I wonder how true this is. I have been trying to switch to a more carnivore diet - more red meat eg steak - for rumored benefits of lowering inflammation and boosting immune system. This is stating the reverse.
It's nutritional science, so the error bars are big, the effect sizes are small and the confounding variables numerous. At least a plant-based diet reduces your GHG footprint, so there's that. If you want to switch to a more carnivorous diet, I'd suggest chicken instead of beef. The evidence for mammalian meat being slightly carcinogenic seems to be pretty solid, and the climate impact of beef is about ten times that of chicken.
If you have so much as tried to grow a garden, much less farm at scale, you have a lot less sympathy for animals and their destructiveness. When you have racoons coming along at night knocking down your corn for the sheer hell of it, and not even eating it, or porcupines doing the same thing, or crows plucking out the stocks just as soon as they poke out of the ground, or deer mowing flat anything that isn't encased in an eight foot high fence, they lose their cute and cuddly charismatic aspects, and you start to view them like a horde of locusts, stealing the bread from your table, and prosecuting them with extreme prejudice becomes very, very attractive.
It's almost as if you've built your garden right in the middle of their habitat.
But seriously, I come from a family of farmers, and I know that the things that farmers do to animals is way worse than anything you've described here.
There’s really no amount of nice treatment that makes taking a calf away from its mother alright. I’m not aware of any ways to produce dairy without systematic animal abuse.
I found a method that leaves them together for 3 months. That's an improvement at least.
(Of course that means that the calf will take most -but not all- of the milk during that time. But then it is stated that the cost for the vet goes down a lot in exchange.)
Another option I found is to give several calves to one cow for 6 months, which has advantages and disadvantages compared to the first way. (Longer time with milk and natural suckling behaviour but calves without their mother and the smaller ones might get less milk.)
edit: Here is a list with places in Germany that do that:
By not taking the calves away from their mothers? That's how we did it for centuries, we only started taking calves away from their mothers when artificial milk replacements made it more profitable to do so.
Not nearly as many, of course, and the same products are eaten by meat eaters as well, and most plants are grown for animal feeding, but yes, it's impossible to live a regular human life and not indirectly hurt animals, humans or the environment. You can try to minimize it, though.
>We should care about unnecessary suffering because we can.
"We should because we can"? There are many things that we "can" do that we better not do. There's no automatic logical deduction from "we can" to "so we should".
Avoiding unnecessary suffering is sometimes used as the basis for whole ethics systems. It's inherently good and doesn't need to be deduced from anything.
But we have been eating meat for millennia, naturally, before we ever concerned ourselves about reading/writing and math, so there's that.
>If ducks stopped raping other ducks, they'd go extinct too. Not really sure if that's an argument in favor of human rapists, though.
That would have mattered only if the same conditions applied (e.g. extinction threat otherwise), which they don't. So it's looks more like a way to force the argument against eating meat based on a strong association with something obviously negative ("think of the children" style argument).
> That would have mattered only if the same conditions applied (e.g. extinction threat otherwise)
Exactly the point I'm making. Humans don't face extinction if we stop eating animal products, so comparing us to lions is not a valid argument for why we should eat meat.
Eating animals (some of which can`t reproduce naturaly anymore) raised in CAFOS, fed unnatural foods and pumped with hormones and antibiotics is all but natural evolutionary behavior and hurts both animals and humans.
>Whether something is “natural” has no bearing on its goodness.
Well, goodness also is not a logical argument. Good according to what, some arbitrary morals? Other people find it perfectly good to eat burgers.
>And certainly plenty of the behaviors that cause human suffering are 100% natural.
Only in the contrived sense, that we are part of nature as a species.
But we have long made the distinction that our more advanced developments concerning invention, historical developments, innovation, etc, are part of "civilization", and it's the behaviors that we already had before we developed those that are our "natural" part.
And we did ate meat before we had writing, and mobile phones.
>This is a fine conclusion that just doesn’t happen to follow from anything else you said.
Isn't not meant to be a logical deduction from something said earlier, it's meant to be about prioritization.
Rape, murder, and infanticide are all natural human behaviors by this definition, and they’ve become less common as we’ve become more divorced from nature. Also natural: having about half of your children die what are now preventable deaths. Life in nature is complete shit.
And I was assuming here a basically utilitarian definition of the good, because of your concern with suffering. Of course it’s debatable.
>At least a plant-based diet reduces your GHG footprint
That isn't actually true. It is a very misleading claim spread to promote veganism. It comes from comparing the raw caloric value of field corn, to the caloric value of beef. In reality, We do not actually eat field corn, we turn it into HFCS and corn oil, this reduces the energy efficiency of corn dramatically. A plant based diet also should not be based on HFCS and corn oil.
Second, beef is the worst meat to compare to, it is not an accurate representation for meat in general. Chicken being fed on corn based feed produces 5 million calories per acre, more than almost all the plant based crops a vegan diet would generally be based on, including soy, and equal to staples like wheat.
Third, even in comparing beef they do it wrong. They are comparing to hypothetical beef raised entirely on corn. There is no such beef. All beef is grass fed for the first year, they are only finished on grain.
That's interesting. I based my opinion on reports such as [1]. Do you have any (semi-)scientific references that support your opinion?
I agree that we don't eat much corn directly, but if it weren't used to feed livestock, we could use the land for something else, like potatoes or lentils or whatever grows in similar climate to corn, which are actually eaten. I'm somewhat doubtful of your claim that corn fed chicken produce 5 million calories per acre. Do you have a citation for that? The usual rule of thumb for going up one level in the food chain is that you lose 9/10th of the energy and corn only produces on the order of 12 million calories per acre. This random google result here [2] indeed claims about 1.4 million calories per acre for chicken.
>Do you have any (semi-)scientific references that support your opinion?
Does arithmetic count? The stats are available to look up yourself, the math is simple to do. But there's nobody funding publishing "debunk vegan nonsense" papers like there are people funding "make up vegan nonsense". So the only people you can find doing the math for you are just random people like the blog I link to later in this post.
>I agree that we don't eat much corn directly, but if it weren't used to feed livestock, we could use the land for something else, like potatoes or lentils or whatever grows in similar climate to corn, which are actually eaten
Most of those alternatives produce far fewer calories per acre than corn, which is the issue. An honest comparison shows most plant crops produce very low calories per acre, and require lots of diesel to produce and transport. Yes, you could grow something else. And almost all of those something elses are worse than corn fed chicken from an energy efficiency standpoint. If vegans want to argue the impact of meat vs plants in this way, then they need to apply the same standard to plants, and that means demanding that the vast majority of crops being grown are abandoned in favor of the tiny number that meet corn's energy output: corn, sugarcane, potatoes, palm. There's your acceptable vegan diet if we're going to limit things for being less efficient than corn.
>The usual rule of thumb for going up one level in the food chain is that you lose 9/10th of the energy
We're not talking about a natural ecosystem, which is what that rule of thumb is for. We're talking about animals that have been bred specifically to grow very large very quickly on very little food.
>and corn only produces on the order of 12 million calories per acre
No, corn produces 12 million calories per acre in human edible calories when converted to corn oil and HFCS. It produces 15 million calories per acre as livestock feed.
>This random google result here [2] indeed claims about 1.4 million calories per acre for chicken.
And it is very wrong. It is making up a silly number by using the human figure for corn calories per acre not the livestock feed figure. Then assuming chickens are fed 50/50 corn and soy when in reality their feed is almost entirely corn. It is also assuming a feed conversion ratio of 3, which is nearly double the actual ratio of 1.6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Poultry
You'd think that the meat industry would pay for debunking vegan nonsense papers, especially when the world starts talking about a carbon tax that would make beef a lot more expensive if they use the numbers I cited. But I'll read the links you provided and update my opinion. Thanks for looking them up for me.
Pasture is not harvested or stored, so there is no rodent or bird deaths from harvesting equipment, and no mass rodenticide usage as there is with grains.
It is far from "loaded". 0.15g per serving is not "loaded", and is half the level of salmon for example, which is promoted as healthy. Omega 6 polyunsaturated fats are highly inflammatory. But our intake is almost entirely from "vegetable oil", not chicken.
That's because people eat a lot of chicken and eggs, and don't each much salmon. When deciding what to eat, the amount per serving is what matters, not how much of it the average person eats. And again, arachidonic acid is just one omega 6 PUFA, being specifically singled out for promotion by vegans because it is found in meat. The rest of the omega 6s are all just as bad, and our intake is almost entirely from vegetable oil. A serving of chicken has less than 2g of omega 6s in total. That's less than of the omega 6s in a serving of tofu.
Animal protein is highly inflammatory. This is about the worst thing you can do if you are concerned about inflammation. Load up on fresh vegetables and fruits instead.
This has been my take away as well. There are plenty of these sorts of studies that don’t rule out meat, but show a clear damaging effect from red meat. Often, they mention leaving in a little serving of low fat meat. It’s probably more to leave people the option of some meat as opposed to making a more divisive statement. Meanwhile, cultures which start out with diets more whole foods, plant based and introduce the standard American diet see stark climbs in cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and the other ailments.
'Animal protein is highly inflammatory'. If this massive unqualified, non-referenced generalization is true then we can see that it doesn't translate into diffential mortality.
"United Kingdom-based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation."
Many fresh vegetables are inflammatory. Plants evolved chemicals to hinder herbation. Roots/tubers and fruit are generally fine, but leaves/stems/flowers are generally full of inflammatory anti-nutrients and should be cooked.
Blog posts and HN posts have an equal lack of authority. Authority does not matter though, facts do. You can look up the levels of oxalates, phytates, PUFAs, etc from whatever source you like and confirm reality. You don't need an "authority" to tell you what to think.
>Blog posts and HN posts have an equal lack of authority.
I agree that ultimately facts are what matter, but I disagree on this point. In the real world where it's not possible to author or reference a peer-reviewed research study for every statement or decision you'd like to make, this authority has value.
TThe administrators of Harvard Medical School, a well respected university, were willing to publish this content on a domain they controlled. This implies that some trusted expert at this trusted institution authored, reviewed, and published this content. This means that they don't believe that this content is so inaccurate as to expose the institution to a reputation loss, as opposed to say www.fake-health-expert.example.com. In fact, this may have more authority than a peer-reviewed study that doesn't properly disclose its funding by e.g. the dairy or sugar industry.
This skin in the game of reputational risk is orders of magnitude different than your or my reputational risk by posting a comment to HN.
>This implies that some trusted expert at this trusted institution authored, reviewed, and published this content.
No it does not. It is a blog post. Tons of people have blogs on that domain. There is absolutely no standard of authority or correctness involved. You are falsely inferring that there are trusted experts involved. There is no factual basis for that belief.
That site is run by a well known quack, and is full of misrepresented "evidence" and even outright lies. It used to be called the "vegan research institute" until he renamed it so it was less obvious as a propaganda outlet.
And btw you linked an article with the following conclusion : "The video confirmed what I already knew from evaluating the published evidence: it is healthier to eat more plant-based foods and less red meat."
