Meat is murder! … This is the catchphrase we loved to shout to vegans to vegans. It has a claw, it’s simple, it appeals to the senses of the listener. But he has a trick, which is usually one of all the slogans: he oversimplifies. This greatly simplifies a tricky problem (is this a real problem?) That ends up being false. But it works. It works because it grows in fertile soil formed by the minds of well-meaning but deeply ignorant people. People who live in concrete houses and asphalt are the only things they step on when they go out, people who have grown up watching cartoons with corresponding humanized animals, people who have only seen real animals in the zoo and zoo. documentaries. People who serve servings of the same animals on plates every day rarely know where the meat they love comes from. Sons of Urban Culture.

MY EXPERIENCE

I’ve been a vegan for eight years. Hardly 20 years old, faced with images of factory farms and slaughterhouses imbued with pure and noble principles, I decided to make the decision that seemed most logical: stop participating in this slaughter. Don’t eat more meat. No meat, no eggs, no milk, no leather dressing. Salvation was easy, and this lifestyle guaranteed purity and moral superiority over other mortals, very attractive to a twenty-year-old child. The family opposed this, but the couple and friends make up a dense enough and compact social network in which to stay safe. Since since making such an important decision, he only reads books that support his opinion and often visits people who think like him, vegetarian / vegan propaganda crystallizes in the brain, forming a solid concrete rock. It becomes a religion. The person becomes radicalized and ends up looking at the feet of other vegans to find out if he is a genuine vegan or, conversely, wearing leather shoes as an unforgivable gesture of moral weakness. The rest of non-vegan humanity is enemies to be defeated. Proselytization becomes the engine of existence. Their propaganda is very diverse and varied. The reasons given by vegans are moral, political and dietary, and they are all imbued with justice and straightforwardness without guilt.

The problem is that when a person learns real data, when he really learns the meaning of life on this planet, when he leaves behind that urban childhood in which we learn for everyone, then when all this fairness and impeccable straightforwardness of vegetarianism arguments / veganism is crumbling like a sand castle.

Vegetarian myth

It would take too much time and space to fix all of these errors point by point, and the interested reader may look to sources as complete and well-grounded as Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, John Nicholson’s Meat Correction, or “ Protein strength “doctor. Eades to give a few examples. Suffice it to say that here man is what he is, thanks to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, consuming animal products, especially his meat and fat, a vital source of essential amino acids and energy to support the brain, which is the calorie consumption machine; that the opening of the fire increased this meat consumption exponentially, that our biology dictates that we are forced to eat mainly meat and animal fat (our intestines and the way of digestion do not lie), supplementing it with vegetables and fruits, so that when we give up our natural lifestyles as hunter-gatherers, the one that spawned our biology (which remains the same) and chose agriculture, problems that still have arisen Today, we do not know how to solve this problem: overpopulation, overpopulation in cities, private property, lords and vassals, rich and poor, slavery, domination of the weak, management of surplus, famine, wars … and that the cereal-based diet brought by agriculture is the origin of almost all degenerative diseases that humanity suffers from, such as obesity, diabetes, arthritis and possibly many types of cancer. The irony is that agriculture is exactly the banner that raises vegetarianism in favor of the planet and animal rights, when in fact it is a machine for destroying grasslands and forests (with all ecosystems and animals). they contain) to turn them into farmland.

Then there are feelings. The one who does not break his heart watching the horrors that the meat industry has brought, the one who does not deserve to be called human. The industrialization of meat production and slaughter is another consequence of the schizophrenia in which we live as a species, but it is automatically inferred from the horrors that the very fact that one animal does not eat the meat of another is risky at best. “But man distinguishes between good and evil,” say vegetarians / vegans. We can argue endlessly whether the concepts “good / bad” have any absolute meaning in space, or, on the contrary, they are Simple conventions that help us live in society (I tend to think about the latter), but even from the most absolute conventionalism I see no evil or cruelty in the hunting scene of any of the hunter / gatherer societies that still remain in the world. Because this is our essence as a human animal. Because this is how we live in the environment and in its power. Because life in capital letters requires life. Because we live inside this inexorable, eternal wheel of life and death, and our original sin was to think that civilization would free us from it. But there is no life behind this wheel. I have no solution to this endemic disease we are sinking into.

Probably the only way out is to reduce, I don’t know, but there is no doubt that the decision should not run counter to our biology.

MY EIGHT YEARS OF VEGANISM

Otherwise, I can only confirm the disaster that a purely plant-based diet has meant for my body. During my eight years vegan, there was even a stage where I decided to eat everything raw, which logically excluded grains and legumes, and vegetable and fruit salads were my only support. After just a few weeks, the result was excessive thinness and incipient anemia. At the doctor’s warning, I reintroduced acne and it was easy to gain weight. The numbers on the scale went up and we were all happy. I would like someone to explain to me then the concept of “body composition”. I turned out to be of normal weight, but composed almost exclusively of skin and fat. My muscle mass was absent, just in that period of a person’s life in which this muscle mass is more important, even without training. This has created all kinds of postural problems that you can accept because “it’s okay.”

Is it also normal that when you are young, the dentist tells you that your teeth are worn out like older people? , demineralization had its consequences. And soy proestrogens do too, producing an accumulation of fat in the breasts that would make it advisable to wear a bra. It was all “normal” the same; my constitution, genetic thing, I told myself. Then there was constant fatigue. Every morning I was overcome by exhaustion, making it impossible to do anything other than lying on the couch at the end of the day. It also happens to everyone, right ?, And a state of eternal melancholy ?, Something of my personality without a doubt.

No, absolutely none of this is normal, and everything is reversible (as long as the damage is not very deep), as soon as a person returns to a diet, that his biology, one that maintains the correct hormonal balance (we are hormones!) and from which makes neurotransmitters that make us function like a well-oiled machine (oh, fat. Another big vegan absence in the kitchen)). The proportions of macronutrients in a vegetarian diet are dangerously skewed. Too many carbohydrates, limited protein (and lack of essential essential amino acids), decompensated and low in fat, with a very clear excess of omega-6 and lack of omega-3 (the one obtained from flax seeds is not absorbed by the body satisfactorily), not to mention the absence cholesterol (yes, against what we were told, cholesterol is necessary). Lack of vitamins B12 and D3 is another problem.

In the face of it all, a deliberate vegetarian could trade a chef’s apron for a chemical coat and spend the rest of his life strategically planning the food mix to provide it with the nutrients it needs, and. Or you can just look back at a truly nutritious diet, because while you can survive as a vegan, living, living a full and healthy life is something else. No diet to which we have to add additives synthesized in the laboratory is not a diet that will bring health, but rather the opposite.

CONCLUSIONS

Is there meat, cruel food ?, dishonest ?? Predatory? It’s amazing how outspokenly vegan claims that giving up on animal consumption ceases to be a predator when you are still enjoying all the comforts of life in the first world, by definition banned from so many millions of people that we can enjoy so little. The truth is that in order for our amenities to be possible, others must not use them: resources are limited. However, each of them must choose their own path in life, and morality is a part of our humanity that carries a lot of weight.

In conclusion, I repeat that I do not have a solution to such an elementary and extensive dilemma, I simply choose the lifestyle that best suits my biology and my morality, with inherent contradictions in this society in which I am a son. Any vegan will not be convinced by this article, although I think I’m lucky if it gets them thinking and looking outside of their circles for information. In these lines, I just tried to point out how wrong the vegetarian / vegan view of the problem is, which goes back to the moment when humanity left the cave, and which spreads its branches to almost all areas of existence.

Beyond morality, beyond politics, beyond the plate: who we are and who we want to be as a species.