Any Disease I've Worked On... Root Cause Consuming Animal: Dr Faraz Harsini

my name is Frost harsini I'm a senior scientist at GFI bioprocessing senior scientist and I went vegan in 2012. I went vegan because one of my friends pointed out that I can't say I love animals and eat them too which made me really upset I was really upset at her didn't talk to her for three months because I was like how dare you challenging my morality but after three months I was like she was right so so your friend just up and says this um yeah so I'm from Iran and there is this tradition that people buy golden fish for for New Year and then I was trying to encourage Iranians not to do that so I went to her and I said would you help me with the graphic design of this poster so I can encourage them not to buy goldfish she said well it doesn't really make sense because you eat other animals and then you're just like worried about this this fish here that's how she said that was that the only time you've ever found yourself worried about another animal No in fact even before going vegan I I was always against like hunting animal testing I didn't know I there was a time that I thought animal testing was necessary so it was like I really feel for the for these animals I felt really terrible so I felt bad for them but I thought it was necessary I always felt you know I'm from Iran I saw animals being sacrificed on the street I loved meat so I kind of convinced myself that it's just one second of them suffering so it's not significant amount of suffering so that's how I convinced myself but I think I always cared for animals did you had you ever heard of the word vegan prior to that no actually even vegetarianism in Iran unlike India it's really like at least back back then 10 15 years ago it was just like a health thing that you know some like weird people did so it wasn't like about animal rights or just not none of that at all and veganism was not I've never heard of veganism that people just not eating like Gary and egg not at all and so had you ever even thought about like just not eating them not really like no one ever came to me to say that hey you know why are you eating animals um I guess that goes hand in hand with misunderstanding and you know miseducation and all that like my mom raised me I remember I never liked meat but like my parents always said you know it it eat the meat that's how you make blood even in in Iran we sometimes eat the bone marrow so it's just like smash big bones um to to remove the you know bone marrow and my mom was like eat that because that's how you make blood and it's like now we know that that's not how it works but you know you feel like you need them no one really talks about animal abuse you don't see the footage you think that you know it's just one second of cutting their throat They Don't Really suffer that much even after my friend pointed out the hypocrisy I remember telling myself it's just one second you know sorry animals I love meat so much that it it just overcomes that like one second that you know you suffer which now I think about it I'm not proud of myself for thinking that way yeah I mean why do you think people think that way is it just their parents and society and mostly is that the way that culture is more than other cultures do you feel like there's more like acceptance for this alternative here I don't really know the role that culture plays um because I took I talk to people a lot and some people say oh like I'm Hispanic and you have no idea in Hispanic culture we just you know we're so into meat or whatever but you also talk to an American he says oh in our cultures like hot dog and whatever you talk to the German guy he says oh you have no idea we eat so much like bratwurst and stuff and then you talk to Iranian and says oh our culture we eat Kebab I feel like every culture we talk to people it's based on meat so I think people think that it's just their culture but it's like every culture and I don't really think that there is any culture that is particular is like really hard to become vegan but of course there is that bias I'm from Iran uh of course I you know I feel like it's harder in my culture but everyone says that so if everyone thinks their culture is really hard that just probably means that no no culture is particularly hard it's just that I honestly think when people think going vegan is hard it's just in their head like when when they think about it they're like oh my parents my friends are gonna make fun of me uh you know they think vegan food sucks um it's not gonna be tasty so it's all in their head once they sit down and just like know the options every time I say there is vegan cheese a lot of people are surprised when I say there is Vegan egg people are surprised so it's in in their head so for three months you're mad at your friend yeah yeah pretty much what was going on in your head like for three months I don't know I just shut down um the problem was my friend as as much as I love her um she is vegetarian or I don't know about now but at the time she was vegetarian and vegetarians often don't push and I really wish she pushed harder all she said was you know you say you love animals but you eat them that's it she didn't say hey you know this is Dominion this is earthlings watch this Google that you know answer any questions none of that so because of that I really just didn't think about it and I loved meat so much that they didn't even think that they could ever go vegan or vegetarian at the time that's one thing that I think it's really important for people to go vegan because you often have vegans pushing more and pushing here doesn't mean that you have to be aggressive or militant but it means that you know you advocate for it you say hey sit down here you know sit down let me show you this this is why you need to go vegan you don't have that passion in vegetarians often how could you have because they're kind of the part of a problem in a way three months goes by what changed in three months to make you suddenly go she's right or something or what I don't really remember I remember that I loved meat so much that I was like I there is no way I go out with my friends and they have like pizza and I'm like no thank you I'm gonna have my salad um but I was like okay I'm gonna start from just not buying meat at home um but when I go out I'm just gonna eat whatever because I don't I couldn't see it in myself to be that strong but honestly when I stopped buying meat one day I went out and my friend held you know I ordered a fellow Phil and my friend had chicken and you know he actually offered me some chicken and I looked at it I was like no thanks I'm a vegetarian so that was June 3rd and I had to go back I was so excited eventually for refusing to eat meat and that I texted one of my friends and later on I had to go back and find that text and that's how I know so I basically changed my birthday um to June 3rd because I think that that was the date that I did something so meaningful unlike the day I was born you know I I didn't have anything to do with it this was probably the the most important decision that I made that changed everything else that I did after that point so after that what made you go vegan even when I was vegetarian I had no idea about milk and egg nothing I even remembered or these people were so extreme they don't even consume dairy or egg but when I moved to the US so this happened in Germany when I when I went vegetarian when I came to the US I was offered like YouTube offered me this video with German subtitle and the video was like 100 101 or 1001 reasons to go vegan maybe it was James Wildman yeah I think so yeah interview it's a very like old video presentation yeah exactly and um it had like German subtitle I was like okay this is a good opportunity for me to practice my English because I just came to the US and also it has German subtitles so I don't forget my German because I was studying German little I knew the whole thing was to convince me to go vegan and it worked that's so after you went vegetarian did you notice anything different physiologically mentally or emotionally that was the result of making that change um not when I went vegetarian I feel like I don't have a clear memory of how I actually felt maybe because I was still consuming Animal product but I remember when I went vegan there was this weird feeling that I always went to this Lake to to watch Ducks I mean I never ate Ducks but for some reason when I went vegan I had this kind of connection that I'm sitting here so peacefully that I'm not eating like animals I'm not causing extra suffering and for three or four months it felt so good when I went to bed I felt like I'm I'm not causing suffering and that felt really good and then after that I started like why can't other people like see what I see so when I started talking to people and I see how resistant they are then I started getting really mad but for three or four months it was it was a really good feeling weren't you worried maybe about needing to eat animals for you know health reasons at all I don't think I even considered it back in the day um just knew that there were people who are vegan and they're fine didn't really think about health and that in fact became a thing after I started graduate school I did my Master's in Cancer Center in cancer research and then I realized 4 out of 10 incidences of cancers are preventable and a lot of it has to do with you know consumption of red meat and I have this memory my advisor for Cancer Center um for my masters he was actually really famous he was a very famous scientist and one day I asked him he was we were at the party and he he was like eating pork a lot of it and I said I was very nervous I said can I ask you something I said sure I was like you are a famous cancer researcher and you know this is carcinogenic like how how is it possible that you know that and you're still eating this and he said oh yeah don't worry I'll just go home and like take vitamin c u too I was like what this is not this is not how it works in fact when I started you know studying biomedical Sciences that's when I started learning about the harmful effects of you know consumption of animal products but before that you know I really didn't even think about that it was mostly for Animals is there anything about uh from your cancer research that shows like whether or not eating animals is a risk factor or protective or eating plants is a risk factor or protective either way yeah so besides my masters my PhD was also about uh protein research so I did protein structure and function and something that stood out to me was methionine which is one of the amino acids it's an it's an essential amino acid we need it but it turns out that animal products be meat egg Dairy their methionine content is really high and it turned out that cancer cells rely on methionine so much more than our normal cells our normal cells can actually recycle methionine so they're much better in you know thriving with very little of the methionine but cancer cells a lot of times don't have that ability so they need to be fed nathanine inconsistently and turns out it's very abundant in animal products so when I started looking into it there is actually a lot of research showing that you can starve cancer cells from methionine and they shrink they go away or at least at the very least they don't grow as much they can't grow without methionine even in breast cancer cell lines if we grow them in a lab in a Petri dish normal cells normal breast cells we can we can just do it without methionine but if it's breast cancer cell then we have to add methane because otherwise they don't survive now I've heard about also methionine involved in the synthesis of amyloid plaques in the brain have you heard about anything like that I know about amyloid plaques but I don't know about the correlation between methane and I have heard like you're saying restricting it you know methylene restriction you know I think Dr T Colin Campbell talks about that song what if they just ate nominal amount of animal protein and didn't eat a bunch of plants well to be clear I think the methionine kind of it may increase the risk of cancer or reduces it may reduce your ability to to fight cancer you because you're feeding your cancers you know at the end the problem with animal protein is that you know well it's high in methionine but also it's generally packed with other stuff that you don't want so the better question is that if you can get the same protein which is better it's it has less methionine but it's packed it comes with fiber it comes with that cholesterol it comes with tons of vitamins why would you go that way to get your protein from animal sources where it comes with heme iron which can be metabolized to carcinogenic compounds it comes without any fiber it comes with cholesterol and saturated fat and endotoxins so endotoxins are something that I've done a lot of research on I work in pharmaceutical companies and one of one of the things I did was to make sure that the final products the final drugs are endotoxin-free just to explain what they are they are residuals of gram negative bacteria so our body is designed to freak out when you have gram-negative bacteria in our blood but the way our body detects this bacteria your white blood cells don't have eyes to tell oh that's a bacteria or bacterium they react with these things that you can find in the cell wall of bacteria which is basically the endotoxins so when you have endotoxins in your blood your your cells don't know that this is live or dead bacteria evolutionary that doesn't make any sense for them to detect if it's live or dead because generally if it's dead it'll clear up anyways so they react the same way so what it means is that when you have endotoxins in your blood you have inflammation your body basically freaks out and it sends a lot of like white blood cells it increases inflammation you can think about it as sending SWOT so it's like a red alarm you have a terrorist you have you know you have something terrible happening since what when swats you know arrives you have inflammation you have redness it hits up but it can be systemic right so if I punch myself it gets red but the same thing it's systemic it's that your whole body I wonder like when the animal's killed is there any moment where that response you're talking about if people are consuming that even I don't know if I can specifically answer the question but for sure when the animals are extremely distressed and or distressed before they're being slaughtered I'm sure there's a lot of like hormones and compounds that are secreted in into their blood that are probably not healthy for us to consume anytime I do like a series or a run of these interviews somebody inevitably pops up and says they believe you're consuming that animal's fear you know and yeah I've heard that and I mean it makes sense in a way that um yeah if the moment that you're afraid or or you're scared um suddenly there are tons of hormones that are released so that totally makes sense you've talked about excess maintaining endotoxins heme iron cholesterol it's a package deal right is your specific day job is there anything there that that enlightens you further or that you could share that might be interesting related to this yeah so I worked for a couple of years in pharmaceutical companies with developed drugs for like anti-inflammatory drugs that helped cancer patients and patients suffering from systemic inflammation think how much we have to go through to just like isolate this protein as a drug for inflammation whereas even when I work on cancer research before pretty much any disease that I've ever worked on the root cause was basically consuming animal products that fact always nagged me that yes we can do all of this or we can just not consume animal products so I don't say not consuming animal products as a solution to literally all diseases it's not that but I always ask myself my time is limited my energy is limited if I want to solve a problem if I want to solve if I want to cure a disease which one do I want to cure obviously the one that kills the most number of people what are they cardiovascular diseases diabetes kidney failure cancer and all of that and majority of these diseases and obesity that leads to other problems majority of these diseases are caused by consumption of animal products and that's why I had a very hard time convincing myself to work on this tiny little issue when the huge problem exists and we are not addressing the elephant in the room which is consumption of animal products now you know the opposition or the anti-vegans or whatever we want to call them the carnivores the ketos whatever they might say it's maybe it's cutting out carbs maybe it's you know processed carbs or you know they they'll usually say carbs and just leave it at that but I think they're just trying to say processed carbs I mean is there any research out there that really controls for that and looks at the best side of both you know like their best side being like a clean lean whatever meat that's not you know overcooked whatever maybe even raw compared to like you know whole plant food diet is there anything out there doing that I'm not sure specifically about that but what I know is that you can always go and see what compounds there are in these meats and see if there is any research that Isola did that one compound for instance in this case you have saturated fat you have cholesterol you know you have hem iron doesn't matter where the source of the meat is you're gonna have him iron even white meat even like chicken has him iron and then there is a clear evidence showing that him iron gets metabolized to carcinogenic compounds you know we have a lot of evidence on on cholesterol and all that that's one way to look at all that is there any evidence that plants have problems because sometimes the opposition also says oh there's mycotoxins or there's lectins or phytates or sopinins or you know any number of anti-nutrients or whatever they want to call them is is that of any concern does that ever come up in your research I don't have experience on that from my research perspective like actual in-lap research but what I can say is that if you look at the diets of people who lived you know over 100 years or the longest lived people in the world you can actually even factor out the geographical differences and you what you are left with is that these people consumed mainly plant-based even if you look at the diet of blue zones you see that they even consume very little fish and it's like 95 percent over 95 percent plant-based what's the most compelling evidence or research paper like an epic study or nurses or Adventist or is there a certain study out there that that really sells what you're saying the amount of evidence that we have on prevention of cardiovascular diseases cancer diabetes and all that with plant-based diet this is you just can't deny that and these are top causes like literally top causes of death it's more than just one paper it's just the fact that this is a very well-known fact that plant-based diet can reduce the risk of all these top causes of death that together with the fact that we know vegetarians and vegans live longer and like I mentioned you look at the longest lived people on the planet and they they plant-based so that's a clear evidence that you know plant-based diet is healthy and then we have on the other hand athletes Physicians committee for responsible medicine they uh they have a really good database of they have a really good paper on showing how athletes have better performance when they're on plant-based diet so the amount of evidence that we have is overwhelming I think there is a problem with just nutrition research that there is a lot of like back and forth and you can always find you know oh here is a paper that showed this you know about cholesterol that cross cholesterol actually doesn't like uh you know increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases versus this paper that says it does and a lot of times you have to go and look at their methodology and who funded the the research and there is just so much into it I guess recommendation for a general audience is that when was the last time that you saw a paper that questions whether apples are healthy or not it's always about meat it's always about cholesterol right because you you may have papers on both sides but on plant-based diet you don't have papers on both sides there is no paper that says blueberries cause cancer another thing that is really powerful is if you look at our physiology we're not meant to consume animal products what that means is even if you can convince me that there are some animal products there is some degree of animal products that that we can tolerate that doesn't mean that it's necessarily good for us or we are designed to do that if you really think about it we all have enzymes to digest lactose but we lose this enzyme unless you're a mutant if if you're a white person most likely so it's not when people say there are lactose intolerant I'm like no you are normal there is a group of white people who are mutant literally and because of that they can tolerate lactose what it tells you is that we are not designed to have milk as in our adolescence you know now you can come to me and say hey milk shows it's good or it's you know a study showed me milk is good or not you're not designed to have milk same thing is true about meat like you know it really bothers me when people say oh we are carnivores oh really can you run after you can't even run after it you know goddamn squirrel right um are you and they say oh your teeth are you telling me that you can like a cow the the most like gentle animal are you telling me that you can just go to a cow just the same way that a lion just attacks a cow you can just go attack it cow and just try to just take a bite out of a cat do you think these teeth can penetrate like their skin yeah right and then you look at our intestines length you look at our enzymes that we have a real carnivore can literally just go to this like spoiled meat and just like say okay this is tasty I'm gonna eat this um but you know if you don't find uh roadkills tasty that's a clear sign that you're not a carnivore and you know again looking at our physiology we just don't have the tools literally the only tool that we are using to to be able to deal with meat problem is our intelligence so we cook it so we literally disinfect the crap out of meat to make sure we don't die from diseases with denature we unfold the protein so we can digest them otherwise we can't you also look at our closest ancestors or closest relatives and you see that they also primarily consume plant-based diets so what evidence better than that do you want to show you that we are designed to have you know to follow a plant-based diet and not meat not dairy you know I honestly think the consumption of egg and milk is weird but it's fine we do weird things and it's not bad because it's weird it's not bad because we just eat eggs from I don't know other species or like breast meat breast milk of another species I mean it's very weird but it's not bad because it's weird it's bad because it shows you that you're not designed to have milk there is no other animal that relies on eating eggs of other species there are some that steal eggs when there are you know it's it can be a source of food for them but it's not the their primary like source of food yeah how many snakes yeah we're not really designed like a snake yeah um I'm sure there's plenty of reptiles that do yeah but they don't necessarily rely on eating eggs of other like animals you know sometimes yeah when they come across it they might there was like something that really showcased the totality of evidence so that people wouldn't get this misinformation from the carnivore movement that's purely anecdotally based is there a way you could articulate in an elevator the totality of evidence I when I do I say well we've got True North Hippocrates Wellness we've got the ornish program that's funded by Medicare and it's non-invasive for cardio metabolic disease we've got pcrm and we got nutrition facts and sure you might say they're biased because we're run by vegans but of course they're vegans because you know if you think crack's bad you're gonna say oh well this person is biased because they don't do crack yeah I mean I mean so I mean you know there's so much evidence and why don't they have anything that delineates it like this you know all they have are anecdotes so I mean that's kind of like the tangent I might go on and I can keep going but I'm curious do you have one I mean you've kind of done that a little bit already I think but I'm just curious if there was any sort of elevator pitch tangent you might have for the totality of evidence that you know sometimes when I do arteries and I talk to people about veganism you know you know a lot of times they bring up the protein problem which is the one that particularly annoys me because I literally have done my you know doctorate on proteins the best way to answer this question is to say do you think it's possible to be vegan and be healthy and a lot of people just say yes most people at least know somebody in their family who's vegan yeah the question that annoys me the most is like when people say uh you know oh proteins or other nutrients a lot of times if you actually ask them what nutrient they just don't have an answer K2 or 12 B12 most people just don't don't know any of this they just hear that you know vegans are deficient or it's just like a lot of times when you ask people these excuses are generally not genuine so they've just heard something and when you ask them when you say I'll just give you another example they say going vegan is expensive and you ask them how so what have you bought before vegan that you think is expensive and the answer is they actually haven't tried they just heard that going vegan is expensive and then I have to explain that just like any other diet so the dietary part of veganism is just like any other diet you can do it cheaply you can do it expensively whether you want to buy Beyond Burger whether you want to buy expensive cheese it's totally up to you but you can also buy legumes rice beans whatever you know make it it can be literally the cheapest diet on Earth so when they say here proteins you say what about proteins have you looked at an elephant do you really think that you need more protein than you know an elephant yeah but then they'll say well I'm not gonna eat what an elephant eats right but the idea is just to show that you can get your proteins from from Plants right um so we got a good point when they say we're not going to eat whatever we don't eat grass right or whatever they might eat you know so that's that's a real challenge I think one of the biggest challenges is that people think that vegans eat just salads and like like really lame and like you know tasteless food and that's that's a picture I had in mind so when I went vegan I had zero like precisely zero vegan friends so I didn't know how to do it I literally I was like all right I just have to eat lettuce for the rest of my life literally I didn't need cheese chocolate none of that for a year because I just didn't know they existed and apparently I was not great at researching this stuff I never Googled you know what should I mean how to make like an alternative cheese yeah I had no idea so I had like none of that for a year so I think that's a misconception that a lot of people have that we really need to fix yeah to show them that there's tasty vegan food there's a Anatomy thing there is the uh actual evidence that we have to show that vegans vegetarians live longer there is our closest relatives uh what they ate um but I would say that there is a problem there where it is possible to be below certain thresholds and be able to if you're super active if you're you know eating better meats and like less processed meats that you can be so much healthier than someone who of course eats like literally just junk food right um so that's why I personally think that it really helps to bring in the ethics part to the to the question like say that to focus more on let's agree that it is possible to be healthy on a vegan diet so you can either approach that this is killing you or you can say it is possible to be vegan I kind of do both I think it's it's great to do both but I think eventually all that matters is that you can be healthy and you can completely survive and get all the nutrients that you need from a plant-based diet which makes eating meat unnecessary so then if you know that you can live like this but this one causes a lot of like suffering and it's potentially bad for you then why not choosing this if we have the option like oh we don't know either way it could work well why why not choose the one that Fosters the most non-violent world you know absolutely yeah I just want to add something that I always encourage people to basically go vegan for the ethics because there is there is one advantage there that you don't cheat on your ethics we all have gone on diets before we you know we try to do recycling but maybe sometimes when no one is looking we just don't recycle um you know we say I'm gonna lose weight but you go to a party and it's like delicious cake or whatever you just eat it but I had a guy who came to me and said hey man you're right I like everything you say about veganism but sometimes it's like 3 A.M I don't have vegan food in my fridge all the vegan restaurants are closed and you know I just have to eat whatever there is and I said has there ever been a situation where all these stores were closed you didn't have any food at home and then you look at your dog you were like well I'm sorry buddy you know today's the date and he left and I said that's because that's you just never look at your dog as food it's not an option no matter how hungry you are eating your dog is not an option so I think that's the power of going vegan for ethics because you're not gonna cheat on it you know another benefit is that if you go to a party so to the point that Peter Singer was making today that you go to a party the cake is already there there is no vegan alternative so why not just eating that because you're not technically increasing suffering or decreasing suffering in any meaningful manner but then that's a first order effect but you have secondary and tertiary order effects it's when someone else is looking at you and they say that you refuse to eat this cake and you say um that's why and then they're like oh I didn't know this about milk or dairy or egg maybe next time they actually have so if you don't refuse to eat that eat that cake you know you are almost guaranteed to not have vegan cake on the next birthday cake birthday so every time that we don't refuse to eat animal products we are basically saying that consumption of animal products is okay we contribute to this thing being so normal and that's why I think there is so much Merit in just refusing it even if it at least on the surface it doesn't like make a big difference what does your family think about this my dad I think is going vegan and my mom pretty much is vegan so they both and they're divorced they're different part of the world but I think they're both very close to go vegan could you be with somebody who isn't vegan uh no absolutely not um I mean as colleagues or whatever you know something that they can't do anything about that's a different story but literally my goal is to reduce suffering to animals so how can my partner and friend truly contribute to the problem that I'm trying to stop it's a huge difference in values I rather want to be with someone who holds me accountable I want I want to be with someone who when I go to a party and I lose the courage to speak up about animals he says hey hey you need to speak up you know don't don't lose your courage it happened today in my talk I Was preparing for my presentation I was trying to be a little more gentle because I didn't want to lose some of my personal relationships with people and their very good friend came to me and said no don't don't compromise for animals so that's the kind of person that I want to I want to I want my partner or my friends to make me a better person and not bring me down I would date someone who's not vegan only just so that I can give them a you know opportunity to become vegan you know but after they know me after I provide them with all the evidences and the reasons to go vegan if they choose to abuse animals I don't think that would be a constructive relationship if somebody sat in front of you maybe you're on a date maybe it's just a friend whatever and they said is it okay if I order chicken what would you say um I hope I have the courage to say that are you asking if it's okay for me or is it okay for you because you're not harming me but you're you know harming another animal um I guess in a way when people say oh I'm so sorry for you know you know they know I'm vegan they eat non-vegan stuff in front of me and they say I'm sorry I always say you don't have to you don't have to apologize to me you're eating someone else in a way when people apologize they kind of EX they're trying to play this game that I'm respecting you so that you can respect me but it doesn't work that way we don't do that in other forms of Oppression we don't say excuse me I'm just gonna be a little racist here excuse me I'm I'm just gonna beat this child here you saying that you're sorry does not make whatever is happening okay I heard your talk was pretty powerful today what kind of stuff did you hit on and make people's I guess emotional I'm from Iran um I went to a lot of protests I really came really close to getting killed in some of this protests I'm also a gay I grew up with a lot of Oppression and you know their homosexuality is a big taboo I I could never accept myself I thought I was mentally ill I thought it goes away forced myself to find a girlfriend so a lot of forms of Oppression that I experience but the whole time I was oppressing animals so in my talk I was basically making a connection between all these different so you know forms of human oppression and animal oppression and how they basically interconnect my point was when we advocate for animals a lot of people suggest you know let's reduce meat consumption let's treat animals more humanely and I think when we focus on that we should ask ourselves if these stuff this stuff is a sound solution for other forms of Injustice so if I'm beating my child and you're trying to stop me would you accept if I say you're right I'm just gonna beat my child you know two days a week it becomes laughable so solution sometimes solutions that we offer for animal rights when we apply them to other places they just become laughable and extremely offensive to the victims so the point I was making was if we fight for Animals we should apply the same standards in you know other forms of Injustice so I think when you go to you know grocery stores when you go to Whole Foods you see all these human literate you know humanely raised certified dad certified this you know grass-fed organic and all this marketing labelings that are meant to make consumers feel better about choices but they make little to no difference in animals lives it's almost like they're apologizing or something yeah and the the problem is I I have no problem with reducing suffering as much as we can but the problem with this way of thinking is we are not thinking about secondary effects so yes on the surface it looks like a little more room for for chickens it's better for a lot of chickens and I agree with that but the problem is it gives people this false sense that you know it's okay to eat these animals because they were treated humanely Industries know that and that's why they label everything now cage-free grass-fed humanly raised now is there you said I think one time you're working on a documentary or something yeah I'm working on a documentary on alternatives to animal testing yeah is that something we could expect anytime soon uh probably in a year or two cool how can people follow you maybe learn more about that when it's about to come out and whatnot you have like an Instagram or Facebook yes it's just Facebook Instagram uh Twitter and YouTube it's all my name Dr Frost harsini and you have a quote you want to share real quick I guess one of my favorite quotes is Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere so we have to realize that what's happening to animals is Injustice and as such it deserves to be treated just like any other form of Injustice and once we realized that we we see that the common groups of all kinds of Oppression in humans and animals goes down to basically operation of humans every time we oppress other people it's because we are focusing on our differences humans of course are different right we have different colors different races but our differences are not morally relevant to the way that we should be treated and every time that we focus on our differences that's what led to racism sexism homophobia and all of that and that's exactly how people justify harming animals because they say oh we are different these are just animals this is exactly how we Justified mass murders of people because we call them oh those are just animals so that's a very very dark territory when we when we go there when we focus on our differences and I always say animal rights doesn't mean that we are equal to other animals of course we are not I think that's one of the big big problems because when you say animal rights people you know people say oh you know we are we are smarter maybe yeah sure but our differences are not morally relevant to the way that these animals should be treated the only thing that matters is that the only relevant question is will they suffer will they feel pain if you stab me it hurts if you stab an animal it hurts the question is not who suffers more I don't say maybe a human suffers more maybe an animal suffers more the question is not it's not a competition who suffers more the question is do they suffer I think anyone who's not pretty much 100 ignorant can admit that yes they do suffer and the question is if you can be healthy if you can be strong and happy without hurting these animals why not the one thing about that real quick you know some people might say well I eat grass-fed and they're they live a good life or you know I hunt I only eat meat I hunt at the end of the day though it's unsustainable which means it inevitably leads to to abuse because not everybody can eat grass-fed not everybody can eat the meat you hunted yeah absolutely first of all a lot of times when people say oh don't worry I just hunt that's like a deflection because you ask them what did you have for lunch they went to McDonald's right they make it sound like they're literally living in a jungle and their hunt for breakfast lunch dinner first of all that's that's a tactic that they use to distract you to distract the conversation from factory farming and eating animals to this hypothetical that probably happens once a year or whatever and even then you know you're killing an animal living naturally and if the animal is having a happy life then you are taking a happy life so that's in a way even worse than taking a miserable life and then even what if it was a mother of a executive or yeah exactly so these animals still have a social life so you kill a mother you kill a father maybe the children are waiting for that um you know parents to come home even let's say it's just like a single uh you know old deer just walking around happily if you like your bodily autonomy if it's wrong to kill you without pain and then it's wrong to kill that animal for nothing if it's a matter of survival that's a different story but for you to take away another animal's life for any reason just because you like the taste that's that's wrong and I just say this when people say the footage you're showing here you know the animal slaughtering factory farming whatever is wrong we just have to do it more humanely I generally ask people Define humane first of all they can so I have to explain them explain to them that Humane means Act of compassion Humane means act of kindness an example of killing an animal humanity is when you put down a dog who's sick and old because you do that because of them for them because you want to try to be kind and compassionate to them when you kill an animal because you like the way they taste under your teeth that's selfish and as such it can never be compassionate a lot of people say oh if you do it painlessly it's okay and I try to make this comparison I say it sounds like you want to do something that is inherently wrong in a good way and that just doesn't work for instance if I kill someone and like torture them and then kill them it's really bad but if I drug them so they don't suffer and kill them it's less bad but it's still wrong right so if I go to a court and I say hey you know they didn't suffer they're not just going to let me out just because they didn't suffer I still did something wrong and a very good way to approach that is to ask people why do you want these animals not to suffer if you care they say because they care right so if you care about them wouldn't be the best solution be not to eat them to begin with so when they think about like Humane that means that there are compassionate people but they still like the taste they're still looking at animals as food so it's our job to make sure that they can change their perspective the same way that they don't see a dog as food and it's never an option to eat a dog we have to do the same thing for these animals so the way that I change people's perspective on how they view animals is by asking them a couple of questions the first question I ask is do you think this is Injustice and most people say yes the second question I ask is the solutions that you're telling me humanely raised meat maybe reducing meat consumption or whatever would you use these solutions for any other form of Oppression like if I was beating my child would would you accept if I just beat my child you know two days a week instead of every day they say no and I asked him if you were being abused if someone was abusing you how urgently would you want them to stop would you want them to stop immediately or would you want them to take baby steps they say immediately right so somehow when it comes to animals they say okay yeah you're right I'm gonna think about it maybe I reduce I don't see it in myself to quit I asked them if it was you would you want it to stop immediately they say yes and lastly I ask them when they say going vegan is hard you have two ways to approach this you can either you know take three hours to to explain that oh there is Beyond Burger there is this and then they say Vegan cheese sucks and then you have to say you have to try it more Brands and or you can just say do you think it's harder for you to go vegan or do you think it's harder for this animal to go through that these three questions are troll free everyone who is not like an absolute troll with you know just a little honesty would say it's harder for the for the animal so that's how you change their perspective and once they don't see these animals as food then figuring out how becomes really easy what else do you do and and explain where we're at today okay I do a bunch of different things so my job is bioprocessing senior scientists at the good food Institute so I work on cultivated meat and to that I say I have no problem with meat itself I have problem with suffering so if you can't have that meat without causing suffering eat whatever you want so that's my daily job I also have a non-profit called Allied Scholars for animal protection so I noticed that animal advocacy in universities is very ineffective and unsustainable so that's the problem that I'm trying to address so I Empower student Advocates to advocate for humans and non-human animals alike and I give them the support and everything they need so that they can have a sustainable animal advocacy student group in universities and is there a website for that yes it's called alliedscholars.org and where are we at today we are at animal and vegan advocacy Summit in Washington DC cool and I appreciate it man fantastic I'm honored

Channel: VeganLinked

Views: 36,484

Keywords: vegan, VeganLinked, Vegan Linked

Id: xlesTNhZk5Q

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023