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There are no healthy cheap and safe alternatives to meat.

by 6d6b73 5y ago

arglebarglegar 5y ago
ehh, I don’t eat meat and it only takes slightly more effort to get enough protein. There are entire cultures that do it
Retric 5y ago
The issue here is cows and their digestive system. Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef. > There are no healthy cheapand safe alternatives to meat. There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets. I love Meat, it’s tasty and delicious, but it’s very much a luxury.
- 6d6b73 5y ago
  Steak vs chicken breast? That's not an alternative not only from the taste stand point but also nutrionally.
  - timeon 5y ago
    Nutritionally it is more than good enough.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Please enlighten us, what’s missing nutritionally in chicken that you can find in steak?
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Lots of delicious saturated fat, for one.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Eating a Chicken drumstick is more nutritious and healthier than a steak. That connective tissue is good for you. Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you. That said their both missing vitamin C [edit: after cooking], so you need a more diverse diet anyway.
    - wyager 5y ago
      > Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you. If your nutritional understanding is at the level of “fat and cholesterol are bad” you should not be giving dietary advice. You appear to be approaching this from a USDA-poster style of nutritional reasoning (please do not do this), so I’ll make two heuristic arguments: Why do you think, everywhere in the world except where there are social taboos on beef, poor people who eat chicken will preferentially switch to beef consumption when their standard of living improves enough to permit it? Is the peptide and vitamin distribution of human flesh closer to that of a cow, or that of a chicken?
      - Retric 5y ago
        The human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals. People may for example need on the order of μg/day of Bromine, Arsenic, Nickel, Fluorine, Boron, Lithium, Strontium, Silicon and Vanadium based on organic compounds containing them, but the need is slow low their plentiful in any reasonable diet. So sure, if you where building a food synthesizer from inorganic compounds then nutrition is quite complex, but in terms of diets people generally self regulate quite well with cravings often occurring should a deficiency develop. Start looking for what’s not either sufficiently plentiful in most foods or synthesized by the body and you end up with a rather short list. Vitamin C is mainly an issue because it’s destroyed by cooking, and even then people can literally go months without developing systems even with zero vitamin C. Thiamine is another one that became an issue when people started eating a lot of white rice, but again it’s food prep not the plant that’s the issue. Many arguments around optimal diets exist, but the original quote was safety not say Olympic athletes. So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet, no there isn’t a significant nutritional benefit to beef over chicken. > switch to beef Because beef is tasty. It’s the same reason people don’t need to be convinced to eat chocolate.
- wyager 5y ago
  > Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef. This is completely 100% incorrect. Chicken is so nutritionally deficient relative to beef that it might as well be a vegetable. > There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets “Cheaply”, yes, “safely” not so much. Vegetarian populations tend to be have stunted growth, have worse dentition, etc. compared to populations who eat a diet based on ruminants, fish, etc. Additionally, dietary requirements are not fungible across the human population. People whose ancestors come from different evolutionary environments will be tuned for different food sources. Lactose tolerance is probably the most well known example. A priori, all of my pre-agricultural ancestors must have had a diet completely incompatible with vegetarianism, so it’s not surprising that people of my background who go vegetarian tend to exhibit metabolic problems. Note that I am not comparing vegetarianism to the standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian already. Switching from SAD to a generic vegetarian diet might simply have the positive effect of reducing the amount of weird slop people consume. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at-calorie-sources-in-the-american-diet https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at...
  - Retric 5y ago
    Vegetarian populations have different deficiencies than other populations but overall they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds.
    - wyager 5y ago
      > they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds Even if this is true, it’s tremendously misleading because (globally) vegetarian populations tend to be quite poor.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        To the extent that’s true, it also demonstrates the false causality in your own claim: poverty, not the absence of meat per se, is the cause of all the things you’re blaming vegetarian diets for.
- jcfrei 5y ago
  It's not a luxury at all in some regions. In higher altitudes for example where warm weather cycles are too short to grow a lot of crops (other than some type of grass) keeping livestock (for meat, eggs, milk) is essential for survival.
  - yboris 5y ago
    It's frustrating to see arguments devolve into this kind of thing. It's almost surely the case we are discussing developed nations like the US (one of the largest consumers of meat), not some remote village in a developing nation. Sure there might be remote places with no access to the world market. Sure there might be some people whose health doesn't allow removal of meat. But on the grand-scale of the US and other developed economies, we can reduce meat consumption by 90% without any negative effects (in fact, we'll improve average health by a lot).
CyanBird 5y ago
I mean, there are, but what's even more important than going vegan bc that's not feasible for everybody right now, is to reduce total meat consumption as much as possible, rather than these token "1 day a week without meat" it ought to be the other way around, 1 or 2 days a week with meat, other days eating tasty well cooked and seasoned food, lentils different types of beans, rice, soups, maybe add these small cubes of "chicken flavorant" in there too which are made with left overs of poultry production and don't directly contribute that much to the agro industry
yboris 5y ago
Beans and rice, for example, are cheaper and healthier than meat. Just about any vegetable you can pick up is healthier than meat.
lucidguppy 5y ago
Looking at plants and beans... ... you sure about that? What did the Okinawans get most of their calories from? Sweet potatoes.. how much animal protein in their diet? 3 percent https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living-100/# https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living... If you eat enough calories per day from real plant foods - getting protein deficiency is impossible.

There are no healthy cheap and safe alternatives to meat.

by 6d6b73 5y ago

There are no healthy cheap and safe alternatives to meat.

ehh, I don’t eat meat and it only takes slightly more effort to get enough protein. There are entire cultures that do it

Retric 5y ago

The issue here is cows and their digestive system. Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef. > There are no healthy cheapand safe alternatives to meat. There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets. I love Meat, it’s tasty and delicious, but it’s very much a luxury.

6d6b73 5y ago
Steak vs chicken breast? That's not an alternative not only from the taste stand point but also nutrionally.
- timeon 5y ago
  Nutritionally it is more than good enough.
- nindalf 5y ago
  Please enlighten us, what’s missing nutritionally in chicken that you can find in steak?
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Lots of delicious saturated fat, for one.
- Retric 5y ago
  Eating a Chicken drumstick is more nutritious and healthier than a steak. That connective tissue is good for you. Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you. That said their both missing vitamin C [edit: after cooking], so you need a more diverse diet anyway.
  - wyager 5y ago
    > Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you. If your nutritional understanding is at the level of “fat and cholesterol are bad” you should not be giving dietary advice. You appear to be approaching this from a USDA-poster style of nutritional reasoning (please do not do this), so I’ll make two heuristic arguments: Why do you think, everywhere in the world except where there are social taboos on beef, poor people who eat chicken will preferentially switch to beef consumption when their standard of living improves enough to permit it? Is the peptide and vitamin distribution of human flesh closer to that of a cow, or that of a chicken?
    - Retric 5y ago
      The human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals. People may for example need on the order of μg/day of Bromine, Arsenic, Nickel, Fluorine, Boron, Lithium, Strontium, Silicon and Vanadium based on organic compounds containing them, but the need is slow low their plentiful in any reasonable diet. So sure, if you where building a food synthesizer from inorganic compounds then nutrition is quite complex, but in terms of diets people generally self regulate quite well with cravings often occurring should a deficiency develop. Start looking for what’s not either sufficiently plentiful in most foods or synthesized by the body and you end up with a rather short list. Vitamin C is mainly an issue because it’s destroyed by cooking, and even then people can literally go months without developing systems even with zero vitamin C. Thiamine is another one that became an issue when people started eating a lot of white rice, but again it’s food prep not the plant that’s the issue. Many arguments around optimal diets exist, but the original quote was safety not say Olympic athletes. So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet, no there isn’t a significant nutritional benefit to beef over chicken. > switch to beef Because beef is tasty. It’s the same reason people don’t need to be convinced to eat chocolate.
wyager 5y ago
> Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef. This is completely 100% incorrect. Chicken is so nutritionally deficient relative to beef that it might as well be a vegetable. > There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets “Cheaply”, yes, “safely” not so much. Vegetarian populations tend to be have stunted growth, have worse dentition, etc. compared to populations who eat a diet based on ruminants, fish, etc. Additionally, dietary requirements are not fungible across the human population. People whose ancestors come from different evolutionary environments will be tuned for different food sources. Lactose tolerance is probably the most well known example. A priori, all of my pre-agricultural ancestors must have had a diet completely incompatible with vegetarianism, so it’s not surprising that people of my background who go vegetarian tend to exhibit metabolic problems. Note that I am not comparing vegetarianism to the standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian already. Switching from SAD to a generic vegetarian diet might simply have the positive effect of reducing the amount of weird slop people consume. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at-calorie-sources-in-the-american-diet https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at...
- Retric 5y ago
  Vegetarian populations have different deficiencies than other populations but overall they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds.
  - wyager 5y ago
    > they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds Even if this is true, it’s tremendously misleading because (globally) vegetarian populations tend to be quite poor.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      To the extent that’s true, it also demonstrates the false causality in your own claim: poverty, not the absence of meat per se, is the cause of all the things you’re blaming vegetarian diets for.
jcfrei 5y ago
It's not a luxury at all in some regions. In higher altitudes for example where warm weather cycles are too short to grow a lot of crops (other than some type of grass) keeping livestock (for meat, eggs, milk) is essential for survival.
- yboris 5y ago
  It's frustrating to see arguments devolve into this kind of thing. It's almost surely the case we are discussing developed nations like the US (one of the largest consumers of meat), not some remote village in a developing nation. Sure there might be remote places with no access to the world market. Sure there might be some people whose health doesn't allow removal of meat. But on the grand-scale of the US and other developed economies, we can reduce meat consumption by 90% without any negative effects (in fact, we'll improve average health by a lot).

CyanBird 5y ago

I mean, there are, but what's even more important than going vegan bc that's not feasible for everybody right now, is to reduce total meat consumption as much as possible, rather than these token "1 day a week without meat" it ought to be the other way around, 1 or 2 days a week with meat, other days eating tasty well cooked and seasoned food, lentils different types of beans, rice, soups, maybe add these small cubes of "chicken flavorant" in there too which are made with left overs of poultry production and don't directly contribute that much to the agro industry

yboris 5y ago

Beans and rice, for example, are cheaper and healthier than meat. Just about any vegetable you can pick up is healthier than meat.

lucidguppy 5y ago

Looking at plants and beans... ... you sure about that? What did the Okinawans get most of their calories from? Sweet potatoes.. how much animal protein in their diet? 3 percent https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living-100/# https://www.bluezones.com/2017/05/okinawa-diet-eating-living... If you eat enough calories per day from real plant foods - getting protein deficiency is impossible.