Community
Print
Vegan bodybuilder Niamai Delgado – who will appear in upcoming film The Game Changers– is the latest big name to appear on the Plant Based News podcast.
During the interview with PBN Co-founder Robbie Lockie, Delgado revealed that he’s never eaten meat, and talks about the physique he biult without the use of steroids. According to the athlete, both of his parents – who he describes as ‘amazing’ – are converted Hindus who raised him as a lacto-vegetarian.
“I was raised with a strong sense of compassion,” he says. “Growing up, my diet has always been about 95 percent vegan, with the exception of dairy products.”
Vegan journey
He describes his consumption of dairy products when he was younger as ‘flexible morality’.
“I never saw anything wrong with it,” he says. “I justified it to myself by saying these dairy cows are not being killed – they’re just being milked. I grew up on a farm that had cows on it, and I saw them getting milked, and the milk those cows produced was used in the community to make cheese and curd and things like that, so it was a different perspective on things.”
“But fast-forward to 2015, I was 25, and working as a corporate engineer at the time – my background is mechanical engineering. My role was to optimize processes – basically to cut costs and increase profit margins.”
The horrors of dairy
Around this time, Delgado’s mother shared a video of what happened behind the scenes within the dairy industry. While he connected with the cows, he also noticed the high level of machinery involved in the dairy process.
“It hit me that this is all mechanical systems that can be optimized, and in reality, there’s a guy, that’s just like me, working for the dairy industry that is working to optimize their systems, to increase their profit margins at the expense of these animals. And it really hit me…I was supporting this industry…I wasn’t going to support it anymore…I cut dairy from my diet that day.”
You can listen to the full podcast here
