Go Vegan or Go Home

let me spell it out real simply. Diabetes is not caused by a reliance on meat products. It is caused because of excessive carbohydrate exposure exhausting the pancreas and increasing insulin resistance. Yes, carbohydrates trigger type II diabetes.<p>One person even experimented with comparing the blood sugar response of a can of Pepsi to whole grains and found there was virtually no difference. Both made the blood sugar climb. http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2011/07/healthy-whole-grains-just-as-healthy-as.html <p> my personal experience and that of other diabetics show that vegetarian or near vegetarian diets are reasonably good predictors of developing type II diabetes. comparing my low carbohydrate approach versus a diabetic I know who is vegan, my blood sugars run in the 100 to 120 mg per deciliter range in his run in the 250 to 400 mg per deciliter range. At this point, the question becomes should I die a slow and painful death from neuropathy, gangrene and other illnesses, raising the overall cost of health care for others by sticking to a "moral" diet or should I eat a low carbohydrate meat based diet which gives me a healthy life, a chance to age gracefully and pass my wisdom onto my grandchildren? <p> The answer simple for me, I want to live, I want to enjoy my life for myself, my wife, and our children. I honor the deaths of the animals that feed me but people I love think I am more important than the animals. who am I to argue?

How refreshing to read the intelligent comments...far more intelligent than the spleen-venting article. Humans have as much moral right to eat animals as has the shark which eats surfers. Lao tzu opined that we invent morals and ethics when we lose the great way.

How refreshing to read such a well-thought-out and well-presented group of comments! Yes, Francione's entire argument rests on his assertion that it has a moral foundation. I wonder, does he find the Native American culture of the Great Plains immoral? Those people were integrated into their ecosystem, and - at least as the stories are told - fully respected and utilized the animals whose lives they ended to support their own. Was it immoral that they did this, simply because they also happened to be humans? Because that is the final resting point of Francione's argument. (Surely he does not try to apply his "morality" to the other predator species of the earth?) The fact of eating/using other beings to sustain oneself is how this earth evolved; the morality of this is not in question - at least not by the earth itself. There are massive problems with the conventional ways animals are used in our society; I guess many of us who raise our own animals for meat, eggs and milk are motivated by a desire to get as far as possible from that system. But I believe Francione's sweeping, flawed logic rests on a common "environmental" theme: that humans are separate from nature, and that - in the hiearchy that stems from that separateness - nature is superior to humans. Therefore, the animals that humans raise and use are inferior lifeforms relative to "nature's" animals, and do not deserve to exist at all. That is the logical outcome of Francione's "morality."

Taking a moral stance is well and good but one must be aware of the biological facts as well. For 99% of human history, we have been hunters and gatherers and it has only been for the last 8,000-10,000 years that we have relied upon agriculture as a food source. This short, short amount of time has not allowed for humans to evolve in a way that their bodies will make the correct use of carbohydrates from vegetable and plant sources. We have evolved as meat (protein and fat) eaters, with a part of our diet coming from nuts and plants. One can see the results of the medical establishment championing high carbohydrate diets in the last 4 decades with meat and fat being only a small part of that diet - overwhelming incidences of obesity, diabetes, heart and cancer disease, digestive problems and more.So-called technological advances in the way food is produced has exacerbated the problem with highly processed and less nutritious packaged and fat foods making up a large portion of our diets. Our fat cells are designed to make use of protein and fat for energy and to store the energy from carbohydrates as fat for use when meat is not plentiful. Flooding our bodies with carbohydrates has made us a sick society. I think that the view offered by Francione is not only extreme but also unrealistic when what our bodies need to be healthy is exactly the opposite - meat, cheese, vegetables, some fruit, little or no sugar, little or no bread or flour products.

I find the description of food/eating as "use as human resource" intriguing. On the one hand it gives Francione the latitude to use many arguments against animal use that are logical and principled. On the other hand: where do we create the boundaries that we assign to sentient life. We know that the vegetable kingdom is also an expression of life. Current biology and science have shown that these forms of life also have awareness and intelligence, communicate in highly sophisticated ways, respond with suffering/withdrawal to traumatic events. Francione's impassioned plea for animal rights should be extended to the rest of nature and modified to have humans be humane, honoring creation, eliminating suffering, and staying alive. We are animals, capable of ethics, living in a universe where we eat to survive. Life as we know it entails consuming sentient life.

(First, everything eats AND is eaten by something else. We can't escape it, but we can be more humane.) What caught my eye in the article was the idea that we shouldn't use animals as human resources. So I guess we shouldn't use humans as human resources either! Seriously, let's get rid of all the Human Resources departments. The parallel is that we treat people as badly as we do animals. We are not just "resources" any more than cows or tomatoes are. Our ability to respect the planet and all the planet's inhabitants is sorely lacking, and our treatment of animals and/or people is not likely to improve much unless we recognize our total dependence on and interrelationship with all that is.

The moral argument is one of first principles, and hard to get beyond yes-we-should, no-we-shouldn't. I eat animals I raise myself, which wouldn't exist but for me, and I make it a point to give them a good life and a humane death. But, on the practical side, I'm curious how Mr. Francione avoids vegetables grown with animal inputs. Surely eating a carrot grown in soil fertilized with chicken manure violates his moral scheme as much as eating an egg does. Beyond that, though, how does he plan to grow the world's vegetables without animal inputs. Manure from our horses, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens are essential for growing crops sustainably and efficiently.

It is not immoral to eat animals. I submit that a moral code must be an absolute, not dependent on circumstance. In addition, it must play equally between those parties bound by the moral code. I know of no vegetarian that would not eat an animal after 10 day of starvation. Vegetarianism is a luxury brought about by abundant agriculture. Take away civilization and we will all eat animals, and hopefully, we would not in that case break the moral code of eating humans, but history has shown even that moral code is set aside during famine. And I know of no bear that would not eat me if hungry and given the opportunity, so this moral code obviously does not play equally between parties! If we adhere to any moral code it should be that we treat animals we eat decently and give them a painless, swift death to honor their sacrifice. In a perfect world that death is administered by the person eating the animal, so that we respect what the animal, and God, have given us. That is not an immoral act, it is a religious practice.