I'm curious about how much of that is due to the charring that comes from grilling meat, or simply cooking meat to well-done, generating heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
It'd be really hard to do a controlled study on such a thing, though.
"I'm curious about how much of that is due to the charring that comes from grilling meat, or simply cooking meat to well-done, generating heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)."
I'll bet it's much more boring than any of that.
I'll bet it's all about fiber content and gut motility and nothing else.
My country (Slovakia) has the highest proportion of colorectal cancer in the world (together with perhaps South Korea and Hungary). Slovakia and Hungary like cured meats, sausages, bacon and pork. And alcohol. South Korea, well not that many cured meats, but some pork and alcohol. So small fiber content probably has some effect, but curing salts, red meat and alcohol are higher on my list.
It seems like the whole 'bone broth' fad is based in part on realizing that diets 100 years ago had a lot more variety of animal-sourced compounds than we have now, where we have narrowed a lot of our intake to specific cuts of meat. Gout was a rich man's disease, caused by similar conditions.
I'd love to see a study that separated diets where meat is an ingredient from those where meat is the main course.
I keep hearing about organ means and bones and stuff, but there doesn't seem to be all that many studies.
Some organs are full of all kinds of active stuff needed to do their jobs. Seems like eating liver especially(Is that a trend or just one youtuber?) would have some kind of effect, that might or might not be wanted.
I think I'll stick with plants, but it would be great to see some actual science. Everyone just talks about nutrients and assumes more nutrients means more health, without citing anything.
Liver is mostly fat and blood. Except for dogs, their liver contains lots of vitamin A, arctic explorers used to die of vit.A overdose, you can imagine why.
Yeah too much nutrients is not good, also overdosing on iron can be pretty bad as the body can't shed iron, so it accumulates and causes bad stuff.
They talk a lot about how it is identical. I don't think I'd trust it to be health food, although I will put a bit of it in lasagne, just not often anymore because it's expensive.
This really ought to be a crime. They explicitly label it as uncured with no added nitrates and then have a dominant ingredient as a "natural" source of concentrated nitrates to exploit exactly the same chemistry the "cured" bacons have. To the extent that food labels have any legal standing, this is obvious fraud.
Wok and other pan cooking typically doesn't char or burn the contents, but you get the texture and chemical changes from the cooking (and whatever sauces and seasonings you used with it).
Baking vegetables in the oven is super easy and results in very enjoyable food. Obviously how long and at what temp depends on what you're cooking, but it's possible to put zucchini, onion, red/yellow/green peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, etc. in one baking pan with just a drizzle of olive oil and a little salt and get out surprisingly tasty food 30-45min later.
This makes our bill for energy much higher. Warming up whole oven for few pieces of vegetables could be quite expensive. But yes, it is tasty and hearty food.
Gonna echo steaming. The trick is to stop shortly before it's at optimal doneness. Doneness can frequently be assessed by the bright, rich color of the veggies: too raw and they're dull and tough, too cooked and they're gray and mushy.
That's the ticket. A properly cooked sous vide carrot tastes completely different from any other cooking method. All of the nutrients and flavor stays in the carrot. Add in herbs and spices and it will completely transform how you experience vegetables.
Of course you then have to be concerned about your food sitting in warm water in a plastic bag leaching chemicals. Silicone is an option but most people don't do it.
> The vegetarian diets (12) include vegan (eats only plant-based foods but no red meat, poultry, fish, dairy or eggs), pesco-lacto-ovo-vegetarian (eats fish, dairy and eggs without red meat or poultry), lacto-ovo-vegetarian (eats dairy and eggs without red meat, poultry or fish), pesco-vegetarian (eats fish, but no red meat, poultry, dairy or eggs), ovo-vegetarian (eats eggs but no red meat, poultry, fish or dairy), lacto-vegetarian(eats dairy, but no red meat, poultry, fish or eggs) and semi vegetarian (eats dairy, eggs and some red meat, poultry and fish ≥1 time/month but only 1 time/week).
So plant-based diet also includes "eats eggs, dairy, some read meat, poultry, fish".
What's the conclusion?
> The correlation between vegan and other plant-based diets was compared using Z-tests, and the results showed no difference.
IOW: being a vegan or being an omnivore that eats some red meat has no difference in risk.
Oh so more contradictory nutrition and food wankery.
There has been a concerted effort to push this narrative for a while, even before all the "studies". Why don't they ever bother to look into the specifics of what is eaten, not just amounts. Or control for the fact that people eating vegan and veg only, in many cases are much younger health obsessed types to begin with. Who exercise etc. Not to mention looking at the full affects on overall health.
Nobody seems able to explain why an omnivore species would suddenly have a problem with meat.
In the end though, these types of studies always seem to miss or ignore the wider points as well as the full reality of things. We shouldn't be pushing people to endanger their health in order to potentially negligibly lower some rare cancer risks.
Omnivore species? You sure about that one? We're opportunists. Don't believe me? Go ahead, rip into some meat raw with your "canines" and let me know how that one goes.
Our ancestors ate bone marrow because it was the only thing other scavengers didn't know about. We transcend our biology all the time, but I wouldn't point to our modern and obscene meat consumption as a historical constant. Most peasants didn't get the luxury.
Raw steak ground with onions Worcestershire sauce etc.
We are it every Saturday at bars /restaurants.
See also steak tartare, sushi etc.
As a child I remember some old dudes eating fresh smelt right out of the river on smelting runs (catching large numbers of the small fish for freezing for bait etc)
Most peasant died early because of lake of animal food. Reading forgotten book from 18th or 18th century about diet and commoner is full a disease very specific related to their diet, for instance one common disease is pellagre.
Mass démocratisation of meat by end of 19th century to increase meat intake for lower class citizen is highly correlated with increased life expectancy and disappearance of numerous disease.
This comment reads 100% that you’re just reacting to something that you don’t want to be true with sweeping dismissals rather than replying to the specifics of the research.
Almost seems like your response to research is to invoke personal superstitions about what must be true.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm for people with diet. For some reason, personal food choice and health ideology seems to fall into the same category as religion and politics.
Care to address the methods section? Are you sure they didn’t control for age and physical activity? Why would this only affect cancers if the digestive system?
I would be happier eating meat than living longer, caring about its carbon footprint or any ethical issues people have with farming.
I don’t mind daily exercise, drinking a green tea now and then and not over indulging on the booze, but I’m not going to be a vegetarian for any of the reasons I’ve come across so far.
You don't need to be a vegetarian or vegan. Just eating less meat helps significantly with the things you mentioned. For example if everyone ate say 50% less meat we'd make a noticeable impact on climate change.
I am a vegan myself, but of course everyone can find the right tradeoff for themselves. I do think it's clear though that reducing meat consumption by some amount is just better overall for the planet, to avoid animal suffering, and for our health.
> For example if everyone ate say 50% less meat we'd make a noticeable impact on climate change.
In cold climate there are no vegetarians for a reason. Less meat consumption during cold weather means less work and more eating sessions. All that ends up in less quality of life and desire to move to warmer places.
> to avoid animal suffering.
Any researches about animal suffering? How does it measure? Maybe there are some ways to decrease animal suffering without decreasing meat consumption?
There were no vegetarians in cold climate because there were no vegetable crops there, so there was little choice but eating meat.
The need for extra energy in cold climate is satisfied by eating more fat, not by extra lean meat.
Traditionally that was animal fat, but while there are some bad vegetable fat sources there are also vegetable fat sources that are better than the animal fat sources, e.g. olive oil or high oleic sunflower oil or avocado or various kinds of nuts that are high in oleic acid, for example cashews, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, peanuts.
Adding a generous amount of olive oil to food can provide enough energy for the coldest climate at a lower cost than using animal fat, while also being healthier.
> In cold climate there are no vegetarians for a reason. Less meat consumption during cold weather means less work and more eating sessions. All that ends up in less quality of life and desire to move to warmer places.
I'm not sure how this tracks. We're not chopping wood or hunting and foraging every day anymore. Why is high caloric density important if you work in an office (or even from home) in Anchorage, AK?
I chop wood and don’t eat meat. When I’m playing tennis, I consume lots of calories to provide the energy to compete. I don’t see how your conclusion that eating lots of meat every day is necessary when you sometimes don’t work in an office and sometimes chop wood logically follows.
This is just my anecdotal evidence. I can not feel good at that times when I do not work in the office (my non-office job is welding which is sometimes better to perform not in building to prevent breathing with chemicals). I tried a lot of really strange things like consume more than 1kg of sugar per day or to drink a sunflower oil to get rid of hunger quickly, but nothing can replace meat for me, especially in cold part of year, which in my home has already started. Either I eat meat at least 2 times per day or I feel hungry and perform a poor quantity of results.
> Maybe there are some ways to decrease animal suffering without decreasing meat consumption?
Please tell me it’s a sarcastic response.
Sometimes i find hard to understand people. Even if studies are off, plant based diets have no negative side effects, can be cheaper, have positive environmental impact, reduce animal cruelty, people still want to find a “yeah but about...” honestly it is mind boggling.
How come it’s always meat diets that look the worst in nutritional studies? For example, it’s not oats and broccoli that increase LDL and apoB.
Frankly at this point it seems that those who defend dietary meat are more in need of compelling evidence. Meanwhile the study people rally behind does something like replace beef with eggs, notice no worsening of cholesterol, to conclude that beef had no impact on blood lipids, for example.
You're moving the goal post. Studies making "meat diets" look the worst does not equate to plant diets having "no side effects". Again, if you're making a claim that wild, back it up.
>How come it’s always meat diets that look the worst in nutritional studies?
Do yourself a favor and look up the actual comparisons. These are not health conscious meat diets vs health conscious vegan diets.
That's not how that works. A few token comparisons detecting no side effects on what is measured does not mean there are zero side effects. "Zero side effects" is something far more difficult to prove and given all the anecdotes running around regarding ex-vegans, people who forget something important on the diet, people feeling better after eliminating a majority of plant-based foods, etc., I wish anyone a lot of luck trying to prove such a bold claim.
Do remind me of all the plants we were eating during winter, and all the plant-only diets people have been following for millennia. If you're trying to use a fallacy to make your argument, at least make a convincing one.
>> Maybe there are some ways to decrease animal suffering without decreasing meat consumption?
> Please tell me it’s a sarcastic response.
I asked to give some measures of animal suffering, if you are talking about reducing animal cruelty so why so-called cruelty is bad?
> Sometimes i find hard to understand people.
I experience the same feelings when I use to propose people to get rid of their cars as I did. Positive environmental impact, better for your health, no negative side effects if your bicycle has enough big bicycle trunk, of course bicycle is way cheaper which allows you to work less and spend more time to cycling... What's wrong with all those people?
> I asked to give some measures of animal suffering, if you are talking about reducing animal cruelty so why so-called cruelty is bad?
Seriously, do we need a long and boring thread about existentialism to understand something, (and i’m gonna have throw a figurative number I clarify it before you ask me to cite the source) 90% of the civilized world agrees is bad? I guess not, so I’m gonna explain it like you’re 5: “Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you.” As simple as that.
As for the car, what would you say anybody can do tomorrow no matter what they do for a living or how much they earn, give up their car or change to a plant-based lifestyle?
90% of people with higher education do not understand logarithms, consider astrology and/or religion as a working thing, etc. Science remembers some cases when 99.999% of civilized world used to be wrong about something.
> Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you.
Cattle is not "others", they are way closer to things then to people. They do not understand conception of self and death, they will not grieve seeing death of their friends or relatives, they will never write a "Romeo and Juliet". Don't you consider a potato as that kind "others"? But if you throw a potato not in a boiling water but in a wet ground it will be possible to see that potato is a living thing.
I agree when somebody is talking about climate impact or health of a diet. But when, after hours of manual labor in an unheated workshop, I go on my lunch break, I read about the suffering of animals with such loud laughter that I can't believe that anyone is talking about it seriously.
> As for the car, what would you say anybody can do tomorrow no matter what they do for a living or how much they earn, give up their car or change to a plant-based lifestyle?
>They do not understand conception of self and death, they will not grieve seeing death of their friends or relatives, they will never write a "Romeo and Juliet".
Then torturing, killing, and eating babies and mentally disabled people is OK in your book?
If you would take 5 minutes to read about animal behavior you'll understand how far off are your concepts.
>But when, after hours of manual labor in an unheated workshop, I go on my lunch break, I read about the suffering of animals with such loud laughter that I can't believe that anyone is talking about it seriously.
> They do not understand conception of self and death, they will not grieve seeing death of their friends or relatives, they will never write a "Romeo and Juliet".
No because it might write another "Romeo and Juliett" or prove Riemann hypothesis you know what I mean. One mentally disabled man even won a Noble for invention of the Game Theory part of Mathematics.
> Is somebody else forcing you into that position?
In my mother language there is an idiom "hunger is not an aunt".
> If you would take 5 minutes to read about animal behavior you'll understand how far off are your concepts.
They use to have pretty nice intelligence, almost on dogs' or horses' level. After reading this work I am sure a cow can suffer, in our understanding of suffering, especially if killing is going to be slow and torturous. But you can not disagree that if killing is going using halal protocol then a cow does not suffer, because blood just leaves the body and cow go to sleep. I am not sure cows I use to eat were killed in full-halal with pleas to some local gods, but I am sure nobody wants to be evil to his meat, that's why I believe all the important parts of halal approach has been met for every animal I ate. When I kill some chicken on my farm I always do it in one move, they do not yell from pain (as they can) so I never consider them suffering. That's why assumptions about animals from city people who do not live with animals every single day will never meet a decent response from me, you are so far away from animals' real life, your statement can not deliver me nothing except laughs.
Last but not least, I am not going to persuade you for obvious reasons.
The plant based diets can very easily have very negative effects.
Eating a plant based diet while avoiding the negative effects requires either much more diet planning than most people are used to do or spending more money on expensive dietary supplements than on the actual food.
I have seen people becoming vegan in a careless way, which resulted in health problems.
On the other hand, eating mostly vegetable food combined with a moderate amount of animal food, that is much easier to do without problems.
Eveyone knows somebody that almost died after a week of trying veganism. You can take a look at the major killer diseases reasons and see how a diet that “requires much less planning” works for the majority.
For example, by weight I eat almost only vegan food.
Nevertheless, I make 2 exceptions from 100% vegan food. I typically eat daily around 50 grams of chicken liver and one spoon of cod liver oil, which provide all the organic substances that are not available or available in too small quantities in vegetables, e.g. vitamin B12, vitamin D, EPA, DHA, choline, taurine.
There are vegan supplements for all those substances, but they would indeed cost more per day than all the food that I eat normally. Even if I could afford that, I would consider that as an irrational choice.
For example, non-animal sources of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids cost about 8 times more than fish oil (per fatty acid content). The cod liver oil costs me about $0.60 per day, so a vegan supplement would be about $4.80 per day. Where I live, in Europe, all the food that I eat in a day costs me normally no more than $5 per day, so already only one of the vegan supplements would cost as much as the current complete daily meals.
Moreover, previously I was making an extra exception and I was taking most of my protein intake from turkey breast or chicken breast.
With the proteins provided by food that was almost pure animal protein, there was a considerable freedom in choosing all the other food sources.
However, removing meat from the diet makes it extremely difficult to eat enough proteins without exceeding the daily energy intake for a sedentary life, unless you are willing to waste money by buying plant protein extracts that are much more expensive than meat.
While I have found a combination that provides enough proteins without providing too much calories, it does not have any degree of freedom, so removing meat from the diet has forced the introduction of a fixed part of the diet that cannot be easily changed from day to day, for more variety.
There are good chances that you have not read the fine print about that vegan omega 3.
The first time when I have seen vegan omega 3 supplements, I have also been fooled into thinking that they are not much more expensive than fish oil, and I have bought some.
After reading the fine print, I have discovered that their content in essential fatty acids was significantly lower than that of products based on fish oil and also significantly lower than for an adequate daily intake.
This is a marketing trick to make their high price more palatable.
That is why in my previous post I have mentioned that the vegan supplements are 8 times more expensive per content of essential fatty acids, because their price per capsule is made to appear low.
The $4.80 per day is computed based on the recommended daily intakes for essential fatty acids, and not on the micro doses recommended by the manufacturers of omega-3 vegan supplements, in order to not scare their customers with the real high prices.
I did read the fine print: they contain the same amount DHA and EPA as every other non-vegan omega 3s on the market, which is AFAIK the recommended amount. But let's suppose they didn't and I had to take 2 or 3, at 20 cents that would still match your 60 cent estimate and not be $4.80. Please share those recommended daily intakes that you base your numbers on.
The daily intake of DHA+EPA on which I based those numbers was between 1 g and 1.5 g.
However, you may be right, because I have checked the current prices for vegan omega-3 supplements and the prices have fallen more than 3 times since the Q1 of 2021, when I have last checked them. So the price here would be only around $1.50 now, instead of $4.80 in Q1 2021.
It is indeed possible that where you live they are as cheap as you say.
Same here, i get 180 days supply of a multi-V that includes B12 for $20 USD and i take it because i’m a gym rat. The liver is where all toxins and mercury are more concentrated so I don’t know how good of an idea is eating it as a “supplement”.
There are public reports with the results of randomized searches for mercury in various fish oil and fish liver oil products. The results have always been that the mercury concentrations were lower than in other fish products, e.g. whole fish or fish filet.
Regarding liver, e.g. chicken liver, as containing concentrated toxins, that is a myth.
The liver is not a storage place for toxins. The liver is an organ that takes toxins from the blood that passes through it and then destroys them, typically by oxidation.
Immediately after a meal that happens to contain very high quantities of undesirable substances, there will be a time interval when the liver will indeed contain higher concentrations of those. For example after a heavy drinking, for some hours the liver will contain more alcohol, until it is oxidized.
However, after a long enough time since the last meal, the liver will contain less quantities of toxins than most other parts of the body, because they are destroyed soon after taking them from the blood, which other organs cannot do.
The domestic animals that are killed for meat are typically slaughtered after some fasting time, so a higher level of toxins in the liver than in other parts is unlikely.
Fish get omega-3 from algae which comes as a supplement too, so why not skipping the fish altogether? To me taking fish oil for the omega-3 seems like eating mud for the water.
I eat meat. It's either fish I catch and kill myself, or 4H cattle. I'm pretty sure it involves less animal suffering than someone eating factory farmed chickens, no? If you care about animal suffering, shouldn't you encourage people to take steps in the right direction?
Add people who “only buy meat from my uncle’s farm” and “i fish my own fish ” and “i hunt my meat” to the “I know a vegan who almost died” box.
If you care about animal suffering you can’t go out and kill them for a sandwich.
How killing something that doesn’t want to die will not be suffering. Do you inderstand that you are arguing that it’s right to take a life for 5 mins of sensory pleasure?
Add that to the box too, what do you think farm animals eat, grass? 80% of global edible crops are fed to livestock, so if your concern is crop deaths, stop eating meat ASAP. As for almond milk, I don’t even remember last time i had some, oat is much better.
Restoration Agriculture requires animals, and those animals need to be culled or aged out of the farm. A holistic approach to land management could easily in the neighborhood of about 10% as much meat, and some larger proportion of eggs, to what we currently produce.
If you specifically had some agenda for not feeding any of this meat to humans, I could offer a few suggestions, but those would still net you a surplus of chicken and/or pork, because closed cycles have substantial pathogen problems.
I personally find what humans do to animals so heartless and disgusting (totally destroying animal lives to have a little pleasure in the mouth; while it is not necessary), that I regularly compare those indulging in animal food to peadosexuals: they destroy someones life over some short sensual pleasure.
I'm on the contrary: veganism should be a moral baseline.
Serious question: how is the destruction of animal life for sustenance different from the destruction of plant life?
I'll give you my answer, and hopefully you can share your thoughts (or other answers entirely) to help clarify my thinking.
I conclude that we draw a line between animals and other kinds of life because we are more like animals than other kinds of life. And "likeness with ourselves" seems like an arbitrary way of dividing life.
Extrapolating in the other direction: why don't we practice cannibalism, as other animals do? Perhaps we find cannibalism dangerous and impractical, but also that the typical human carries social instincts that make the behavior distasteful (which in turn leads to taboos in many -- but not all -- of our cultures).
One of my favorite expressions is that "there are no boundaries in nature". That is to say: all dividing lines between categories are invented, regardless of how useful those lines may be. And human constructs change with time and culture. The line between "destroying a someone" and "harvesting a resource" may depend very much on time and place.
I'm not trying to criticize your position, only trying to clarify my own. I would appreciate your thoughts (or links to the thoughts of others).
Of course we value more the life of beings more closely related to us than the life of beings more distantly related to us.
However, there are more differences between the domestic plants and the domestic animals than that.
The life of most animals that are eaten by humans can really be said to be destructed from the day when they are born until the day when they are killed, because they are forced to live in a way different from the life for which their body is made for and that they obviously do not enjoy.
On the other hand, there is no significant difference between the life of the wild plants and that of the cultivated plants. From the plants that are perennial, we take some parts, e.g. fruits or seeds, which would have been discarded anyway. The annual plants like wheat are killed during the harvest, but they would have died anyway after spreading their seeds, and until the harvest they have lived in the same way as a wild plant.
Before the last century, the lives of the domestic animals were usually much better than now and they frequently could be said to live as well as similar wild animals. For example, the chickens grown by my grandparents were certainly happy during all their life. They had a very large space where they could wander all day and eat whatever plants or insects they liked besides the corn that supplemented their diet. They raised their young and did everything else that wild chickens would do, until the day when they were caught and killed. As a small child, I have played a lot with those chickens.
So, unlike the cultivated plants, most of them had their lives shortened, but, except for duration, their lives were not altered in other ways.
Unfortunately such animal raising methods cannot be scaled to feed billions of humans.
I think it's worth noting that your position is not the same as GP's, however.
One small objection: I assume you lead with "of course" in your first sentence because that value is intuitive to you. It's intuitive to me, too, but I don't have an argument for why it's moral.
> [...] I regularly compare those indulging in animal food to peadosexuals: they destroy someones life over some short sensual pleasure.
If you regularly do this, you're shutting down conversation in such an extremist way that it is counterproductive. There's a campaign in my country run by some extremist animals rights group with signs that read (translation mine) "yuck! Meat is nauseating!". Their campaign gains little traction because it's both extremist and demonstrably false; most people eating an asado concur meat is delicious, not nauseating. That line of extremist argumentation -- just like comparing eating animals to pedophilia -- is going to lead you nowhere.
Meat is nauseating if you aren't raised on it to eat it every day. Vegetables don't do that to you. Your body isn't gonna forget how to digest a tomato because you stop eating them for a few years. Most digestion of meat is done by bacteria since the cells are too similar to our own for other processes. Those bacteria die out if you don't feed them meat.
Eating an animal means killing a sapient being for your own pleasure. You don't need it for sustenance. It's objectively worse for that end both on an efficiency scale (trophic levels from sun -> plant -> herbivore -> you) and health scale.
People might get offended by the comparison but it's not my job to hold the hands of people offended by rhetoric. I thought facts don't care about feelings? Extreme is subjective. I view daily murder as pretty extreme but we consider that fine as long as the life being taken is non-human. Want to go wring a chicken's neck in your backyard and eat it? Totally normal and rustic.
Tell people that is gross? Extremist demonstrably false vegan agenda
Apples give me nausea, almost always. No other fruit does this to me, though. My mother-in-law finds the sweet smell of bananas nauseating as well, it makes her want to puke.
> Tell people that is gross? Extremist demonstrably false vegan agenda
It is demonstrably false that meat is disgusting. It's also counterproductive propaganda. Over here most people enjoy asado. It is delicious. Tell them "meat is nauseating" and they will contrast it with their experience, see it's false, and write you off. If the goal with the extremist slogan was to advance a cause, congratulations -- you've failed.
It doesn't work because it's both extremist and false. There are other ways of making the vegan point.
Comparing eating animals to pedophilia is... unwise.
I am curious, I’ve seen several people recently quite proud they cause environmental harm.
I can understand ignorance, I can get you believe something contrary; I just can’t fathom why you’re pleased that you’re actively causing harm for the planet we all live on.
Dunno, the top level comments to studies like this (like the current thread) are often preachy, defensive posts about keeping meat in their diet despite TFA.
People like lashing out to defend their world view.
It's not a pride thing, entropy increases with all life.
Does eating meat make any kind of significant difference for me or my footprint? Probably not significantly. Do I want to live gen-less and eat beans and rice? No.
I should also mention, apparently mossy earth plants a tree or two for me each month. Perhaps you'd like to join them in offsetting your lifestyle (whatever that may be).
Eating meat is the second largest contribution to lifestyle emissions generally after having children. It takes a thousand gallons of water to produce a typical burger patty. You can have as many of those in the desert as you'd like. Heck, we even grow the alfalfa to feed those cows in the desert.
People act like going vegetarian is some giant sacrifice. It's not that hard. Westerners just view it as poor people stuff. If you want meat to be a luxury so bad then let's cut the subsidies and see what the real cost of it is when you factor in the actual impact.
Very American centric farming practices and concerns you have.
Not everywhere grows 2 acres of corn to feed to livestock.
I grew up on a farm in New Zealand, water is plentiful, cows eat grass and are calved on milk that for one reason or another would be wasted otherwise. Processing of the meat was done in the paddock by a home kill butcher.
In the same way people like going on cruises but don’t worry about how much bunker fuel it burns, I like eating meat and will continue to do so.
If you want to be vegetarian great, but I’m making a lifestyle choice that I’ll eat meat because I enjoy it and all of the dishes that can’t be made without it.
Yes I see you offering a lot of “content” while selectively engaging with people. The equivalent of running up to someone shouting your viewpoint and then moving on the to next victim.
The thing that seems to be escaping you is that others have different value systems and desires.
So I’ll agree with you, as per your definition, people don’t care enough about what you care about to put effort in to align themselves the way you have aligned.
I'd like to offer a lecture on why I do what I do, but the nature of the medium forces me to engage with different people at different paces, I do so only to clear misconceptions that have been so entrenched ad parroted that everyone assume as truths without taking time to verify if they actually hold any ground.
As for "what I care about", it's simply the respect to other species, we've been feed an individualistic concept of life that might be pleasurable in the short run but, as you might have probably noticed in the environmental effects, and the general destruction of our world, is not very wise for the future of our species.
I don't understand why every discussion about climate change ends up with this comment. We know, the rock and the bacteria will be fine, that's obviously not what people worry about. We care about the Earth because it sustains us.
I should start this by saying I don't support forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to, and for environmental reasons I very rarely eat meat.
That being said I believe everyone aught to eat at least a little meat because we are omnivores and it is advantageous for us to be able to, we don't know what the future holds and in evolution if you don't use it you lose it.
I don’t mind eating less meat in order to try and be healthier.
It really comes down to finding tasty meals to have instead. I’ll get a nice risotto instead of a steak more often these days, and I now make it myself.
Probably impossible for me to completely give up meat but I try to make it a less frequent option.
Man, that is a depressing link. (Thanks for posting it, though.)
I still can't resist the occasional sushi outing, but I've mostly stepped away from eating fish otherwise, largely because of pollution concerns like these.
I do wonder if there's room for some notion of "ultra-clean sushi." What if a restaurant went fully vertically integrated, farming its own fish in its own aquariums? Then fish could be pulled out and sliced up as needed, and you'd know they were pollutant-free.
For sushi novergian are buildling "in ocean" fish farm that are ridiculously big to tackle problems with fishing and existing fish farms (polution, feed, sea lice etc...)
Another good thing is implementing fish directly in aquaponic farms, where you use water from fish tank as fertilizer in the water loop of you hyroponics. Might work with salmon.... but not on huge scale to meet current demand.
A confounding view here though is that even though seafood contains pollutants, the benefit of high omega-3 content in some species outweighs the negative effects of the pollutants. The key is find the combo of:
- high omega-3-to-omega-6 fat ratio in the fish
- short-lived fish (low bioaccumulation)
That basically leaves you with wild salmon, (some) farmed salmon, and small/oily fishes (like sardines and some species of mackerel).
So, yeah, farmed fish are the only ones making it on the list for pregnant woman and young children. So those are what I limit myself to too. No wild catches.
Nope, precisely because they can be controlled for heavy metal intake and the like. Surprised me too.
Make sure to buy from a traceable certified farm. There ate still farms that feed their fish trash and waste, they are no longer allowed to be imported where I live. Source: https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/
> Nope, precisely because they can be controlled for heavy metal intake and the like. Surprised me too.
Pretty sure Chilean salmon, the only one I can get, is awful for you and also bad for the ecosystem. I hear bad things about some Norwegian salmon too (whose main branch apparently "owns" Chilean salmon farms).
> Make sure to buy from a traceable certified farm
Depends on which part of the world you live. Over here it's Chilean salmon. Apparently, pretty bad.
edit: wait, your link recommends wild caught salmon from Alaska, and considers farmed Atlantic salmon as dodgy! From the website you linked to:
> "Atlantic salmon sustainability varies. Avoid wild Atlantic salmon as they are struggling in the wild and numbers are dangerously low. Most of what’s in the market is farmed. There are environmental concerns relating to the farming of salmon. Check labels for how and where it was produced and look out for eco-labels [...]"
"There are environmental concerns relating to the farming of salmon"
What I heard is that Chilean salmon is pumped full of antibiotics.
These studies are conducted using nutrition surveys typically given out every year (or five) asking the subject about their eating habits over the last period.
They are notoriously bad data, and also do not account for the healthy user bias (or the inverse effect).
Of course that doesn't seem to stop researchers from using them to tease out extremely small effect sizes
Well, that sounded like a blanket dismissal of food logging rather than a specific criticism. Which study asked people to recall what they ate a year ago?
It’s very annoying that this article mixes “red and processed meats” like they are the same thing. The author themselves mention that there’s much better evidence against processed meat, but keeps talking about how dangerous “red and processed meats” are. The author clearly can’t be trusted.
Besides, that study has the same issue GP mentions: they just asked people how much meat they ate.
This is a meta analysis. Meta analyses are done by collecting other studies and trying to pull the results out of each to apply to the main question of the study. The problem is of you have bad studies to start with you end up with a bad meta analysis, or garbage in, garbage out
Nutrition studies are very frequently awful. The use of questionaires to find out what someone eats is inherently flawed (do you remember how many times you ate brocoli this year?) and leads to biased results. People who care about their health will tend towards vegetarian and vegan diets because they are claimed to be healthy, but they will also be more likely to exercise, not smoke, be wary of alcohol, and so on, reducing the likelihood of cancer through those other mechanisms. Unless you actually randomly assign a diet for a long period of time and control for all of those factors your study is worthless, completely swamped in noise and misattribution. Let's also bot forget that people who are richer and more educated are more likely to be lower in stress and have more resources while also being more likely to go to a plant based diet.
Now take a bung of studies that are too short to see the effect, rely on bad data collection, stratify people by diet while also happening to get richer and more health conscious people in one group, and then bring them all together in one big study. You will find an effect. Is the effect because of the plant based diet or is it because that group is richer, less stressed, drinks and smokes less, works a better job, has a better education, and visits their doctor more frequently? I would expect and effect from the latter half, but the former in not shown by this or any other study thus far.
In the introduction to the study they include this statement, which I think agrees with your comment:
"This study systematically searched two databases and included six cohort studies included with limited types of digestive system cancers. Therefore, the evidence is not sufficiently strong to evaluate the relationship between digestive system cancers and plant-based diets. Comprehensive evaluations are scarce, especially for various digestive system cancers and multiple dietary patterns."
A cursory review of her website doesn't reveal any references or links to actual scientific studies of any kind. Well, except for this one, which seems to be about Homo Erectus species in the Levant region being dependent on eating elephants for a source of fat about 400,000 years ago: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
However, I found lots of affiliate links to various products.
More accurate TL;DR: Reporting on an annual diet survey that you avoid meat is associated with a reduction in the risk of digestive cancers between 12% and 30%.
It'd be really hard to do a controlled study on such a thing, though.