Personal thoughts on <span title="Vegan,RawFoods,&Macrobiotics?">Vegan,RawFoods,&Macrobiot...</span>

Question

I wanna know what people think personally the farthest I am willing to go is vegetarian but I wanna incorporate all of the above occasionally into what i eat so I can atleast be openminded.

Answer 1

My personal thoughts on a vegan diet are, well, that it&#039;s great. I&#039;m clearly biased because I eat a vegan diet, but I&#039;ve never felt healthier and I&#039;ve saved hundreds, possibly thousands, on restaurant and food bills. Everything I need is in the produce section, really - the bulk beans, the rice in bags, the veggies and fruit, the trays of tofu. I never have to go into the processed food aisles unless I really have to, and you&#039;ll find that the more raw food someone eats the less they go into those aisles as well.

I personally believe my diet leaves a fraction of the footprint on the environment that a meat-eating diet does, or a diet heavy in processed foods. I also feel happy knowing that nothing had to die, that I can be 100% certain that no animal had to be raised in gross conditions and slaughtered in an unclean, cold, mechanical way. Even if you buy the most expensive organic meat, there&#039;s no guarantee, at best you can be sure that the animal ate well and saw a minimum amount of exposure to the environment, there&#039;s no steadfast rules.

Eggs and dairy have no guarantee of being cruelty free either, organic applies mostly to feed regulations. Even cage free can mean that the hens are standing beak to rear in some warehouse by the thousands, knee-deep in f***s, fed arsenic to prevent worm infestations. I just don&#039;t like feeling unsure about something like that. If I had my own chickens and I knew they lived in the lap of luxury, I would probably not be a vegan. But since I live in an urban area, I&#039;ll do the next best thing and just avoid the potential for cruelty in the first place.

I think raw food diets make sense, but I am not sure about an all raw diet. I like cooked food, though the premises (though somewhat unfounded) are logical - eating food in it&#039;s most natural state should include that food being raw, with all the enzymes and nutritional content intact. But I just find it boring and bland, and sometimes I just want french fries or some tofu pad thai with peanut sauce, and there&#039;s nothing wrong with that. If someone likes raw food, that&#039;s cool, but it&#039;s not for me. I try to eat a partially raw diet (it&#039;s incredibly good for your digestion, your skin, your hair) - raw nuts and seeds, raw dark leafy greens, raw fruits and veggies in particular. But I don&#039;t want to cook all-raw. Besides, there&#039;s no animal cruelty issue in the transition from vegan to raw vegan, it&#039;s just a personal opinion on which diet has the best benefit for you.

Macrobiotic diets I think make little sense whatsoever, since I have a somewhat medical background (US ARMY 91W - Health Care Spec) and I&#039;m in med school and have some nursing certifications on top of it, I just don&#039;t get the claims. I think it&#039;s in part a way to sucker people into a fad, or maybe books and products. I&#039;d attribute the health benefits to placebo effect. I don&#039;t think our ancestors from millions of years ago spent their days worrying about eating a macrobiotic, balanced diet. They ate what they found. To claim what is optimal for our bodies and systems is a bit bogus, in the end, since we&#039;ve been made through millions of years of evolution and are pretty much strong as steel in many ways. Our bodies can survive on broth and bread for months (like in concentration camps) or on an almost all-meat diet (like in the polar circles where wawndering Inuit tribes don&#039;t have vegetation, period, for long periods of time). There is no way to know what a perfect diet is because our body will adapt expertly to nearly every diet.