# Your Positions
- We should use animals however we like, as long as we aren't just hurting them for no reason. Humans are superior! ([Start Over](/Vegan Philosophy Adventure))
- Are you kidding me? The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics are a bunch of quacks. Everyone knows you need meat to grow muscle and milk to grow strong bones. Yeah, you can technically survive on just plants, but you won't really be healthy. Just look at how frail vegans are, and then compare that to all those weightlifters who get enough protein. Your own health is a perfectly good reason to eat animals. It's our health versus the farm animals, and you can't blame a person for making that choice or expect people to sacrifice so much for a lowly animal. ([Go back](D)
# Things to Consider
This is Kendrick Farris, the only American male weightlifter to qualify for the 2016 Rio Olympics:
What's special about Kendrick? Not only is he one of the few that refuses to dope and actively speaks out against doping in the sport, he's also vegan.
> Now, my body recovers a lot faster. I feel lighter. My mind is a lot more clear. I feel I can focus a lot better—not that I wasn’t a focused individual before, but now I feel like I’m totally locked in.
>
> -- Kendrick Farris
Not only are vegans capable of being healthy, some of the best athletes in the world are vegan.
Now, you might wonder, if this is so, then why are almost all the beefiest guys in the gym you go to always talking about drinking eggs and pounding down lots of beef and chicken? Well, ask yourself why it is when you go to a restaurant most of people are ordering meat and dairy? A very small percentage of the total population is vegan, so you should expect by default a very small percentage of people pretty much anywhere are going to be vegan. For every vegan getting into a sport, there are a hundred omnivores, as we should expect because that's about the ratio to vegans to omnivores in the general population.
Moreover, the culture of weightlifting includes a lot of conversation of diet, because you need to eat a lot more to sustain that level of activity than you do lying on the couch, and that's something pretty much anyone doing high-intensity athletic training is going to notice. You're going to see a lot of weightlifters talking about diet in a way you won't necessarily see a lot of computer programmers talking about diet for that reason. However, just because the people in that community talk a lot about diet doesn't mean they are right about what the healthiest diet is. A lot of people coming into weightlifting may be coming from a position where their previous diet included a lot of fast food, and moved towards a diet that has a lot of home-cooked meals. Those people are probably going to feel physically better from this shift, but it doesn't mean they have necessarily optimized their diet.
Considering that weightlifting has a huge problem with steroid use, which is well-known to sacrifice long-term health for short-term gains, we should probably be skeptical of advice coming out of that community, and definitely be wary of trying to apply it to general life. How many weightlifters have even tried a vegan diet for a few months before totally dismissing it? And let's be real, most of us are not competitive weightlifters.
If we measure health by longevity, populations following diets low in meat and dairy, like the Seventh Day Adventists in the US, or the Okinawans in Japan, are among the longest lived populations in the world. There is even evidence of disease rates increasing when people move from cultures with low meat/dairy consumption to high meat/dairy consumption.
In terms of why there is an impression that vegans are frail? Well, there's a lot of culture coming in here. Someone who rejects the idea that raw physical strength is important may be more likely to be open to a vegan diet. There are vegans out there with "a lot of meat on their bones", so to speak, but likely you just don't think about them when you picture in your head a vegan, just like you don't necessarily picture an attractive-looking guy when you hear the word "rapist", despite the fact that many rapists are in fact attractive (date rape, not stranger rape, is more common). This is due to the way society portrays people who fall outside of social norms (for good or for bad reasons).
When it comes to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly known as the American Dietetic Association), there is reason to be skeptical of what they say, but their bias probably goes in the opposite direction you think. There are a lot of conflicts of interest due to funding from and "partnerships" with big agri-business. Canada recently updated their dietary guidelines (the analogue of the US "food pyramid") to de-emphasize meat and dairy based on recent scientific evidence. People have been living healthily on what are essentially vegan diets for thousands of years. Nutrition is a complicated subject, of course, but the most common reasons cite for the necessity of eating meat have been completely debunked. The idea that drinking milk is necessary for strong bones is not only false, the opposite is true: milk consumption leads to acidification of the blood, which draws calcium out of the bones and leads to osteoporosis. Countries with higher rates of milk consumption have significantly higher rates of osteoporosis than those with lower rates. Second, meat is not required to "get protein". Plants have protein too, and foods like soy are "complete proteins", meaning they have every essential amino acid. Although you could probably figure this out just by reflecting for a few moments, it's worth mentioning that if you eat animal muscle, those proteins don't just transfer right into your muscles. They are first broken down into basic building blocks (animo acids and similar small molecules). Your body then re-assembles those basic building blocks into the proteins your body needs. You don't need to "eat muscle to build muscle". You just need to make sure you are getting all the basic building blocks in your diet.
# Select the position the best represents your views
(A) [I don't believe any of that science about osteoporosis or plants having enough protein. Here's an article I read online saying that people who eat meat are healthier.](DBA)
(B) [Kendrick Farris is only able to be both vegan and one of the best weightlifters because he has really good genes. But I'll bet he'd do even better if he ate meat.](DBB)
(C) [I read a story about some parents who fed her baby a vegan diet, and the baby was so malnourished and had their growth stunted so much the parents ended up going to jail.](DBC)
(D) [Regardless of whether it's healthy or not, eating animal products is part of my culture. There are thousands of years of tradition here, and people can't be expected to give up their culture so easily. Also, science changes all the time. It's really way too much to ask for people to abandon the culture that has gotten them to this point in time and totally change their lives to try something completely untested. If you want to take the risk and create a new culture, go ahead, but you have no right to obligate others to.](DBD)