And some PB milks are actually quite good – the oat ‘barista’ ones in particular. Your taste buds also adapt, to the point where you end up getting the same amount of pleasure from products that don’t involve cruelty to innocent, defenceless individuals.
Great TED talk on the psychology of pleasure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX2btaDOBK8
And that’s from just hearing about it. Imagine what it’s like to be in that position and be put through all of that. We only hear and see what they must endure with their bodies because of our actions. Your feelings show that you’re empathetic, so all that remains is to put that in practice and align your actions with your values. Being vegan is the only practical solution to not fund animal abuse.
Chances are you’re a kind and compassionate person, so you may be interested to know this: cows are forcefully impregnated to lactate; 9 months later, their children are taken away from them (they’re very maternal animals, so they’ll run after them, cry and bellow), their male babies are killed young and the females forced through the same tortuous process and constant exploitation of their bodies, year after year, until they’re no longer profitable—at which point all of them are killed against their will, at less than half their normal lifespan.
If your values indicate this is a messed up system you wouldn’t want to support, some good resources include: WatchDominion, Earthling Ed, Gary Yurofski, Challenge22. All best ✌💚
Be careful with some of Sinclair’s claims, particularly around resveratrol; these short video analyses on the topic might interest you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGmmBJq0NNo
You’ll likely find this reply to have a useful mental model that you may be unfamiliar with, but which can serve you well in the future.
Here is another equally unreliable (yet true) anecdote:
I was on an omnivorous diet for over 17 years; I was skinny, anaemic, and generally unhealthy. I’ve been vegan for the past >7 years and my health is both objectively (markers from clinical tests) and subjectively great. Why? Is it because omnivorous diets are necessarily unhealthy? No. It’s simply because I have ensured to meet all my nutritional needs through planning and reiteration; it is the nutrients that matter to health, not the source or label of your diet.
Why is this anecdote unreliable, though? On the hierarchy of evidence (which is a heuristic for applying the same scientific method that makes this very platform possible), anecdotes score very low. When there is a myriad of (systematic reviews of) RCTs and high-quality cohort studies that show – on the totality of evidence – that it’s possible to be healthy on a vegan diet at all stages of life, there is no reason to rely on individual stories with many uncontrolled confounding factors and overlooked judgement errors. For more info about this and the research on the topic, I highly recommend checking out Dr Gil Carvalho’s channel, which is probably the most measured and rigorous free educational resource about diet and nutrition available online that is also very accessible and easy to digest (npi): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPcLNXDAj0
Let’s see if rational discourse is practicable on Nostr.
Hey #[3]
You seem like someone who’s open to the possibility of being wrong. I’m unsure if it’s a proprietary definition of ‘religion’ you’ve used here, but is veganism really ‘a system of faith and worship in a superhuman power’? Are people like Yuval Noah Harari (another practitioner of the Vipassana technique btw) religious dogmatists for recognising that members of animal species other than humans and dogs also have conscious individual experiences, emotional needs, and a will to live and be with their families?
If by religion, you do just mean some kind of a philosophical belief, then that would qualify many ethical stances – such as being against murder, stealing, dog abuse, domestic violence, etc – as religions. Surely this isn’t compatible with your worldview, is it?