[HN Gopher] World's Top Beef Supplier Approves Methane-Busting C...
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World's Top Beef Supplier Approves Methane-Busting Cow Feed
Author : montalbano
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-09-11 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| gandalfian wrote:
| On the plus side beef is an original superfood not only a
| complete protein with a full set of amino acids but also a highly
| compact dense efficiently transportable protein. Plus a byproduct
| is ice cream! Moderation required certainly. But for the good of
| my health and food transport carbon emissions I for one am
| prepared to fall on the occasional steak...
| humaniania wrote:
| Probably because cows are mammals and are very similar to
| humans. For example they have families and feelings and think
| and play. How would you feel if a more advanced species decided
| to treat humans how many humans treat cows?
| bagacrap wrote:
| It's entirely possible this is happening, just in a way that
| we're not aware of, a la The Matrix. So I guess I feel
| ambivalent about it. Ignorance is bliss.
| inportb wrote:
| The same way a captive vegetable feels, I imagine.
| Intermittently amputated. Never fully allowed to heal. You
| grow as much you could, only to be cut down again at the next
| harvest.
| irrational wrote:
| I think beef and dairy cows are different, right? I wonder what
| percentage are dairy versus beef?
| purplerabbit wrote:
| Depends. Cheap meat (think: McDonalds) is made from dairy
| cows that are too old to keep producing milk.
| tengbretson wrote:
| They don't end up grading good enough for a high end steak,
| but when they're done with their milk producing days, they
| all go to the same place.
| while1fork wrote:
| How about reducing beef production for all of the other problems
| it causes besides climate change? Antibiotic resistance,
| pandemics, supply-chain fossil fuel demands, deforestation,
| resource waste (water and calories), animal cruelty, and
| air/water/soil pollution.
| diego_moita wrote:
| 1.Sorry for the cynicism, but this approval is by Jair
| Bolsonaro's government, perhaps the most relevant Global Warming
| denier today. If it were meaningful it wouldn't be approved.
|
| 2. The overwhelming majority of beef production in Brazil is done
| by small producers that just don't care and are Bolsonaro's main
| supporters. The main problem with them is not even methane cow
| flatulence, is deforestation of the rain forest for making
| pastures.
|
| 3. The beef importers that could put some pressure on Brazil
| (e.g.: European Union) already gave up on importing Brazilian
| beef (since Bolsonaro began insulting Angela Merkel an Macron's
| wife).
|
| 4. JBS, the main beef processing company in the world, might use
| this as window dressing and to present a polished image overseas.
| But they're powerless to inspect how ranchers handle their
| cattle.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Nitrooxypropanol
|
| Wish the article had included this info about what exactly it is,
| but it seems like most articles these days are written for
| someone with a kindergarten level understanding of science.
|
| Interestingly if you do this to a young calf it seems to change
| the microflora that develop in the digestive system, perhaps
| permanently even.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-82084-9
| ben_w wrote:
| > it seems like most articles these days are written for
| someone with a kindergarten level understanding of science.
|
| The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect may have only been coined 19 years
| ago, but this type of problem has been with us basically
| forever.
| lcam84 wrote:
| Is on this kind of measures where jevons paradox or the rebound
| effect kicks in. We will inclined to eat more meat because is
| more sustainable, and with that we neutralize the gains. Also
| meat from Brazil is many times dependent on Amazon deforestation,
| so although I love picanha, I will not eat it anymore. For those
| in Europe please press your government not to ratify the EU-
| Mercosul agreement that will increase the trade of soy meat and
| ethanol in exchange for Europe export more cars to America
| Latina. We should avoid meat and individual transports and try to
| invest in the local economy so this agreement doesn't make any
| sense
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > not to ratify the EU-Mercosul agreement
|
| I.e., let's keep poor people poor.
| tootie wrote:
| Decreasing methane emissions is great but it doesn't solve the
| land and water use problems. This will blunt the damage but
| cattle will likely remain a top contributor to climate change.
| pindab0ter wrote:
| I doubt this will cause people to eat more meat. I'm just
| guessing, but it has to be a very small group of people that
| limit the amount of meat they eat out of purely environmental
| reasons.
|
| The group that's limited by either cost or because they're
| saturated has to be orders of magnitude larger. So I see this
| as an awesome bit of progress.
|
| Please do correct me of my assumptions are wrong, though.
| pricecomstock wrote:
| I don't have any numbers or sources, but I'll chime in as
| someone who limits beef intake solely because of
| environmental reasons. I don't cut it out completely, I just
| stay mindful and only eat beef when it's meaningful. So
| trying something new and interesting, special occasions, or
| when I otherwise will really savor it. If I'm getting fast
| food or just eating to eat, I steer towards chicken, eggs, or
| vegetarian options.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Yet, but you are also probably the sort of person who would
| browse this article and conversation. No offense intended,
| but not representative of the general population.
| acchow wrote:
| This isn't making beef cheaper in financial costs. There are a
| minuscule number of people limiting their beef consumption due
| to the carbon emissions.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| This is more about getting ahead of carbon taxes than it is
| about changing people's eating behavior today.
| afarrell wrote:
| Long-term changes in habits and culture take a long time -- if
| they happen at all. The effect of this decision is that we can
| decrease the beef-related methane production by spending mere
| years changing mere hundreds of supply chains instead of
| spending spending fruitless decades trying decades to enforce
| new dietary habits on millions of defiant Texans or Pakistanis.
| usrusr wrote:
| Highly doubt it: vegans won't change their behavior and
| unrestricted meat eaters won't start eating even more meat.
| There's hardly anybody in between. Yes, theoretically less
| people might turn vegan afterwards, but how many vegans have
| become vegan because of methane?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| a quick search shows that about ten percent of Europe are
| vegetarian, and about 375 million people world wide. Please
| note that "vegan" has a narrow, specific meaning; there are
| fewer vegans.
|
| The definition of advertising is to change behavior, it is
| done daily for lots of reasons. Why not let people choose?
| Let's not prescribe outcomes, but instead enable evolution.
| usrusr wrote:
| 375 million people world wide, and I'd expect not one of
| them to start eating meat because of some reduction of
| methane impact.
| it_citizen wrote:
| On the topic of rebound effect, it seems to me that for energy
| efficiency to work you need a carrot and stick are necessary.
| Help your country to become more energy efficient but as they
| do, tax externalities more severely.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| Picanha is just a particular cut. You can get it from any cow,
| regardless of region.
|
| I get that most picanha-branded meat is advertised as
| originating from Brazil, but if you really want to contribute
| to protecting the Amazon forest, why not boycott the real
| source of the problem, Brazilian originating meat?
|
| You can also go to your local butcher, and ask for a picanha
| cut of any local cow. That way you can still enjoy picanha,
| without worrying about the Amazon.
|
| Maybe search for other names as well, in US it's apparently
| unknown: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picanha
|
| "In the United States, the cut is little known and often named
| top sirloin cap, rump cover, rump cap, or culotte. Instead,
| North American butchers generally divide this cut into other
| cuts like the rump, the round, and the loin."
| epistasis wrote:
| Jevon's paradox almost never applies to a subject matter. We
| have to stop using it to prevent making the world better.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how our planet managed global warming
| when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other animals
| roamed our planet before? How much methane did flocks of pigeons
| generate if they were so large that they were able to darken the
| sky?
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| > Can someone explain to me how our planet managed global
| warming when billions of bisons, deers, cows, sheep and other
| animals roamed our planet before?
|
| A constant number of cows produce a constant amount of methane
| which plateaus quickly due to its very small atmospheric half-
| life.
|
| "Additional methane emission categories such as rice
| cultivation (RIC), ruminant animal (ANI), North American shale
| gas extraction (SHA), and tropical wetlands (TRO) have been
| investigated as potential causes of the resuming methane growth
| starting from 2007. In agreement with recent studies, we find
| that a methane increase of 15.4 Tg yr-1 in 2007 and subsequent
| years, of which __50 % are from RIC (7.68 Tg yr-1), 46 % from
| SHA (7.15 Tg yr-1), and 4 % from TRO (0.58 Tg yr-1)__, can
| optimally explain the trend up to 2013." - ["Model simulations
| of atmospheric methane (1997-2016) and their evaluation using
| NOAA and AGAGE surface and IAGOS-CARIBIC aircraft observations"
| (2020)](https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/5787/2020/)
|
| "On November 17, 2003 National Oceanic and Atmospheric
| Administration reported that the concentration of the potent
| greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere was leveling off and
| it appears to have remained at this 1999 level (Figure 1). The
| Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 acknowledged
| that methane concentrations have plateaued, with emissions
| being equivalent to removals. These changes in methane
| atmospheric dynamics have raised questions about the relative
| importance of ruminant livestock in global methane accounting
| and the value of pursuing means of further suppressing methane
| production from ruminants. At this time there is no
| relationship between increasing ruminant numbers and changes in
| atmospheric methane concentrations changes, a break from
| previously assumed role of ruminants in greenhouse gases
| (Figure 1)." - ["Belching Ruminants, a minor player in
| atmospheric methane" (2008)](http://www-
| naweb.iaea.org/nafa/news/2008-atmospheric-methane...)
| ben_w wrote:
| There were an estimated 3-5 billion passenger pigeons in the
| Americas before Europeans arrived.
|
| There are currently about 1.5 billion cattle worldwide, and
| each one weighs a lot more than 3 pigeons.
|
| Worldwide livestock biomass significantly exceeds worldwide
| wild animal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/
|
| The current livestock population can only be supported by
| industrialised agriculture.
|
| Livestock biomass is also artificially increased both by many
| generations of selective breeding and by a known effect of
| certain hormones and antibiotics.
|
| The actual methane emissions are a lot more complex than just
| count or biomass, as demonstrated even by the headline of the
| link (you wouldn't see 55%, let alone 80%, if it wasn't):
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
|
| Finally, this planet does not actively manage global warming.
| It goes though glacial and interglacial periods precisely
| because of the absence of active management. The natural causes
| of this lead to the pre-industrial cycles, and are why the
| average temperature of this planet is so much higher than the
| average temperature of the moon:
| http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20temperature%2...
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| And maybe these cycles are how the planet self regulates?
| simonh wrote:
| The point is it doesn't self-regulate, which as the poster
| pointed out is why it veers precariously into and out of
| ice ages and thermal maxima.
| smolder wrote:
| If these fluctuations aren't part of a roughly stable
| pattern of self-regulation, why hasn't Earth gone into
| such an extreme ice age or thermal runaway that it it's
| unrecoverable and can't support life? Would you say it's
| externally regulated as opposed to self-regulating,
| maybe? Sheer luck?
| ben_w wrote:
| "We are lucky" is certainly a viable solution to the
| Fermi paradox.
|
| Venus had thermal runaway and the precipitation there is
| lead rather than water.
|
| Martian winters cause ~25% of the atmosphere to condense
| into the polar (dry)ice caps.
| simonh wrote:
| Well, Earth's orbit is roughly stable, solar output is
| roughly stable but both have long term oscillations but
| within somewhat stable parameters. That's just luck.
|
| There are some effects that cause unstable feedback loops
| though. Rising temperatures trigger several effects that
| lead to even more temperature rise. Reflective ice caps
| melt, tundra thaws releasing methane. Frozen methane in
| ocean sediments melts. Similarly our planet has been
| through several deep freeze events, far more severe than
| ice ages. If temperatures drop too much the ice reflects
| too much solar radiation leading to more freezing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| While there's an underlying point that could be gleaned from
| your inane post, you could make it without sounding like a
| blubbering idiot.
|
| Do cows/cattle/livestock produce methane? Yes. So do humans.
|
| How did the planet manage? For one, there was a helluva lot
| less other greenhouse warming gases in total larely due to
| human's industrial revolution. Once humans found out about
| using coal/oil/etc, it quickly dwarfed anything ever seen other
| than volanic eruptions.
|
| The livestock methane argument has always sounded like a BigOil
| tactic rather than a scientific one to deflect blame, and then
| championed by someone like PETA to help further their agenda.
| How significant would livestock methane emmisions be to the
| climate if ICE pollution was elminitated?
| abecedarius wrote:
| One serious answer is the work of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory
|
| There are claims it's all bullshit (ahem); I wouldn't
| automatically trust either side.
| fzzzy wrote:
| They were not fed unnatural diets which caused them to produce
| a shitload of methane.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Cattle is Brazil roams free and eats grass.
| bogomipz wrote:
| This has traditionally been true for neighboring Argentina
| as well which is widely known for it's prized grass-fed
| Pampas cattle. My understanding is that this has been
| changing however in recent years.
| stjo wrote:
| > How much methane did flocks of pigeons generate if they were
| so large that they were able to darken the sky.
|
| Sorry, what?
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Pigeons poop. If there is a lot of them there is a lot of
| poop. Lota of pigeons-> lots of poop-> lots of methane
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Cows have bacteria in their rumen which produce methane. As
| a curiosity, I ddg'd "do pigeons fart", and according to
| pigeonpedia they do not because they have short digestive
| tracts lacking gas producing bacteria.
|
| https://pigeonpedia.com/do-pigeons-fart/
| pfdietz wrote:
| Bird poop tends to be dispersed (with some exceptions), and
| so will tend to decompose aerobically, which does not
| produce methane.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Pastured cattle have a NET NEGATIVE effect on carbon. They're
| not carbon emitters. Pasturing them sequesters carbon in the
| ground and their manure improves the local soil biome.
|
| Feed lot cattle are another story.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I can believe that for carbon specifically, but what about
| their general GHG impact?
| reubenswartz wrote:
| There are actually far more domestic livestock now than there
| were bison back in the day. Just a lot less roaming.
|
| Pigeons don't produce methane the way ruminants do AFAIK.
|
| And, methane from livestock is only part of humanity's climate
| altering activity.
| guerby wrote:
| I wanted to check, I don't know if the following sources are
| reliable:
|
| http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php "Table : before
| 1800 60 million bisons in North America"
|
| https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/01-29-2021.php "There
| were 93.6 million head of cattle and calves on U.S. farms as
| of Jan. 1, 2021, according to the Cattle report published
| today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National
| Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)."
|
| I didn't find number for ruminant megafauna in prehistoric
| times.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| I think this xkcd sums it up nicely: https://xkcd.com/1338/
|
| Humans are good at cultivating farting animals.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Wild ruminants eat grass. Domesticated ruminants mostly eat
| grain. That accounts for the bulk of the difference AFAIK.
| Zababa wrote:
| In America maybe? In France grain is ~25% of what cows eat: h
| ttps://idele.fr/?eID=cmis_download&oID=workspace://SpacesSt..
| .
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 25% of the mass might be 90% of the calories.
| Zababa wrote:
| Or it could be 5% of the calories, and unless you have
| some source on cattle nutrition this is just baseless
| speculation.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I spent twenty years of my life feeding cattle.
| Zababa wrote:
| I'll retract the "baseless speculation" part then. Sorry,
| that was needlessly aggressive.
| CyanBird wrote:
| Well, exaggerations aside such as blocking the sun, cows and
| pigs represent 60% of all mammal biomass on earth right now
|
| ... > Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all
| mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account
| for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent.
|
| > The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is
| about three times higher than that of wild birds.
|
| > "It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on
| Earth," Milo told The Guardian. "When I do a puzzle with my
| daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next
| to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic
| sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a
| cow and then a chicken ... [0]
|
| I would love to see how that compares to the great bison herds,
| or the great African savanna migrations
|
| Maybe as an idea, just the food and the fact that bison etc
| used to have a more active life and varied foods than modern
| cows meant that they released less methane?
|
| Lastly, ought be noted that methane releases from industrial
| agriculture are very much under counted and that might need to
| be accounted into the comparison [1]
|
| [0] https://www-ecowatch-
| com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.ecowatch...
|
| [1] https://www-technologynetworks-
| com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/ww...
| truffdog wrote:
| It wasn't an exaggeration-
| https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-darken-the-
| heavens-t...
|
| Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from
| cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and
| sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until
| it very abruptly wasn't.
| shipman05 wrote:
| > Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane,
| from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon
| and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless
| until it very abruptly wasn't.
|
| I'm unsure about the fisheries, but the other numbers are
| debated now.
|
| Until very recent times, the reports of European explorers
| pushing into the interior of North America were taken as a
| good proxy for the pre-Columbian state of those areas. We
| now know that those areas were far more densely populated
| before 1500 than they were more than 200 years later when
| European settlers started moving in. European diseases
| preceded European settlers and completely wiped out much of
| the continent's population.
|
| AFIK, it's still being debated, but it seems reasonable
| that: - Predators like wolves kept large herd animal
| numbers relatively low - Large populations of Native
| Americans killed those predators but continued to keep the
| numbers of herd animals low via hunting - Native American
| population collapse coupled with low numbers of predator
| species allowed bison herd numbers to explode - European
| settlers arrived in the 1700s and 1800s and made the
| mistaken assumption that both the Native American and bison
| populations they encountered represented the way things had
| always been.
| PrinceRichard wrote:
| Mass murder of non-humans is not environmentally friendly. Nor is
| it healthful.
| Zababa wrote:
| In that case beef is probably the best choice compared to most
| other mammals. You can feed way more people on one cow than on
| one chicken.
| jacknews wrote:
| Approved for use, but will farmers use it?
|
| What incentive do they have? Perhaps they should get 'methane
| credits', or 'methane fines'.
| 14 wrote:
| Probably the same incentives as a farmer doing organic farming.
| If you can make a brand that is significantly more eco friendly
| that may be a selling point in itself. Then if it is
| significant in the amount of carbon it reduces some governments
| may start insisting it be used as part of their greenhouse gas
| reduction plan.
| gilrain wrote:
| They and their progeny might get a livable planet. It's really
| time to stop treating climate as something to profit from and
| start treating it as bare survival.
| jacknews wrote:
| Sorry but this is an argument from a lofty position.
|
| Much of the planet lives hand to mouth, and while they of
| course care about the state of planet in the relatively
| distant future, they care more that they or their progeny
| will actually get there at all.
| Zababa wrote:
| Have you heard about the tragedy of commons? If there is no
| superior authority to enforce this, some people will want to
| get an advantage on other people by using more these
| resources.
| ben_w wrote:
| > It's really time to stop treating climate as something to
| profit from and start treating it as bare survival.
|
| While this is true, the scale and duration of the problem
| means we need the "right" choices to make short-economic
| sense at every level from individual farmers up to economic
| superpowers, and for that to be maintained. If the Nash
| equilibrium is bad, we get a tragedy of the commons.
| echopurity wrote:
| The pseudo-science is strong with this one.
| yboris wrote:
| Consumers can also have a 100% reduction in methane production in
| cows by abstaining from purchasing cow products.
|
| We have an ongoing tragedy of animal abuse, groundwater and air
| pollution, and various health problems -- all because of people's
| addiction to meat.
| belorn wrote:
| Changing culture in terms of food is a hard problem and one
| which would have a large range of benefits. Any country that
| has environmental issues from overpopulated or invasive species
| could benefit greatly if people hunted an ate that animal, but
| since they aren't part of the culture people don't and allow
| overpopulated or invasive species to continue being a problem.
| People are addicted to the cultural food that is popular in
| their local area.
|
| We see the same issue in the cultivating of mono-culture
| plants. Instead of using a wide range of different plants and
| land usage we instead see a overuse of the same plants being
| force fed artificial fertilizers in order to keep production
| high, with much of it ending up in the water creating
| eutrophication. This is a primary reason why a whole ocean, the
| Baltic sea, is turning into an underwater desert with a lack of
| oxygen so great that not even many bacterials like to live
| there. Artificial fertilizers has destroyed more way more land
| than nuclear fission and nuclear bombs has together.
|
| If we could change peoples culture in terms in what they eat we
| could not only have a 100% reduction in methane, but also fix
| the water pollution, biodiversity, usage of fossil fuels in the
| food chain, decrease land usage, fix overpopulation and remove
| invasive species, and feed even more people than we do today.
| It would also likely taste quite well, especially since taste
| is heavily influenced by culture.
| collegeburner wrote:
| Sure, in Texas a lot of us hunt and eat wild hogs as they're
| a nuisance. Javelina are native but can be a pest sometimes,
| so we eat them too (good in sausage).
| belorn wrote:
| Wild hogs tend to be part of the culture in most areas that
| I know has them. A useful sign for this is that such meat
| is generally more expensive to buy than beef, which
| illustrate the value that the culture puts on it as food.
|
| In contrast one can look at areas which has an
| overpopulation of seals. People don't eat the meat and the
| most common use is to generate oil, which is also not very
| useful in modern days. As such hunters are not very
| interested to spend time on it and overpopulation is
| allowed to continue even if it has a known negative impact
| on bio diversity in an local area.
|
| If one goes into the area of eutrophication, over
| population of non-cultural acceptable fish is very common.
| When government create initiatives to address the issue,
| the caught fish (many many tons of fish) get either turned
| into bio fuel or animal feed if the cost of transportation
| allows it. Hard to find a bigger waste of food than that,
| and it is purely a matter of culture.
| bequanna wrote:
| Or, you could stop buying cheap, garbage meat that sometimes
| causes the problems you describe. Buy from a food coop,
| research the farm that supplies the meat. If you have the
| luxury to make informed choices, do that.
|
| Of course, good luck getting the poor or working class to do
| any of those things. They simply want cheap, appetizing
| calories.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I agree, it's worth it if you have the means. But looking as
| to why people are resorting to the cheapest most inhumane
| options is the root of the problem. I'm sure if everyone
| could afford premium, well sourced meat then the problem
| would be reduced, but the issue is that the poor and working
| class have been put into the position they are in and will
| choose the cheaper route out of necessity and where there is
| necessity, there is a market and someone willing to
| capitalize on it.
| bequanna wrote:
| It isn't just out of necessity. We don't really have much
| of a hunger problem in the US or most of the Western world.
|
| We need to stop approaching problems by trying to force
| people to change their habits and preferences. That isn't
| going to happen.
|
| Also, regardless of the arguments and hand waving from
| vegetarians, vegans, PETA, etc. we should accept that the
| vast majority of people are meant to and will always choose
| to eat meat as part of their diet.
|
| If you want to get people off of conventionally produced
| meat you need something that normal people actually
| consider to be appetizing. If fact, it would be even better
| if they didn't realize any changes were made. The
| replacement for meat that has any chance of succeeding is
| ...meat.
|
| Lab grown meat is the only solution with any chance of mass
| adoption. We can control the inputs, create something more
| appetizing, cheaper and maybe even healthier. It checks all
| the boxes vs. some unholy concoction of super processed
| ingredients marketed as a "meat substitute".
| lucidguppy wrote:
| Smoking was drastically reduced in the US after a public
| health push.
| bequanna wrote:
| Nice try. Eating high quality meat is absolutely NOT a
| public health concern.
|
| Man, after reading some of these comments I realize how
| lucky I am to live in a part of the world where we push
| back very hard when the shrieking, alarmist minority try
| to force their preferences down the throats of others.
| cheese_goddess wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to say that people have an "addiction to
| meat". We eat meat because it's a very nutritious food. We need
| to eat food to survive, to live, and to thrive.
|
| If you 're looking for an addiction that harms the environment,
| then look no further than right in front of your eyes. Right
| now, you are probably looking at the screen of a smart phone
| that you will most likely throw away for a new one before the
| end of the year. You don't _need_ a new phone every year, nor
| do the many millions of people who buy a new one each year, and
| yet so they do.
|
| https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...
| drewg123 wrote:
| I encourage people to try plant based "meat" substitutes. I
| have a vegan friend when encouraged me to try Impossible
| burger. I finally relented during the early days of the
| pandemic when I could not find ground beef one day at the
| store, and I have to say that I love it. I use it everywhere
| I'd have used ground beef (burgers, tacos, chili, etc). My
| cholesterol and blood sugar numbers have improved dramatically.
| a-dub wrote:
| i tried (ed: strike impossible) beyond burgers recently. they
| were... ok. but i did notice that i felt extremely sluggish
| after eating them. (like having to lay down)
|
| the thickness of the oil exuded onto the griddle and the
| difficulty i had cleaning it off was a bit frightening as
| well... but i don't prepare meat so maybe the real deal is
| worse?
| Zababa wrote:
| Those are usually not "meat" substitutes but "ground meat"
| substitutes. I personally don't consume much ground meat, so
| they are a bit useless for me unfortunately.
| Tomte wrote:
| It's hit and miss. I've tried one premier producer's "vegan
| minced meat" in Germany (Wiesenhof) and one supermarket's
| "vegan minced meat".
|
| They look okay, but they don't brown in the pan and worst of
| all, they smell very very foul. You open the packaging and
| want to immediately put in in the garbage bin.
|
| Taste is okay-ish, if boring and bland, but the smell
| disqualifies it.
|
| I understand there are brands that don't have that problem
| (or less of it), but after two disasters I'm currently eating
| real meat when I want some, but try to limit it.
|
| Better an honest vegan/vegetarian substitute than a "it has
| to look like meat, no matter what" substitute.
|
| Soy shreds can be a good substitute for some uses of minced
| meat, for example.
| mc32 wrote:
| The only drawback I'd see is it's ultra processed food, but
| it looks as though ftom your experience you experienced
| health improvements which outweigh Ann concern over ultra
| processing .
| kiba wrote:
| I looked up a comparison.[1] It seems that the only
| potential issue with an impossible burger is much more
| sodium. On the other hand, it actually contains fiber(3
| grams).
|
| Apparently, Impossible meat are fortified with
| micronutrient as well.
|
| Correct me if I am wrong, but the problem with ultra
| processed food is not the processing per se, but the poor
| nutritional profiles.
|
| 1. https://www.cnet.com/health/nutrition/is-the-impossible-
| burg...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I wanted to find some views on the the impossible/beyond
| GMO meat substitutes vs organic, grass-fed, which many
| contend is the gold standard for healthy meat, _not_
| regular feedlot / grain raised beef.
|
| Found a number of different perspectives [1], [2], [3]
| [4] [5]
|
| Most alarming was the presence of GMO, and soy &
| glyphosate connection alleged by testing from Moms Across
| America [6] found in both varieties (They are anti-GMO
| and anti-vaxx in the pre-covid term, using the original
| vaccine defintion). A vegan response by The Reasoned
| Vegan to these allegations and testing can be found at
| [7] which raised questions about the overblown testing
| hyperbole by Moms Across America. Consequently, I don't
| have a strong opinion on the veracity of the testing.
|
| However, given my biases towards organic, grass-fed and
| away from both soy, GMO, and feedlot/grain cattle, the
| Chiropractor Dr. Pompa best captured a nuanced view with
| which I concur. [8] I say this because I've known many
| vegans, and the one I dated expressed concerns around the
| negative implications of a heavy soy diet that led to her
| to cut out all soy, and head more towards a raw food
| diet.
|
| [1] https://blessingfalls.com/2019/08/14/plant-based-
| impossible-...
|
| [2] https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/lab-
| produced-mea...
|
| [3] https://www.eatthis.com/news-impossible-meat-
| ingredient-may-...
|
| [4]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanabandoim/2019/12/20/what-
| the...
|
| [5] https://www.gmoscience.org/2019/06/25/rat-feeding-
| studies-su...
|
| [6] https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/gmo_impossible_burg
| er_posi...
|
| [7] https://thereasonedvegan.com/2019/07/24/lies-about-
| roundup-i...
|
| [8] https://drpompa.com/cellular-detox/meat-substitute-
| burgers-a...
| cheese_goddess wrote:
| If you want to eat a vegetable patty, why does it have to be
| a fake meat burger? Why can't you enjoy a falafel?
|
| More to the point, if you want to stop eating meat, why do
| you have to eat pretend-meat? If you're cutting out a major
| food group from your diet you're already making a huge
| commitment in time and effort to eat in a certain way while
| not missing out on nutrients (so no excuses about how it's
| simpler to eat fake meat). So why not spend this time and
| effort to learn to cook tasty, delicious foods, without meat?
|
| Why not spend this time and effort to learn to cook the many
| traditional dishes of the many world cuisines that are
| majority vegetarian or vegan, that teem with dishes that are
| absolutely heavenly, without any animal products in them?
| Learn to cook Indian, or Mediterranean, or African, or Thai.
| Learn to cook with olive oil instead of butter, learn to cook
| succulent, decadent aubergine casseroles and succulent legume
| dishes. Learn to cook! And don't leave your nutrition to the
| same old actors in the same old food industry that is
| destroying the environment and abusing animals with
| industrial beef (and pig, and chicken) production.
|
| Remember that the biggest investors in meat substitutes
| are... giant meat and dairy conglomerates. Check out this
| article:
|
| https://www.just-food.com/features/eyeing-alternatives-
| meat-...
|
| Recognise any names?
| GordonS wrote:
| Do any of these plant based meat substitutes have the same
| macro and micro nutrient profiles as the real thing, or are
| they mainly comprised of cheap carbs?
|
| I'd be willing to give it a go for a few things, like
| burgers, but only if nutritionally they are close to like for
| like. (there is also a medical reason behind this for me
| personally, as I have reactive hypoglycemia and avoid all but
| the smallest carb intake).
|
| I'll also add, our family doesn't actually eat much red meat
| - it's more of a treat, with chicken and pork far more common
| at our table than beef or lamb. Partly for health reasons,
| partly for cost reasons.
| yissp wrote:
| The newer ones (Beyond, Impossible) are a lot closer
| nutritionally to beef than the older style of veggie
| burgers that were mostly bean-based in my experience. Those
| could still be pretty good for what they were, but not
| really comparable to beef.
| pm90 wrote:
| If you have medical reasons to eat meat, IMO you shouldn't
| be experimenting with new foods unless your
| doctor/nutritionist okays it. Ie I feel like you may not be
| the target audience of people who can give up meat.
| datameta wrote:
| Generally they are very high in protein, have a decent
| amount of good fats (normally have much less omega-6 than
| red meats) and have low carb content. Beyond Meat, for
| example, is my go-to substitute. I get their ground stuff
| in a pack and add more spices and make patties (though I'm
| a huge fan of it as is when eating out).
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Not sure how much you eat of it. But generally processed
| foods are not that good for you. I know they add and additive
| to make it taste like it has serum from blood. I remember
| there being media reports and controversy over the safety of
| it. I tried making a meatless burger, and found adding almond
| flower goes a long way to make it taste great.
| tingletech wrote:
| One of the brands uses a generically engineered yeast to
| create a plant heme with a gene spliced in from soy. It's
| GMO but seems safe (its not like a round up ready GMO). I
| think these engineered meat substitutes may not be as
| healthy as a whole food plant based diet -- but I find it
| hard to believe they are less healthy or have a higher
| environmental impact that the meat they replace.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| My family raise one steer in our back yard. It feeds two
| families for a year. Do you consider this animal abuse? Do you
| consider it a source of groundwater or air pollution?
|
| I'm genuinely curious and somewhat open to being persuaded.
| It's hard for me to see it, but there could be an argument for
| it.
|
| Or perhaps you feel that those things are a product of
| industrial scale. If so, can you not conceive any solution that
| would involve less than 100% reduction?
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| Most of the ill effects come from industrial scale
| production, which (at least in the USA) probably covers 99%
| of production. Regarding your personal cow, it does produce
| (from quick googling) ~220 lbs of methane a year, which seems
| to trap ~85x as much heat as an equivalent amount of CO2 over
| a ~20 year timescale, or ~30x as much over a much longer
| timescale, so that's like releasing ~18700 lbs of CO2 each
| year in the short term. A gasoline powered car will produce
| about a pound of CO2 per mile driven, so you can think of
| your cow as being equivalent to having an extra car that
| drives 18.7k miles per year (or ~9.5k miles per family).
| Eating half a cow seems pretty close to driving an extra car.
| captainredbeard wrote:
| Apples to oranges - a pasture raised cow doesn't produce as
| much methane because the "rumen flora" differs between a
| grain-based and a forage-based diet. The bacterial
| population is so different between the two foods that if
| you switch a cow's feed to grain too quickly, the ensuing
| bloating can be life threatening. The bacteria digesting
| the corn is what produces the most methane.
|
| Unlike CO2, methane breaks down in the atmosphere so it's
| not an infinitely growing sink, it's a rolling window.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| Brief research doesn't really appear to support that -
| grass fed cows seem to put on weight much slower, and
| therefore produce methane longer, and the methane of
| course degrades into CO2 (hence the 'effective' amount of
| CO2 over a given time period). But the differences
| between the two seem to be relatively small-ish
| (certainly 'different sized apples' rather than apples
| and oranges).
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| Methane is CH4. It doesn't degrade to CO2 so much as the
| relative ability to trap infrared radiation is given in
| proportion to what an equal number of CO2 molecules would
| absorb/trap. Similarly, other gasses like refrigerants
| are rated in Global Warming Potential (GWP) units based
| on 20 years of absorption of infrared.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
| Zababa wrote:
| Does this take into account the CO2/energy used to
| harvest the grain and move it?
| dundarious wrote:
| So you do a thing that almost no consumers do? Interesting
| question for finding out philosophical underpinnings of
| someone's beliefs/opinions, but at best tangential and at
| worst verging on sophistry when discussing practical matters.
| This is not an accusation, just an observation.
|
| But to attempt an answer: for example, I have rescued pet
| cats. If I find some arts and crafts use for the plentiful
| fur I "acquire" when I groom them, no big deal. If I make a
| commercial enterprise out of this and seek to maximize my
| profits at the expense of their well-being, that's bad. There
| are gradations in between that are bad as well -- ones that
| can easily occur for backyard farm animals, where their
| welfare and enrichment are very low on the totem pole.
| Especially if you are slaughtering, which obviously places
| their welfare very low on the totem pole. I'm avoiding the
| environmental aspect because it's inarguably increasing GHG
| emissions compared to what was originally suggested.
|
| But again, irrelevant for arguments about ideal supermarket
| habits.
| mrfusion wrote:
| They're social animals though. Wouldn't it be lonely?
| eplanit wrote:
| It'll take a couple of generations. Starting raising your kids
| on only Soylent Green type modern foods, and no meats; then,
| they'll grow up to find real meat disgusting.
| poopypoopington wrote:
| Or fruit and vegetables. The alternative to meat isn't
| Soylent Green, but of course you're just a troll you don't
| want to debate facts.
| eplanit wrote:
| Technically, Soylent Green was made of people (the plot of
| the movie). The premise of it though was Soylent (Blue,
| Yellow,...) foods were (supposed to have been) made from
| vegetable and seaweed protein -- which is not so much
| science fiction anymore w.r.t. Beyond Meat and other such
| products.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Or the first time they have real meat, they actually enjoy
| it. Similar to all of those parents that regulate their kid's
| sugar content by not allowing sodas/candy/etc. Once they go
| to a friend's house or school and get a taste, they do not
| spit it out in disgust.
| yboris wrote:
| Meat is rather different. Just about no kid in America
| would want to eat a dog. And there's nothing significantly
| different between a dog and a pig, other than our cultural
| attitudes towards them.
| spijdar wrote:
| As disgusting as I've been raised to find the idea, I
| suspect GP's point might hold have a grain of truth to
| dog meat, too. Some cultures eat dog -- I suspect if I
| ate dog meat, especially if I didn't _know_ it was dog
| meat, I 'd probably find it an okay meat.
|
| (that said, I don't believe the physiology of domestic
| dogs really lends itself to "good meat", certainly not as
| efficient as domestic pigs, so raising dogs as food
| doesn't really make sense)
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if there is calculations where dogs would fall
| on axis of chicken, pork and beef. Probably around pork,
| but which side and what sort of diets would be allowable.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| A dog, being carnivorous, is further up the food chain
| than a pig, so will have more accumulated toxins.
| pm90 wrote:
| Pigs are omnivores.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Congratulations, you posted something that appears to
| rebut my post but doesn't actually contradict anything I
| said.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think that is just because we haven't served it to
| them. Serve it a few years and then tell what it is.
| Could solve that issue. Also I wonder how well decent
| breed of dog compares to beef, chicken and pork from
| ecological and economic perspective.
|
| Only animals I'm against eating is hominids like apes,
| monkeys and humans. And that is only because of
| pathogens.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I have a friend who was raised Hindu but is himself lapsed.
| He has trouble eating beef, it upsets his digestive system.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Funny enough, this happened to me, I was raised without
| meat as a toddler very young child, tofu dogs, seitan, the
| whole nine yards. My parents from the Bay Area were
| militant about it...until I was about 5 at a family friends
| bbq, I had bacon for the first time, and as my dad tells
| it, that basically ended the whole family's vegetarianism
| it was so good. We all eat meat till this day... so maybe
| there is something instinctual about it.
| hourislate wrote:
| Yeah, I'm good. You go ahead but we're having a large steak
| barbecue tonight. Bought like 20 lbs of Ribeye and 10 lbs of
| chicken.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Nice!
| coffeefirst wrote:
| This is getting downvoted because it's snarky, but look,
| barbecue is a cultural staple. The climate/PETA/imitation
| beef proponents are just priming to pump on the Virtue-
| Signaling-Politicization-Industrial complex, which will
| inevitably transform the cheeseburger into a political
| statement.
|
| The last thing we need is to turn cheeseburgers into a
| political statement.
|
| You want to make real progress?
|
| Don't pick fights with hourislate's barbecue--it sounds like
| a great time.
|
| At least in the US, there's no chance of convincing more than
| a tiny minority of people to give up cheeseburgers and
| barbecue.
|
| But on the other hand, if you promote non-meat dishes from
| around the world (falafel, shakshuka, black bean tacos,
| pastas, you get the idea) it's entirely possible for the
| average person who eats meat every day to switch for a few
| meals per week, whether they're motivated by climate, health,
| or just really liking tacos.
|
| And take a hard look at restaurant portion sizes. In a lot of
| cases they've doubled since the 1980's.
|
| It's easy to imagine this as a 25% reduction in meat usage,
| without picking a losing battle against backyard barbecues.
| yissp wrote:
| Even encouraging people to reduce beef consumption in favor
| of pork or chicken would have a pretty significant impact,
| and that's a lot less drastic of a lifestyle change than
| going fully vegan. Although from an animal welfare
| perspective it might not be desirable - a lot more chickens
| need to suffer to produce the same amount of meat as one
| cow for instance.
| [deleted]
| cheese_goddess wrote:
| I don't 100% agree on how there's no chance of convincing
| people to give up cheeseburgers and BBQs. Sure, they're a
| cultural staple, but smoking was a cultural staple in
| France and yet the French have basically given up on
| smoking, because deep down inside they're sensible people
| (despite being pig-headed Gauls, at the same time).
|
| What I find hard to understand is this: if you want to eat
| meat, why would you choose to eat a meat substitute? If you
| don't want to eat meat, why would you choose to eat a meat
| substitute?
|
| How many people are there that really _want_ to eat _fake
| meat_? Or fake anything, for that matter?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Everybody gangsta 'till the climate changes.
| hourislate wrote:
| The world average temp has warmed .9degC since 1880.
| bulletsvshumans wrote:
| "I'm only going 20 miles an hour", said the teenager
| slamming on the gas.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Yeah, yeah. Cool story, greenie.
| Spivak wrote:
| The individual punishment for anyone alive today will
| basically be nothing even in the worst cases, so while I
| agree with you, that argument doesn't really work.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Already we have witnessed increased frequency of extreme
| weather events. And the thing about positive feedback
| loops is that they accelerate.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| Heart disease is the number one killer in the US
| currently.
| https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929#heart-
| disea...
|
| Which can be reversed by eating a plant based diet.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466936/
|
| If not for the planet, then for your health.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Yeah, because eating meat leads to heart disease. Oh
| wait, I heard those people also drank water!
| macinjosh wrote:
| This is the same logic those who say we should end teen
| pregnancy by teaching abstinence use and we all know how that
| works out.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's also a huge coordination problem. Just casually get 300
| million people to be on the same page and make a collective
| action against their own personal interest where there is no
| punishment for noncompliance, no feedback mechanism for
| rewards, and no guarantee it will have any effect.
|
| When the expected outcome is "you deny yourself pleasures you
| want and nothing changes" it's pretty darn rational to just
| not bother.
| afarrell wrote:
| > 300 million
|
| Add Argentina's population of 45 million to that. And then
| go ask Pakistanis how they would feel about a "don't eat
| beef" law imposed on them.
| fortran77 wrote:
| On a similar line of reasoning: 65% of Americans are obese or
| overweight. We can make significant progress toward reducing
| all sorts of environmental harm if people simple didn't eat
| more food than they needed.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| The obesity is most likely due to unhealthy carbs than meat.
| Eating grilled meat and salads will rarely get you obese.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Yes, but there's still a lot of pollution associated with
| it: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2011151
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We should stop subsidizing corn production.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I wonder, from a cows point of view, if being eliminated as a
| species is preferable to being eaten one at a time at some
| point in their life cycle.
|
| Because this appears to be advocating for genocide. Or
| bovinecide (is that the right word)?
|
| <Edit>Apparently this is being taken as an argument for meat
| eating. It's not, I suspect we will lay off eating animal flesh
| as a species fairly soon. Just a theoretical question.
| Something to think about. Because simple "everyone should just
| XXX!" often have wider implications.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| In general, I'm confused by the counter-factual ethics
| required to work this out. For example, if we stop eating
| meat and dairy, then we would have no incentive to raise
| cattle. And without that incentive, cattle populations would
| drop dramatically; they would be limited to special preserves
| or zoos, or very marginal land. The species might not even
| survive. We don't have a stellar record of keeping large
| nuisance animals around if they have no economic value to us.
| It's not even clear (to me) that domestic cows are capable of
| surviving in the wild. So, in its most extreme form, the
| question posed is it more ethical to continue eating cattle
| and sustaining the species, or abstaining and letting the
| species go extinct? I don't know.
| the8472 wrote:
| Wouldn't be the first time, nobody remembers the great horse
| genocide of 1908 either.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Equicide? At least people still kept some horses around for
| recreational riding etc. What will happen to cows?
| lucidguppy wrote:
| Wildlife now only makes up 5% of the biomass of mammals
| on planet earth. Where is the outcry for the thousands of
| species that go extinct.
| https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-
| muc...
|
| Why don't people give up the meat until this has all been
| figured out?
| yboris wrote:
| It's so sad that even now people misunderstand the concerns
| of most people advocating reducing (or eliminating) meat from
| everyone's diet.
|
| In the grand scheme of things, "being eaten" (that is getting
| killed prematurely) isn't as great a problem as the severe
| abuse animals undergo before they are killed. If there was a
| choice to make, I'd rather never exist, than to be brought
| into existence on a factory farm, confined, abused, rape-
| inseminated, have my children be taken away, be hauled by a
| tractor because I can no longer stand up, etc.
|
| Please watch "Earthlings" to better understand the way humans
| treat animals: http://www.nationearth.com
| rastafang wrote:
| Would be a lot better to reduce the number of cows... I'm doing
| my part, I'm eating less meat.
|
| It reminds me of people that work out to loose weight... much
| easier to reduce the amount of calories you take in.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I don't understand this attitude towards exercise. You'll be
| healthier if you work out and weigh XXXlbs than if you sit on
| your ass and weigh the same.
| the8472 wrote:
| "as much as 55%" seems low since recent studies with seaweed have
| shown "over 80%" reduction in vivo.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| echopurity wrote:
| TBH a study with 21 subjects isn't worth much.
| goohle wrote:
| Humaninty must control everything, even what cow eats, and how
| cow farts. The next step will be to control what cow thinks about
| all that.
| dekken_ wrote:
| they like music if you're curious
| twoslide wrote:
| 55% reduction in methanse is good, but its still a destructive
| and inefficient way to produce protein. Wish people would give up
| on beef and look into alternatives.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| There are no healthy cheap and safe alternatives to meat.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| jcfrei wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| Steak vs chicken breast? That's not an alternative not only
| from the taste stand point but also nutrionally.
| timeon wrote:
| Nutritionally it is more than good enough.
| nindalf wrote:
| Please enlighten us, what's missing nutritionally in
| chicken that you can find in steak?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Lots of delicious saturated fat, for one.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| the-dude wrote:
| What is wrong with cholesterol?
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Nothing. Fatties seem to think that only they populate
| the earth.
| Retric wrote:
| On it's own nothing the body needs quite a lot of it. But
| it can be a problem if your diet includes excessive
| quantities.
|
| Edit: Saying a food is healthy or not IMO really a
| question of how well it fits into the widest selection of
| current diets and lifestyles. Drinking say 1oz of sea
| water it generally fine and if people where frequently
| salt deficient then it could be considered healthy, but
| as insufficient salt intake is not a common problem and
| excessive salt intake is occasionally one I don't think
| we can really consider sea water as healthy.
|
| Similarly dietary cholesterol has minimal impact on most
| people, but overall excess is more generally going to be
| an issue simply due to the small population that is at
| risk. As such I think we can say lower cholesterol
| chicken is a net positive overall unless we know more
| about the specific person involved.
| the-dude wrote:
| Well that is true for almost anything including water.
|
| What is the problem you are referring to?
| wyager wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 mg/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 wrote:
| > The human body can produce almost everything it needs
| internally from most editable plants and animals.
|
| I note that your statement is appropriately very strongly
| hedged.
|
| > So, based on all existing research and in the context
| of a normal diet,
|
| Dietary "science" has one of the lowest standards of
| rigor of any field, in the same ballpark as psychology.
| Until we have accurate computer models of every metabolic
| pathway in the human body, I'm not going to trust papers
| that are like "actually you can just eat soy and seitan
| and be fine" (incidentally, the counterfactual study got
| funding approval from vegan activists and seventh-day
| Adventists!). Also, "in the context of a normal diet" is
| another pretty big hedge - "normal" diets are terrible.
|
| In any case, when we're talking about nutrition, since
| the state of research is so bad, we're basically stuck
| with a priori reasoning and Bayesian observation, and
| after applying those two, my observation is that people
| who eat only ruminants and fish and stuff look really
| good and are strong and healthy, and the exact opposite
| is true for people who eat only vegetables, and this
| doesn't really impose a big update on my prior derived
| from what I know about pre-agriculture food sources in
| these people's evolutionary environments.
|
| > Because beef is tasty.
|
| As you point out, when your body makes something taste
| better than something else, it's probably because it's
| doing a better job of meeting your nutritional needs. If
| two foods were abundant in the evolutionary environment,
| I expect taste to be reasonably well-calibrated in terms
| of causing me to eat the nutritionally optimal
| distribution of foods.
|
| Ruminants and birds were both abundant in my evolutionary
| environment. So what does it say that ruminants taste so
| much better?
| Retric wrote:
| > Dietary "science" has one of the lowest standards of
| rigor of any field
|
| Modern dietary science is quite different from it's
| starting point. We know enough for soldiers, inmates, etc
| to eat exactly the food provided and be healthy. That's
| the basic benchmark for success.
|
| > it's probably because it's doing a better job.
|
| Many birds are quite tasty, chicken however wasn't part
| of our evolutionary environment. It also breaks down in
| the wider context, evolution would be adjusting things
| based on the overall diet and lifestyle of our ancestors
| which based on available evidence was quite different
| from our own.
| Retric wrote:
| Having suggested more tasty birds I will recommend a few.
| Squab/pidgin, Ruffed Grouse, Wild Turkey, Canada Goose.
| They have a surprisingly wide range of flavors.
|
| Chickens are easy to farm which is why their so common,
| but they aren't that representative of other bird
| species.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > That said their both missing vitamin C, so you need a
| more diverse diet anyway.
|
| People have been shown to live on fresh beef alone for
| extended period without suffering scurvy.
|
| Paradoxically, adding other might actually introduce the
| need for additional vitamin C.
| Retric wrote:
| Uncooked meat has vitamin C, but is harder to digest and
| risks food born diseases. Cooking is the issue rather
| than the lack of it in chicken or beef.
|
| People don't need much vitamin C to avoid scurvy, a
| healthy person can skip it for about 3 months without
| significant issue.
| wyager wrote:
| > 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...
| shipman05 wrote:
| > standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian
| already
|
| Not by any reasonable definition. Americans consume more
| meat per capita than any nation on earth. (https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...)
|
| I'm guessing you're basing that statement on the article
| you shared showing that 70% of calories consumed by
| Americans come from plant-based sources.
|
| 1. I believe your calorie-percentage data points more to
| the high amount sugar and corn syrup in the standard
| American diet. Those two plant-based, calorie-dense
| ingredients skew the data. A McDonald's chicken nugget
| value meal with a regular Coke has a high number of
| plant-based calories due to the Coke, but it is pretty
| far from being a vegetarian meal.
|
| 2. Calling 70% vegetarian "practically vegetarian" really
| stretches the definitions of both words. Most Americans
| consume meat with > 2 meals per day.
| wyager wrote:
| Sweeteners are about 15% of calories for Americans which
| sort of undercuts your idea that it's all about corn
| syrup. Your example of a single hypothetical meal is
| irrelevant - the data is clear that Americans are
| practically vegetarian, in aggregate.
|
| 70% plants is absolutely "practically vegetarian"
| compared to, say, a diet consistent with the pre-
| agricultural evolutionary environment of most Americans.
| Personally, in excess of 90% of my caloric intake comes
| from animals (and I am visibly and medically healthier
| than 95% of Americans, even health-focused herbivores, as
| are people I know who eat similarly).
| Retric wrote:
| Preindustrial diets where mostly plant based in
| aggregate. Even if you look before agriculture estimates
| place typical hunter gatherers at about 65% plant based
| with extreme variation. Which is the same ratio as
| Americans eat when you exclude those sweeteners.
|
| Longer term surviving examples tended to have a higher
| meat based ratio largely because they lived on islands or
| in more marginal areas. However, looking at land area and
| population density estimates adjusts the ratio
| significantly.
|
| Some of this needs to be inferred from things like Native
| American tribal densities and is further confused as
| diseases decimated native populations throwing off those
| density estimates. Still the idea of our ancestors eating
| a primarily meat based diet seems to be a mistake.
| wyager wrote:
| > Preindustrial diets where mostly plant based in
| aggregate.
|
| You're telling me my snow-bound ancestors were eating
| vegetables in the dead of winter, prior to the advent of
| agriculture?
| Retric wrote:
| Vegetarian populations have different deficiencies than
| other populations but overall they aren't worse lifespans
| than other populations with similar economic backgrounds.
| wyager wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| Obviously the people I'm comparing against each other are
| in the same social-economic stratum. Even after
| conditioning for other factors, the costs of bad
| (vegetable-based) diets are significant.
|
| And, of course, there is a bidirectional causality with
| poor people getting bad food, which stunts their
| development, which keeps them poor.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| 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...
|
| If you eat enough calories per day from real plant foods -
| getting protein deficiency is impossible.
| CyanBird wrote:
| 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
| arglebarglegar wrote:
| ehh, I don't eat meat and it only takes slightly more effort
| to get enough protein. There are entire cultures that do it
| yboris wrote:
| Beans and rice, for example, are cheaper and healthier than
| meat. Just about any vegetable you can pick up is healthier
| than meat.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| What sort of alternatives? Chicken, sheep and goats?
|
| Personally I want to stop buying meat. I'll probably start
| hunting once or twice a year and fill a freezer.
| yummybear wrote:
| Mitigating climate change is not solved by a single action.
| This is great news - it's something that is immediately
| actionable. Changing peoples diets can take years and years of
| campaigning, and some will never change.
| while1fork wrote:
| It's not "great news," it's a drop in the bucket. Only the
| end of FF extraction and large-scale bio oceanic carbon
| capture and sequestration (CCS) (phytoplankton and/or kelp,
| GMO possibly) can bring about a net negative carbon budget to
| get back to preindustrial levels soon enough before human
| civilization collapses.
|
| Another example is Iceland's direct air capture plant. It is
| immensely expensive, power-hungry, and unable to scale. Such
| approaches are doomed to fail because they are big
| engineering solutions that don't utilize life to do more of
| the work for us. If we don't solve the problem at scale, soon
| enough, in a cost-effective manner, then we die.
| yboris wrote:
| Have you stopped eating meat? Or are you saying "my
| contribution is just a drop in the bucket, so I may as well
| continue eating meat?"
|
| Of course government action is better than individual action.
| But why not both? Signal your discontent by removing yourself
| from the meat market.
| anonymoushermit wrote:
| > _Have you stopped eating meat?_
|
| No.
|
| > _Or are you saying "my contribution is just a drop in the
| bucket, so I may as well continue eating meat?"_
|
| Compared to, say, global shipping, meat itself is a drop in
| the bucket.
|
| > _Of course government action is better than individual
| action._
|
| I wish this were sarcasm.
|
| > _But why not both?_
|
| Because the promoted alternative (soy) makes people docile
| and easier to control. No, thank you.
| yboris wrote:
| > Because the promoted alternative (soy) makes people
| docile and easier to control.
|
| This is a bold empirical claim. Do you have any credible
| reasons to believe this that you could share?
| anonymoushermit wrote:
| https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-that-lower-
| testos...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/17/science/aggression-in-
| men...
| yboris wrote:
| How do you conclude that people consuming soy are "easier
| to control"? Are women "easier to control"? Are you also
| saying that becoming more woman-like is problematic?
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| > Are you also saying that becoming more woman-like is
| problematic?
|
| As a man, yes.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Compared to, say, global shipping, meat itself is a
| drop in the bucket.
|
| According to this, livestock & manure are 5.8% of the
| total, while shipping is 1.7% of the total:
| https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
|
| IIRC the actual level of change we need to achieve long-
| term stability is something like 99%-99.9% reduction
| (depending on the gas, CH4 != CO2). If so, we'd have to
| eliminate about half of shipping emissions even if we
| eliminated 100% of the emissions in every other sector,
| but that's even worse for your argument as it also means
| we have to eliminate 5/6ths of all livestock & manure
| emissions if we eliminated 100% of everything else.
| Zababa wrote:
| > IIRC the actual level of change we need to achieve
| long-term stability is something like 99%-99.9% reduction
|
| This is impossible to attain though.
| convolvatron wrote:
| not impossible at all. we just have to wait for the
| oncoming economic collapse, famine and mass migration.
| the great part of this whole thing is that the more we
| double down on the systems that brought us here, the more
| they will be undermined.
|
| I wish people would stop pretending we have a choice to
| do nothing because the whole thing is just going to be
| too inconvenient.
| Zababa wrote:
| > I wish people would stop pretending we have a choice to
| do nothing because the whole thing is just going to be
| too inconvenient.
|
| But we do? There's no pretension here, no action is
| always a choice. That doesn't mean that we will be free
| from the consequences of course. I think many people are
| betting, consciously or not, on the fact that we can keep
| going like this until the day they die and then they
| won't have to care about the consequences.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| > we just have to wait for the oncoming economic
| collapse, famine and mass migration. the great part of
| this whole thing is that the more we double down on the
| systems that brought us here, the more they will be
| undermined
|
| Uhuh, we just need to wait until you stop reading
| dystopian books and will leave your basement.
| ben_w wrote:
| Perhaps, perhaps not. I'm optimistic.
|
| Also: while I wasn't thinking of this when I wrote the
| previous post, if carbon capture powered by non-fossil
| sources turned out to be useful (but not _so_ useful to
| give us the exact opposite problem), that's still a
| success.
| ip26 wrote:
| The ascetics haven't made much progress in fifty-odd years
| of trying. I suspect going to extremes makes you less
| relatable, which makes it hard to influence others,
| limiting your impact. A flexitarian who eats a burger at a
| social event once in a while might model a more
| approachable lifestyle change for others...
| [deleted]
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| See, thus is what's wrong with you people. Some of us want to
| enjoy food, not to treat it like some necessary evil and stuff
| whatever amount of crap we need.
| ben_w wrote:
| Many people are already doing that. While various products are
| already on the consumer market and more are in the pipeline,
| and while I hope they collectively succeed in replacing it,
| this takes time and money.
| Haga wrote:
| Agri culture is the car industries scape goat. I blame the
| peasants for the gluttony.
| Borrible wrote:
| Which is some fine news for World's Top Beef Supplier on
| Bloomberg.
|
| What share of world wide greenhouse gas emissions by cow burbs is
| it again?
|
| Around four percent?
|
| So Brazil maybe two percent?
|
| And they reduce them by what? Let's say, by half?
|
| That is one percent.
|
| Well Okay...
|
| It's a start.
| ShrigmaMale wrote:
| How does it affect taste? Cattle feed has a big effect on how
| meat tastes and, to a lesser extent, milk.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I do not understand this focus on methane. It is very short lived
| in the atmosphere, it cannot accumulate like carbon dioxide can.
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