Ruyven

Right. It's usually* healthier than the "typical American diet", if only because most vegans give the topic of food so much thought and eat real food, but it also seems to me that it's easier to have a healthy omnivorous diet. * if you discount my friend who tried to go vegan by only cutting animal products out of his diet and ate things like pasta with ketchup

Yeah, I'm aware of that. In my case, before I found out about Paleo and Nerd Fitness, I always kinda thought in the back of my mind that being vegan was a more healthy and moral thing that I should be doing. But after finding out, I actively chose not to be vegan. So I thought, maybe the same has happened to other people here haha.

First of all, I don't want this to devolve into a discussion. Or actually, it's welcome to devolve into a discussion of mutual respect where we take everyone's point of view into consideration. But the reason I'm starting this thread is that I've given this much thought, and I bet I'm not the only one. So if you're not vegan, why have you decided not to be / not decided to be? I'm going to start with my reasons: I've come to realize that whenever I eat, something had to die for that food. Growing up on a farm, I've definitely felt bad when I watched my Dad skin a rabbit. That said, I also felt bad when we grew potatoes and I had to kill potato beetles that would otherwise prevent our potatoes from growing, or snails that would otherwise eat our veggies, or even the weeds that grew between our useful plants because I knew they were alive and wanted to stay that way. Health reasons. Or I guess I should say laziness reasons. It's just so much easier to eat meat than to find all the nutritions I get from meat in veggies instead, and prepare them properly. I don't believe that grains and legumes and such are unhealthy per se, you just need to put extra work into preparing them. Low Carb High Fat (i.e. at most about 150g of carbs per day) is the diet I'm aiming for, so as far as I know, if I wanted to avoid animal products I'd have to eat lots and lots of nuts. When I tried that I realized that nuts don't agree with my digestion, at least if I eat them daily. So meat and cheese and eggs it is, I guess? Convenience is part of it - I want to be able to eat out anywhere. That's also the reason I'm mostly Paleo when I cook for myself, but when someone else cooks for me or I go out to eat, I don't like to sort out foods. Factory farming is despicable, but there's gotta be other ways to prevent it than avoiding animal products altogether. I'm more for supporting local farmers that treat their animals well, eating venison since we have to keep the deer population under control anyway, that kind of thing. I don't want to give up milk (I know, milk isn't Paleo either) because giving it up can actually cause lactose intolerance. What are some of y'all's thoughts?