So are any of you going to fact check literally any of this before you mindlessly share it in your thousands? …No? Okay, I’ll do it for you; one pseudo-scientific, half-baked, unsourced claim at a time.
1) Plant-based soures of B12 don’t produce it in a form we can digest. (Source: None.)
No, they don’t… But neither do animals or their byproducts. B12 is produced by a microbe which primarily exists in soil; we used to get this from all vegetables and meat naturally, but modern hygiene practices means that the usable amount of vitamin B12 in our diets is much lower. Experts disagree on this and there has been a recent discovery of what may be a plant-based source of B12, the conventional wisdom has been that no foods now naturally contain the vitamin. Do you know how it gets into “all animal products?” The animals are given it as an artificial supplement. All you’re doing by getting your B12 through animal products is filtering it through someone else’s body.
So if, as per your claim, any diet which requires supplementation is “unhealthy,” then that’s pretty much all modern diets. Do you have any idea how much of your daily nutrients comes from artificially fortified foods? Cereals, grains, fruit juices, oats, dairy products- most are fortified with vitamins which modern humans don’t generally get enough of. The idea that artificial = bad is purist, pseudo-scientific nonsense.
2) Not all of us can manufacture enough taurine. (Source: None.)
Well… Yes? That some people have a health issue which means they do not properly produce taurine is not a criticism of veganism, or any sort of reflection on how healthy or unhealthy it is. Some people can’t process protein from red meat, is that a reflection on how healthy a meat-eating diet is? Both of these points essentially rely on the notion that supplementing any vitamin or nutrient is bad, but there is just no basis for that at all. With 31% of people in the US at risk of at least one vitamin deficiency, most of those being meat eaters, supplementing is a good idea for just about anyone.
You’ve through in a couple of others vitamins like calcium and d3, but just to save us all some time, there is no vitamin, nutrient of mineral you cannot get on a plant-based diet. The American Dietetic Association tells us that a well-planned plant-based diet is healthful, nutritionally complete and may aid in the prevention of several diseases.
3) You can’t get enough protein because of your various allergies/health issues. (Source: None needed)
Again, my first thought reading this was… Okay? All of that is relevant to you, but your own personal circumstances do not at all reflect on the general availability of protein in a vegan diet. Protein deficiency is extremely rare for anyone who isn’t malnourished, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. In first world countries like the USA, protein deficiency is almost unheard of. It is extremely easy for most people to get their daily protein on a vegan diet, it is a non-issue. If someone has specific health issues which prevent them from doing this, that’s fine, but nobody is claiming that everyone can consume a 100% plant-based diet. Assuming all this is true, all that means is that you can’t get enough protein from a vegan diet, though even that is dubious, since protein is in literally everything.
We know that some people can’t live on a 100% plant-based diet, the very definition of veganism includes an acknowledgement that we can only do whatever is possible and practicable to avoid animal exploitation. There are real barriers for some people which prevent them adopting a plant-based diet, and no good vegan advocate will shame those people. All we expect is that people do the best they can in their situation.
4) Soy has an impact on puberty, reproductive systems or hormones. (Source: None.)
Again, another widely spread fallacy. Phytoestrogens have not been found to have an impact on human reproductive health. This is widely debated among nutrionists but there is general agreement that while phytoestrogens have several health benefits, more research needs to be done in order to establish or rule out any potential impact on human hormones. You apparently know something about this which nutritional experts don’t, but you’ve apparently declined to share it, since (like everything else in this post) you haven’t backed it up with anything other than your say so. If you’d like to read the perspective of an actual expert though, here is a piece written by a vegan doctor addressing the (dangerous) myths that you yourself are perpetuating.
5) Quinoa is unethical. (Source: None.)
You’ve assumed (without checking) that this is true based on the posts above yours, but it absolutely is not. This has been debunked dozens of times over the years, and was based on a single pop-opinion piece in the New York Times, and spread quickly among those looking for an excuse to hate vegans, despite the fact that we make up a tiny portion of people eating quinoa. According to farmers anthropologists, the Present of Bolivia and the farmers themselves, the rising popularity of Quinoa has been hugely beneficial for farmers and the country at large. I’ve dealt with this notorious fallacy in a (fully sourced) essay here.
6) Veganism is not environmentally friendly (Source: None.)
Your argument for this seems to literally just be the word “nope”? You touch on food security, job loss, the lack of arable land to grow crops, you briefly mention a few crops which are bad for the environment, but that fairly obviously doesn’t mean that veganism as a whole is not environmentally friendly. This incredibly weak point barely even needs a response, but just for good measure, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation advocate a global shift away from meat and dairy in order to avert the worst affects of climate change. The most comprehensive study ever performed on this topic recently found that the adoption of a plant-based diet represents the single biggest thing any individual can do to lower their environmental impact.
7) Veganism would cost people their jobs (Source: None.)
You claim that if the world 1.3 billion people would lose their jobs overnight. You repeat the number “1.3 billion”, as if repetition makes up for the complete lack of any source for this statistic. First of all, who on earth is saying that the world is going vegan over night? Who did that study? You think that the fall of one industry would cost jobs, but the creation of a new one wouldn’t create any? The fact that an industry creates jobs does not justify it’s continued existence. Big pharmacutical industries create jobs, as does the industrial military complex, big tobacco and the oil companies who are ruining our environment. That an industry provides jobs isn’t a good reason for it to continue to exist.
8) We do not have enough arable land to feed everyone on a plant-based diet. (Source: None.)
This is objectively, demonstrably false. When calculating the land use required for farmed animals, we need to take into account two factors, the land animals require to graze or be housed on, and the land it takes to grow the crops which feed them. At present a full 1/3 of the planet’s land surface and 2/3 of available agricultural land is used for farming animals. That 2/3 is arable land, by the way.
If we look at cows, for example, it takes 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. All told, livestock consume 70% of all the grain we produce, 98% of all soy, and a fifth of all water consumed globally. Around 86% of this is not fit for human consumption, but even that remaining 14% could feed millions of people, due to just how many farmed animals exist on earth and how much food they require to get them to slaughter weight. For every 1 kg of meat produced we need 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants (animals with more than one stomach) and 3.2 for monogastrics (animals with one stomach).
It is estimated that if the world went vegan, we would add an addition 70% to the world’s global food supply, enough to comfortably feed everyone if it were equally distributed. Even considering the fact that global market forces and capitalism means that distribution would never be equal, 70% more food in the world means significantly less people go hungry. That land which isn’t suitable for farming crops (like parts of Scotland) could be re-wilded, which would have a resoundingly positive impact on the environment and species conservation.
You claim that the last global census in 2008 said that if 6 billion people went vegan, we would need 3,068,444,911 acres of arable land. You can only be referring to the UNHCR Index, the UN World Population Prospects report, or the Global Human Settlement Layer by the European Commission. All of these are updated regularly and none just mysteriously stopped recording in 2008. The mere idea that the last global census of agriculture and arable land would have been in 2008 is laughable, as is the idea that any global census would specifically comment on what would happen if the entire world went vegan overnight. I can’t find this stat anywhere, not on any authoritative data collection site, and the statistic itself is just ludicrous. You have blatantly pulled this out of thin air.
10) Vegan clothing isn’t sustainable (Not your claim, but again, unsourced.)
It’s so convenient that you guys always want to compare fur and leather to plastic, and not pinatex, cork, bark, organic cotton, pineapple derived fibres, hemp, recycled plastic, or any one of the other dozens of sustainable vegan alternatives. But even in your own, incredibly biased false dichotomy, you still lose. According to the Higgs Sustainability Index, which is the authoritative standard for measuring the sustainability of fabrics both leather and fur are less sustainable than even plastic, in fact, leather is one of the least sustainable fabrics on the planet, only behind alpaca wool.
My response is likely littered with spelling errors, typos and grammatical mistakes. But you’ll have to forgive me for that, and understand that I have had to deal with various forms of this post at least six or seven times, when I am tagged in it or asked to respond by others who don’t have the time or energy, (which is completely fine). In every other instance, I’ve been debunking the claims of someone who I have given the benefit of the doubt, assuming that their falsities are the result of ignorance, not malice. In this case, however, I am not convinced. I think that you have done enough research here to produce falsities which sound at least vaguely believable, and in doing so, I just cannot imagine a scenario in which you haven’t stumbled on the fact that almost nothing you’ve said here is true. You’ve cherry-picked, you’ve made up statistics, you’ve manipulated what little data you have looked at and I just can’t bring myself to believe that you don’t know any better, or that you’re just misinformed . I think that you’re a liar.
But you know what? You don’t need to worry, because I can’t compete with you here. All I can offer those reading this is an uncomfortable truth, the acceptance of which would require them to face up to their own culpability in funding an industry which is killing our planet, exploiting humans and slaughtering animals in their trillions. What you can offer them is a pat on the back and the convenient lie that no, veganism isn’t any better, that they don’t need to give up their bacon, their favourite leather coat or their fur gloves. So people will continue reblogging your demonstrably false claims, despite the fact that you’ve failed to provide a single shred evidence for a single one of them. Confirmation bias means that those who would rather not learn uncomfortable truths will lap it up, because it tells them that they don’t need to do anything to alter their lifestyle at all.
I know you don’t care what the truth is, and I know you won’t respond, just like the six or seven other people spreading nonsense on this post didn’t. But if you do read this, I need you to understand that you are doing enormous harm here. The planet is dying, animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change, species extinction and deforestation. It uses an unconscionable amount of land, resources and energy. It harms animals, workers, communities and our world. Yet you are so desperate to defend it and your own part in supporting it that you will spread what you must know are outright lies. In doing so, you perpetuate this cruelty, this environmental destruction and this widespread apathy in the face of a global atrocity. You are, unfortunately, having more of an impact here than you will ever know.
Animal agriculture corporations can only continue to do what they do because of people like you who are willing to tell lies like these, and because of the hundreds of thousands of people willing to believe it without checking a single word of it. Your made up statistics, false dichotomy and straw man arguments are. unfortunately, far more appealing than the truth. I just hope that you and those spreading these lies will wake up; before it’s too late.
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