3 ms·

The fact that beef is being positioned as “safe” given the massive, massive environmental impact of production - not to mention the fairly compelling direct evi

by dmje 3y ago

The fact that beef is being positioned as “safe” given the massive, massive environmental impact of production - not to mention the fairly compelling direct evidence that red meat is bad for you - is a little hilarious, I’d have thought? Seems like a very obvious threatened industry doing what threatened industries do best…

sofixa 3y ago
> the fairly compelling direct evidence that red meat is bad for you In large quantities*. It's still very nutritious and dense in important stuff like iron, protein, so consumption in limited quantities is OK. Eating 500g of it twice a day is not.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I eat pork steaks fairly regularly. They’re nice because you can make four of them at once and throw them in the fridge for whenever you’re hungry. I eat other things too, but 500g twice a day isn’t too far off from what I sometimes eat. Am I making a mistake? Why or why not? To be clear on the quantity, I just checked my latest pork steak package in our fridge. It’s 4.47 pounds, across four steaks. After cooking it probably reduces to about three pounds. 500g is 1.1 pounds, so that’s about two of the four steaks. And eating two pork steaks over the course of a day isn’t uncommon for me. 500g twice a day would be the entire pack of 4 over the course of a day. I could imagine myself eating that much, but it would feel more along the lines of participating in an eating contest than my usual intake. Is there a scientific way to determine, based on available factual evidence, whether I’m at risk of long term problems from this habit? All in all, I usually order a pack of 4 twice a week, and that’s when I’m only eating pork steaks. I usually get bored and switch to sandwiches, salads, cheeses, and other foods. But again, it’s within a factor of three of your warning level, which prompts me to ask.
  - maigret 3y ago
    A quick search answers that quickly actually. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrition/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrit...
    - barrkel 3y ago
      That article doesn't look to be up to date with respect to meat fat. As far as I can tell, the current bad stuff is trans fats (hydrogenated oils), followed by processed meat (preservation like smoking, nitrates, high salt), followed by some uncertainty, maybe high temperature grilling. Meat fat itself is a mixed bag; some good stuff, some bad stuff, some neutral stuff.
  - gloryjulio 3y ago
    On top of my head, if you have too much protein intake without the back up of working out or exercise, it might post a risk to your kidneys for simply eating too much
  - olnluis 3y ago
    1kg of meat a day is a lot, but it obviously depends on what your diet is and what your body needs. This differs for all of us, so I can't say if you're making a mistake or not. Some people can make do just fine with that but they're usually burning that off or actually consuming the excess protein from post-exercise recovery, even then, 1kg is still a lot. A lot by how much, that depends on your body composition and the fat percentage of those steaks. But anyway, on data: Red meats are classified as <probable carcinogenics> (key: probable). https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can... Quantifying data: "The cancer risk related to the consumption of red meat is more difficult to estimate because the evidence that red meat causes cancer is not as strong. However, if the association of red meat and colorectal cancer were proven to be causal, data from the same studies suggest that the risk of colorectal cancer could increase by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily." What is not clear to me is if this was measured raw or cooked. Cooked meat will shrink and weigh less. If I were you, I would just go get some checkups, see if you got any deficiencies or anything wrong that might be caused by your eating habits, and if not, just keep enjoying your 1kg of pork steak a day... anyway, I'm amazed you can eat that much pork in a single day, lol.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Thank you. 17% cancer risk per 100g daily red meat is an alarming correlation. That’s what I was hoping to find out, so I appreciate it. Is two pork steaks a day really an amazing amount? Usually it’s one (often none), but if I didn’t eat anything else, two is about how many I’d go through. I honestly had no clue it was far outside the norm… Interesting. Ironically I’m half Jewish, so maybe there’s a genetic craving after thousands of years of pork denial. Well, I guess I’ll downshift away from red meats as I push 40. Luckily my other vice is apples (one time I bought so many that the cashier was convinced we were making apple pies, but I told her it’s my standard weekly intake) so the transition won’t be too jarring. Cheers.
      - olnluis 3y ago
        Glad that helped! If it serves as a guideline, the calorie tracking app I use has a default serving suggestion of 100-150g, raw, for different meats. So even 2 servings of those, twice a day, would still be around half of 2 of those steaks, which happens to be about what I eat in a day, between chicken and lean beef. Different things come to mind with the size of those steaks but honestly I would just be assuming things and spouting probable nonsense. If they're packaged raw, I would check if they're heavily injected with water to boost the marketable weight. If it's not cheap meat it's probably not an issue.
  - psiops 3y ago
    The UK's National Health Service advises to eat no more than 70g a day (on average, I assume) to reduce the risks of bowel cancer. So 500g daily seems quite high.
  - kuschku 3y ago
    My father just had a heart attack, caused primarily by red meat and stress (as he's already living very healthy except for these two factors). The current recommendation is down to 50g a day. If we look at how prehistoric humans actually lived, we can take a look at today's remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Most of which eat up to 15% of their daily energy intake as meat. The fossil record shows similar patterns since before the emergence of homo erectus, so we can be reasonably sure that this value is relatively consistent over time. Hunter-gatherers primarily ate meat from small mammals, fish and poultry. If we use the nutrient values of rabbit meat, this would be equivalent to about 200g of meat per day per person, so a rabbit could feed one person for 5 days at least. Realistically, it would be significantly less than that, as most hunter gatherers had access to fish and poultry.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Thank you for this data point, and the specifics about the doctor recommendation. I hope your father is recovering.
arrowsmith 3y ago
Is "red meat" categorically bad for us, or is it merely bad for us in the corrupt, bastardized form that it usually takes in modern diets? I'm no nutritionist, but intuition would suggest that it's actually quite healthy to eat the same animals that humans have been chomping on since the dawn of time. Maybe the problem isn't that we eat cows, it's that we eat mutant freak factory-farmed cows that have been pumped full of hormones, raised on diets of toxic garbage and tortured for most of their short lives? I'm only guessing. With that being said, the thing that concerns me most about lab-grown meat isn't whether it's healthy, it's that if it ever gets popular then it's going to be controlled by a tiny handful of multinational megacorps who'll use it to crush independent food producers worldwide and enforce a brutal centralized control of something as basic to human survival our everyday protein consumption. They're the last people on earth we should trust to keep us healthy and satiated, and their claims that they're doing it for our or the environment's benefit (and not just their own greedy empowerment and profiteering) should be treated with extreme scepticism.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > but intuition would suggest that it's actually quite healthy to eat the same animals that humans have been chomping on since the dawn of time When life expectancy is no more than 40, you don't care about getting cancer at 60. When it's 80+, that's more of a problem. Moreover in traditional societies people have grown-up children long before they get cancer in average, so there's very little selective pressure on that front.
  - slily 3y ago
    I don't know how these myths keep getting regurgitated to this day, but plenty of people lived to old age back when life expectancy was low due to high infant mortality. People in blue zones also ate meat regularly despite some claims to the contrary.
    - pazimzadeh 3y ago
      regularly ≠ often
candiodari 3y ago
If you think this is bad ... then don't look at historically approved medicines. It is easy to kill yourself with aspirin and even easier to do it with paracetamol. By accident I mean. There is no way in hell these would be approved today, but outlawing them because they are dangerous is not up for discussion. Once approved, always approved. Aspirin's approval, specifically, is centuries old.
seoulmetro 3y ago
This may shock you but environmental impact does not directly relate to safety. Unless you're talking about the safety of the species, which no one does. It's not unsafe to walk alone at night because humans will be eradicated. Red meat is not bad for you. Now that's hilarious. Several animals live off red meat alone. They seem to be doing okay. Sounds more like a little person crying that people are doing what they have done for ages. If you want to cry about environmental aspects of red meat, sure, do it. Most agree with that, but don't collate it in with your emotional falsehoods.

by dmje 3y ago

sofixa 3y ago

> the fairly compelling direct evidence that red meat is bad for you In large quantities*. It's still very nutritious and dense in important stuff like iron, protein, so consumption in limited quantities is OK. Eating 500g of it twice a day is not.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
I eat pork steaks fairly regularly. They’re nice because you can make four of them at once and throw them in the fridge for whenever you’re hungry. I eat other things too, but 500g twice a day isn’t too far off from what I sometimes eat. Am I making a mistake? Why or why not? To be clear on the quantity, I just checked my latest pork steak package in our fridge. It’s 4.47 pounds, across four steaks. After cooking it probably reduces to about three pounds. 500g is 1.1 pounds, so that’s about two of the four steaks. And eating two pork steaks over the course of a day isn’t uncommon for me. 500g twice a day would be the entire pack of 4 over the course of a day. I could imagine myself eating that much, but it would feel more along the lines of participating in an eating contest than my usual intake. Is there a scientific way to determine, based on available factual evidence, whether I’m at risk of long term problems from this habit? All in all, I usually order a pack of 4 twice a week, and that’s when I’m only eating pork steaks. I usually get bored and switch to sandwiches, salads, cheeses, and other foods. But again, it’s within a factor of three of your warning level, which prompts me to ask.
- maigret 3y ago
  A quick search answers that quickly actually. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrition/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrit...
  - barrkel 3y ago
    That article doesn't look to be up to date with respect to meat fat. As far as I can tell, the current bad stuff is trans fats (hydrogenated oils), followed by processed meat (preservation like smoking, nitrates, high salt), followed by some uncertainty, maybe high temperature grilling. Meat fat itself is a mixed bag; some good stuff, some bad stuff, some neutral stuff.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  On top of my head, if you have too much protein intake without the back up of working out or exercise, it might post a risk to your kidneys for simply eating too much
- olnluis 3y ago
  1kg of meat a day is a lot, but it obviously depends on what your diet is and what your body needs. This differs for all of us, so I can't say if you're making a mistake or not. Some people can make do just fine with that but they're usually burning that off or actually consuming the excess protein from post-exercise recovery, even then, 1kg is still a lot. A lot by how much, that depends on your body composition and the fat percentage of those steaks. But anyway, on data: Red meats are classified as <probable carcinogenics> (key: probable). https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can... Quantifying data: "The cancer risk related to the consumption of red meat is more difficult to estimate because the evidence that red meat causes cancer is not as strong. However, if the association of red meat and colorectal cancer were proven to be causal, data from the same studies suggest that the risk of colorectal cancer could increase by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily." What is not clear to me is if this was measured raw or cooked. Cooked meat will shrink and weigh less. If I were you, I would just go get some checkups, see if you got any deficiencies or anything wrong that might be caused by your eating habits, and if not, just keep enjoying your 1kg of pork steak a day... anyway, I'm amazed you can eat that much pork in a single day, lol.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Thank you. 17% cancer risk per 100g daily red meat is an alarming correlation. That’s what I was hoping to find out, so I appreciate it. Is two pork steaks a day really an amazing amount? Usually it’s one (often none), but if I didn’t eat anything else, two is about how many I’d go through. I honestly had no clue it was far outside the norm… Interesting. Ironically I’m half Jewish, so maybe there’s a genetic craving after thousands of years of pork denial. Well, I guess I’ll downshift away from red meats as I push 40. Luckily my other vice is apples (one time I bought so many that the cashier was convinced we were making apple pies, but I told her it’s my standard weekly intake) so the transition won’t be too jarring. Cheers.
    - olnluis 3y ago
      Glad that helped! If it serves as a guideline, the calorie tracking app I use has a default serving suggestion of 100-150g, raw, for different meats. So even 2 servings of those, twice a day, would still be around half of 2 of those steaks, which happens to be about what I eat in a day, between chicken and lean beef. Different things come to mind with the size of those steaks but honestly I would just be assuming things and spouting probable nonsense. If they're packaged raw, I would check if they're heavily injected with water to boost the marketable weight. If it's not cheap meat it's probably not an issue.
- psiops 3y ago
  The UK's National Health Service advises to eat no more than 70g a day (on average, I assume) to reduce the risks of bowel cancer. So 500g daily seems quite high.
- kuschku 3y ago
  My father just had a heart attack, caused primarily by red meat and stress (as he's already living very healthy except for these two factors). The current recommendation is down to 50g a day. If we look at how prehistoric humans actually lived, we can take a look at today's remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Most of which eat up to 15% of their daily energy intake as meat. The fossil record shows similar patterns since before the emergence of homo erectus, so we can be reasonably sure that this value is relatively consistent over time. Hunter-gatherers primarily ate meat from small mammals, fish and poultry. If we use the nutrient values of rabbit meat, this would be equivalent to about 200g of meat per day per person, so a rabbit could feed one person for 5 days at least. Realistically, it would be significantly less than that, as most hunter gatherers had access to fish and poultry.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Thank you for this data point, and the specifics about the doctor recommendation. I hope your father is recovering.

arrowsmith 3y ago

Is "red meat" categorically bad for us, or is it merely bad for us in the corrupt, bastardized form that it usually takes in modern diets? I'm no nutritionist, but intuition would suggest that it's actually quite healthy to eat the same animals that humans have been chomping on since the dawn of time. Maybe the problem isn't that we eat cows, it's that we eat mutant freak factory-farmed cows that have been pumped full of hormones, raised on diets of toxic garbage and tortured for most of their short lives? I'm only guessing. With that being said, the thing that concerns me most about lab-grown meat isn't whether it's healthy, it's that if it ever gets popular then it's going to be controlled by a tiny handful of multinational megacorps who'll use it to crush independent food producers worldwide and enforce a brutal centralized control of something as basic to human survival our everyday protein consumption. They're the last people on earth we should trust to keep us healthy and satiated, and their claims that they're doing it for our or the environment's benefit (and not just their own greedy empowerment and profiteering) should be treated with extreme scepticism.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> but intuition would suggest that it's actually quite healthy to eat the same animals that humans have been chomping on since the dawn of time When life expectancy is no more than 40, you don't care about getting cancer at 60. When it's 80+, that's more of a problem. Moreover in traditional societies people have grown-up children long before they get cancer in average, so there's very little selective pressure on that front.
- slily 3y ago
  I don't know how these myths keep getting regurgitated to this day, but plenty of people lived to old age back when life expectancy was low due to high infant mortality. People in blue zones also ate meat regularly despite some claims to the contrary.
  - pazimzadeh 3y ago
    regularly ≠ often

candiodari 3y ago

If you think this is bad ... then don't look at historically approved medicines. It is easy to kill yourself with aspirin and even easier to do it with paracetamol. By accident I mean. There is no way in hell these would be approved today, but outlawing them because they are dangerous is not up for discussion. Once approved, always approved. Aspirin's approval, specifically, is centuries old.

seoulmetro 3y ago

This may shock you but environmental impact does not directly relate to safety. Unless you're talking about the safety of the species, which no one does. It's not unsafe to walk alone at night because humans will be eradicated. Red meat is not bad for you. Now that's hilarious. Several animals live off red meat alone. They seem to be doing okay. Sounds more like a little person crying that people are doing what they have done for ages. If you want to cry about environmental aspects of red meat, sure, do it. Most agree with that, but don't collate it in with your emotional falsehoods.