- [Bearded man] What about the animals,
what do you think they think about that John?
- You know I tried asking them but they didn't reply so,
I never really weighed my opinions based on Dr. Gregor.
And I always found him a little bit too arrogant
after looking into the Dietetics Association,
corporate ties, all these different corruptions
that are going on.
(whistling clicks)
- Hey everybody, this is Klaus from Plant Based News.
So you probably heard the news recently that John Venus
has quit veganism, he's a bodybuilder and I found some
of his claims rather interesting
and we're gonna look into them one by one.
I hope you enjoy.
(slow acoustic music)
- Like I would say the bad part of veganism
is not like a religion, it's more like a cult
where people operate out of manipulation and lies
and just trying to keep people in by shaming
and threats and that kind of stuff.
A lot of people allow their points of view to become
more important than family, than anything in the world.
Right and unless someone is willing to say
that you're right and you're 100% correct
and we're wrong, then you're not gonna hang out with them.
And I think that's just a extreme mindset
that a lot of people have.
- Okay, this is from a livestream that John did
of an anti vegan contrasting,
I think we all agree that there is always gonna be vocal
over the top people from all groups
including the vegan community,
but it's not just from veganism it's from every group
I've ever seen of a niche like the Carnival Movement
or a mainstream movement.
(slow acoustic music)
- You take a study and you use that study to come
to conclusion, but then another person with a whole another
opinion will take that same exact study and come to like
the opposite conclusion to someone else.
- So clearly John had major doubts about nutrition science,
and this is one of the things that underpinned his reason
for discontinuing the vegan diet, but I think if you throw
away YouTuber opinion and you throw away a tabloid
journalist opinion and you only focus in on what the experts
are saying on nutrition, the people that can correctly
interpret studies, when you look at the correlation
based data, like the Chinese study, when you look
at the clinical trials show that you can reverse
and prevent some of the biggest killers,
when you look at some of the mechanistic data,
when you look at some of the kind of common sense
anatomical data, everybody agrees that
if you head into the plant based direction
eat predominantly plant based vegan,
you're gonna be healthier if you do it right.
(slow acoustic music)
- I truly believed it for the last four years,
I think the last year I've been questioning a lot of things,
but for the vast majority of the time that I was vegan,
I really actually believed that it was optimal
for human health, because that is what we're being sold,
big organizations like the American Dietetics Association,
all that mixed together makes it extremely easy
to just believe 100% that you are doing the right thing.
After looking into the Dietetics Association,
corporate ties, all these different corruptions
that are going on.
- John here is implying that organizations
are selling us a lie.
Let's look at the list of sponsors
of the American Dietetic Association.
And just so you don't get confused, it's changed its name
to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Those are hardly what you're looking at now,
pro vegan sponsors.
What would they have to gain by supporting a vegan diet
if it wasn't actually healthy?
Yet this organization gives full support to plant based
diets, and they're not the only health group
even the Canadian Pediatric Society agrees,
and so does the Italian Society of Human Nutrition
and the British Dietetic Association.
So basically health organizations from all over the world
are in support of plant based nutrition.
Obviously it needs to be done correctly
and they stipulate this in the wording.
But the point is John, it's not a conspiracy.
(slow acoustic music)
- I'd made up my mind to really go for it and find as much
evidence as I could with the help of vegan doctors,
vegan experts and all these people who like everyone's
telling me to go to help for, like I was in contact
with a lot of them to get all the research that we have
available in the literature for raising vegan kids
and just veganism for children.
- Yeah.
- And the amount of papers published and the equality
of those papers published are extremely poor.
- As we heard John claims there's virtually no proper
research looking into vegan nutrition for kids and mothers.
If we actually look into the details of the available data,
this is not true and it doesn't marry up
with what John is saying.
For example this study, which says on page 20,
that well balanced, vegetarian and vegan diets
should be considered safe for the mother's health
and for offspring during pregnancy and lactation,
or this study, which says a completely plant based diet
is suitable during pregnancy, lactation, infancy
and childhood provided that it is well-planned,
or this study, which says a vegan and vegetarian diet
in early childhood can provide the same amount of energy
and macronutrients leading to a normal growth
in comparison to omnivorous children.
The take home point is that if the vegan or exclusively
plant-based diet is healthy, it can work.
(slow acoustic music)
- I am not comfortable of dismissing hundreds of thousands
of years, or even millions of years of a certain
eating pattern, and instead do something that requires
supplementation to make possible like B12
because again, I used to think that you can get B12
from the soil and water, and that there is no
scientific evidence for that to be true.
- Okay so let's untangle what John is saying here.
First up humans have evolved predominantly
on plant based foods.
As professor Amanda Henry Per said,
"Plants were the staples, they were the foods
that formed the basis of the calories in most environments."
But because we live in such a strange world
where we have computers, where we have sterile conditions
where the soil is not as rich as it used to be
and all these other different reasons, right,
we run into problems, yes of course we do.
So we need to supplement that's not exclusive to vegans.
B12 is not just a thing that vegans need to supplement
is a problem in meat-eaters
and the cows are supplemented anyway so even if you think
you're getting it from meat,
often it's because of supplementation.
Also vegans should take vitamin D often as well
if they're not getting enough sunlight,
and this is a problem amongst 50% of the global population
vegan or not vegan.
So if the issue is, if you need to supplement a diet
that makes the diet not the right choice,
this is completely nonsensical when it means that
all diets then are not appropriate
if we're following John's logic.
And also John you're taking protein supplements.
So I'm genuinely curious, are you gonna continue
to take those, or are you gonna throw them out the window?
And the other point which I nearly forgot to mention
which is super important is that even babies and toddlers
are recommended to take supplementation,
regardless of what diet they're on.
It's not a vegan versus non-vegan issue
because of the world we live in,
humans including babies need to supplement.
(slow acoustic music)
- I always found him a little bit too arrogant
to actually be able to listen to him so like,
I have never really heard good vibes from him
and I also know people in real life who have met him
in person and apparently, they didn't have many good things
to say either so I've never really kind of weighed
my opinions based on Doctor Gregor or Barnard
or any of these guys who claim that eating a steak
or even a tiny piece of chicken is the same as smoking
a cigarette and telling these people who are eating meat
that they're basically getting a lung cancer
for their diet's choice of eating animal products.
So it's always seemed really farfetched for me,
even as a hardcore vegan myself, I've never really
bought into those claims and what to health
of comparing me to cigarettes and these things.
- Here we hear John dismissing some of the plant based
doctors which is pretty funny.
I find it really really funny the way he's belittling them
with that interpretation of some of the statistics around
eggs and cancer risk and of course John,
nobody's saying that if you smoke 10 cigarettes
or you eat 10 eggs you're gonna die,
but you're misrepresenting the statistical interpretation
of the data that they're doing.
- And I never really watched Doctor Bernard
or Doctor Gregor's interviews because I didn't really like
the way they communicated too much.
They didn't speak to me directly.
But I do remember watching a London Reel episode
with Neil Bernard I think and that was I think
in that episode he was actually comparing cheese
to heroin or maybe it was meat to cigarettes.
I can't remember
exactly what it was-- - Yeah, I think all the above.
All those.
(chuckles)
- Right and multiple times telling Brian Rose,
I think his name is the host of that eating meat is like
extremely dangerous and I just kept thinking of the parents
and just people watching that, listening to that
and feeling bad about giving their kids cigarettes basically
and feeding their children cigarettes and how that could
impact the emotional health and just how people look
at their like actual parenting skills
and that kinda stuff.
- Firstly John is confusing the facts that he had,
secondly he's thinking about parents' feelings,
he's got his priorities mixed up and the general point
I wanna say here is I feel like he's being extremely vague
and he's not being very clear at making a succinct point.
What's he trying to say?
(slow acoustic music)
- That's the thing, right so first of all,
there is no such thing as the science is settled, right?
Like even in physics, even in--
(chuckles)
even when it comes to gravity and these like actual
(chuckles) real equations that we know or people think
that are actual facts and truths, they can be proven
to be wrong and change over time.
- I genuinely don't know what to say here.
I'm really confused.
I think John is saying, because he can never prove anything
100%, there's no point committing to anything
100%, I'm not sure let's move on.
(slow acoustic music)
- I really enjoy shooting in shooting ranges,
I've always like my favorite childhood movie was "Shooter."
So like, just shooting has always been one of my favorite
activities and hobbies and I think I'm pretty good at it
so I think I'm gonna be able to get some clean shots.
Now I've just been taking advantage of our current
situation and eating stuff that I 100% know
that is clean food right so you can see the antlers hanging
on the wall here so my father-in-law and my uncle
and my grandpa and a lot of people around here are hunters
and there's a huge abundance of deer, a little bit
of reindeer, some moose and yeah some,
I don't even know what the English name is
for this other kind of animal that is around here,
but they're kind of roaming like if I drive from this place
from Catherine's parents place to my grandpa's place,
I'm guaranteed to see deer almost every time
like they're always eating grass close to neighborhoods
and stuff like that.
So I can guarantee that that is from the valley here,
I can guarantee that they're just eating real food
instead of like chemically sprayed grains and these things,
and that they were killed in a way that I think
is a good way to go
most of the time-- - Yeah.
right.
- So now here we hear John is fulfilling his childhood dream
of becoming a hunter, and he's gonna become a hunter now
for nutritional reasons and as this upcoming clip shows,
because animals can't tell him not to.
- What about the animals?
What do you think they think about that John?
- Yeah, well, you know, that's, I tried asking them
but they didn't reply so.
(whistling clicks)