How many poor vegans do you know?
No, I’m not talking about those with the luxury to fake lives of minimalism and austerity — all the while knowing they can run back to mommy & daddy any time if…like…the tie-died, dreadlocked, barefooted grunge thing doesn’t work out on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz.
And while not Santa Cruz, California, this is still a pretty decent display of vegan affluence. I give you the 30 Bananas a Day crowd at a raw food retreat in Australia.
Now, before I show it, I do want to be fair. These are whole foods. They are concerned about their health and well being, they have some trepidation about how the modern rat race might not be good for you. But all in all, I have to conclude that they are on a fool’s mission. Body composition is almost uniformly awful. They actually have high body fat percentages owing to the stick figure low lean mass they carry, especially in the men. Observe some of those twigs they pass off as arms. And don’t even get me started on what they refer to as "workouts." I’m 50 years old in January and just this morning pulled 305# for 4 reps in the deadlift, followed by 275# for another four. That’s a workout. Less than six months ago I was at about 165#. I didn’t make those gains on raw fruit, I can tell you.
OK, let’s get to the video which, I do have a fondness for on some levels, so let’s be fair.
And whether it’s 30 bananas a day, or 70, as Durianrider claims to eat, that’s one hell of an extreme diet. Even at 30, about 3,000 – 3,500 kcals depending on the size of the bananas, that’s a whopping 780g of carbs, about 130g of it being fructose — highly associated with fatty liver. Unlike other sugars, fructose goes straight to the liver to be metabolized pretty much exactly like alcohol.
All that said, it must be acknowledged that they are grain and processed food free, just as we paleos. And if you suspect, as do I, that it’s the grains, modern frankenfats, refined sugars and processed foods in general that create the chronic inflammatory environment upon which high carbohydrate diets act upon to cause disease, then, well…who knows?
This is why I don’t pursue "health" directly, per se. I pursue pristine body composition within the framework of a real foods, omnivorous, largely "paleo" diet with a mixture of cooked & raw foods. And since there is such a strong evolutionary basis for the way I eat and express genes in other ways such as episodic fasting and brief, high intensity workouts I’m willing to bank on my "health" just taking care of itself, which should be the natural and logical assumption.
…In the meantime, there’s this wonderful guest post by Willis Eschenbach at Anthony Watt’s blog, courtesy of a reader alert to me this morning: Vegans are not from Vegas. Do read the whole wonderful story, but here’s a few excerpts.
For the host of reasons I listed in the previous post, people around the planet have found it advantageous to domesticate and keep (and eat) animals. Perhaps some random Vegan knows more about how to scratch out a living in a hostile world than do all of the billions of poor farmers and householders around the planet, maybe they’re all wrong to keep chickens and pigs and such, maybe we might be able to feed more people if we were all vegetarians … but I doubt it very much. The farmers and the poor around the planet aren’t that stupid. […]
Once when I was working in Liberia, in West Africa, they were burning a local sugar cane field. The whole village came out with clubs. They surrounded the fire in a long line. When the fire chased the cane rats out of the burning cane, they clubbed the rats and took them home and ate them. […]
Here’s the reason why cane rat is a delicacy, why kids lined up to get some of the meat. The villagers that eat that meat are stronger and healthier and more resistant to disease and quicker to heal and faster growing than the villagers who don’t eat that meat. Simple as that. The chance to eat meat doesn’t come up often. When that chance comes up, those people that eat the meat improve their chances of living compared to those who don’t eat meat.
Our bodies know that and have known it since forever. You could see it in the kids’ eyes, they could smell it, they wanted it, their bodies responded without conscious thought. Meat makes you stronger, it provides a host of vitamins and minerals, it is powerful food. Which is why people eat meat, in Africa and around the planet. It increases their odds of survival in a harsh and unforgiving environment. So they ate cane rats.
And then there’s the story of the 7-year-old boy and his 4-year-old brother in Mexico.
He searched around, picked up and discarded a few stones, finally settling on exactly the right one. He put it in the pouch of the slingshot, and started walking around and gazing intently up into the tree branches above us. He stopped, pulled back and let fly.
There was a “poof” sound up in the tree, and a bird the size of a small robin, that I didn’t even know was in the tree, tumbled down at my feet. He and his tiny brother both jumped on it, and he twisted its neck in an economical, practiced fashion.
I told you. You’ll want to go read the whole thing.
John 
Dana 
gallier2 
Jerry 
Stabby 
Garth Whelan 
suzan 
Rob K 
Dave Fish
so I have a friend who went to UT Austin and he met a vegan homeless person in Austin. No joke he said he tried to give the guy some food and he rejected it because he was vegan.
I’ve always found that funny, I also have a hard time believing that this person was actually homeless for financial or social reasons.
I have had that same thought. If I was homeless (foodless) and rejected a piece of bread.
Would I be considered an ungrateful bastard? At that point a may have to eat the bread.
Paleo is rather bourgeois, but unlike Animal Rights Veganism is based on individual health. I’m eating paleo for me. AR vegans want EVERYONE to eat their diet.
I guess I should plug this project:
MIXED systems are the future for the world’s impoverished. Maybe they can’t afford a paleo diet, but using animals for agriculture provides valuable milk, meat, labor, and fertilizer.
If you cut out grains and sugar you are most of the way to paleo. Stop subsidising big ag and we’ll see whether living paleo is really expensive in the long term.
How can someone not afford a paleo diet? Grow a vegetable garden, raise some goats and chickens (which actually would have a lower overhead in a developing country than it does in a developed nation where such is a hobby). There you go. Paleo diet.
It’s a lot more expensive to grow huge cash crops of grains and beans and sugar.
They’ve got the gathering part of hunter-gatherer down, don’t they? Some of that stuff looked pretty dang good. Give me a little bit of some of it, and a steak or perhaps some seafood and I’ll call it a meal.
But, like you Richard, I sure wouldn’t want the skeletal appearance those guys have! I’m only 43 and have the same affinity for deadlifts you have developed. I can now deadlift more at 43 than at any other time in my life, and I first did them in my teens.
I think several of those guys would have a hard time lifting 150-200 pounds based on the skin/bones appearance. In fact, if they were REALLY living in the wild, I’d venture to say they’ve prepared themselves well to end up being a non-vegetarian meal for some other animal that isn’t afraid of meat. Lions, tigers, oh my!
“They’ve got the gathering part of hunter-gatherer down” in hunter gather civilizations, the women were typically the gatherers. did you notice how the women looked pretty healthy while the men looked like skinny unhealthy women? makes you wonder if women, because they gathered, were more adapted to eat that type of food.
That’s a reflection I already have made at a time I had nothing else to do (had a lot of mission in rural France and was every evening in Hotels and Restaurants) than observe what people order. Women tended more to fish, seafood and vegetable and men were more into meat, organ meats and venison.
That’s a cultural thing. There’s no biological reason women wouldn’t want to eat meat.
Look at chimps- female chimps trade SEX for meat hunted by males. We lose blood…we need to replace it somehow :) Women build mass… in the womb. We’ll see how these women’s children turn out…
Women might look better only because estrogen will fight harder to maintain a minimum fat % if they lose too much weight, in the same way that had those men been eating enough good protein their testosterone would have fought harder to maintain a higher minimum muscle mass %
Women do need more glucose during lactation because we split glucose into galactose and then turn that into lactose. If we just relied on our native supplies of glucose during that time we’d quickly run out of sugar for the few tissues that need it and we’d go dry to boot, bad news for a kid in a primal situation who can’t be taken to Kroger to pick up some Similac.
At other times of the year, not so much, you don’t even need that much glucose to grow a baby in pregnancy. In fact if you get too much glucose, the baby grows too big to get out safely. That’s why large babies are considered a risk factor for later diabetes in the mother, and why diabetes is so dangerous during pregnancy.
Wow, my wrists are bigger than some of these guys arms. I mean seriously they do not look close to anything I would call healthy. And from an evolutionary standpoint, I doubt any of them could run away from a hungry lion, or kill a cave bear. Not that they would probably have to, Im sure any natural predator worth his weight would take one look at them and move on to something more nourishing
Very Nice stories. There is nothing natural about Veganism.
Is it the vegan diet that causes the cognitive impairment or the cognitive impairment that causes the vegan diet? A question for the ages.
It’s not just the “twig” arms, it’s the pasty skin and vacant look in their eyes. Sadly, I saw children there who are no doubt being fed a nutrionally deficient fruitarian/vegan diet. They will have small brains, poor cognitive function and other problems. I think it’s child abuse to feed a child this way.
Interestingly, they make this big deal about fruit not making them fat. This somewhat goes back to what we were talking about yesterday. Just being thin does not=healthy. One thing we know, it could take years for nutrional deficiencies to show up. Dr. Mercola experimented with a fruit diet once and in just a week or so checked his blood and discovered his triglycerides had shot up to 3,000! That’s because fructose is metabolized in the liver and drives up tri’s. I’d be curious to see blood work on these 30 bananas people. Also, because of all the fructose and the fact that were drinking sugar cane juice, these people are essentially addicts…..sugar junkies. Of course, they’re always hungry as we know carbs burn fast and stimulate appetite. That’s why the whole video is about eating!
Kim:
I had actually mulled over comparing this to a meth, coke, or opium “gettaway” but in the end decided on the higher road just this once.
But yea, that’s what I thought too, as in, sure, you’re definitely going to feel on top of the world. Not in question. But for how long? And that is a matter of dregree.
No need to speculate about comparisons between sugar addiction and addiction to cocaine or heroin. Behavioral Neuroscientists and psychopharmacologists have already written about evidence for sugar addiction and its neurochemical underpinnings. Yes, sugar addiction is due to sugar hijacking the same reward circuitry as do opiate drugs. One recent paper is a review titled Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake by Avena, Rada, and Hoebel published in 2007 in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. I can provide a copy to anyone who’s interested but doesn’t have access to the full text.
I believe it.
I’ve been saying this but I’ve based it on nothing but personal experience. Do you have any links to those studies?
The 70 Bannanas is crazy. The excess potassium from so many bannanas could lead to an imbalance with sodium and cause a heart attack. All of these people lookednot only physically weak (risking osteoporosis, arthritis..) but emotionally weak as well – no energy. Unless they are taking 100 different supplements a day, their bodies and brains are starving for amino acids, essential fatty acids, proteins, co-q-10. The only good thing that vegans do is that which Mr. Nikoley noted, they don’t eat grains, refind sugars, or processed stuff. But staying away from bad crap isn’t enough. The body also requires you to intake certain things. It just makes me feel bad to see these people totally misguided and oblivious to the damage they are causing to themselves. If a person wants to eat crap, it’s their choice, but it should be an informed choice. These people are ill informed, and I blame the scheister vegan/global warming con artists who equate animals with humans, and thus push their agenda on others; or who think, orwant people to think that the earth is in danger and thus push vegan on people. Rambler out:)
“bodies and brains are starving for amino acids, essential fatty acids, proteins, co-q-10.”
Few small problems with that. Bananas contain all 8 essential amino acids. 70 small bananas contain 77 grams of protein. Bananas have essentials fatty acids, potassium & sugars which the brain loves.
They eat a lot more than just bananas. Done correctly, the diet isn’t deficient in much of anything. It is a a real food diet. Don’t judge the diet by the appearance of a few. That’s what the vegans like to do ;)
Grok, they do contain all 8 essential amino acids, but as far as the abundance of them, there are other plant foods that are better (potatoes, avocado), while the amino acid completeness for animal foods is far superior.
The essential EFA that bananas contain are LA (which people get plenty of unless they’re being tube feed) and ALA. Conversion of ALA to EPA and DHA runs around 5% to 25%: on average, much lower conversion rates if you’re male. That means that, on average, in 70 small bananas (that’s 17 lbs of bananas… seriously?), a person would convert 95 mg to 477 mg of ALA to the *really* essential fatty acids IF you have the enzymes… That seems incredibly inefficient compared to eating just one ounce of wild salmon (less than 300 times the weight of 17 lbs. bananas), which gives over 700 mg. omega 3.
Depending on a person’s genotype, he/she could definitely be deficient in EFAs, vitamin A, B12, taurine, and who knows what else on this diet. Over the long haul, it’s a huge gamble.
“there are other plant foods that are better”
Of course there are. Bananas are cheap, most people like them, and are easily available year round. I think this is much of the reason the banana landed as a centerpiece.
“Conversion of ALA to EPA and DHA”
I know all this. It’s probably written somewhere on my site. I was PARANOID to give up my CLO when I started this diet, as I have serious joint inflammation issues. I have 2 – 3 unopened 12oz bottles I’ll probably give away. Despite training as much/more, I haven’t felt the need since I started eating veg. Efficiency isn’t the my point here, it’s that plants do have what you need.
Yes seriously. I was eating an average of 10lbs of bananas a day. There is a lot of other variety too. Done correctly there’s hardly concern for a vitamin A deficiency. If anything the gov would tell most they’re in danger of an overdose. My personal average for the past 2 months is 375% of the RDA. All coming from real food.
As far as I’m concerned, the whole damn country is deficient in vitamin A, B12, D, taurine. I have no problem looking past this detail. They should probably be supplemented on a paleo diet as well.
The only reason I defend the diet is because I have tried it and followed the protocol fairly closely. I’ve taken A LOT away from it so far! During my research, the people I saw having issues… really shouldn’t be blaming the diet.
Expect a full review fairly soon.
Put emotions and dogma aside & lets think outside the box people. <– Not directing this comment at you Monica ;)
Hate the fact (I feel) a disclaimer is needed to avoid a battle. Why the fuck do people online get offended so easily? #1000000Question
Grok, no offense taken, although I just disagree.
You may be interested in this little piece on vitamin A: donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/11/another-vegetarian-fallacy-exposed.html
Cheers.
“As far as I’m concerned, the whole damn country is deficient in vitamin A, B12, D, taurine.”
Yeah, if they ate a bit more meat and liver that’d probably fix most of their problems.
Humans *are* animals. You’re paleo/primal and you haven’t figured that out?
I wish people could take each issue individually and try to come to some kind of understanding about it. Look at what rabbits did to Australia. We’re more powerful and probably more numerous than rabbits. If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.
You know what I tell a vegan who claims meat eating causes global warming? I tell them to go look up the word “silvopasture” and then invite them to introduce me to a variety of grain or bean that does not require full sunlight in which to grow. Then I ask them where all the cedar forests in Iraq got to. Oh wait, grain farming killed them. Right. What’s one of the foremost causes of desertification? Agriculture, because you have to clear trees. What’s one of the claimed major causes of climate change? Deforestation.
Quit arguing shit on their terms and start learning about actual ecology. Because ecology itself refutes vegan arguments.
Wow, I didn’t expect to see any kind of Super Athlete Physique’s but I really didn’t expect to see what appear to be “beer guts!” Some emaciation I anticipated but the mix of emaciation and flabbiness was pretty surprising. And that poor child! He did not look healthy! Such skinny arms! Kinda sad stuff.
What happened to the Lean Gains post?
Shhhhhhh. It’s a secret still until tomorrow. Maybe tonight. My eff up in trying to pword protect it for Matin’s review.
LeanGains post? What?! I can’t wait! I love that guy!
Haha, wow, I have a very different definition of “healthy” compared to these guys.
No, but seriously though, that looks creepy and they should eat a steak.
The women are bigger than the men! It’s actually quite surprising.
The fruit/veg looked good. I kept thinking how nice it would have been to serve it all with a git steak. I feel very sorry for those folks. They seem nice, and sincere, but very misguided. If they continue to eat that way, in a few years, they’ll be sick, and probably blame themselves for not being diligent enough, or blame their genes, or the environment.
with a great steak, not a git steak! LOL
I just had a quick scan of the 30Bad forums. They are already sick. There are heaps of posts talking about chronic fatigue, massive fat gain etc.
I pay almost no attention but am not surprised to know it’s worse than I feared.
It’s an extreme diet.
We’re omnivores.
“… I don’t pursue “health” directly, per se. I pursue pristine body composition within the framework of a real foods, omnivorous, largely “paleo” diet with a mixture of cooked & raw foods.”
Do you rate having a good body composition more highly than having outstanding health (to the extent two aren’t compatible)? Surely you’re still extremely interested in being healthy enough to live a long and well.
VW:
You are missing the point. Think about it a little more. What do I mean?
I might not actually be missing the point. As I’ve been reading your stuff and the accompanying comments of everyone else, I’m seeing quite a few comments that relate to peoples’ arms and muscles and things like that. That’s just something I never, ever notice or think about, and it suggests to me that there might possibly be less of an interest in overall health from people here than I’m interested.
Then again, it might not suggest anything of the sort.
It’s equally likely, I suppose, that I’m the one who is being a little unusual. But the fact remains that all I’ve ever cared about was maintaining health and I never gave two shits about having big muscles or anything like that. It’s perplexing to me that anyone puts such an emphasis on those things. (Full disclosure: I was always pretty big and athletic from a very early age and had a long life as a serious professional athlete, so I understand that body composition has never been a “problem” for me in the sense that I’ve always been lean, athletic, etc.)
Well beyond the recognition that men probably ought to naturally have bigger lean mass than women (not in evidence in the video), do you know, VW, what fuels your immune system?
Where do the raw materials come from? What happens when you loose 40% of your lean mass?
Hint: you die.
Just because you “never gave two shits about having big muscles” doesn’t change the fact that a good muscular frame is a marker for health just as much as any blood panel.
A “good muscular frame” (had to put it in quotes since you did that to something I typed. :) ) might well be something I’ve always taken for granted, Paleo Rob. I’ll admit that.
It is something you’ve taken for granted. I’m small, and incredibly un-athletic. I don’t give a rats ass about being muscular or being proud of lifting weights. I’m focused on my health — feeling well and living well. Since I’ve been focusing on eating more paleo, I’ve been emotionally healthier and physically stronger than I have ever been in my life. I can work longer and harder now at 37 than I could when I was 22. I believe it’s a side benefit of the better diet.
How in the world do you build muscles in the absence of steroid supplementation if you are not in pristine health? Your body’s got more important things to do than put amino acids into your arms and legs if something is seriously wrong with you.
Not to carry on because you’ve been so sporting here, VW,but what I mean is that health is an ephemorous concept. Body composition is not.
I don’t have any idea of how “healthy” I am, if by that you mean an assured long life in vitality. None of us do. What I can do is look at my body comp, I can eat a diet humans evolved to eat, and the rest is simply unknown, but I will say this: it’s very nice at 50 to get flirted with by women half you age and to have a wife that just fucking hates that. :)
Fair enough. Naturally, nothing is guaranteed.
Just turned 50 myself and get much younger guys looking. I think it has to do with the whole “cougar” thing that’s so popular. But seriously, I like having a guy that looks a lot older than me. Makes me look even younger!
I lived in Australia for six years and these people are what the Aussies would colloquially call “Wankers”. Not sure if that was a durian he was ripping open near the beginning but when I had some in Malaysia they used a machete to cut it open. If it is a durian, it’s pretty damn big!
It’s a jackfruit.