Nature vs. Culture vs. Nutrition

hey not everybody can be right all the
time in fact everybody's got to be wrong some of the time but I just saw a quick video from a natural vegan and it's so true and what she has to say is so right so wanted to put up a couple of words in agreement with her the basic point she makes is that there is no logical reason there is no scientific reason for a Whole Foods plant-based diet to be nutritionally complete there is no reason for a vegan diet in principle to be nutritionally complete so the point is yes on almost any diet conceivably you can have nutritional deficiencies and there are a lot of excuses being made a lot of glorification is being offered for the vegan diet as long as you eat enough calories as long as you're eating fruit and vegetables all the time you'll never get a deficiency and the further point that a natural vegan makes although very briefly to back this up is that if people continue to believe in this or promote this misconception it will result in X vegans so I want to say up front my shallow point I have a shallow point I have a deeper point the shallow point is I actually knew one example of this I'm not going to say like there are thousands and thousands of x vegans around the world who had this experience the total number of people were talking about in 2015 is small but I knew someone in the internet I think she never told me her age she was maximum age 20 she might have been 18 um I only knew who are on the internet because she was a vegan activist so she wasn't just someone who was like passively vegan or vegan because her parents forced her to me she was interested in veganism and advocated veganism and she was vegan herself she had a shock when she went to the doctor's office and the doctor came back to her with blood test results and said you have serious health problems due to deficiencies in your diet and I really tried to talk to her after that because she she flipped I mean she got spooked we would say she got scared straight in common parlance in slang for whatever reason that experience for her of talking to the doctor and being told basically you're vegan diet is killing you she flipped 180 degrees and I remember like she she had the word vegan like in her username she was really into veganism and she went back to eating like pork sausages like I couldn't believe the change and now I wrote to her I didn't write to her with hate mail I didn't write you with anger I was writing to her reasoning with her because I thought I could talk her through this and be like look from my perspective even if you had a short term reason even if you want doctor's orders to consume animal products for like two weeks or something to me that would never be a justification for in the long term resigning yourself to eating animal products in a daily basis that makes no sense to me now you know people can fill in the blanks here it is only under some really bizarre circumstances that you would be under legitimate doctor's orders to eat meat although the reality is doctors are human beings too I've heard lots of stories about doctors giving bad advice of telling vegans and vegetarians they have to eat meat for the sake of their health even if it's not true so although the legitimate scientific reasons for that incredibly rare and narrow the social the socially real reasons given are probably all over the place um to digress briefly I myself had the experience of being treated like garbage by doctors in a hospital in France because their perception of me was that because I was vegan I must be a member of some strange cult and the doctors treated me like crap and the nurses treated me like crap and it was uh with such a struggle to get food in the hospital and just even though what I was actually saying in conversations with the doctors showed that I really did have very shrewd scientific attitudes the questions I was asking everything else they disregarded that and had this prejudicial attitude towards me because I was vegan um so for a lot of people that shock of having an authority figure treat you like crap it can change your life you can become an X vegan as in the case of this girl with her blood tests on the other hand if you're really accustomed to authority figures treating you like crap it might not be the chocolate probably what it is man look those doctors shrimp like crap but hey you know if you've been through it before you sure you're gonna go through it again might not impact you all that deeply so you know University Professors treat you like crap that would have a big impact if it's the first time 10th time 20th time you got a thick skin you can deal with it uh alright so my shallow point here was yes a natural begin is right you can get dietary deficiencies on a vegan diet and I'll wholefoods plant-based vegan diet even if you're eating enough calories even a greeting fruits and vegetables and it can result in vegans becoming ex vegan the deeper point I want to raise here is that this type of delusion has been a big part of Western culture and Western civilization especially during the 19th century the original meaning of whole foods today we use Whole Foods in a different sense to me foods that aren't processed and so on but through the whole 19th century there was this big fad the pseudo scientific fashion of people believing that foods were nutritionally complete as long as you eat the whole food the entire food so you see this in literature and also in nonfiction from the 19th century I can remember coming up repeatedly in 19th century Russian literature so you know Tolstoy turgay Nia of that kind of thing remember inter Gainey have one of the characters he's a devotee of this school of thought where he thinks as long as you eat like an entire fish that that fish is going to be nutritionally complete provide with everything you need in nonfiction Henry David Thoreau the historically correct pronunciation of his name is henry david thoreau but everyone says Henry only David Thoreau um very famous author very influential including influential for people interested in ecology and veganism he participated in this popular delusion and he believed that as long as you ate a whole cob of corn and this kind of thing the entire plant with different types of plants eating the whole stock that this would be nutritionally complete ultimately this pseudo-scientific idea is religious in its Genesis it ultimately relies on the idea that we live in a universe created by a benevolent deity who ensures that things are nutritionally complete human beings and that is not true now today even people who do not believe in any religion have a belief of this kind because they think that the relationship between nature and human nature is logical diagrammatic perfectly designed perfectly intended to make your life easier wonderful and it isn't we don't live in a human centric universe the stars in the sky are not aligned in a logical pattern to help you navigate on a ship it's amazing the human beings had the ingenuity to figure out how to look at the stars in the sky and navigate a ship and figure out where they are on a map sit down and try it sometime I had to do some studying of star charts because i was doing historical research and southeast asia it's hard as hell and that one guy one guy with the PhD who really figured out how to use star positions but a couple centuries ago that was a major practical science human beings relied upon being able to get on a boat and figure out how far you'd gone by charting the distances it stars in the sky okay but it wasn't created for us the logic and the system of relating the position of the stars of the sky to our position the planet is something we create with our minds with our reasoning we're imposing our logic on nature there is absolutely the relationship between nutrition and nature is arbitrary at best some plants are poisonous some plants are nutritious with the passage of centuries of painstaking hard work and trial and error above all outs people have figured out what's going to poison them what's going to feed them what combinations of foods they can survive on and man this comes up in the social sciences also there are many many anthropological works that assume falsely that indigenous people who've been living in one class met in one area who've been indigenous to one area for thousands of years that they will have a perfect understanding of how to get a nutritionally complete diet out of that environment out of the plants that are available in the forest or in the desert whatever whatever ecological niche they've been living in and that is not true and that is never true I've seen studies of the Cree our indigenous people here in Canada that point out look there were some really nutritious plants available to them that they did not eat they did not farm and they did not collect from the forest they did not exploit and one of the reasons for that was that Cree culture right up to the modern period right up to there getting involved with europeans was tremendously focused on consuming meat so naturally also with implants they just culturally ascribed values to some plants and ignored others but above all else that was a culture massively focused on hunting meat on eating meat like beaver and moose that was what was valued and interestingly they put a very low value on eating rabbit they considered eating rabbit rather a bad thing there are old crease sayings you can starve to death eating Rab and stuff of that the point is look the Cree are one example I've also looked at native people in Southeast Asia in Laos Cambodia Thailand etc just like modern Western scientific people they were all struggling with imperfect knowledge to figure out how to survive given the arbitrary raw materials that emerged from the environment around them and a long painstaking process of trial and error and observation and finally in the 20th century in the 21st century I mean look at how recently the word protein entered the English language the discovery of protein the discovery of the the lettered vitamins vitamins a b c d its recent science it's all of this is really fairly new knowledge when my father and grandfather grew up these misconceptions were legitimately rooted in ignorance it's only the last few years that the type of information you get by putting food into a mass spectrometer and analyzing what nutrients are there in what proportions and doing the incredibly difficult work of figuring out the impacts of chemicals within the human body nutrients and otherwise that that stuff is starting to come together and we're getting a complete picture of what you need to survive and look I'm vegan I'm encouraging you to go vegan but I've got to tell you when I became vegan I had no idea that being vegan was better for your health my attitude was this is the right thing to do morally and ethically and if it's bad for my health so what because I'm not trying to win at the Olympics I'm not going to do something immoral and unethical because it might help me run in a race a few seconds faster I understand that some people are but for me that's not what matters my concerns are ethical environmental ecological whatever word you want to use my concerns are about living a meaningful life and doing the best I can with the knowledge I've got in the ecology of God in the context of God and including in the cultural context of God and for me when I was younger the answer that was become strictly vegetarian as I got older it became obvious to me the answer was to be strictly vegan that's all I got to say a natural vegan thanks for making a great video and inspiring this rant what up