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Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat
- bethekidyouwant 1y ago25% of people are anaemic
- chneu 1y agoLess than 7% of Americans eat enough fiber.
- baggy_trough 1y agoBetter from the perspective of carbon emissions, but that isn't everything.
- wyre 1y agoTaste, convenience, or tradition? Am I missing any other reasons? Either way, I think those aren’t great reasons for a lot of people, especially the general user of this site.
- ovligatecarn 1y agoHave you considered health? Pseudovegetarianism is not amenable to all phenotypes.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoI’m actually very interested in this if you have any research to link. I have close friends who went vegan for years and tell me their body seemed to need meat so strongly they went back to it, but obviously many people can be vegan for long periods just fine. So I have become curious what scientific research about the former type of person reveals.
- ovligatecarn 1y ago> Several of the genes associated with vegetarianism, including TMEM241, NPC1, and RMC1, have important functions in lipid metabolism and brain function, raising the possibility that differences in lipid metabolism and their effects on the brain may underlie the ability to subsist on a vegetarian diet. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291305 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- ada1981 1y agoVegan 25 years. If you "crave" animal products, it's simply that you have a nutrient you need that your body only associates with an animal product. But you can just figure out what it actually is you need and then add that in other ways. I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health, I've just never seen it. Also, the idea veganism is extreme is wild. Eating plants and fruit vs. paying someone to essentially torture animals that you'd keep as pets and love in a different context... that is extreme.
- doctordemen 1y agoVitamin B12 being synthesized exclusively by animals should be an indication that > I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health might not be the most accurate position to hold.
- kartoffelmos 1y agoAnimals don't synthesise B12, bacteria does. Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil. Industrial farming often require B12 to be added to animal feed as a supplement as they don't graze (as much). Give this a second thought: humans don't synthesise B12 either.
- doctordemen 1y ago> Animals don't synthesise B12, bacteria does. Yes, that's technically correct. > Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil. No. Animals provide a hospitable environment (gut) for said bacteria to exist and synthesize. So while technically the animal's cells are not the ones directly synthesizing B12, the bacteria and animal gut are working in harmony to do so. These facts are tangential to my point. The commenter I responded to said that people don't need to eat animal products to live at optimal health, which is laughable, and this is an incredibly clear example of why. A quick google search will illuminate the dangers of B12 deficiency. And one more thing to consider, if humans coevolved with the animals they eat, how can we be so certain that simply supplementing a few vitamins found in animal products is a sufficient replacement? We hardly understand human metabolism at its most basic level, it's quite a stretch to think that we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients we would have received from consuming animals.
- baggy_trough 1y agoWhy wouldn't they be? Quite a claim.
- dehrmann 1y agoPlants are almost always more sustainable because they cut out the middle man in calorie production. It takes less land to grow food for a human than to grow enough food for enough pigs for a human.
- spacephysics 1y agoThis assumes the same bioavailability with plants and micro/macro nutrient parity between plants and meat products which is not true. You would need exogenous supplementation for parity.
- strken 1y agoThere are exceptions to this. Marginal land can't be used for crops but can support cattle, the permaculture people use animals for various purposes that help them grow plants more efficiently, pigs have traditionally been fed waste that would go to compost today (and are thus somewhat more efficient than just feeding the pig something you grew), diverting existing waste products like whey or mechanically reclaimed meat can be more efficient than growing new plants, etc.
- chneu 1y agoThere's an already large and growing body of research that shows cows are even bad for "marginal land". I work in the western US where we have a lot of desert grassland where cattle graze. We've seen a huge uptick in invasive grasses and wildfires as a result. Cows also consume what limited resources are available. Water, calories, etc. Ranchers also want to exterminate several predator species that do a ton of good for the ecosystem. Wolves, bears, coyotes, etc. Look at yellowstone for a clear example. I remember at a talk a few years ago a researcher estimated that cows are responsible for at least 30 animal extinctions in the western US. Things like reptiles, birds, etc. There are several listed species right now that list cows/ranching as their main threat. So this marginal land still suffers and putting cows on it winds up hurting us in the long run. The land is always healthier without cows on it. They are invasive.
- strken 1y ago
- Calwestjobs 1y agoCarbon was chosen as indicator of energy use. Rightly so. If you give it superpowers it is on you. So use it as just indicator of energy use and you will have less problems with it. No carbon is not everything. For example who cares about carbon when you can grow all food with same energetic and nutritional value on 3-10 times less area. that means less labor, less machinery, less storage, less fertilizers, less processing.... You can even grow additional plants to act as "fertilizer" for next crop... and still use less land than land needed to feed cows to feed you. Just how many people are employed in extremely low wage jobs like processing, sorting, butchering poultry. or look up on youtube how involved is to cut beef into final products, people have their bones in their hands crooked from all the work, not even talking about work injuries, they can not work until pension/retirement in that industry. so why not use them in better jobs instead from start, for whole of their career. Meat markets were suspected with helping the transfer of disease from one type of animal to another species... There is 10s - 100s of MILLIONS of poultry dispatched because of avian flu in europe every year, for last 20 + years. China alone experienced the culling or death of around 225 million pigs due to ASF from 2018-19. foot-and-mouth back in europe this year too, etc, etc. yes carbon is not everything.
- canadiantim 1y ago[flagged]
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- ada1981 1y agoIncorrect. Less cancer and heart disease when eating plant based diets. But the marketing is powerful!
- Calwestjobs 1y agoless cancer in current situation where US has 30% of people drinking water with lead pipes / lead solder in waterworks ? Or google what everything was dumped nilly willy into EPA Superfunds, or atomic tests in nevada with fallout on most of US citizens.. lesss cancer is nonsense. you get cancer from everything you touch these days, what you eat is no issue, because that is one thing which is actually tested... less heart disease - you drink carrot shakes while you exercise vs you eat steaks while you sit behind table...
- const_cast 1y ago> you get cancer from everything you touch these days, what you eat is no issue Nonsense, processed red meats are the same group of carcinogen as Tobacco and Alcohol. That is to say, the most carcinogenic substances we know of. > less heart disease - you drink carrot shakes while you exercise vs you eat steaks while you sit behind table... I have no idea what this means, but it's just plainly true that diets high in saturated fats are going to contribute more to obesity, heart disease, liver disease, metabolic syndrome, and some others.
- epistasis 1y agoFor people in the US, food emissions are almost a rounding error compared to other categories, such as transportation. Both cars and meat are huge cultural lighting rods, and focusing on them for climate action has high risk, but focusing on meat as climate action is high risk with very few climate gains.
- deepsun 1y agoAny data to support it? I've heard cows emit methane, way more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. And there are a lot of cows, especially in India. But I don't know the numbers.
- epistasis 1y agoThere are two types of climate inventories that account for emissions either at time of production or time of consumption. Production-based inventories are easier to measure, but consumption-based inventories can be more informative for individual consumers. I'm mostly familiar with California-centric inventories because I want to influence state and local policies. California State's inventory: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data There used to be really great consumption-based maps at this site, but I'm not finding them at the moment. Instead here is a per-city breakdown of estimates: https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/inventory https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/inventory One thing that takes a very long time to change is transportation. City planning is pretty ossified. Cars have multi-decade lifespans. So starting the change for transportation is a very very urgent need. Diet is far more flexible, and there are innovations such as specific types of algae added to cows' diets that drastically reduce methane emissions. Changing the diet of cows is a far faster change than replacing every consumer's vehicle with a clean one. The history of environmental action shows that it's very easy to regulate and bring business in line. It when it comes to consumers, it's far far trickier. Tackling meat, which is a quarter of the emissions of the diet of folks, may need to happen eventually but it will have far less impact than legalizing apartments in dense urban cores and allowing people to live without cars.
- Maxatar 1y agoBeef alone accounts for 6% of greenhouse gas emissions with livestock in total accounting for 14.5%. That is not a rounding error by any means: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492bb0b2-8b73-4e49-b188-8176b1d8c711/content https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492...
- zvmaz 1y agoLess meat means less sentient beings suffering.
- hiuyty 1y ago[dead]
- chneu 1y agoIt also means less resources used which benefits everyone. It also means healthier people which benefits everyone.
- spwa4 1y agoReally? The problem with this argument is that if you go look at communities where the least resources are used, to put it very mildly, you will not find happy people. Or even healthy people. We are still in the situation that even though specific uses of resources might look wasteful, nobody has trouble coming up with good uses for more resources, even in the world's richest places. Building housing. Fighting disease. Transportation. Less resources means taking those things away from the level they're at right now.
- throwaway422432 1y agoThe land cattle is often raised on is unsuitable for anything else. Poor soil, unpredictable rainfall that can fluctuate between drought and flooding. Some Australian outback cattle stations may cover millions of hectares, but you're not going to be able to grow anything else out there: too hot and little water and unlike cattle you can't move your pea farm to where the water is. I would agree that land-clearing (cutting down forests) to raise cattle is unacceptable, as are the use of feed-lots, but I would disagree that we need to eat less meat, and I would personally never give up my grass-fed organic beef.
- rich_sasha 1y agoThe usual counter is that even then, afforestation is better than grazing lands. And that's a CO2 sink. I don't know specifically about the land down under.
- throwaway422432 1y agoWe try and preserve forests and tree lines to counter erosion and salinity, better for raising cattle in the long term.
- Snow_Falls 1y agoJust because that land is there doesn't mean we need to have cows on it though. Also don't forget that the methane porduced by cow herds also contributes to climate change. If we don't raise cows on land that could sustain crops or use that land to produce animal feed, that would necessarily mean there will be less meat to eat. We would in fact need to reduce our meat consumption to account for this. Surely you can see you're contradicting yourself by saying we don't neede to eat less meat but also shouldn't use feed-lots?
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- throwaway422432 1y ago
- goldforever 1y ago[dead]
- gb12345 1y ago[flagged]
- uslic001 1y agoAs a gastroenterologist for over 30 years the healthiest patients I see are either on carnivore or paleo diet. The sickest patients are the vegans. This article does not agree with my experience.