Kevin Smith Will Die of a Heart Attack: the Vegan Peril.

compared to the unbelievable ethical and
ecological challenge we face as humanity and what can we possibly do about it there's a sense in which I can say veganism is easy veganism is easy compared to transitioning to being a society fueled by solar power compared to the difficulty for you as an individual in ceasing to use a car entirely or for us as a society to have 50% of people stop using cars to stop to eliminate cars and trucks or even significantly reduce cars and trucks that's hard compared to those things being vegan is easy but I gotta tell you as a diet as a weight loss diet as a diet to be beautiful veganism is not easy the only thing that has moved him to consider the plight of cows that are raised to die in veal crates which is a moving sight to the most stone-hearted of nihilists myself included the idea of an animal being born taken away from its mother put in a plastic shed to be born and raised and live only to die to be turned into veal and guess what guys the veal industry and the dairy industry are not two separate industries there are two stages of one in the same industry you don't produce dairy with a veal you don't produce feel without dairy this is a constant process of cows living their whole life on a concrete floor surrounded by steel rails with a steel shed for a sky living just to die forcibly inseminated having their children taken away from etc because if they're not constantly impregnated again again they're not producing milk and Kevin Smith is a guy who has gone out of his way repeatedly to laugh at that and to encourage others to laugh at it to laugh at veganism as an ethical cause as an ecological cause to take absolutely no responsibility for anything until his own health puts him at death's door it's all [ __ ] sign drawn on like this public utility thing I said not your mom yeah tilt a picture of a cow's head like Bessie Borden cow or not your mom not your milk really made me think made me feel really bad it's pulled cuz I drink a lot of milk if you're going a gallon of milk a day poor little cows are rolling around a field going like we're so thirsty I'm like I'm not Venice yen hey guys I'm broadcasting in my pajamas in natural sunlight no makeup no preparation no scripts this is what YouTube was invented for it's commonly said amongst vegans that you know our real enemy is just ignorance and indifference that our enemy is not people who are anti vegan but just people who've never really thought about veganism people have never really questioned the dietary habits that their own grandparents had the assumptions and values whether those are ecological ethical or health-related because veganism engages the all three well guess what Kevin Smith just had a heart attack and he is in the vocal minority of people who are not just passively ignorant of veganism but who were actively anti-vegan part of the reason for this is just a Kevin Smith is someone who was recorded hundreds and hundreds of hours of YouTube videos and podcasts I'm also in that category yes I have a much smaller audience but I think I have about 900 videos on YouTube now so once you get over a certain threshold you find yourself speaking on the record about topics that you probably thought you'd never talk about the you never take a stand on or have a position on I realized that veganism was not a high priority for this guy it's not something he was really sincerely interested in but he has taken the time at some length to state why he is against veganism he is married to a woman who is vegetarian and they've been married for many many years so within his own home he's talked about what it's like to live with someone you know eating I assume two or three meals a day but eating very often with someone who is vegetarian well he continued to eat meat and while he had tremendous health problems linked to eating meat most obviously obesity he struggled with obesity is now looking leader but he's also on a gurney with this heart attack that could have killed it just a couple days ago all right um being lean and indeed being beautiful has remarkably little to do with being healthy of course it's natural that we all have this assumption that being beautiful means that you're healthy and that being healthy will make you beautiful but it's not merely in a technical sense that it's not true just lately this is a tangent but it's related to what I want to say here about Kevin Smith I've really noticed two major vegan youtubers one called Mike the vegan and one called plant-based news going back to the form of advocacy for veganism that tries to I don't know perpetuate the myth that all vegans look like bikini models or that if you become vegan you will have a bikini body or that any significant percentage of the people who are in there living that way any significant percentage of the people who are professional models professional beautiful people professional actors or actresses with that kind of torso shall we say torso is the word here um a lean torso a muscular torso said that any significant percentage of those people are vegan or the V doesn't help them them do it the leading vegan models and influences and ask them to share their secrets in this video they outline the benefits of going plant-based and describe how excess weight and illness melted away as here is the before and here is the after I know not the most intense weight loss ever but does she have a time machine her her boyfriend just watched the documentary Earthlings and then thankfully switched to a more healthy vegan diet the first one is like its aunt Vicki on the cruise you know then all sudden she's like 20 years younger in a later picture it's the same person though pretty amazing the power of plants and that's overlooking what I think is the real mass phenomenon with with veganism which is that the vast majority of people including very athletic people when they first switch to a vegan diet they struggle with their weight which is say they gain weight they get fatter on a vegan diet they're deeply disappointed with the diet because it doesn't deliver those results it definitely doesn't deliver them effortlessly right and flatulence okay being all the way will most people are not accustomed to a diet that involves eating beans and bean products three meals a day I was just drinking soy milk as you can tell for me this is first thing in the morning but I wake up and eat soy milk which is made out of beans and whether it's the protein powder I'm eating or whole foods you know processed or unprocessed foods a lot of hard to digest high protein roughage is in the vegan diet and of course sorry and that's once you've figured out how to have enough protein as a vegan which is a lot to do with eating a lot of beans and as I say that can really bring about a lot of digestive issues when you haven't figured it out yet just the amount of carbohydrates and sugar in the vegan diet and the lack of feeling sated the way you're used to feeling satiated foods I mean dairy is unbelievably unhealthy dairy products for you right foods like cheese but most of these people have had cheese and meat as a crush of their diet from early childhood and when you eat for example a cheese burgers and it combines cheese and ground beef you're getting a ton of salt an unbelievable amount of salt and a ton of fat and a ton of protein all in one package all at one time and it's extremely filling and then I mean you may not be aware of it if you're a mediator you've grown up with it you have a feeling of fullness that you almost never get on a vegan diet for me now I've been vegan for so long I have the opposite problem like I find bread overwhelmingly filling if I eat too much of it at once I know that's crazy I had an olive bread but bread that had all lives in it and olive oil in it and I you know I couldn't believe it felt like you know I felt like I was eating something like cheese like something very fun so you can kind of I think this is just a psychological change not a physiological change terms how you feel about rich and filling food things do change eventually as a vegan but look compared to the unbelievable ethical and ecological challenge we face as humanity and what can we possibly do about it there's a sense in which I can say veganism is easy veganism is easy compared to transitioning to being a society fueled by solar power compared to putting up solar panels on every rooftop in Los Angeles or filling the Mojave Desert with solar panels you know compared to the other changes in our society that would have similar ecological benefits compared to saving any one watershed you know compared to preventing the Panama Canal from filling up with silt due to erosion compared to solving the unbelievable crisis in water pollution we have that's caused by cattle farming pig farming chicken farming and then the related use of fertilizers because these things are linked both to produce the food for the animals and in terms what's done with the poo and runoff of those animals and manufacturing as a fertilizer these are you know ecological problems on an unbelievable scale and you can just google them a little bit and get a sense of the math of what I'm talking about here compared to the difficulty for you as an individual in ceasing to use a car entirely or for us as a society to have 50% of people stop using cars to stop to eliminate cars and trucks or even significantly reduce cars and trucks that's hard compared to those things being vegan is easy but I gotta tell you as a diet as a weight-loss diet as a diet to be beautiful veganism is not easy and it's partly not easy because we didn't grow up with this culturally we didn't grow up with their grandparents teaching us how to do this and it's also difficult because of those reasons that a lot of vegans a lie to you about it's not that easy to get enough protein it's not that easy to get enough calcium it's not that easy to get enough zinc of course it's not easy to get b12 you gotta take a vitamin for b12 and it's not easy to learn to really balance your macros and have a vibrant high protein low fat moderate moderate carb diet as a vegan especially when you're when you're not into it the benefits of going plan based in describe how excess weight and illness melted away if you walk into any corner store and just look at the rack of women's magazines you know Cosmopolitan magazine the name of these magazines sorry magazines like cosmopolitan magazine or it doesn't matter if there are magazines aimed at a women's market or a men's market a lot of them have women in revealing attire they have this image of the slim athletic woman on the cover and filling the page of these magazines the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue just ask yourself what percentage of those women are achieving and maintaining that body that look that appearance through a vegan diet the answer is very close to zero and many of those magazines are full of diet advice weight loss advice fitness advice from those same women telling you how they do it and of course that's about having some kind of strictly controlled meat-based diet right so that's about the outer appearance and of course one flip side of that is cholesterol and its effects are invisible I've known people much slimmer than myself who are not vegan who did have heart attacks I remember one guy he was living in Thailand he was a lot slimmer than I was and he was living on Thai Street food you know from from food stall vendors and people think that's so much healthier than eating at McDonald's but it's all little bits of meat in oily spicy sauces and that kind of thing a street vendor food in Thailand that was what he ate it's kind of seven days a week as a he was a white guy living in Thailand and yeah he during the time I knew him he collapsed and nearly died and was hospitalized and you know the question was were they gonna put a shunt into his veins and arteries and so on um you know people want to believe that beauty is virtue and virtue is beauty and it's not whether or not you have cholesterol clogging your arteries whether or not you have cholesterol clogging the pathways of the brain which is terrifying long before it gets to the point of being Alzheimer's disease it's still terrifying and to say I have mixed feelings about somebody like Kevin Smith who has actively come out and been anti vegetarian and anti vegan for years would be a lie I don't have mixed feelings I only feel harsh cotton towards this guy the only thing that has moved him to consider the plight of cows that are raised to die in veal crates which is a moving sight to the most stone-hearted of nihilists myself included the idea of an animal being born taken away from its mother put in a plastic shed to be born and raised and live only to die to be turned into veal and guess what guys the veal industry and the dairy industry are not two separate industries there are two stages of one in the same industry you don't produce dairy with a veal you don't produce feel without dairy this is a constant process of calves living their whole life on a concrete floor surrounded by steel rails with a steel shed for a sky living just to die forcibly inseminated having their children taken away for them cetera because if they're not constantly impregnated again again they're not producing milk and Kevin Smith is a guy who has gone out of his way repeatedly to laugh at that and to encourage others to laugh at it to laugh at veganism as an ethical cause as an ecological cause today absolutely no responsibility for anything until his own health puts him at death's door until a doctor tells him if you don't change you're gonna die and Kevin Smith you think of yourself as a moral person I've heard you being an amateur moral philosopher he used to think of himself as a religious person we've heard as a religious philosophy for years too in his films and in his podcasts and everything else Kevin Smith you are the lowest of the low you are a scumbag you richly deserve the consequences of your actions which in your case were not made out of ignorance you're in the tiny minority of people who really consciously intentionally chose this really made me think dark is that I'm just enjoying this I looked over simple milk I'm like I guess you're right look do they lie to me do we have to kill cows for this milk now obviously if your doctor now orders you to be in a plant-based diet you can be on a plant-based diet but I can't say that you'll ever be welcome in the vegan movement because the vegan movement is all about taking responsibility not just for the consequences of our actions as individuals but the consequences of our actions collectively as a society in the 21st century which which involves the suffering and death of millions of animals to produce food that is both unnecessary and unhealthy that of course causes unbelievable suffering to human beings with conditions like heart attacks but also causes unbelievable damage to air pollution water pollution and creating a cycle of industrialized misery that is frankly beyond belief if I describe to you what we do everyday in industrial meat production if I describe with you as an idea for a science fiction novel you'd say that's not believable you'd say what kind of cartoonish supervillain would invent such a thing all right but it is all too believable in the world we live in right now I still a sick [ __ ] you yeah like every man for himself that was including no [ __ ] [ __ ] nope does about a good that's not talked drink it I own it but you know what I don't even waste it my guest I drink I know they're cows out there like [ __ ] prick at least I'm drinking it some got thrown out [ __ ] nope never expires my house yeah so there I'm just a bonus yen