Go Vegan, for your health, animal welfare, and the environment. The reason for so much cancer, diabetes, and cancer, is the standard American Diet, which includes far too many animals products. Check out the China study and the documentary Forks Over Knives. Yeah, yeah, I know... stupid vegan and his vegan propaganda.
Calories in minus Calories out.
Factory Farming has to go, for your health, the environment, and the animals:
Farm to Fridge - The Truth Behind Meat Production - YouTube
We evolved to be omnivores.
Our brains are what they are today because we ate meat, specifically cooked meat.
And not all meat comes from the commercial industry.
I buy my beef from a local farm not 50 miles from me. A couple friends and I buy a whole cow every year and freeze the beef. I buy eggs from a friend of mine who keeps chickens. I buy pastured poultry and heritage turkeys from a farm in RI and game meat from friends of mine who hunt.
You're not going to guilt me into that whole cruel and bad for the environment crap.
Besides that I have tried the vegetarian diet and found it to be lacking in B vitamins and quite frankly left me with little energy. I have found that I have a sensitivity to insulin. When I eat a high carb diet my body produced way too much insulin and as a result I gain weight and my blood chemistry goes wacko.
I am glad to hear you do not buy factory farm meat, but I sincerely hope this goes for all of your animal products, because factory farms that produce meat, dairy, and eggs amount to a holocaust-like scenario (concentration camps). I am not trying to guilt anybody into anything, just show people the reality of factory farming, because I believe it is likely against the values of most people, and if they only knew, would not want to support it. Therefore, it is only a matter of getting to them to see the truth behind it.
By the way, meat did not make us smart. This is known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis proposed by Aiello and Wheeler in 1995 which says that there had to have been a trade-off between the enlarging brain and the digestive tract, and as such, we needed more nutrient dense food: meat. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, it has been retested using the same data and shown to be untrue. The reality, is that among mammals there is a negative correlation between brain and adipose tissue deposits (fat), because for quadrupeds, it takes a lot of energy to lug around fat. According to Keiblers Law, any given mammal with a certain mass only has a certain metabolism it can handle. If it is spending a lot of energy on inefficient locomotion to move around, it can't grow a larger brain. However, humans are an exception to this rule, because we evolved to become bipedal, which is far more energy efficient, which freed up energy for encephalization. Any increase in fat tissue for us, did not meat nearly as much calorie expenditure to move around that fat as it did for a quadruped. Here's an article that explains it:
PaleoVeganology: It's Curtains For The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis
"Navarrete's, et. al.'s, main findings (further details below) are:
-There is no negative correlation between brain size and gut size in any mammalian taxa, refuting the ETH's prediction to the contrary;
-There is, however, a strong negative correlation between brain size and adipose tissue deposits; that is, fatter animals have smaller brains than lean ones; and,
-Humans are seeming exceptions to this rule because our fat deposits don't interfere adversely with our means of locomotion, thus freeing up energy for encephalization that other primates have to use for carrying around all that fat."
Here's a link to a summary of the actual study in case you doubt the credibility of this vegan blog:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v480/n7375/full/nature10629.html
"The human brain stands out among mammals by being unusually large. The expensive-tissue hypothesis1 explains its evolution by proposing a trade-off between the size of the brain and that of the digestive tract, which is smaller than expected for a primate of our body size. Although this hypothesis is widely accepted, empirical support so far has been equivocal. Here we test it in a sample of 100 mammalian species, including 23 primates, by analysing brain size and organ mass data. We found that, controlling for fat-free body mass, brain size is not negatively correlated with the mass of the digestive tract or any other expensive organ, thus refuting the expensive-tissue hypothesis. Nonetheless, consistent with the existence of energy trade-offs with brain size, we find that the size of brains and adipose depots are negatively correlated in mammals, indicating that encephalization and fat storage are compensatory strategies to buffer against starvation. However, these two strategies can be combined if fat storage does not unduly hamper locomotor efficiency. We propose that human encephalization was made possible by a combination of stabilization of energy inputs and a redirection of energy from locomotion, growth and reproduction." (Navarette, Shaik, Isler)
