rolandson wrote:two years ago my daughter comes home for summer break and announces that she has become a vegan. I was hoping it was some sort of sandwich.

ever shopped for a vegan? it'll bankrupt ya.

eelj wrote:I wonder if vegans are into oral sex?

Saran wrap.

SwampGrouch wrote:Check for a vegan Indian restaurant in your area. They're the only ones that really pull vegan off worth a damn. There's one in Renton that I'll actually chose to visit.

As suggested earlier, Morningstar fake meat products are actually pretty good. They're in the frozen section in large supermarkets.

Asian with tofu can be decent. (CAN be, depending on how it's prepared.)

Seitan is to wheat what tofu is to soy beans. It can fool you, too, and is pretty damn good in some Asian dishes. It has the advantage of being gluten, so if they start screaming you know they're vegan just to be a pain in the ass.

Oatmeal for breakfast, maybe lay in some soy milk. Let them take you out to the Asian place for lunch and the Indian place for dinner.

rolandson wrote:two years ago my daughter comes home for summer break and announces that she has become a vegan. I was hoping it was some sort of sandwich.

ever shopped for a vegan? it'll bankrupt ya.

goosekiller wrote:My house will be invaded by the wife's 36-year-old son and his family today.

Vegans! Yikes.These sick people are not carnivores. They aren't even omnivores.

What do ya feed 'em? I suppose venison and goose sausage are out of the question.
Any of you got a good vegetarian recipe or two? Thank you in advance...

TxChinaman wrote:A young friend of mine decided to go Raw Vegan organic a few years ago. Most of her (expensive) meals consisted of some nuts, sprouts, leafy greens, uncooked sliced veggies, and countless pieces of fruit. Nothing could be processed or cooked, the theory being that cooking destroys the natural goodness and nutrients of your food. She grazed on this stuff constantly and still ended up looking like a Holocaust survivor after a year. Her cycle stopped, she was constantly cold, she had low energy, got tired easily, was always hungry, and the enamel of her teeth was damaged from eating acidic fruit all day long.

Richard Wrangham, professor at Harvard University, writes compellingly on the topic in his book “Catching Fire”:

“Evolutionary adaptation to cooking might likewise explain why humans seem less prepared to tolerate toxins than do other apes. In my experience of sampling many wild foods eaten by primates, items eaten by chimpanzees in the wild taste better than foods eaten by monkeys. Even so, some of the fruits, seeds, and leaves that chimpanzees select taste so foul that I can barely swallow them. The tastes are strong and rich, excellent indicators of the presence of non-nutritional compounds, many of which are likely to be toxic to humans—but presumably much less so to chimpanzees. Consider the plum-size fruit of Warburgia ugandensis, a tree famous for its medicinal bark. Warburgia fruits contain a spicy compound reminiscent of a mustard oil. The hot taste renders even a single fruit impossibly unpleasant for humans to ingest. But chimpanzees can eat a pile of these fruits and then look eagerly for more. Many other fruits in the chimpanzee diet are almost equally unpleasant to the human palate. Astringency, the drying sensation produced by tannins and a few other compounds, is common in fruits eaten by chimpanzees.”

(…) Astringency is caused by the presence of tannins, which bind to proteins and cause them to precipitate. Our mouths are normally lubricated by mucoproteins in our saliva, but because a high density of tannins precipitates those proteins, it leaves our tongues and mouths dry: hence the “furry” sensation in our mouths after eating an unripe apple or drinking a tannin-rich wine. One has the same experience when tasting chimpanzee fruits such as Mimusops bagshawei or the widespread Pseudospondias microcarpa. Though chimpanzees can eat more than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of such fruits during an hour or more of continuous chewing, we cannot.

(…) The shifts in food preference between chimpanzees and humans suggest that our species has a reduced physiological tolerance for foods high in toxins or tannins. Since cooking predictably destroys many toxins, we may have evolved a relatively sensitive palate.”

If modern-day raw foodists tried to live on what chimpanzees eat in the wild, they would live in a more or less permanent state of indigestion and would likely not be able to survive.

The ultimate proof of this? Look at the foods that raw foodists eat. People love the sweetest mangoes, the sweetest melons, the least acidic oranges, and would cringe at eating very acrid fruit like the “quince.”

Chimps in zoos fed bananas and kale are NOT fed their natural diet. And even so they still prefer hybridized human food, even cooked food compared to their natural food.

Humans produce in their saliva up to 12 times more amylase (an enzymes that digests starch) than chimpanzees do. That’s an evolutionary adaptation to eating cooked starches. We develop this enzyme from the age of 2 and up. (New borns cannot digest starch and should only be fed human breast milk and non starchy fruits up to the age of 2)

The main thing to keep in mind is that over 4 to 7 million years of evolution separate chimpanzees from humans. They may be our closest relatives, but they are very distant ones indeed.

3) We never “adapted” to cooked foods.

The human being has adapted to eating cooked foods, to some degree. This is evidenced by our smaller digestive system, which is 25% shorter than that of chimpanzees (by body size). The idea behind this adaptation is that we are used to eating more concentrated nutrition than they do. We also produce more starch-splitting enzymes, among many other changes.

Richard Wrangham writes:

“All great apes have a prominent snout and a wide grin: chimpanzees can open their mouths twice as far as humans, as they regularly do when eating. If a playful chimpanzee ever kisses you, you will never forget this point. To find a primate with as relatively small an aperture as that of humans, you have to go to a diminutive species, such as a squirrel monkey, weighing less than 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds).”

(…) The difference in mouth size is even more obvious when we take the lips into account. The amount of food a chimpanzee can hold in its mouth far exceeds what humans can do because, in addition to their wide gape and big mouths, chimpanzees have enormous and very muscular lips. When eating juicy foods like fruits or meat, chimpanzees use their lips to hold a large wad of food in the outer part of their mouths and squeeze it hard against their teeth, which they may do repeatedly for many minutes before swallowing. The strong lips are probably an adaptation for eating fruits, because fruit bats have similarly large and muscular lips that they use in the same way to squeeze fruit wads against their teeth. Humans have relatively tiny lips, appropriate for a small amount of food in the mouth at one time.

(…) Human chewing teeth, or molars, also are small—the smallest of any primate species in relation to body size. Continuing farther into the body, our stomachs again are comparatively small. In humans the surface area of the stomach is less than one-third the size expected for a typical mammal of our body weight, and smaller than in 97 percent of other primates. The high caloric density of cooked food suggests that our stomachs can afford to be small. Great apes eat perhaps twice as much by weight per day as we do because their foods are packed with indigestible fiber (around 30 percent by weight, compared to 5 percent to 10 percent or less in human diets). Thanks to the high caloric density of cooked food, we have modest needs that are adequately served by our small stomachs.

(…) The human small intestine is only a little smaller than expected from the size of our bodies, reflecting that this organ is the main site of digestion and absorption, and humans have the same basal metabolic rate as other primates in relation to body weight. But the large intestine, or colon, is less than 60 percent of the mass that would be expected for a primate of our body weight. The colon is where our intestinal flora ferment plant fiber, producing fatty acids that are absorbed into the body and used for energy. That the colon is relatively small in humans means we cannot retain as much fiber as the great apes can and therefore cannot utilize plant fiber as effectively for food. But that matters little. The high caloric density of cooked food means that normally we do not need the large fermenting potential that apes rely on.

(…) The weight of our guts is estimated at about 60 percent of what is expected for a primate of our size: the human digestive system as a whole is much smaller than would be predicted on the basis of size relations in primates.”

Modern day raw foodists do not eat like wild animals. They blend foods, eat highly hybridized, extra sweet fruit, and have many ways to make vegetables easier to chew and digest. That’s because as human beings, we are adapted to eating highly nutritious and more concentrated foods of higher caloric density, as opposed to the low-calorie wild fruits eaten by chimpanzees and other apes.

The modern fruits loved and revered by raw foodists, like bananas, dates and durian, are extremely high in calories and low in fiber, compared to wild fruits eaten by chimpanzees.

There is a really interesting series called Becoming Human that has a wealth of information on how humans were NOT the first upright-walking ape to cook foods and how they helped in our successful domination over other races like Neandertals. It’s also available on iTunes.

GuitarsandGuns wrote: There are too many healthy 95-year-olds who never ate vegan, drank booze and may of even smoked cigars.

Genetics rules.

Xela wrote: Yep. I was on my way to an early death, probably before the age of 40. But I made it; I just turned 40 this year. In most likelyhood, I won't see 60 though.

Thank you genes. Thank you very much.

I'm not giving up just because of that though. "Vive la mort!" Yes, but I rather hang around as long as possible.

Xela

GuitarsandGuns wrote: Who will I chat with if I get to 84?

Xela wrote:

GuitarsandGuns wrote: There are too many healthy 95-year-olds who never ate vegan, drank booze and may of even smoked cigars.

Genetics rules.

Yep. I was on my way to an early death, probably before the age of 40. But I made it; I just turned 40 this year. In most likelyhood, I won't see 60 though.

Thank you genes. Thank you very much.

I'm not giving up just because of that though. "Vive la mort!" Yes, but I rather hang around as long as possible.

Xela

Caliman73 wrote:We found the one group that we can all agree is annoying and worthy of scorn...self righteous vegans. Ah, unity....