edit: was pointed to this Reuters[0] article which seems like a reasonable starting point.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-money-chicken-organic/is-...
- Fewer hormones for growth
- Fewer antibiotics (diseases spread rapidly in confined spaces)
- Higher quality meat (Chicken gets more exercise and movement, as well as increased quality of feed)
- Higher nutritional value (increased exercise and sunlight, potentially)
In terms of calories though, it's probably a wash, and more inefficient from calories/money.
edit: formatting
If your chicken don't get sick because they have free roaming space and don't peck each other and so on you don't need antibiotics.
Chickens are assholes no matter the square footage.
i won't spoil the punchline (it's not obvious from first blush).
otherwise you can search for “ODI optical distortion business case” to find sites that have the setup and various attempts at analyzing/answering the case.
That's why organic isn't always the most ideal.
In Europe it’s different - https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-...
“When the animals are ill, chemically synthesised allopathic veterinary medicinal products including antibiotics may be used where necessary and under strict conditions. This is only allowed when the use of phytotherapeutic, homeopathic and other products is inappropriate.”
https://www.fooddialogues.com/happens-farm-animals-raised-no...
> On an organic farm, once that animal receives antibiotics, she is no longer considered an organic animal. Rather than rejoining her organic herd, she will join a traditional herd of cows that may have received antibiotics during their lives.
The more popular the organic religious dietary code becomes, the least viable traditional herds are.
The FDA bans hormones in all poultry production, companies advertising it are trying to fool you into thinking the opposite is possible, it isn't.
>- Fewer antibiotics
Zero antibiotics is very common among producers
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/chicken-...
This is a urban legend. Not sure if it was true at any point, but it is not the case.
Chickens were selectively bred to grow fast enough as it is, to the point that some breeds have a percentage of offspring lost. Try to make them grow any faster and more will die.
> - Higher quality meat (Chicken gets more exercise and movement, as well as increased quality of feed)
At least for cows (and most game), you don't want them to exercise too much or the meat won't be as tender. Is it different for chickens?
There tends to be a flavour/tenderness tradeoff. So you'll tend to get more flavour from more used muscles. (eg chicken breast v thigh)
That said, the average battery hen could do a hell of a lot more exercise and still not be tough.
If you go to other beef obsessed countries in the world in South America, Europe and especially Asia, a certain degree of chew is considered desirable. Take Picanha from Brazil, Bistecca alla Fiorentina from Florence of Kalbi Short Ribs from Korea.
>Chicken gets more exercise and movement
Having raised chickens for meat on a small scale (30-40 at a time), I can tell you that chickens used for meat ("Broiler" chickens) are selectively bred to grow as big as possible as quickly as possible. There is no need for growth hormones, they grow so quickly that their bone structure cannot keep up, to the point that they are barely able to walk 8-12 weeks from hatching. If they are not slaughtered on time, they die from heart failure.
Wow, you weren't kidding. [1] I am not surprised that chickens have been bred to grow fast, but I've never heard of an animal that implodes because it grows so fast.
[1]
At this point, they're not far away from muscle growing machines with just enough brain attached to partially handle themselves.
It's been illegal to give chickens growth hormones for a long time. Most major chicken brands (Tyson and Purdue, who are #1 and 2 in terms of production) do not give chickens antibiotics, unless the flock gets sick. In that case, the flock is treated and then sold as a different product- usually either as pet food or an off brand.
I don't know why we use hormones and antibiotics for pork and beef but not chicken.
You may be interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
http://time.com/4252373/meat-eating-veganism-evolution/
If plant diet was optimizing for caloric intake and health advantages, most human societies would have been vegan. But no human society throughout human existence and pre-human existence were vegan because plant diet isn't optimal.
It's also why vegans tend to be lethargic, lose bone mass, teeth rot, joint pains, have trouble concentrating, etc. It's why vegans have to take tons of supplements to even stay alive and while doing so do long term damage to their bodies.
Balanced diet folks. It's something humans have been designed to eat since human existence. Not only does your body need it, it also helps with your gut biodiversity which helps prevent anxiety, depression, etc.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/anxiety-head-gut/story?id=2022...
This is simply not true and one of the many lies anti-vegan activists tell.
Can you show me one vegan that doesn't take supplements?
It's much harder to have a balanced diet eating only plants. You can't easily compete against organisms that only eat plants, and have been collecting all the nutrients, for their entire existence, for you.
Humans are adapted to eat from both plants and animal sources. Take away one source, and you have to adapt.
They don't. All you need to supplement is B12, and that's one small pill a day to take.
If you're interested in the background, find some information e.g. here: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/vitamin-b12/
I've never had a cavity in my life. I'm not super old yet, but I don't think I have any joint issues beyond what comes with being nearly 50.
The efficacy of supplements isn't even established as reliable in many cases.
Porpiosly's comments on this seem quite extreme. I suggest others reading this do their own research or consult with their personal physicians before altering their diet in a significant way.
Caveat: I'm a huge meat eater. Love the stuff. Can't stop won't stop.
BUUUTTTT the natural fallacy has to die. Just because we did something for the last N millennia doesn't make it worthy of continuation.
And my point wasn't that we should do something just because it's been done before. My point is that if veganism was "natural and optimal", then why hasn't any human society in history adopted it? Because humans cannot survive on a vegan diet without supplements.
In other words, my point is that if the vegan assertion that "veganism is the optimal natural human diet" ( aka what humans were meant to eat ), why has no human society ever adopted it and why can't humans survive on a vegan diet in nature.
I don't know if that's true. We may not have been able to supply the amount of vegetation required to keep a human being upright and functional a millennia ago, but now that we live in the age of abundance, with food diversity that's unprecedented that may not be an issue at all. We can artificially create a complete diet of strictly plant matter with intelligent choices.
That's very hard to distinguish from supplements. Some nutrients are hard to find in useful quantities in plants, so you need a ton of them. The most practical approach is to extract and put them in a pill. Supplements. Nothing wrong with it.
I think when somebody asserts x is the best diet because x is what we have been doing for thousands of years, x most often includes eating meat. There is a whole diet based around this idea called the Paleo diet. It may very well be the most popular diet of the last 5 years.
The only time I can recall it being asserted that veganism was the historic human diet, it was by a total quack YouTube personality. Veganism was also tangential to this claim; the claim was that the diet should be 100% figs.
Just in case. Many people think that a fallacy existing is proof of the contrary position, or at least they speak/argue/type as if that is the case.
The corollary of course is that despite the apparent fallacious reasoning you could be right.
I'm confused as to what you mean here. Do you mean the energy required to produce plant foods is higher than the energy required to produce animal foods? If so, this seems self-evidently false: all edible calories start out as plant calories, and we can either eat the plants or have animals eat the plants (wasting a bunch of the input energy along the way) and then eat the animals. Or do you mean the effort to prepare the plant foods is higher? If so... maybe? But that'll inherently be subjective and depend on what people want to eat. Certainly, meat-free prepared foods are not difficult to find, at least in the US.
> But no human society throughout human existence and pre-human existence were vegan because plant diet isn't optimal... Balanced diet folks. It's something humans have been designed to eat since human existence.
I don't think many vegans argue that humans were designed to eat only plants (many would dispute that humans were designed at all), but looking at historical societies isn't that useful; advances in agricultural technology have made eating a healthy vegan diet more feasible than it used to be, so the fact that it wasn't practical to do 100 years ago or 1000 years ago or whatever isn't very interesting. In the here and now, it is possible, and there's plenty of peer-reviewed research suggesting that the optimal amount of red meat, in particular, to consume, is none (it's carcinogenic), that animal fat of any kind isn't great either, and that people who reduce or eliminate consumption of these foods while still maintaining adequate caloric and nutrient intake have reduced all-cause mortality.
In any event, many vegans would also argue that even if it wasn't possible to eat vegan historically, the fact that it is now means that we should, for reasons of ethics/animal welfare, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.
> It's also why vegans tend to be lethargic, lose bone mass, teeth rot, joint pains, have trouble concentrating, etc.
Citation needed?
> It's why vegans have to take tons of supplements to even stay alive and while doing so do long term damage to their bodies.
The only nutrient that only occurs naturally in animal sources is B12. It's true that vegans generally need to get their B12 either from supplements or fortified foods, but the technology for that exists, so there's no real downside here.
Other than that, many vegans choose to get other nutrients from supplements or fortified foods because it's easier than planning a diet that includes all of them naturally. Omnivores do this too, though; we just don't think about it, because that diet is standard enough that it makes sense from a public health perspective to incorporate nutrient supplementation directly into the regular food supply so people don't have to think about it. That's why there's iodine in table salt, or vitamin D in milk. If everyone were vegan, we would do the same for nutrients that require special attention in vegan diets, but that says nothing inherent about veganism.
And I have no idea what that "long term damage" claim is about. There's nothing inherently dangerous about getting a nutrient in a capsule instead of in a steak.
Your link also suggests that having healthy gut flora is important (true), but doesn't support the case that you need to eat animals to achieve it, at least as far as I can tell.
I'm no expert but I believe there may actually be some limited basis to that claim: ruminants can eat things we can't (grass) and there are areas where it's more ecological to grow grass and let ruminants eat it than try to grow things that we could process. You also get the benefit of better topsoil with the help of the animal dung.
But I think the (huge) majority of the meat we eat is fed grain, where we're obviously wasting energy.
I'm curious about this one - what about things like corn and soybean? Those would seem pretty readily accessible in terms of pure caloric content.
If that is so, why are all these people healing and getting healthier on an all-meat diet? http://meatheals.com
Sure, if you could live eating chicken feed then it would certainly be cheaper to eat that instead of chicken for caloric intake. But to optimize for dollar nutritional value in food humans actually eat, it's pretty hard to beat the $5 chicken.
As for the present time, I agree that the retail price of meat and the nutrients offered makes it a pretty good deal.