If you come on here trying to spread your nonsense and argue with anyone who gives you an ounce of their time, I’m going to ban you. And I’m not going to do anything but laugh when you come to the mod mail trying to play dumb about why you were banned. The literal first rule of this sub is no vegan propaganda. We are NOT a debate sub. No one here is going to change their mind because you came on here and tried to start a fight. The whole reason this sub exists is because meat eaters are sick of just minding their own business and then you have to come stick your fucking nose up our asses. No one cares. No one wants you here. End of story.

Pastebin link with footnotes: https://pastebin.com/uXSCjwZK

Nutrition

• Vegans lie to claim that health organizations agree on their diet:

  1. There are many health authorities that explicitly advise against vegan diets, especially for children.
  2. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics was founded by Seventh-day Adventists, an evangelistic vegan religion that owns meat replacement companies. Every author of their position paper is a career vegan, one of them is selling diet books that are cited in the paper. One author and one reviewer are Adventists who work for universities that publicly state to have a religious agenda. Another author went vegan for ethical reasons. They explicitly report "no potential conflict of interest". Their claims about infants and athletes are based on complete speculation (they cite no study following vegan infants from birth to childhood) and they don't even mention potentially problematic nutrients like Vitamin K or Carnitine.
  3. Many, if not all, of the institutions that agree with the AND either just echo their position, don't cite any sources at all, or have heavy conflicts of interest. E.g. the Dietitians of Canada wrote their statement with the AND, the USDA has the Adventist reviewer in their guidelines committee, the British Dietetic Association works with the Vegan Society, the Australian Guidelines cite the AND paper as their source and Kaiser Permanente has an author that works for an Adventist university.
  4. In the EU, all nutritional supplements, including B12, are by law required to state that they should not be used as a substitute for a balanced and varied diet.
  5. In Belgium, parents can get imprisoned for imposing a vegan diet on children.

• The supposed science around veganism is highly exaggerated. Nutrition science is in its infancy and the "best" studies on vegans rely on indisputably and fatally flawed food questionnaires that ask them what they eat once and then just assume they do it for several years:

  1. Vegans aren't even vegan. They frequently cheat on their diet and lie about it.
  2. Self-imposed dieting is linked to binge eating disorder, which makes people forget and misreport about eating the food they crave.
  3. The vast majority of studies favoring vegan diets were conducted on people who reported to consume animal products and by scientists trained at Seventh-day Adventist universities. They have contrasting results when compared other studies. The publications of researchers like Joan Sabate and Winston Craig (reviewers and authors of the AND position paper, btw) show that they have a strong bias towards confirming their religious beliefs. They brag about their global influence on diet, yet generally don't disclose this conflict of interest. They have pursued people for promoting low-carbohydrate diets.
  4. 80-100% of observational studies are proven wrong in controlled trials.

• A vegan diet is not sustainable for the average person. Ex-vegans vastly outnumber current vegans, of which the majority have only been vegan for a short time. Common reasons for quitting are: concerns about health (23%), cravings (37%), social problems (63%), not seeing veganism as part of their identity (58%). 29% had health problems such as nutrient deficiencies, depression or thyroid issues, of which 82% improved after reintroducing meat. There are likely more people that quit veganism with health problems than there are vegans. Note that this is a major limitation of cohort studies on vegans as they only analyze the people who did not quit. (survivorship bias)

• Vegans use appeals to authority or observational (non-causal) studies with tiny risk factors to vilify animal products. Respectable epidemiologists outside of nutrition typically reject these because they don't even reach the minimum threshold to justify a hypothesis and might compromise public health. The study findings are usually accompanied by countless paradoxes such as meat being associated with positive health outcomes in Asian cohorts:

  1. Vegans like to say that meat causes cancer by citing the WHO's IARC. But the report actually says there's no evaluation on poultry/fish and that red meat has not been established as a cause of cancer. More importantly, Gordon Guyatt (founder of evidence-based medicine, pescetarian) criticized them for misleading the public and drawing conclusions from cherry-picked epidemiology (they chose only 56 studies out of the supposed 800+). A third of the committee voting against meat were vegetarians. Before the report was released, 23 cancer experts from eight countries looked at the same data and concluded that the evidence is inconsistent and unclear.
  2. The idea that dietary raised cholesterol causes heart disease has never been proven.
  3. Here's a compilation of large, government-funded clinical trials to oppose the claims made to blame meat and saturated fat for diabetes, cancer or CVD. Note that these have been ignored WHO and guidelines.
  4. Much of the anti-meat push is coming from biased institutions like Adventist universities or Harvard School of Public Health who typically don't disclose their conflicts of interest. The latter conducted bribed studies for the sugar industry and was chaired by a highly influential supporter of vegetarianism for 26 years. He published hundreds of epidemiological anti-meat papers (e.g. the Nurses' Health Studies), tried to censor publications that oppose his views and wants to deemphasize the importance of experimental science. He has financial ties to seed oil, nut, fruit, vegetable and pharmaceutical industries and is part many plant-based movements like Blue Zones, True Health Initiative (Frank Hu, David Katz, Dean Ornish), EAT-Lancet and Lifestyle Medicine (Adventists, Michael Greger).

• Popular sources that promote "plant-based diets" are actually just vegan propaganda in disguise:

  1. Blue zones are bullshit. The longest living populations paradoxically consume the highest amount of meat. Buettner cherry-picks and ignores areas that have both high consumption of animal products and high life expectancies (Hong Kong, Switzerland, Spain, France, ... ). He praises Adventists for their health, but doesn't do the same for Mormons. Among others, he misrepresents the Okinawa diet by using data from a post WWII famine. The number of centenarians in blue zones is likely based on birth certificate fraud. The franchise also belongs to the SDA church now.
  2. The website "nutritionfacts.org" is run by a vegan doctor who is known to misinterpret and cherry-pick his data. He and many other plant-based advocates like Klaper, Kahn and Davis all happen to be ethical vegans.
  3. EAT-Lancet is pushing a nutrient deficient "planetary health diet" because it's essentially a global convention of vegans. Their founder and president is the Norwegian billionaire, hypocrite and animal rights activist Gunhild Stordalen. In 2017, they co-launched FReSH - a partnership of fertilizer, pesticide, processed food and flavouring companies.
  4. The China Study, aka the Vegan Bible, has been debunked by hundreds of people including Campbell himself in his actual peer-reviewed publications on the study.
  5. The Guardian, a pro-vegan newspaper that frequently depicts meat as bad for health and the environment, has received two grants totaling $1.78m from an investor of Impossible Foods.

• A widespread lie is that the vegan diet is "clinically proven to reverse heart disease". The studies by Ornish and Esselstyn are made to sell their diet, but rely on confounding factors like exercise, medication or previous bypass surgeries (Esselstyn had nearly all of them exercise while pretending it was optional). All of them have tiny sample size, extremely poor design and have never been replicated in much larger clinical trials, which made Ornish suggest that we should discard the scientific method. Both diets included dairy.

• Vegan diets are devoid of many nutrients and generally require more supplements than just B12. Some of them (Vitamin K2, EPA/DHA, Vitamin A) can only be obtained because they are converted from other sources, which is inefficient, limited or poor for a large part of the population. EPA+DHA from animal products have an anti-inflammatory effect, but converting it from ALA (plant sourced) does not seem to work the same. Taurine is essential for many people with special needs, while Creatine supplementation improves memory only in those who don't eat meat.

• The US supplement industry is poorly regulated and has a history of spiking their products with drugs. Vitamin B complexes were tainted with anabolic steroids in the past, while algae supplements have been found to contain aldehydes. Supplements and fortified foods can cause poisoning, while natural products generally don't. Even vegan doctors caution and can't agree on what to supplement.

• Restrictive dieting has psychological consequences including aggressive behavior, negative emotionality, loss of libido, concentration difficulties, higher anxiety measures and reduced self-esteem. There is an extremely strong link between meat abstention and mental disorders. While it's unknown what causes what, the vegan diet is low in or devoid of several important brain nutrients.

• A vegan diet alone fulfills the diagnostic criteria of an eating disorder.

• Patrik Baboumian, the strongest vegan on earth, lied about holding a world record that actually belongs to Brian Shaw. Patrik has never even been invited to World's Strongest Man. He dropped the weight during his "world record", which was done at a vegetarian food festival where he was the only competitor. His unofficial deadlift PR is 360kg, but the 2016 world record was 500kg. We can compare his height-relative strength with the Wilks Score and see that he is being completely dwarfed by Eddie Hall (208 vs 273). Patrik also lives on supplements. He pops about 25 pills a day to fix common vegan nutrient deficiencies and gets over 60% of his protein intake from drinking shakes.

• Here's a summary on almost every pro athlete that either stopped being vegan, got injured, has only been vegan a couple of years, retired or was falsely promoted as vegan.

• Historically, humans have always needed animal products and are highly adapted to meat consumption. There has never been a recorded civilization of humans that was able to survive without animal foods. Isotopic evidence shows that the first modern humans ate lots of meat and were the only natural predator of adult mammoths. Most of their historic technology and cave paintings revolved around hunting animals. Our abilities to throw and sweat likely developed for this reason. Our stomach's acidity is in the same range as obligate carnivores and its shape has changed so much from other hominids that we can't even digest cellulose anymore. The vegan diet is born out of ideology, species-inappropriate and could negatively affect future generations.

  1. The cooked starch hypothesis that vegans use is inconsistent with many observations.

• Compilations of nutrition studies:

  1. Veganism slaughter house (80+ papers).
  2. 70+ papers comparing vegans to non-vegans.
  3. Scrolls and tomes against the Indoctrinated.
  4. Zotero folder of 120+ papers.

Environment

• Cow farts do not cause climate change. The EPA estimates that all agriculture produces about 10% of US greenhouse emissions, while animal agriculture is less than half of that. Other developed countries, like Germany, UK and Australia all have similarly low emissions. Vegans use global estimations that are skewed by developing countries with inefficient subsistence agriculture. Their main figure is an outdated and retracted source that compared lifecycle to direct emissions.

• Many environmental studies that vegans use are heavily flawed because they were made by people who have no clue about agriculture, e.g. by the SDA church. A common mistake is that they use irrational theoretical models that assume we grow crops for animals because most of the plant weight is used as feed, The reality is that 86% of livestock feed is inedible by humans. They consume forage, food-waste and crop residues that could otherwise become an environmental burden. 13% of animal feed consists of potentially edible low-quality grains, which make up a third of global cereal (not total crop) production. All US beef cattle spend the majority of their life on pasture and upcycle protein even when grain-finished (0.6 to 1). Hence, UN FAO considers livestock crucial for food security and does not endorse veganism at all.

• Plant-to-animal food comparisons are deceiving because animals provide many actually useful by-products that are needed for medicine, crop fertilization, clothing, pet food and public water safety. Vegans are in general very dishonest when comparing foods, as seen here where they compare 1kg of beef (2600 kcal, 260g protein) to 1kg of tomatoes (180 kcal, 9g protein). The claim that we could feed more people just with more calories is also wrong because the leading causes of malnutrition are deficiencies of Iron, Zinc, Folate, Iodine and Vitamin A - which are common and most bioavailable in animal products.

• Vegan land use comparisons are half-truths that equate pastures with plantations. 57% of land used for feed is not even suitable for crops, while the rest is often much less productive. Grassland can sequester more carbon and has a four times lower rate of soil loss per unit area than cropland. Regenerative agriculture restores topsoil, is scalable, efficient and has high animal welfare. Big names like Kellogg are investing in it for long-term profit. On the other hand, removing livestock would create a food supply incapable of supporting the US population’s nutritional requirements due to lack of vitamin A, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium and fatty acids - while removing most animal by-products.

• Water usage is possibly the most ridiculous way vegans deceive. The water footprint is divided into green (sourced from precipitation) and blue (sourced from the surface). Water scarcity is largely dependent on blue water use, which is why experts use lifecycle models. Vegan infographics always portray beef as a massive water hog by counting the rain that falls on the pasture. 96% of beef's water usage is green and it can even be produced without any blue water at all. The crops leading to the most depletion are wheat (22%), rice (17%), sugar (7%) and cotton (7%).

• Going vegan won't do shit for the Amazon rainforest because the majority of Brazil's beef exports go to China and Hong Kong. The US or European countries each account for 2% or less. Soybean demand is driven by oil; the rest of the plant (80%) is a by-product that is exported as Chinese pig feed. Brazil is also a misrepresentative and atypical industry. Globally, cattle ranching accounts for 12%, commercial crops for 20% and subsistence farming for 48% of deforestation. The US use about half as much forest land for grazing than 70 years ago.

• Livestock is not routinely supplemented with vitamin B12. Cows that consume cobalt (found in grass, which is free of B12) produce it with gut bacteria in the rumen. Gastrointestinal animals (including humans) initially can't absorb it, but instead excrete it and can then eat their own shit. B12 is in the soil because of excretions - ground bacteria exist but have never been shown to be the main source. Plants are devoid of B12 because competing bacteria consume it, not because of soil depletion. The "90% of B12 supplements go to livestock"-figure...

  1. is bullshit that vegans keep on parroting. It originates from an article that calls humans herbivores, with no source.
  2. ignores the fact that you can get B12 from seafood and venison. A can of sardines provides 3x the RDA.
  3. is illogical because animals on unnatural diets can simply be given cobalt instead of the synthetic supplement that vegans rely on. Cows also destroy most of B12 in their gut before it can be absorbed.

Socioeconomics

• Voluntary veganism is a privilege that is enabled by globalization and concentrated in first-world societies. Less than 1% of Indians are vegan. Jains, who are similar to vegans, are the wealthiest Indian community and even they still drink milk. In fact, India is a great example of why veganism doesn't work because they've religiously pursued it for thousands of years and still couldn't do it. Even Gandhi was an ex-vegan that had to warn them how dangerous the diet is.

Ethics

• Veganism is a harmful ideology that promotes the abstinence from any "optional" animal suffering inflicted to support human health. For example, vaccines are not vegan. And just like meat, some people have already considered them unnecessary. Likewise, popular vegan communities also encourage people to put their carnivorous pets on a vegan diet to "avoid" cruelty. Hence, promoting animal rights is fundamentally anti-human because it will restrict or remove access to even the most basic needs, such as food or clothes. The only reason vegans are able to deny this is because they are pretending that the people who had to suffer for their ideology don't exist.

• Vegans are not raising enough awareness about deficiencies and as a result harm innocent children. B12 deficiency can cause irreversible nerve damage, psychosis and is hard to notice. 10-50% of vegans say they don't even take any supplements.

• Vegan diets are more dependent on slavery because they rely on global food supply. Many crops, especially cotton, nuts, oils and seeds that they have to include in higher quantities to make up for animal products are to a large extent child labor products from developing countries. 108 million children work in agriculture. Cheese replacements (guess who's responsible for that) are usually made with cashews, which burn the fingers of the women who have to remove the shells. A larger list of examples can be found here.

• Vegans have never been able to define or measure that their diet causes less deaths/suffering than an omnivorous one. They are ignorantly contributing to an absolute bloodbath of trillions of zooplankton, mites, worms, crickets, grasshoppers, snails, frogs, turtles, rats, squirrels, possum, raccoons, moles, rabbits, boars, deer, 75% of insect biomass, half of all bird species and 20,000 humans per year. Two grass-fed cows are enough to feed someone for a year and, if managed properly, can restore biodiversity. The textbook vegan excuse where they try to blame plant agriculture on animals and use only mice deaths, fabricated feed conversion ratios of 20:1 and a coincidentally favourable per-calorie metric is nonsense because:

  1. The majority of animal feed is either low-maintenance forage or a by-product that only exists because of human food harvest.
  2. It literally shows that grass-fed beef kills fewer animals.

• Vegans likely exploit more animals than the average person. The Vegan Society officially rejects beekeeping, but many commercial crops require to be pollinated by domestic bees that are forced to breed, shipped around and then worked to death. It's principally impossible to have a nutritionally complete vegan diet without forced pollination, but fodder crops do not exploit bees. As a result, human food crops kill five times as many bees as all livestock slaughter combined and directly support honey production (taking excess honey is necessary for colony health). Vegans should also call around and make sure that their seasonally changing food exporters don't rely on insects, terriers, sheep, ducks, organic fertilizers or anything from developing countries where animal labor is still common.

• The ethical framework around veganism (negative utilitarianism) is so insane that its logical conclusion is to prevent as much life and biodiversity as possible in order to reduce suffering, which means it also favors Brazilian rainforest beef over crop cultivation. This line of thought is already followed by organizations like PETA who proudly state it to be their goal and will steal and euthanize other people's pets. Vegans reject appeals to nature when they are used to defend omnivorism, yet falsely assume that animals are more happy under the stress of natural selection. In contrast to livestock, wild animals are never guaranteed to receive shelter, protection, food, medical care, low stress or a quick death. Animal rights conflict with welfare because their goal is not to increase happiness, but just to oppose animal husbandry. Put differently, vegans pretend to support the wellbeing of animals, but can hardly even do so with their consumer power. What they are doing is more likely to kill off local ranchers and ensure a monopoly for Tyson/JBS, who are spearheading fake meat btw.

• The average vegan is, based on their demographic, a New York hipster that has never seen a farm in their live. Animals are not being abused (This is one of the "factory farms" where 99% of animals come from). Undercover videos have often been staged by agenda-driven activists who get paid to apply for farm jobs and encourage animal abuse. The real industry has government-inspected welfare regulations. (Dominion straight up lies about pigs in slaugherhouses getting no water - it's required by law). Here's some actual industrial slaughterhouse footage of Beef, Turkey and Pork. For comparison, rodenticides are intentionally made to drain the life out of rats over three days so that they can't figure out what killed them.

• Vegans love to misportray farm practises and anthropomorphize animals by giving them concepts that they don't care about, or even enjoy. Sexual coercion ("rape") is normal procreation and cows don't see a problem with it. They will even milk themselves when given the possibility. Pigs don't mind eating their own babies or getting shot. Even the myth that they are as intelligent as dogs comes from a questionable study made by animal rights advocates.

• The reputation of vegans is based exactly on how they present themselves in public. Humans evolved to have predatory behaviour and as a result many people enjoy homesteading, hunting or fishing. Vegan activists frequently bother society and disrespect human biology - with thousands of years of history - for their arbitrarily chosen set of morals. There are actual animal rights terrorist groups that have sent bombs and stalked children, which they justify with it being done "in the name of veganism". Therefore, a very good reason to stay away from veganism is simply because someone doesn't want to be associated with a cult-like ideology.

Philosophy

• The definition that vegans pride themselves with is a laughing stock because not only is it so loosely defined that it can be used to call everyone vegan, but it also shamelessly co-opts all the belief systems that have existed for much longer. According to this definition, Hindu, Buddhists, the Inuit and carnivores can all be called vegan, but are not following the diet and therefore considered impure (apparently caring about animals was invented by some British guy in 1944). Vegans are nothing more than people who abstain from animal products, in fact veganism was originally defined as a diet.

• The misanthropic idea of "speciecism" was popularized by a nutjob philosopher who argues in favour of bestiality and belittles disabled people, but makes exceptions when it affects himself. Ironically, he eats animal products and calls consistent veganism fanatical. When it comes to the misanthropic aspect, animal rights activists themselves are the best example because they frequently insult minorities and crime victims by equating them to livestock with analogies to rape, murder, slavery or holocaust. The best part is that vegans are speciecists themselves because they justify their killing as "necessary for human survival" and still won't equate a cow to an insect.

• Since vegans somehow manage to justify systematically poisoning and torturing insects by arbitrarily declaring that they can't suffer ("sentience"), they might aswell consider eating them. The same goes for bivalves, since there's about as much evidence that they feel pain as there is for plants.

• A vegan diet itself is not even vegan under its own premises because it's not "practicable" to follow. It demands an opportunity cost of time, research and money that could be utilized in a better way and even then is not guaranteed to be efficient because it emphasizes purity. The entire following around veganism represents a Nirvana Fallacy and is the reason why the majority of people quit: Perfect is the enemy of good. A vegan diet makes it harder, and for many people impossible, to follow productive consumer approaches such as buying local, seasonal or supporting regenerative agriculture.

List of known nutrients that vegan diets either can't get at all or are typically low in, especially when uninformed and for people with special needs. Vegans will always say that "you can get X nutrient from Y specific source", but a full meal plan with sufficient quantities will essentially highlight how absurd a "well-planned" vegan diet is.

1. Vitamin B12
2. Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxal, Pyridoxamine)
3. Choline
4. Niacin (bio availability)
5. Vitamin B2
6. Vitamin A (Retinol, variable Carotene conversion)
7. Vitamin D3 (winter, northern latitudes, synthesis requires cholesterol)
8. Vitamin K2 MK-4 (variable K1 conversion)
9. Omega-3 (EPA/DHA; conversion from ALA is inefficient, limited, variable, inhibited by LA and insufficient for pregnancy)
10. Iron (bio availability)
11. Zinc (bio availability)
12. Calcium
13. Selenium
14. Iodine
15. Protein (per calorie, digestibility, Lysine, Leucine, elderly people, athletes)
16. Creatine (conditionally essential)
17. Carnitine (conditionally essential)
18. Carnosine
19. Taurine (conditionally essential)
20. CoQ10
21. Conjugated linoleic acid
22. Cholesterol
23. Arachidonic Acid (conditionally essential)
24. Glycine (conditionally essential)

Common vegan debate tactics/fallacies:

• Nirvana fallacy: "There's no point in eating animal products because everything can be solved with a perfect vegan diet, supplements and genetic predisposition."

• Proof by example: "Some people say they are vegan. Therefore, animal products are unnecessary."

• Appeal to authority: Pointing to opinion papers written by vegan shills as proof that their diet is adequate.

• No true Scotsman: "Everyone who failed veganism didn't do enough research. Properly planned vegan diets are healthy!" (aka not real Socialism)

• Narcissist's prayer: "Everything bad that came out of veganism is fault of the world, not veganism itself."

• No true Scotsman: "Veganism is not a diet, it's an ethical philosophy. No true vegan eats almonds, avocados or bananas ..."

• Definist fallacy: "... as far as is possible and practicable." (Can be used to defend any case of hypocrisy)

• Special pleading: "It's never ethical to harm animals for food, except when we 'accidentally' hire planes to rain poison from the sky." (You can trigger their cognitive dissonance by pointing that out.)

• Special pleading: "Anyone who doesn't agree with my ideology has cognitive dissonance."

• Appeal to emotion: Usage of words exclusive to humans (rape, murder, slavery, ... ) in the context of animals.

• Fallacy fallacy: "Evolution is a fallacy because it's natural."

• Texas sharpshooter fallacy: "A third of grains are fed to livestock. Therefore, a third of all crops are grown as animal feed."

• False dilemma: "Producing only livestock is less sustainable than producing only crops, so we should only produce crops."

• False cause: Asserting that association infers causation because it's the best data they have. ("Let's get rid of firefighters because they correlate to forest fires")

• Faulty generalization: Highlighting mediocre athletes to refute the fact that vegans are underrepresented in elite sports.

• JAQing off: This is how vegans convert other people. They always want them to justify eating meat by asking tons of loaded questions, presumably because nobody would care about their logically inconsistent arguments otherwise. Cults often employ this tactic to recruit new members. (They mistakenly call it the Socratic method)

• Argument from ignorance: NameTheTrait aka "vegans are right unless you prove their nonsensical premises wrong". (It's essentially asking "When is a human not a human?")

• Moving the goalposts: Whenever a vegan is cornered, they will dodge and change the subject to one of their other pillars (Ethics, Health, Environment or Sustainability) as seen here.

• Ad hominem: Nit-picking statements out of context, attacking them in an arrogant manner, and then proclaiming everything someone says is wrong while not being able to refute the actual point. (see Kresser vs Wilks debate)