No longer a Vegan after 11 years

My childhood friend choose to be Vegetarian aged 21, she took a course on food science to make sure she was eating properly and she cooked from scratch everyday and rarely had any processed food, within a few years she always looked like she had had a rough night. She then went Vegan 9 years ago and quickly began to look like death warmed up, had no energy and hair falling out, at 53 she looked 103 Her Mother and he Doctor begged her to eat meat. She started eating eggs and cheese during the first lockdown before adding small amounts of meat about 6 months later. She now looks amazing, her skin glows and her hair shines, she has so much energy and now looks her age.

kjmpde Snide comments about vegans will end when their public voice is no longer one of moral superiority.

Your comparison is ridiculous. Equality is a human right. Being a vegan is a lifestyle choice.

kjmpde

if you go to the centre for alternative technology in machynlleth (sorry if mis spelt) , you will see that it produces enough compost .

Thank you for the link. It’s very interesting and a place I would like to visit. We have Ryton Organic Gardens not too far away from us.

Nevertheless, although their advice on composting is very good, it still wouldn’t produce sufficient compost from the waste produced to renew the soil for multiple crops of the same type. This is why a legume heavy diet is a problem. It requires specific nutrients which compost generated within a closed circle cannot supply.

That’s because as consumers of whatever is produced we lock some nutrients within our bodies and excrete others. We only achieve equilibrium when we add our body waste ( including the ultimate decay) to the equation.

Not surprisingly we’re a bit reluctant to do that, though I do have friends who pee on their compost heaps!

You’ll see from the website that even the Centre adds extra in the form of various paper products and doesn’t claim that their compost is the only fertiliser they use.

Although I run three compost bins and work a three year rotation, there are still times when the soil is depleted and I have to add nutrients from an outside source. Mostly horse manure, chicken and cattle manure.

These wouldn’t be available if we were mostly vegan, so I think it would have to be chemical.

We all need to live in earth ships, and have composting toilets.

Why wouldn’t horse manure be available?

I doubt there would be enough horses?
Like many of our modern problems, it’s a matter of scale, I think. When we come up with a new idea it’s impact is not too noticeable. When we apply it by the millions or billions we create imbalance.

Human waste can be used as compost( especially that from non meat eaters) . No shortage of humans.

Horse manure needs to rest at least 6 months before it is used and then you can still get grass seeds sprouting everywhere. You can make your own liquid feed using nettle leaves or comfrey leaves. Seaweed compost can be bought to spread on the soil.. To improve soil texture rot leaves down for a couple of years.

I hate the references to the "Western World" and "Here in the West" when referring to how our meat is raised. I live in Norfolk. Free range pigs abound. On many farms now pigs are increasingly used to cleanse and manure the fields in a rotation lasting three to five years. Sheep have grazed sugar beet tops down before the beet is harvested for decades, manuring as they go. Most farms still bring their cows in for the winter, fed on silage far more than imported soya, and the deep litter is then spread on the fields. But increasingly, with careful land management, cattle are being left out most, if not all year. Also meadowland and flood plains are so very, very important to biodiversity and carbon capture. And they need grazing to maintain this. Consumer demand for free range chicken means more birds have access to the outdoors. We're fortunate here to have a good abattoir as EU regulations forced the closure of so many, but hopefully this will change and more smaller ones will open so animals have shorter travel distances.

Its a big mistake to lump UK farming into the same category as the enormous factory farming lots common in the Americas. The vast majority of our farmers have great respect for their animals and treat them well.

vegansrock

Why wouldn’t horse manure be available?

I guess because horses only exist here as domestic animals for people to make use of ( except for the few wild ones on Dartmoor etc).
Sent the whole point that animals shouldn’t be used by people for their own ends?

vegansrock

Human waste can be used as compost( especially that from non meat eaters) . No shortage of humans.

Yes, if you use your own. Have you seen “The Martian’?

I don’t know if it can be sterilised n great quantities to prevent the spread of disease.

I just can’t fancy it, somehow?

The problem with vegan or vegetarian is that the body doesn’t get the right nutrients, we were not meant to eat in this way and cannot process these types of foods. I respect anyone’s views but cannot understand them. I know lots will disagree with me, that is their prerogative. I eat low carb, no sugars, processed foods or oils and have high fat diet including dairy, meat, fish, eggs, nuts and berries, leafy greens. I cook in butter, ghee, lard, goose fat, duck fat, dripping and use olive oil too. No bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, carby veg, pulses or high sugar fruits. I am not overweight, not diabetic and feel really well. Rarely go to the doctors. This suits me and it is the way our grandparents used to eat.

All human waste can be be and is used as fertiliser and has been for many years. The sewage treatment plant can’t tell the difference between vegan poo, carnivore poo and omnivore poo so they recycle it all together and then spread it on the fields to nurture our crops.
I watched a TV program about it and here’s a link to read if you want.
sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/human-manure-closing-the-nutrient-loop/

In the Rhanna series by Christine Marion Fraser, which I read many years ago, one man used his own poo on his rhubarb. No one really fancied it once they found out, but if vegans want to macerate their poo and put it on their veggies, go for it!

Wow. Didn’t know all that. Thank you.

I still don’t want to think about it too much though?

Me neither!

I understand that vegans usually become short of iron for blood and vit B12 (folate) also prevents anaemia.

You dd very well though as most vegans hsve problems after a couple of years.

The reason we haven't got bellies like a gorillas is that, unlike them, we have shorter guts for meat digestion not the lengthy guts needed by vegetarian animals.

Good luck and don't feel guilty - we shortened our guts millions of years ago, in order to have enough blood to grow bigger brains.

Happy New Year

Shropshirelass I doubt very much that our grandparents ate a low-carb diet.
Most of them would not have been able to afford large quantities of meat and would have derived a lot of their protein from bread.
If they were engaged in heavy manual labour outside or inside the home, they would have needed the calories derived from the carbohydrate element of their diet.

janeainsworth, I absolutely agree, bread and potatoes were the staples of the British working man and woman's diet until at least the start of WW2.

In fact even in quite comfortable families meat was rationed and the purpose of the Yorkshire pudding, eaten before not with the meat course, was to curb people's appetite for meat.

I remember reading a 19th century novel, one by Charlotte Bronte I think, where the squire of a small villages admonished his son who wanted to skip the earlier courses to get to the meat ' No ball (Yorkshire pudding or suet pudding) without soup and no meat without ball.' In other words no one got meat until they had eaten their soup and their portion of 'ball' so that their appetite had been blunted and they wera already beginning to feel full.so that they would eat less meat.

It’s easy to get enough B12 by using fortified plant milks such as Oatly on your cereals, eat marmite on toast, sprinkle yeast flakes on your pasta or taking a supplement. Plenty of people take various supplements if you look at all the shelves in the chemist.( not all of them vegans I would surmise). I have had several blood tests recently and am not anaemic or deficient in any vitamins.

Marmite!

Supplements / fortifying chemicals are usually high carbon footprint! Just eat the low meat diet which we have spent millions of years adapting to!!

Marmite is a by-product of the brewing industry, that is why it was in short supply during the first lockdown, because with beer production falling through the floor, there was no by-product to turn into marmite.

LJP1 that is an interesting claim about supplements. Omega3 apart, and the problems there are well known, I could find no verifiable evidence for your claim online. A few wishy washy assertions, but little else.

LPJI Please don’t instruct me to eat a “low meat diet”, I choose not to, and don’t need to. You can choose what you want to eat, Maybe you could investigate the carbon footprint of most meat eaten in terms of land, energy and water use.

vegansrock as with all things, it depends on the source of the meat you eat.

As James Rebank has shown, while methane emissions are a fact, The Pasture for Life movement, where cattle are grazed only on grassland and hay and sileage produced on farm, with no imported high density food supplements, where the animals trample dung into the soil leading to carbon sequestration daily.jstor.org/can-cows-help-mitigate-climate-change-yes-they-can/

Across this country and probably every country in the world there are huge swathes of marginal land, unsuitable for growing crops but have grazed cattle for thousands of years. These grazing areas have developed an ecology of their own with many plant and insect species that are found only on this type of habitat.

It obviously favours those opposed to meat eating to look to the most damaging, to animal and environment, cattle rearing methods, work out how damaging that is to the environment, and then extrapolate it to all cattle production, but over at least the last decade many farmers in many countries world wide have been reconsidering their cattle rearing systems and going back to pasture for life systems.

By the way, you still haven't answered my query on a vegan diet for someone allergic to soya, nuts and fresh fruit.

You might be better trying the FODMAP diet. My niece does this and legumes aren't allowed. FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols. There are tons of diet/cookbooks on Amazon (and other booksellers). I look at Amazon whenever I want a book (o anything) but then buy from WOB.com (formerly world of books) as they are sometimes cheaper and, if in the UK, its free postage.