>>12531619Humans are absolutely designed to eat meat.
Here is a short, non exhaustive list of important nutrients that are not possible to obtain on a vegan diet:
Creatine, carnosine, taurine, EPA, DHA omega-3, haem iron, vitamin B12, vitamin D3
In addition, many nutrients exist in small quantities in plant foods but getting enough of them is unrealistic:
Vitamin B6, Choline, Iron, Zinc
These are just a few from a very short search.
Can you supplement them? Yes, you can. Many vegans supplement some of the above, but very few people will supplement choline, creatine, carnisine or taurine, for example.
The problem with saying "I will just take supplements" is that it is a kind of a whack a mole solution. We don't know everything about nutrition yet. We don't know exactly what nutrients we need. There are probably many nutrients that we need that we don't fully understand yet. A vegan diet is not robust to these deficiencies in our understanding, because humans are designed to eat meat and there are many nutrients we need from meat. A diet consisting of various, unprocessed, natural foods including meat, fish and eggs IS robust to these knowledge deficiencies because it's the diet we were designed to eat.
The ethical argument for veganism is pretty weak. Animals are not intelligent compared to humans. Human concepts like mortality, future orientation, aspirations do not apply to them. Factory farming aside, there's no real reason why an animal living a comfortable life, with better health and food security and a higher life expectancy than in the wild is unethical.
The environmental argument is somewhat valid, but only really for beef and even then, it's pretty small compared to transportation (10% of emissions from agriculture afaik, maybe if everyone went vegan that would drop to 5% - pretty inconsequential)
