meals is that meats are at the center, and anything else is just (window) dressing instead of supplying your body with nutrients that are also tasty. That’s playing fast and loose with your health. Especially because many of those ‘foods’ make you eat too much of them and, on top of that, are addictive, making you crave for more.

Last but not least, when used to eating tasteless things like meat, milk, fish, and eggs, people add much salt and other spices and scorch the outsides, like coffee beans. They then start treating vegetables the same way. If you only knew what some people put on lattice.

He had not expected so many negative and angry comments. One accused him of being part of a conspiracy to turn “the entire universe” into vegans. He tries to pacify his readers by saying that veganism is not necessarily healthy, he’s not a vegan, and is not proselytizing. Not a good scenario when you need to say, after saying something good about Israel: I didn’t say that everything in Israel is perfect; I’m not a Jew or the Zionist lobby.

He defines vegans as refraining from eating meat, chicken, fish, eggs, or dairy. I would not put it like that. That’s a meat-eater’s perspective. Vegan is having a diverse diet that doesn’t need animal produce. But then, he ‘concedes’ vegan doesn’t necessarily reflect a healthy way to eat. ‘Only drinking Coca-Cola and eating Oreo cookies, donuts, and non-dairy ice cream is still vegan.’ He forgot vodka.

He opines there are really three main motives people might become vegan: health, ethics, or environment. That is lacking so many reasons. Doesn’t he know or doesn’t want to shock his already furious readers?

Reasons to eat (more) vegan might be slightly more than three (20+):

• Who gave you permission to kill for food? (Male chicks won’t lay eggs and are murdered without mercy.) Large-scale animal killing seems to make people callous enough to go to war and kill people.
• The industrial-scale killing of animals is often painful. Ritual slaughter is bloody and therefore looks bad but is better.
• Financial survival in the bioindustry doesn’t allow for enough space for animal welfare. Yearly impregnating milk cows and taking away their newborn calves is cruel. Many farm animals live in pain, in anti-social, unnatural conditions.
• Large-scale animal farms obligate farmers to work with antibiotics that end up inside the consumers.
• Large-scale animal farms are breeding and mutation grounds for deadly zoonoses and pandemics. This is so dangerous!
• There is no decent, environmentally sound way to get rid of so much animal poop. (If you only eat vegan, your poop won’t stink.)
• The enormous amount of flatulating and burping by animals adds significantly to climate change. Each dairy cow alone produces about 200 liters of methane every day. For decades, methane warms our Planet 86 times as much as carbon dioxide!
• Animals eat fodder is grown in fields that could grow crops for human consumption. Close to 1B people are hungry every day!
• The insane demand for meat makes that tropical forest is cut down to create more animal feed or grounds. The Earth’s longs!
• The amount of protein in meat is like seven times lower than the amount of protein the animal ate in its lifetime. This, while close to a billion people are chronically undernourished. What a waste!
• Animals like cows need enormous amounts of water on a Globe where drinkable water gets more and more scares.
• Animal produce is basically tasteless, so it needs much salt (high blood pressure) and other spices (throat cancer) and scorching the outsides (all kinds of cancers but less than by cigarettes).
• Fake meats (vegan or vegetarian) are not as wasteful in production as real meat but still extremely wasteful compared to growing the plants they are made of and full of salt and spices the body doesn’t need. Without antibiotics but with preservatives.
• Animal produce resembles the human physique, so when it spoils, it is often really dangerous to our health. People buy too large quantities and end up throwing out much of what was bought.
• Wild-water animals have too much mercury and other pollutants, and fish ponds must be full of antibiotics to prevent epizootics.
• Real and fake meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and fish are tremendously expensive. The population is fooled into thinking it’s healthy, so, worth it. Many people living paycheck to paycheck often should eat whole-wheat bread with real peanut butter and not animal produce.
• The protein in animal produce takes away our hunger feelings so that we don’t eat enough fiber-rich foods, and we unlearn to chew.

One critic said he would rather die earlier or be ill than give up ‘his’ meat. Compare cigarettes. Even fake meat wouldn’t do it. Mental illness.

‘In the Blue Zones, those five places on the planet that have been thoroughly studied because their populations live to be more than 100 years old, they live those years as thriving people. They have a very plant-predominant diet, but they do include very small amounts of meat or fish in their menu, and sometimes even a tiny bit of dairy.’ He might refer to this Time article. His claims are grossly simplified and overstated.

‘Unless you need to really reverse chronic or autoimmune diseases, it’s more a question of just changing the ratio of your food choices, not giving up these foods altogether.’ This is not a sentence. Let me guess what he means. ‘We must choose to eat more vegan-like but need not stop certain foods to really reverse chronic or autoimmune diseases.’ A baseless claim.

Someone commented that animal proteins have the exact amount of amino acids our body needs and that we can’t get that from plants. He writes that the amino acid argument is incorrect and outdated. He doesn’t know. The ratio of different amino acids (the building blocks of protein) is the same in animals (meat) as in humans. The old idea was that you need to find the same ratios in every vegan meal, to combine legumes and grains. That is not true. They don’t need to be balanced in every meal. But over a day or so, they must be. When certain essential amino acids are not eaten, the body treats the others as fuel and not building blocks of muscle. BTW: Chickpeas have the same amino acid proportions as animal muscle.

He now adds that ‘research is showing that some of the amino acids are more inflammatory than others, mostly methionine.’ And it exists ‘a lot less’ in plants, so we should eat more plants and less animals to minimize inflammation.’ Now, perhaps this is true at some esoteric level, but scientifically, no amino acid gives inflammation. Inflammation is our response to injuries or invaders. If you have too much methionine, you get sick, and if you have too little, you get sick too. Don’t take his lay advice!

‘Just increase your fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, and decrease the animal proteins. The more you change that ratio, the better your health will be.’ The latter is untrue. He forgets nuts and mushrooms. These are extra important for Ashkenazic vegans who don’t eat kitniyot on Pesach. But (fat-free coco)nut protein will keep you satisfied. If you follow his advice, you end up dead decades before your time. When you scale back animal produce, you must start with vitamin B12. No human food has enough vitamin D; it is added to milk products. When you diminish dairy intake, you must start taking D. Once a year, have your blood checked.

For sustained weight loss, disease prevention, and even disease reversal, he advises a diet rich in plant-based foods but without oils, sodium, and sugar. He seems not to know that our body needs some oils and that olive and peanut oils protect our health. And reducing salt by 90% is enough. Counting calories seems outdated since it does not work as weight loss strategy for many people. Intermittent fasting is more successful.

In closing, he mentions in passing that ‘the calorie density of plant-based food is so low, you can eat lots and lots of it without gaining weight or causing health issues.’ Try that with avocados, figs, white bread with jam, and beer. See your doctor if you want proper and legal health advice. Don’t put your health in the hands of quacks. Their approach “adds hours to my day, days to my year and years to my life” but not to yours.