Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Vegan sausage rolls and Morgans

There's nothing wrong with Vegetarian/Vegan food providing there is some meat added

I’m certainly cutting down on red meat
I’m not cutting it out of my diet altogether like my brothers family who have all been vegan for 20 years but if done right it’s definately healthier

Stewart, humans have evolved an omnivorous digestive system, remarkably similar to that of the pig. Which is why the Mediterranean diet is so good.

We can be very healthy as vegetarians, as are millions of people. When I used to travel to India I ate as a vegetarian, because the meals are so good!

But a vegan diet deprives us of certain essential nutrients only found in animal products... eggs, milk, cheese.
Adults can work round these deficiencies, but to impose a vegan diet on growing children is very unwise, unless supplements are added.

This is a link to the NHS advice on the matter.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/vegetarian-vegan-children/

Another concern is that many vegan food substitutes are heavily processed: it is generally accepted that processed foods are not good for health.

Absolutely this - especially where the ingredients use stuff like Palm Oil which is a real environmental problem. I suspect there are a fair few 'fad vegans' who are eating some pretty dodgy food.

Much better in my view to consume decent organic eggs, milk, butter, and cheese - not so much because of the lack of chemicals but because the standards of welfare are so much higher.

Where do chickens and cows get these nutrients from?

Cannibalism.

Cows etc get the nutrients from plants. For a start I am not sure how many vegans can actually process hard plant matter as we are not ruminants. Maybe if they ferment said vegetable matter in big vats they could make use of it. But then the methane and co2 produced would at the end of the day equate to that produced by animals. After all physics and chemistry obey laws not opinions or whims.

The animal after all is a biological factory carrying out chemical processes.
Turning raw materials into other products still uses energy and has biproducts.

You won't have animals in ace you'll need masses of factories in their place to process plant matter.

The vegan milk article recently had me chuckling, not sure how much almonds rice or soy we grow in the uk? But it's okay ignore the transport costs, what's wrong with water we get plenty of that locally.

Most vegans get their protein from beans and pulses. Not much processing needed and if you grow the right crop for the local climate you can produce far more protein per hectare than you can doing it with animals. In the UK Borlotti and Broad/Fava beans do especially well. In upland areas where the only growable crop is grass then lambs make a great deal of sense.

Any UK-produced meat is streets ahead of even EU-produced meat (think about the poor welfare of Danish pork, for example) but it's orders of magnitude more enlightened than say the feed-lot raised hormone-pumped beef in the Americas.

You're quite right about all the strange 'milks', though. The only one that makes sense to me as a milk alternative in the UK is oat milk, fortunately that's quite palatable.

For us it's a balance between animal welfare standards, minimal/zero processing (everything gets cooked from raw ingredients) and food miles.

Today's dinner was pea and mushroom curry with basmati rice and a side dish of sag aloo. The only non-UK elements were the rice and the creamed coconut.

Yum Yum!

These are my thoughts and my theory
They are not based on any in-depth research or knowledge on the matter as I’m quite ignorant of the research and I’m no scientist but based on my logic and what I’ve read and my association with a football nutritionist

1. Evolution of the human digestive system

It has evolved to allow us to be Omniverous but millions of years of evolution has purely helped us to have children, look after them, teach them to hunt and survive, pass on our genes and then die.

Our gut hasn’t evolved to keep us alive and fit into our 90’s because it hasn’t needed to. It’s been designed to make us flexible in our foodstuffs to help us survive in the greatest spread of environments up to the age of around 40 (20 years past past prime procreation age)

Personally I don’t think our body copes very well with the build up of toxins, animal fats and digestion of meat over a long period of time

2. What we generally know about nutrition and diet is I think rubbish and we are only just now understanding what might be going on because of lack of proper funded research

No big food producer is going to waste money on research that tells us just to eat fresh vegetables. So this mantra of a ‘balanced diet’ keeps coming out but no one really knows what bit of our diets is killing us

Instead researchers look at the world and just see who is the healthier (living the longest) and see what they are eating, that’s why this ‘mediterranean’ thing keeps coming up. Also the Japanese diet of lots of veg and fish, little meat diet but that is skewed by up to recently a lot of Japanese smoking so other lifestyle bits come into play

3. Who do I trust?

Nutritionists linked to elite sports science

Why?

Money

Very recently, wealthy sports stars and mega bucks sports organisations are funding this research because it means that they can get the very best out of athletes and sports people to increase their fitness and their longevity in the sport

Interestingly the latest research in this field is all pointing to veganism with extracted proteins so you don’t have to digest the animal fats to get the protein requirement

It's interesting that when Dale Vince (owner of Ecotricity and vegan evangelist) bought Forest Green Rovers a few years ago, he insisted that only vegan food was served in the ground and for player's training. It caused a huge kerfuffle at the time, but the team has been going from strength to strength.

Although they are not contractually obliged, many of the players have chosen to follow a vegan diet at home too, because they say they feel better and their performance has improved.

Cauliflower cheese and chips today! Yum Yum.