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Comment by saynsedit | Hacker News Reader

What does being "vegan on principle" mean here? What specific principles are you talking about?

Some vegans do it because killing animals is morally bankrupt.

Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.

Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.

I'm not sure what vegan principles are violated by GMOs. I don't know of anyone who is actually against GMOs, the debate is around labeling them not banning them.

Personally I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to eat pesticide/herbicide drenched food. It's how we're going to feed the third world.

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> Some vegans do it because raising livestock is unsustainable. There is not enough land on earth for everyone to have a meat diet.

I'm dubious about this statement. There is a lot of ocean, so seafood farming is probably quite capable of feeding humans meat. In addition, western societies currently overconsume meat. I suspect that if calorically balanced levels of consumption were observed, we probably have plenty of land.

> Some vegans do it because it's healthier. In general you can expect to ingest less toxins by eating lower on the food chain.

I see a lot of vegans eating far less healthy diets than those of carnivores. They up the oil and carb content quite significantly to make things taste better/create satiety.

I find that vegetarians (and even those who just back off on meat) seem to eat healthier than vegans, in general.

One pound of beef requires 1,847 gallons of water. Cattle produce a huge amount of methane. Ranchers use antibiotics profligately. Cows require a terrific amount of energy to grow, relative to plants, meaning lots of the corn we grow in the US goes to meat, which is far less energy efficient.

Um, you do realize that most nuts require in the same range of water, right?

Hazlenuts, walnuts, almonds, and cashews need from 1100 to 1900 gallons per pound.

So, I'm not quite sure what you are trying to prove other than don't farm things that require water in areas that also require irrigation.

Um, you do realize that a fair summary of your argument is, "nuts too require much water, therefore beef is a sustainable food source?"

Not all people subscribe to the conventional wisdom that carbs and oils are unconditionally unhealthy.

Oils can help your body absorb nutrients more effectively and also aid in other cellular processes.

Carbs are energy and your body needs this.

The key is to not consume processed carbs/oils that your body can't integrate.

Carbs from fruits and natural oils (like coconut) are a large component of any thoughtful vegan's diet. You can eat lots of these foods because they not only have carbs but they also have fiber, protein and other vitamins in good proportion, so "carb the f* up!"

Obsessively starving your body of all carbs and eating lots of meat is an extreme and unbalanced diet and will certainly lead to an early death. Just eat whole foods.

I prefer (and am so far practicing my self) population control to bring the number of humans inhabiting Earth towards a /sustainable/ level with all living humans having the quality of life we'd like to see.

For the record, I know plenty of people who are actually against GMO's and want them labelled so that all consumers can boycott them and they get forced out of the market.

I don't think getting GMOs labeled is a plot to get all consumers to boycott them... It's so the subsection of the population that cares about ingesting GMOs can make an informed choice when buying food.

That's like saying getting kosher food labeled was really a plot to get everyone to boycott all non-kosher food.

That's not the plan by everyone who wants labelling, no. All I said is that I know people who do want/expect it to work that way. (I neither want it to or believe that it will).

For the record, I know plenty of people who actually believe climate change isn't real. Is that relevant to a discussion on environmental policy?

A vegan or vegetarian diet (as commonly practiced, with loads of grains, potatoes, sugar, etc, etc) tends to be much less healthy than a meat-loaded keto diet.

It's an informal sociological clustering observation. Vegans are often sort of 'hippy' types, who place value on food being 'natural', 'organic' and dislike GMOs.

Ohhh I see. It's similar to how vegans generally consider all non-vegans immoral lazy unhealthy fat poison-eating murderers. The informal sociological clustering is efficient since the generalization is ~80% true. Nuance wastes too much time.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201210/st...

Is linking to some random opinion article on the Internet your way of arguing for the validity of stereotypes? Well, I'm convinced. Too bad "accurate enough" doesn't work in physics, we'd already understand the universe by now!

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