 so are you a vegan or what turned you on to the vegan diet 15 years ago I found out about the process by which animal products come to my plate and I decided I was not comfortable with that and didn't do it overnight but I I know I know it's fine okay and yeah I decided that that wasn't for me and I've been vegan since so it was mainly how they were treating conventionally raised animals like the like the pork the beef and the chicken yes and I mean it's not like I would eat any animal it's not like I would eat I would go to China and dogs or cats either yeah it's not something I would do myself so I wasn't comfortable with paying somebody else to do it for me so is it I mean it's a combination of how the animals are being treated as well as you know the act of killing the animal itself yes it's both but neither neither one is something I would do myself so I can't really justify paying a company to do for me so so you're so when you go in the supermarket and you see that meat you know a lot of people are detached from the reality of what goes into producing that product and that just that just really spoke to you yes absolutely so when you you know you convert it to the vegan diet you know mainly for that that reason I mean did you consider any other aspects from you know the nutritional drawbacks of a vegan diet or possibly the environmental aspects of it as well yeah I mean I've done a lot of my own homework I'm skeptical of anybody if anybody has a case for any dogma I should believe I always ask questions and I was sufficiently convinced of the benefits of a vegan diet if you think that there is evidence that I'm ignoring or missing then feel free to try to convince me but I've done a lot of my own research it wasn't something I did blindly so you looked into you know contrary aspects of those points like you know the animals the environment the nutritional aspects yes I did I mean I mean you know and the nutrition is something very difficult to understand because I mean just about everyone whether they're vegan or not you know there's a lot of health issues related to nutrition in this country in general so so to say that a vegan diet you know I mean there are arguably vegans that are healthier than standard American dieters because of how poor the diet is but you know there are specific nutrients that people do need to be concerned about on a vegan diet do you think the importance of you know proper supplementation and being aware of those things is a little bit understated I mean as far as I know there's only one nutrients that well okay as with any diet you need to think about the nutrients are getting it doesn't matter if you're vegan or not right I mean I see it sounds like you agree with that so it's important to be aware of what you're getting and where you're getting it from as far as and I mean I'm not gonna argue that there's that every vegan is healthy I mean you can eat potato chips and ice cream every day and be a vegan so it really has to do with paying attention to what nutrients are getting and where you're getting them from and as far as I know it's really only be 12 that vegans have a tendency to lack in their diet unless they're a potato chip vegan you know I mean people go on and on about protein mostly because people are very uneducated about protein but I don't supplement personally I do sometimes eat foods that are fortified with certain nutrients but as far as I know and as far as the things I've read a vegan diet has all the essential nutrients except for be 12 so I mean do you think that understanding all these nutritional aspects are of a vegan diet are too much for someone to undertake that doesn't have a lot of a lot of hours researching you know like hundreds to thousands of hours researching this topic no I don't believe you need to be a nutritionist to learn about nutrition so so you think the vegan diet is adequate in in all of the nutrients our body needs are you comfortable with listing those every single nutrient vitamins minerals elements and fatty acids not not every single one but you know the general important ones this is a good challenge I like it so what do we have we have a CDE K the B vitamins thymine riboflavin all the B vitamins all the B vitamins we have protein obviously we have carbs obviously which was yeah we have iron potassium you know selenium iodine magnesium copper zinc the point is there's a lot of shit there's there's a lot of stuff so you know when you go over the vitamins you know as you said a b c d e k you know you have the omega fatty acids e p a dha and the list of omega 3s and omega 6 is very complicated you have all the minerals the elements and and even I have a hard time listing those off the top of my head you know you have the electrolyte minerals like sodium calcium potassium as well as magnesium you have you know when you go into the elements you have copper zinc you have selenium you have iodine in the minerals we missed there's sulfur the point is there's there's a huge well yeah sodium in the electrolytes there's a huge amount of chloride you have fluoride you have you know there's too many elements minerals fatty acids vitamins everything to list and break down there's really is a lot to understand and and there's you know we're lacking kind of that understanding of those nutrients in general but you know vegans are inclined to believe they're getting all of those yet people understand American diet are deficient yes I mean it's very complicated so I mean and I don't want to go into this discussion and go too far down the list but you know we can start with vitamin a and I mean I'm assuming you know most vegans are led to believe that beta-carotene contained in plant foods converts to vitamin a yes because that's because beta-carotene can be labeled as vitamin a in plant foods but it's actually in the form of beta-carotene but here your body needs to convert it into vitamin a yes do you understand that conversion process no so and this is where things get foggy this is where there's a lack of studying on this in general so there are gene polymorphisms that cause some people not to not be able to convert beta-carotene into retinol vitamin a that occurs in about 35% of the population and then about 15% of the population is not able to convert carotene to retinol at all and then even if you are part of the population that can convert carotene to retinol there's an enzyme called the beta-carotene 1515 deoxygenase enzyme this enzyme cleaves beta-carotene it looks like two retinol molecules so it needs to turn their carotene into two retinol molecules which is what our body uses and this enzyme is inhibited by the flavonoids and the flavonoids that are typically contained in these in these vegetable foods but information like this that I'm talking to you about right now you know this took me hours and hours of studying and research to figure out and you know you can even look at tissue samples of you know people that consume high amounts of carotene containing foods and carotene gets thrown in the fat they don't get utilized by the body and and if we were to break down all of these processes for every single vitamin it's very complicated yes so I think we would both agree that in order for someone to have an understanding of nutrition it's above most people's heads yes do you know which two forms of vitamin b12 need to be consumed for vegans no I don't so aceno cobalamin and methyl cobalamin are the bioactive form of vitamin b12 those can be there are artificial supplements that are made for that and you know you can also obtain it from animal foods you know but when you know to go down the list or you can eat dirt I mean dirt might have a very minute amount of bacteria in it but that's not very much b12 the main issue is that when you look at blood levels of homocysteine and vegans homocysteine are free amino acids despite supplementing vitamin b12 vegans still have high levels of homocysteine and this homocysteine is is one of the leading causes of stroke it causes a lot of our oxidative stress in the arterial wall just in the body in general and despite supplementing b12 you know vegans still have high homocysteine levels so you know there's a lot of things that people in general are unaware of and and even if you know even modern people standard American dietors are deficient in vitamin b12 so when you restrict that even further I think people are so used to being unhealthy on a standard American diet that when they go to a vegan diet they don't really notice too much of a difference or they notice a slight improvement so so the nutritional aspect of veganism is very difficult to understand the environmental aspect is also something you can't really talk about off the top of your head because you know where are people getting these statistics from you know where is this understanding of carbon emissions coming from so I mean if you want to talk about that or would you rather talk about the moral or ethical aspect I don't have a preference man so on on the moral topic you know you have the aspect of you know the cows being treated very poorly in feedlots them being slaughtered you know to provide you with that steak but have you considered that you know conventional agriculture the growing of certain grains and soybeans you know the damage that does to the environment in the context of herbicides and pesticides and tilling you know making that choice of buying that meat that one animal that was slaughtered that provides a large amount of caloric nutrition versus those thousands to maybe even trillions of insects and smaller animals that suffer in conventional plant agriculture animals suffer in every form of industrial agriculture that we have manufactured I mean I don't know if you're laboring under the assumption that veganism is about perfection it's not it's about at least for me it's about doing the best I can and yeah I'm I'm well aware of this I've heard of this it doesn't it's it's not really it's I think it's kind of fallacious to say because we're doing some harm that that means that we should not strive to do the least harm you know just because just because we can't go a hundred percent and not ever harm an animal unless we kill ourselves that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do the best we can with what we have within the kind of society that you see around you it's hard to even take a step without hurting something you know because everything everything that we everything that we consume harms something that's along some point of the process most vegans I know are not under any illusion otherwise you know it's it's not really about purity it's about doing the least time that we can and yeah your point is valid but it's it's misleading to say that that causes more harm to animals than this does I mean the main issue I have with this is you don't you think that vegan should advocate more towards local even pasture raised animal foods as opposed to being just completely against animal foods in general well no because I mean first of all it's if we're going to say that we're against killing animals then obviously we're not going to advocate for that and you know you can agree or disagree with that I'm sorry I'm sorry just to clarify the I mean let's say you have three choices you can buy you know you can buy the plants in the supermarket and you know rodents and insects and animals were killed unknowingly unintentionally but it just had to happen because you're harvesting the plants or you could buy that conventional crap feed lot beef the animals are treated horribly injected kept alive with chemicals or you could go to a local farm buy an animal that had a happy life you know I mean there's there's three options there wouldn't you rather have people switch to you know more you know animals that were treated better as opposed to just vegan completely isn't that something more realistic something that's just as beneficial there's not only three options first of all I mean I'm saying those are the three options I think most people would have to take right sure but there's more than that I mean I I come from a place where you know community gardens are a thing like it's when you have this many people in the smallest space obviously that's unrealistic but so is animal agriculture you know I mean it's in the end for me a lot of it comes down to how do you feed this many people well it's hard because there's too many people and that's part of why everything we do does harm because there are so many of us that it's kind of unsustainable to feed everybody no matter how you do it but I mean going back to your point like yes there there are more than three choices and I like to see I like to see people eating food that was going to waste first of all and I whether it's vegan or not I mean I personally am not going to eat animal products because they probably make me sick at this point and also because there's ample plant food that is going to waste and I'd like to see more people growing their own food you know I come from a place in California where that's common so that would be option four that I would pick but in terms of your three options yeah I mean there's less or evils and it's it's difficult to pick I would say that what we're showing here is the greatest evil in turn just all around in terms of whether you care about animals or the planet whether you care about doing the least harm this is probably doing the most harm of any practice I mean we might even agree of that so it's really a choice between you know vegetables at Whole Foods or Farmer John and up in Red Hook right yeah I mean it's it's a tough choice I personally would go with the vegetables I know I'm like I said I'm under no illusions that this is doing no harm but Farmer John is not all that he's cracked up to be I mean even small farms take an environmental toll it's not just one cow you know it's well when you raise animals on grassland it's it's carbon positive it's beneficial for the environment how so grass see questers carbon so when cows emit carbon through their manure which goes back into the soil because the manure is being you know put onto the soil and then they whether they belts or fart whatever it is the grass absorbs that carbon back into the soil the problem is you know these feed-on operations are not sequestering carbon back into the soil I mean are you gonna say that we should go start shooting deer in the woods because they're farting in the woods no but we're not breeding those deer so you think because there was there would be more if there are more deer it'd be an issue there are a lot of deer and they overpopulate in many areas and it is an issue because we have killed off all their predators but if there were periods of time where the carbon emissions on this planet were drastically higher you know thousands and thousands of years ago with much larger animals much larger fauna why are we suddenly worried about animals living in their natural environment now which animals are you talking about any animals living in their natural environment I'm not I'm not sure I understand well whether it's a herd of bison roaming the fields I mean deer in the woods whatever animals you want to talk about is you know what's wrong with raising animals in the context of pasture and grasslands and carbon-positive farming that puts carbon back in the soil and is beneficial for the environment did you know that the only way to restore dirt desertification is to have animals roam through the fields and graze those lands where Alan Savry has a TED talk where he goes over how to reverse reverse desertification in desert climates and when animals go through those fields they leave manure and that manure fertilizes the soil when the rain comes the grasslands grow back so these animals these roaming herds of animals have always been part of nature's ecosystem right and this hasn't and us growing you know us bulldozing the Amazon to grow soybeans to feed the animals on feedlots isn't well yes I mean feedlots are the issue but why are vegans so why don't vegans ever promote pastured animals why don't they mention that they're much better alternatives to these animals that are being tortured it's Mr. Kiljoy one Paul said nobody it's Mr. Kiljoy one I need to go in a bit anyway but I mean I can answer your question wait what was your question I'm sorry it's a world of a difference it's a world of a difference we could also advocate that people grow their own food is there something negative in your mind about that does that create a bigger carbon footprint than having a pasture full of cows that you have to pee that you have to feed well when you when you get into this discussion that there's no real access to these plant foods that are grown locally and in large amounts certain things cannot be obtained you have a lot of a lot of the grains a lot of the high caloric vegan foods are not grown in these types of environments these local environments you might have some fruits and vegetables that are grown locally but you couldn't subsist off of that from a caloric standpoint whereas when you have these naturally natural quality animal foods you know fat meat organs the flesh of these animals is very high in calories and calorie density compared to plant foods you know that there are indigenous cultures who were plant-based every single indigenous culture obtained between 45 and 65 percent of their calories from animal foods averaging about 55 percent there were some indigenous groups that consumed less plant food less animal foods but the lowest in nature is about 40 percent what about the Choctaw Choctaw South American that there is no there is no indigenous group that has ever existed that has consumed less than maybe the pygmies in South America consume a very small percentage of their calories from animal foods but there has never been a group of people to that has not subsisted off of animal flesh let alone there's let alone solely dairy you could give them as much dairy as you want you could give them give them as much eggs as you want every single group of people has consumed the physical flesh of an animal or fish that's not true from what I've read at heart vegans may have good intentions but it's very clear there are misled on the nutrition environment as well as moral and ethical aspects of a vegan diet let's continue the promotion of high quality nutrient-dense animal foods