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Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

Er, compared to what?

Animals may not be an energy efficient food, but they are the only way to get meat.

> Er, compared to what?

I meant compared to lab-grown meat, as most of the energy from food is not used for building muscles but rather for the brain.

> I meant compared to lab-grown meat

How are you able to say this? Have you seen any data about how efficient lab-grown mean is to produce?

Eating non-animal foods and producing meat (muscle) inside your body.

It is far more efficient to eat animals and produce muscle. There aren't many world renowned athletes who are vegan for obvious reasons.

Will you elaborate on the obvious reasons? Pretend they aren't obvious to me.

I'm interested in reading more about athletic advantages gained from consuming meat. Is there a reason that other sources of protein aren't giving the same benefit?

Here is a good article breaking it all down along with the amounts you would need to eat to get the same benefit.

https://www.muscleforlife.com/animal-protein-vs-plant-protei...

efficiency in that context means from a global of view, not how much time you're spending eating.

I assume they mean efficiency as in land area used etc. You have to put quite a lot of calories into a cow to get one calorie out.

https://qz.com/749443/being-vegan-isnt-as-environmentally-fr...

Being vegan is that efficient either.

That's a poor summary of the article you link, given that it says vegan diets are almost twice as efficient as the standard American diet. (It just also says that low-meat diets are even more efficient in terms of land use.)

seeing as how veganism is not the default choice in most of the industrialized world, this is a misleading frame. it's also incorrect that it's more efficient to "eat animals" to produce muscle if we're being pedantic (as a vegetarian, however, this is not a meaningless distinction to me)— amino acids in dairy & eggs have a measurably higher bioavailability than those in meat, whether ranked by the PDCAAS or DIAAS https://web.archive.org/web/20151010170125/http://www.idf-is....

Compared to just eating the grains ourselves.

For cattle, it takes 100 calories of grains to produce 10 calories of beef.

I think it's important to point out though that cattle can digest and "convert" a significantly wider variety of plant sources into meat. Our bodies simply can't digest a lot of what they can.

Sure... but it's also important to point out that while cattle "should" eat grass and can eat silage... 78% of beef in America comes from feedlot cattle[1]. On feedlots, the cattle are fed grains, not grass/silage... grains that we humans can easily eat like soy, corn, and barley [2].

1. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nil-zacharias/its-time-to-end...

2. http://www.goodfoodworld.com/2012/01/grass-fed-vs-feedlot-be...

None of those cows are raised on feedlots. Feedlots are used to fatten and "finish" the beef.

Most all cattle start their life being grass fed.

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