I didn't say vegans CAN avoid all those substances you mentioned. I said they avoid meat and dairy because they DO have those substances. Should they eat nothing because those substances are in everything?
The standard American diet has brought us to, roughly, 30 percent of us being obese and/or diabetic from being fat ... and yet you decry a different way of eating.
I get it, you disagree. Fine. I'm agnostic one way or another. But the way we are eating now is making us sick. Let other people eat a different way. It's no skin off your ass.
I didn't know that vegans don't consume sugar.
Some of the most harmful things a person can ingest are embraced as "vegan". Plant based "milk", fruit smoothies, energy bars, fruit yogurt, coconut sugar, brown rice syrup, plant-based margarine, rice cakes, dried raisins, sports drinks, and breakfast cereal will make you obese where meat will not. I've seen vegan salads with 1,400 calories per serving.
I call it industrial food. Maybe that’s not original, I do not know.
Unless you grow it yourself, or shop form a local farmer where you know how they raise the the animals or grow the plants, you are getting food where they try to maximize the yield per acre, reduce spoilage, grow the livestock quickly, feed it cheaply, confine it, mass produced everything...
The assembly line and modern chemistry have done a lot of good, and there is a benefit for them in food production. But we have taken it to the point where we sacrifice quality (how healthy food is) by ONLY focusing on how it tastes, looks and cutting every cent possible in its production, storage, and logistics.
That said, all you’re doing is pretending that GMO food that is grown using fertilizers in depleted soil, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, homogenized, pasteurized and irradiated, that has been cooked and canned where many of the vitamins and minerals have been washed out, is somehow better than food where they feed the animals antibiotics, hormones, give them weird things to eat, don’t let them move around and keep them in the dark.
The only way to get away from “industrial food” is to avoid Cargill, Monsanto, Tyson, Frito Lay, Kraft, Nestle, Unilevel, PepsiCo, Danone, BASF, Archer Daniels, Bunge who produce EVERYTHING that you see in a main stream grocery store.
If you shop in a grocery store, the best you can hope for is something a little less bad, something mass produced and in a green package that is marketed to the health conscious, costs twice as much, but is still not of the highest quality (health and nutrition).
That’s just MHO