What I learned about vegans in my last video “vegan bodybuilding nutrition” is that there are a lot of angry vegans running around with chips on their shoulder and political axes to grind. If you look at my Facebook Post, there is not one single word of thanks, just attacks because I dared to suggest that perhaps vegans are at a disadvantage when it comes to gaining muscle. Silly me, I was expecting a tiny bit of gratitude from the vegan/vegetarian community for doing this video.
Not one word of thanks about my attempt to try to explain to the meat eating masses about the difficulties faced by vegans and why they deserve some respect. Not one single comment about the protein quality tool that I spent months of engineering time on that helps vegans not only see graphically the amino acid profiles of over 5000 foods but also lets them see a list of the best complimentary protein sources for each food. I was expecting and hoping for some suggestions on how to make it more useful, or maybe even a word of thanks for not ignoring their needs like all the other mainstream bodybuilding website do. Again, silly me.
I do understand that like with most groups, its the 10% that give everyone else a bad name and I am sure this is the case in the vegan community as well. For the benefit of vegans everywhere, the moderate contingent might do well and try to make it clear that the chip-on-their-shoulder vegans do not speak for them – its the only way that the “angry vegan” image will ever be shed. There are many types of vegans but from what I have seen they fall into three major camps, the political vegans, the health vegans, and the religious vegans. The first two camps seem to have more tenacity than Mormon’s on their missionary in their desire to convert people to veganism and they are the ones going around tagging “meat is murder” on every wall. They are the ones who try at every turn to make their meat eating co-workers feel uncomfortable at lunch time by calling their lunch “dead animals” or “muscle”. Only the third group, the religious vegans, seem to belong to the live and let live mentality.
Being a vegan can have a LOT of benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people have lowered their blood pressure, lowered their cholesterol, kicked diabetes, and become way healthier by passing on the animal products. Eating lower on the food chain decreases the amount of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and heavy metals as well since animals concentrate these products. Some of you have made the mistake of equating “vegan” with “thin” and healthy – not true at all. Vegans can be just as unhealthy and morbidly obese as their meat eating brethren. Potato chips, cookies, cake, Coke, peanuts, olives, and avocados are all vegan – chow down on those all day long and you will get FAT FAT FAT. If you are vegan you still need to make good nutritional choices!
There are a LOT of reasons to be a vegan but one of them is NOT because you think it will be easy to gain muscle. Keep posting those photos of bodybuilding vegans if you think it will help you become the next vegan Jay Cutler. I just love it when people hold up pictures of former steroid using, meat eating bodybuilders who have been vegan a few years as proof of how much muscle you can gain as a vegan :)
