Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

The context of the early 70s was that "The Limits To Growth" and "The Population Bomb" had just been published and there was a real concern in the air that the world was going to run out of food quickly unless something drastic was done. I think this created a strong confirmation bias that favored any scientific validation of vegetarianism as good news. Saturated fat being the main component of meats that is not in vegetables, and carbohydrates being the main components of vegetables that are not in meats, the confirmation bias was decidedly pro-carbohydrates, anti-saturated fats.

IMHO, whenever you get people saying "Wouldn't it be wonderful if the science said <x> because it would help with <some other thing that is hard to figure out>" you get one of these situations.

View on HN

Of course on the other hand: wouldn't it be amazingly convenient for the meat industry if just as a massive drought was bringing forth a renewed wave of criticism against the wastefulness of alfalfa for feed; with factory farms being heavily criticized as horrifying cruel; antibiotics in animal feed being blamed for bringing about the MRSApocalypse; hormones being blamed for... well just about anything; along with shit lagoons destroying the environment and cowfarts destroying the ozone layer there was a sudden rush of studies showing that you should be eating more meat.

I mean. You know. It plays both ways.

I suspect there is a certain amount of "meat solidarity", but meat itself is not really a monolithic thing.

Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce, and poultry three times as efficient. Replacing beef in your diet with other meats is already a substantial improvement without the hassle of going full-vegan.

Err, in this hypothetical, wouldn't that be the case for vegetables as well? Some vegetables would not be as efficient to grow as the most efficient meats, thus you would want to focus on the efficient vegetables...etc

Fresh vegetables are typically only labelled by society as 'fresh vegetables' because they're so calorie-poor you'd need a fridge full of the stuff every day to feed someone enough calories that they don't lose weight. Efficient calories don't often get called 'vegetables', but some sort of essential staple food. Vegetables average around 100 calories per pound: http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/cal-par/calorie-paradox1...

Calories we can produce really, really well with various techniques:

Cereal grains - maize, rice, wheat, sorghum / millet

Legumes - soya, various beans / lentils / peas

Some root vegetables - potato, sweet potato, taro, cassava, yam, beet

Sugarcane

Plantains & Bananas

It's almost certainly true for some vegetables, but I'm not sure any of those crops account for a majority of a vegetarian diet. Soybean, corn, potatoes, rice and wheat are like, really awesome.

But "let's not use any animal products at all" is a much harder sell. "Hey, if you eat mostly chicken and pork with just the occasional steak or burger on a special occasion you can get like 50%+ of the environmental benefits" is a much more plausible way forward for the US.

It's not a question of 'is meat bad for the planet'. It's that the internet seems to be full of people who fancy themselves sharp-minded critical-thinking skeptics running around accusing Big-Ag of motivated reasoning with regards to carbohydrates while ignoring that meat production is part of Big-Ag and has just as much cause for motivated reasoning.

Yeah, fair enough. Honestly any single study is also just goddamn meaningless -- it's really impossible to draw any conclusions from most any study without the context of the rest of the field to judge the quality and implications of a particular paper. Pushing a single study is usually either disingenuous (on the part of anyone with financial interest) or irresponsible (on the part of media/blogger sensationalists).

I personally find it more amusing that the internet is so friendly towards "big organic". :-)

"Pork is roughly twice as efficient as beef to produce"

Citation needed.

Beef can live on range-lands that aren't good for much else and requires very low inputs. If we didn't have a taste for grain fed finished animals it would almost certainly be many times as efficient as pork.

That is an excellent point: while pork is more efficient on a per-calorie basis and a per-acre usage (because you can pack pigs into a factory and feed them corn & soy beans, two of the most space-efficient crops), you can't discount that land is not fungible.

There definitely is land that is only useful (agriculturally) for grazing. There will be a subset of this land for which the tradeoffs favor grazing (there may be some land we could technically graze but as a society prefer not to, eg, to conserve water resources or leave an area "wild"), and there's no reason to not produce beef just because it's inefficient in other contexts.

Pork also has a niche like that -- you can feed pigs food waste. Some food waste can simply be eliminated and you always have the option to just compost food waste, but there is a non-negligible amount of necessary food waste (slightly spoiled produce, table scraps, etc). If you could efficiently funnel all of this food waste into pork production, you could reclaim those calories.

Thanks for this. This seems very plausable. I'm now eating low carb and shuning most vetegable oils. I do use Olive Oil and eat more fish. I use just a little coconut oil. Lost ~28 lbs and have not been sick at all since going ketonic. Still have to lose more weight. I do eat red meat and chicken, turkey. Cheese is a favorite and my bias is I don't want to have to give up cheese.

I remember reading that cheese (and dairy products) are actually relatively addictive, apparently because of casein. Here's a link, but it's not the original study just an article about it. I'm sure a google search for "casein yale food addiction study" might turn up better results.

http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/chee...

That's correct. Cheese has a really high concentration of the casein protein which breaks down into casomorphins in the gut which then act like an opioid. Cheese is also very high in advanced glycation end products (AGEs) which are known to cause aging.

Great, I will be an old addict to cheese.

ketogenic diet is a fad.

just like any other diet (paleo and other shit).

science today can tell you only that you have to eat a variety of foods, not too much or too little, mostly plants.

personalized nutrition will be the solution tailored and true, but that takes a lot of resources and currently uninvented tech.

low carb has been around for decades. it's not a fad, by definition. it's also not a fad just because you're annoyed by it.

things that are also not fads but probably also annoy you: yoga, jogging, veganism.

That being said, I wonder if a worthwhile goal is to breed plants, especially grains, to have higher fat (and specifically higher omega-3 fat) and lower carbohydrate contents. Long term storage might be an issue since unsaturated fats tend to oxidize while carbohydrates are stable, but if it's possible for the fat to be mostly saturated that wouldn't be an issue.

Walnuts.

Vegetarian diet isn't really connected to low-fat. Meat generally decreases your food's average fat content, since most meat is lean. Vegetarians make up lack of lean meat with more fatty dairy and cholesterol raising eggs.

Except a ton of vegetarians don't consume dairy or eggs because they're made from animals.

those are vegans.

No, they're vegetarians, as well. Forgive the site, I'm not trying to say anything, but it was the first easy-to-digest reference I found: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/the-different-kinds-of...

mm hmm.

There are also non-vegan vegetarians who eat a lot of vegan food, or are health or environmental conscious so they minimize egg/dairy while not cutting it out completely.

It's my understanding that dietary cholesterol consumption is not correlated with blood cholesterol levels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com