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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

One thing to note is that being vegan is very difficult and most people aren't going to be vegan. One thing everyone can do is to cut their meat intake. People have meat for almost every meal and it's pretty simple to cut back and you still get some health and environmental benefits.

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Being vegan is a lot easier than you might think, but you're right that reducing your meat intake and trying to buy more humanely raised meat also helps. What I recommend to my non-vegan friends is to just pick one day a week in which they consume no animal products and then expand from there.

Choosing one day a week to be completely miserable sounds like a much worse path to veganism than cutting back one thing at a time.

Different approaches work for different people. Personally I just went cold turkey but for a lot of people it's easier to set aside a day to try it. Whatever works for you is fine, of course. A lot of people find that, far from being miserable, they feel better and enjoy the food they're eating.

Also, you don't have to be miserable. There are tons of foods that a lot of people find delicious that aren't meat. You can use substitutes (tvp or lentil/walnuts for tacos, tofu in a stir fry, etc).

As a vegetable hater that was a misconception that I used to have. Turned out that in most cases I even prefer vegan meat substitutes to real meat now for their taste and texture (they can be pretty similar, but the slight differences IMO work against meat).

You could start by going vegetarian instead by choosing to eat a cheese pizza instead of a hamburger. There's a wide world between carnivore and Jainist vegan. There's also a ton of much better vegan/vegetarian meat replacements available than just a few years ago.

It is hard, you either need to carefully plan your diet or you're risking ruining your health far more than usual. However, it's very easy to greatly reduce your meat intake - just looking around for vegan options lets you put a lot of variety into your daily diet and it turns out that it can be tasty even if you generally hate vegetables, like I do. Even though I sometimes still choose meat out of preference when eating out, I would never expect that I would be able to actively prefer vege and vegan options in so many cases until I tried :) Ended up in me always checking (and contributing to) OpenVegeMap when looking for someplace to eat in a new area.

It's also healthy to cut back on (red) meat consumption. NHS recommends 70g/day. One proper steak means no meat for the rest of the week.

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/meat-nutrition/#how-mu...

Actually, later studies found that red meat isn't the issue per se, it's processed red meat that is the real culprit.

So basically, raw ingredients of any kind are good to eat, processed food is not so good for you.

I've been trying to keep my average under 90g/day since about 2010 and most weeks nowadays I average half that.

However I wouldn't call 500g a proper steak, only time I've seen stakes at that size is as novalty items on menus of burger/grill joints, and even then very rarely.

Yeah, when we get steak for dinners, we wind up with 500-600g for a family of four. And that's 2-3 cuts.

Why would you think that is true? Here in the USA we eat less red meat than we did 45 years ago, and are way less healthy. NHS and the USDA make all kinds of boneheaded dietary prescriptions that are terrible (eat lots of grains, eat trans fats, avoid eggs, avoid butter).

Since the 1970s, at least:

* Americans eat less red meat and more white meat than they used to in the 70's.

* Americans get fewer calories total from meat than they used to, yet eat way more plant material (hint: carbs) than ever before. https://imgur.com/a/LgqUMJz

* Americans and Brits are way more overweight than ever before, with the obesity "trend" starting in the late 70s or early 80s. Obesity should concern you, it kills 10 times the people that the US opioid epidemic does (300K deaths/year vs 30K deaths/year), but culture makes it much harder to take 10 times as seriously. Or talk about at all for that matter. What's a minute increase in bowel cancer comparatively?

Why fear (unprocessed) red meat in 2018, and why on earth listen to the NHS on the subject? Are people who listen to NHS guidelines actually healthier than people in the 1970's, who ate more red meat?

Consumption of chicken and cheese has gone through the roof. Consumption of sweeteners and simple carbs has gone done. Do the math.

> People have meat for almost every meal

I'm gonna call BS on this unless you provide a citation.

Many people (in the west) eat a breakfast (cereal, pancakes, waffles, bagel, toast) or lunch (PB&J sandwich, salad) that contains no meat every day or every workday. Then you have to account for all the meals where there is no meat (pizza, mac and cheese). You'd need to have a substantial fraction of the population eating meat (almost) literally every meal in order to make up for the people who habitually don't eat meat at particular meals.

Edit: I'm talking about meat for the purpose of environmental impact and sustainability here. I'm not talking about meat from the perspective of strict veganism or the milk in your coffee or the eggs in your baked goods, those have negligible impact compared to raising animals to slaughter for food.

bacon with your waffles? hot dog for lunch? meat lovers pizza for dinner?

Many many many foods have eggs or dairy products in them that simply don’t need them. The bread for that pbj could very well have milk, eggs in it. Butter on toast is a dairy product. Eggs are a common ingredient in veggie burgers!

Dairy and small amounts of egg (usually added for it's chemical/material properties) in baked goods don't count as meat for discussions about food sustainability because they don't require raising animals for slaughter. A dairy cow can produce many gallons of milk and a chicken can lay many eggs over its lifetime. They're a drop in the bucket compared to the environmental impact of meat raised for direct consumption.

That's like complaining about oil products used to patch roads in a discussion about the environmental impact of oil.

Dairy production absolutely requires raising animals for slaughter. There is no beef industry without the dairy industry. Like mammals, cows produce milk as food source for their offspring - the dairy industry ensures that cows are always producing offspring. Those offspring don't get milk - it's sold to us. Those male offspring become veal and are slaughtered early. Those female offspring become more dairy cows. Those dairy cows that can no longer produce milk are slaughtered for meat and myriad other uses.

That's a huge reason why veganism is growing far faster than vegetarianism. People are realizing the systemic connection between the industries and understanding that all animal products must be eschewed.

Most people don't eat a breakfast with multiple things most days, just a quick meal before work (or they shove a bagel in their face while driving). Most people eat food that requires basically no prep work for lunch most days. Eating out (with the exception of coffee and donuts in certain industries) is not a regular occurrence for most people because it's not justifiable at their income level.

I'm not denying that one can have meat at every meal if they so desire. I'm saying that as a matter of convenience many do not.

The McDonalds drive through doesn't require any prep work and is super cheap. I see tons of people load up on Egg McMuffins with sausage at 6-7am on their way to work.

For the record, veganism also excludes dairy products, and we still have a pretty significant impact from things like dairy producing cows (not to mention they are treated just as poorly in factory conditions). And especially in restaurants, meat is very often consumed as a part of the things you mentioned. At least half (sometimes more) of pizza options have meat, mac and cheese when eaten as an entree and not a side almost always has bacon, chicken, etc. People take turkey or ham sandwiches for lunch just as often as PB&J. Burgers, breakfast sandwiches, etc. And look at fast food, how many places do you know where you (or other non-vegans) would actually regularly get meatless options?

The only fast food place we ever eat at is Taco Bell because you can customize everything to have beans instead of beef. We can't really eat at Chick-Fil-A, Wendy's, etc anymore.

Yeah it's not every meal but even many of your examples are often eaten with meat. Pancakes often come with bacon, salad often with chicken, and pizza with pepperoni or sausage. "Almost every meal" might be hyperbole but the prevalence of meat in our food and the sheer volume we traditionally consume is staggering. The USDA estimates about 222 pounds of consumption per capita in 2018 but I couldn't get a good figure on how to translate that in to how much people actually eat (I think that is difficult to do accurately)

I find it amusing that you call out OP for not providing a citation but then list a bunch of examples of things many people eat also without citation!

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