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I am vegetarian but try to stay on the vegan side whenever I can and avoid eggs quite diligently. But note the article you responded to is about both so the que

I am vegetarian but try to stay on the vegan side whenever I can and avoid eggs quite diligently. But note the article you responded to is about both so the question is irrelevant. What strikes me however is that you very selectively respond to a few points, e.g. in my comment the most non-substantial one > As the other commenter points out, a pure meat diet is not sustainable at scale and you'll find plenty of hints that it isn't healthy (eg red meat associated with colon cancer). It requires huge feed input, produces vast amounts of suffering and has a huge climate impact. In other words: even if it were the best choice health-wise (which is rather unlikely as humans are evolved omnivores) it is still an immoral and selfish choice. Even the article quoted by the guardian points out the many higher mortality risks associated with meat eating over a vegetarian diet - so clearly a health choice is not in favour of meat and 100% not in favour of a meat only diet.

jononomo 4y ago
I can't reply to every point that everyone makes -- I've been commenting on this thread for quite a while now. But I'll do my best! In fact, I am so convinced that the carnivore diet would be a panacea for the world if we would just do it at scale that I am thinking of writing a book about it, which I would title "The Carnivore Panacea". The association between red meat and colon cancer is "an association". Note that in nutrition science it is extraordinarily hard to demonstrate "causation" rather than "an association" because to demonstrate causation you would need the kind of double blind, placebo-controlled trials that are basically impossible to administer in this field. Most nutrition science relies on people remembering what they ate last month, or feeding people in a controlled setting for a few days or weeks rather than the few months or years that would be necessary. So, to put it bluntly, I am absolutely certain that eating red meat does not cause colon cancer -- but I am aware that this is a major talking point that has caught hold in the culture. As for the "suffering" that eating meat causes, it is nothing in comparison to the suffering that eating plants causes, so I think eating meat wins easily on that count. Note that some people think that if there are only plants on the plate of food that they are eating from, then this means that no animals were harmed to bring them that plate of food. For these people it is just a matter of pointing out the ecological costs associated with agriculture: * the ten-thousand-acre mono-crop farms the destroy habitats, * the massive quantities of insecticides that kill all the insects * the secondary effect on the bird population that has plummeted due to the insecticide use * the transportation costs (meat is more likely to be local than plant-based food) * the impact on the health care sector (a major contributor to global warming) from the obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease All of the above can all be summed up by picturing the vultures that circle behind those combines on those massive mono-crop farms -- vultures because they can devour all the baby deer and little foxes and ground-nesting birds and little mice that live in the fields and get chewed up by the combine -- because when the harvest time comes, death comes with it.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > I am so convinced that the carnivore diet would be a panacea for the world Are you trying to weaken your argument?
  - jononomo 4y ago
    Not at all - imagine a world without chronic disease, without obesity, and with a 90% reduction in mental health disorders -- and then have the epiphany that the dietary approach leading to this world would also be better for the environment.
- neuralRiot 4y ago
  All those points are invalidated because meat is inefficient, it takes more crops, more water, more pesticides, more “crop deaths” to cultivate food for livestock than for direct consumption. The romanticized picture of the cow pleasantly grazing in an open field is an unsustainable fantasy.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    There were herds of bison on the American plains during the early 1800s that were so large it would take a week for the herd to walk past a campsite. I was reading the memoirs of Ulysses S Grant a couple years ago and he reports that when he was on a military expedition in Texas a couple of decades before the American Civil War, they came across a herd of wild horses that was so large that they could climb to the top of a nearby hill and see the herd stretching from horizon to horizon on either side. My question for you is: what were all these animals eating, since we were not cultivating food for them? Also, why do you think cows don't graze in open fields? Maybe you should take a drive through Lancaster County, PA, sometime. I hear there are cows out west, too.

jononomo 4y ago

I can't reply to every point that everyone makes -- I've been commenting on this thread for quite a while now. But I'll do my best! In fact, I am so convinced that the carnivore diet would be a panacea for the world if we would just do it at scale that I am thinking of writing a book about it, which I would title "The Carnivore Panacea". The association between red meat and colon cancer is "an association". Note that in nutrition science it is extraordinarily hard to demonstrate "causation" rather than "an association" because to demonstrate causation you would need the kind of double blind, placebo-controlled trials that are basically impossible to administer in this field. Most nutrition science relies on people remembering what they ate last month, or feeding people in a controlled setting for a few days or weeks rather than the few months or years that would be necessary. So, to put it bluntly, I am absolutely certain that eating red meat does not cause colon cancer -- but I am aware that this is a major talking point that has caught hold in the culture. As for the "suffering" that eating meat causes, it is nothing in comparison to the suffering that eating plants causes, so I think eating meat wins easily on that count. Note that some people think that if there are only plants on the plate of food that they are eating from, then this means that no animals were harmed to bring them that plate of food. For these people it is just a matter of pointing out the ecological costs associated with agriculture: * the ten-thousand-acre mono-crop farms the destroy habitats, * the massive quantities of insecticides that kill all the insects * the secondary effect on the bird population that has plummeted due to the insecticide use * the transportation costs (meat is more likely to be local than plant-based food) * the impact on the health care sector (a major contributor to global warming) from the obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease All of the above can all be summed up by picturing the vultures that circle behind those combines on those massive mono-crop farms -- vultures because they can devour all the baby deer and little foxes and ground-nesting birds and little mice that live in the fields and get chewed up by the combine -- because when the harvest time comes, death comes with it.

the_only_law 4y ago
> I am so convinced that the carnivore diet would be a panacea for the world Are you trying to weaken your argument?
- jononomo 4y ago
  Not at all - imagine a world without chronic disease, without obesity, and with a 90% reduction in mental health disorders -- and then have the epiphany that the dietary approach leading to this world would also be better for the environment.
neuralRiot 4y ago
All those points are invalidated because meat is inefficient, it takes more crops, more water, more pesticides, more “crop deaths” to cultivate food for livestock than for direct consumption. The romanticized picture of the cow pleasantly grazing in an open field is an unsustainable fantasy.
- jononomo 4y ago
  There were herds of bison on the American plains during the early 1800s that were so large it would take a week for the herd to walk past a campsite. I was reading the memoirs of Ulysses S Grant a couple years ago and he reports that when he was on a military expedition in Texas a couple of decades before the American Civil War, they came across a herd of wild horses that was so large that they could climb to the top of a nearby hill and see the herd stretching from horizon to horizon on either side. My question for you is: what were all these animals eating, since we were not cultivating food for them? Also, why do you think cows don't graze in open fields? Maybe you should take a drive through Lancaster County, PA, sometime. I hear there are cows out west, too.