I prefer the inverse view: it's not the "bad" food that is unhealthy, it's the lack of "good" food when too much of it is displaced by the "bad". Once the demand for all the required non-energy food components is satisfied it should be perfectly fine to fill the remaining energy balance with whatever junk food available.

As I see it, the basic problem is that our "animal brain" food autopilot, which serves us incredibly well with natural food, is easily fooled by state of the art food preparation tricks. If we lack some random nutrient, let's call it foomium, then the autopilot will make foomium-rich food taste good. And food that is engineered to be very tasty to people who are in "acquire foomium" mode (amongst many others), despite not containing any of it. If we have a candy bar completely devoid of foomium, but that successfully tricks the foomium-deprived body to trigger the "this gives me foomium" heuristic, then we will eat quite a lot of it before giving in to overeating. Repeat this a few times and you will see that industrially processed food is unhealthy. Not because of what it contains, but because of what is missing (but what is cleverly pretended to be there, as a side effect of successful engineering for tastyness)

If one wants to embark on a moral argument present in the theory of evolution, where no organism is more special than the other, then you'd probably avoid consumption of food coming from animals, or you'd be setting yourself up to some contradiction in the brain. :D

Or, if one wants to embark on a moral argument that humans are special and that life is worth conserving. Then, you'd probably also want to not include animal products, due to high pollution implicitly killing off humans, and animal agriculture being one of the causes of global warming.

Or, if one feels he's compassionate, good, then murder is not the way, or maybe humane murder is? Is there such a thing as humane murder?

Or, one wants to embark on a moral argument that in this universe that is so vast, it's entirely meaningless to ponder over ethics, and morality, and that you just want to maximize your utility function, which includes enjoying the flavor of baked flesh, cooked embryos and sweet vomit. Then, it doesn't matter at all what you eat, if you feel great.

The viewpoint of dairy-as-unnatural gets tricky, as there are parallels in the animal kingdom.

For example, ants keep aphids for honeydew just as humans keep animals for dairy products.

Honeydew isn't tit secretion, it's vomit/shit. And how can a symbiosis of ants and aphids be a parallel for humans and cows. We do not protect cows from their predators, we slit their throats and they know that that's coming. We also do not eat cow's shit. Hilarious parallel.

When did we ever in history of our evolution have a need for another mammal's milk? From an evolutionary perspective, from a perspective of natural parallels, it makes no sense.

The milk you need is the milk your mother gives you. If you seek calcium there's more of it in parsley, basil, origano per mass than is in milk. If you want iron it's also there, more than there is in some of the available animal flesh.

There are also many parallels in the diets of other mammals, 75% of species are herbivore on this planet. If we are seeking parallels in nature to mirror, why are we cherrypicking?

75% herbivores means that genes for plant-based diets are all over the place.

  Honeydew isn't tit secretion, it's vomit/shit

Choose one phony analogy at a time, willya? Point being, ants keep aphids as livestock: they are captives, herded, controlled, denied free will and their preferred environment, and exploited for food products. The ethical questions are exactly parallel.

  We do not protect cows from their predators

In your universe, sheepdogs, cattle dogs, and other shepherd dogs don't exist, and cattlemen from the gauchos of the Pampas to the Masai don't protect their stock? For the rest of us: http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/s/shepherds.htm

  we slit their throats & they know that it's coming

Again, make up your mind what to rant about. In this thread, you raised global warming; slaughter stops that in its tracks. Would you prefer to switch back to the anti-dairy rant again? In any case, humane slaughter is the goal, and new experts in that field like Temple Grandin have helped that.

  (dairy) makes no sense

yet indigenous peoples all over the world independently developed diets with dairy, from central Africa to Mongolia to neolithic Britain to Sinai to Mesopotamia and India.

I never mentioned dairy. You mentioned a half-assed parallel, and it is, and I pointed out every single bit that stinks in it, I do not give a damn about slaughter. I wasn't sure if aphids shit honeydew, or if they vomit it out through mouth. So, pick an analogy you know that makes sense to you, because you've obviously capable of equating an ant with a human and raise a silly ethical question.

I asked you what about 75% herbivores, you cherry picked.

> yet indigenous peoples all over the world independently developed diets with dairy, from central Africa to Mongolia to neolithic Britain to Sinai to Mesopotamia and India.

Yeah, people are known to be very smart and very natural. Lets cherry pick again, people have developed weapons to hunt animals with, but then used them to kill humans. People developed technology to kill animal efficiently with it, then they used the same techniques on humans. I guess we are so smart and natural and it makes sense to do it because everyone did it. We all know what they did when they did that, they raised their utility function. At some point it was a rational decision, at another it stopped being.

Sorry, but this discussion is over, if you aren't kind and compassionate, if you do not value human life, if you do not think that values of the theory of evolution matter, then go keep raising that utility function, I entirely understand your viewpoint and with that there's nothing to discuss.

We should be able to do better than that. If there are indications that some foods are burdensome to health, then there should be indications that some foods are beneficial. It is just taking us forever to separate the facts from the persuasions.

Anecdotally, the spices Tumeric and Cumin seem to be great tonics for my particular metabolism/diet/lifestyle.

  Tumeric and Cumin 

turmeric and curcumin

No its coincidental. Cuminum cyminum, Brown Cumin - Asian grocery grade, 1g a day.

So avoid all animal products, then? Trans fat are found in all of them.

This is the third time in a month (that I've noticed) that noondip has repeated this falsehood knowing that it is false.

TL;DR: dairy products have small amounts of naturally-occurring transfat that have no established adverse effects, while meats have essentially none.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858482 for the previous example of refutation (and it has a link to the one before that, as well as references). The one reference he posts there refers to dairy, not meat.

Have a look at what the National Academy of Sciences - the prestigious and nonpartisan non-profit scientific community in the country - has to say about Trans Fat:

> Trans fatty acids are not essential and provide no known benefit to human health. Therefore, no AI or RDA is set. As with saturated fatty acids, there is a positive linear trend between trans fatty acid intake and LDL cholesterol concentration, and therefore increased risk of CHD. A UL is not set for trans fatty acids because any incremental increase in trans fatty acid intake increases CHD risk.

I know you disagree, but so far you've only cited one dairy industry-funded paper to support the conclusion TFAs are safe - even beneficial - for human consumption. I honestly want to know whether you have more compelling evidence, or are just defending unhealthy fat for some ideological reason.

Naturally occurring trans fats (vaccenic acid and conjugated linoleic acid) occur in trace amounts in animal products. They also have been shown to possibly be beneficial for LDL and triglycerides, while hydrogenated oil is harmful.

Source for that? The top result for me was the following review.

> Published data suggest that all fatty acids with a double bond in the trans configuration [produced either by industrial hydrogenation or by biohydrogenation in the rumens of cows and sheep] raise the ratio of plasma LDL to HDL cholesterol.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20209147

  Source for that?

Um, here's one that you already knew about from the referenced prior thread:

Effects of Ruminant trans Fatty Acids on Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer: A Comprehensive Review of Epidemiological, Clinical, and Mechanistic Studies (Adv Nutr July 2011 Adv Nutr vol. 2: 332-354, 2011

Have you got any studies not funded by the dairy industry to share?

Trans fats are way more prevalent in hydrogenated vegetable oils that try to look like animal fat replacements. They are simply much cheaper to manufacture.

Example: margarine 15g v.s. real butter 3.3g for each 100g of product.

Agreed, hydrogenated oils - whether from vegetables or ruminants - all seem to have adverse health effects. But to keep things in perspective, margarine is #3 in the list of top sources, after (presumably non-vegan) baked goods and animal products - http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2005/document/html/ch...