Nutrition is not a solved equation. We simply do not know how exactly various foods affect our health, the extent that human genetics and microbiome affect “proper” nutrition for a person, what all the essential nutrients are, what the immunoresponse to various foods are, and any number of unknown unknowns about diet. Any claims to the contrary are irresponsible at best.
You mention biodiversity but seem to be glossing over the role of ruminants in the ecological system, and the severe lack of biodiversity which can be the consequence of large scale crop production.
These and other reasons lead me to be concerned that this viewpoint is to some degree tainted by ideological blind spots.
Nevertheless the same applies to the way we changed our diets in relatively recent times, and yet that hasn't stopped us.
That is true, but it's very likely the meat you buy was not grazing freely, and instead was stuffed with feed in a feedlot space or sometimes let to graze on a tiny plot to be "grass-fed". This is how the scale of our industrial animal agriculture is met.
[0] https://www.splendidtable.org/story/inside-the-factory-farm-...
> While doing research for his book Pig Tales, author Barry Estabrook visited a farmer in Iowa who raised 150,000 pigs a year. What he saw at this factory farm -- the way 97 percent of pigs in the U.S. are raised -- is a far cry from Old MacDonald's.
> "[The pigs] never see the light of day," he says. "They never set foot on anything but a bare, hard floor. They breathe that poisoned air 24/7."
[1] https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...
>According to the latest Sentience Institute analysis, the percent of U.S. farmed animals living on factory farms is…
* Broiler chickens (99.9%) live on factory farms
* Turkeys (99.8%) live on factory farms
* Egg chickens (98.2%) live on factory farms
* Pigs (98.3%) live on factory farms
* Cows (70.4%) live on factory farms
To resolve this cycle let me propose a radical idea: Tell us when you would change your mind! Then we have something to work towards to.
What is the level of evidence and rigor that you require until you accept that plant based diets generally have better consequences for all beings involved and should be promoted over „western“ heavy meat based diets?
Yes, the expansion of agricultural land is almost always bad. Unless its expansion into desert, and isn't depleting water (which is almost never the case).
But, sheep, cattle and especially pigs provide useful products in the farming cycle, essential if you want to cut out oil based fertilisers.
Thats not to mention that most of the country side of Europe looks the way it does because if farming sheep or cattle.
Pasture has its own biodiversity. Simply stopping all animal consumption would leave us more dependent on fertilisers in the short to medium term. It would also cause rapid local environmental changes, that would have interesting side effects.
That said it still could run into problems with other requisite elemental depletion in soil even with assistance of things like bacteria. If the plants need calcium and it is all extracted then thr farm would be limited to simpler life that doesn't need any trace elements. If say algae can get by on just atmospheric gas components, water, and sunlight indefinitely then a hypothetical algae farm could run indefinitely. But there isn't much of a market for algae.
Eventually, the ground will become depleted of phosphorous and potassium. Other trace elements tend to take a really long time to deplete, especially in clay.
For every product that leaves the farm, it takes something from the ground. Some can be amended with legume plants, but minerals will deplete at some point - adding them yearly is responsible farming.
We are on the right track with getting people to switch red with white meat, a single weekly day without meat, ect. But it is with all likelihood not something that we can do over the next decade. It's something we instill in the younger generations and as they grow up it will happen.
Some of that cost could be offset by incentivizing carbon capturing farming practices like silvopasture and agroforestry. But while healthy pastures can sequester a lot of carbon, it’s nowhere near the numbers of a healthy forest. Ultimately we need to reforest a lot of land, which will reduce the grazing carrying load of the planet, and again make beef more expensive.
I get it: beef is easy, and people love it. So are fossil fuels. You can make a strong argument that both have done a lot of good in bringing the world out of poverty. But, where things stand today, it’s unsustainable.
People tend to focus just on the methane emissions of cows, but that’s probably somewhat solvable with changes to their diets — adding seaweed, etc. The real carbon cost is in land use change, chemical fertilizer production, transport, etc. The majority of our food system is set up to produce feed for animals. And the EPA numbers for agricultural emissions only focus on direct emissions from things like tilling, or gas burned by tractors. The true carbon cost of farming is likely to be much, much bigger than conventional estimates suggest.
There seems to be a fear that a mostly vegetarian / vegan diet is somehow less healthy. I’d argue that there’s plenty of contemporary science on the subject to suggest that it’s just as healthy a way to live, and perhaps even more so. But even if it’s a tossup, there’s an undeniable fact: global warming is happening, and the health effects of that greatly outweigh the health effects that can probably be solved with a couple of supplements. (Anecdotal evidence, but my kids are vegan due to allergies, and they’re thriving. It’s never been easier to be vegan. My parents were for a time when I was a kid, and let me tell you, things have come a long way.)
> "A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork"
Seriously though, the top thing in our control is eating plant based food!
I like meat, in fact I love it. I used to contribute to a food blog reviewing steak restaurants. I love the smell and (the thought of) the taste. I haven't eaten meat for about five years because of environmental reasons, not because I dislike it.
Not eating meat is such an easy thing for most people to do, the facts are in front of us and it would make a significant difference. It does not fill with me with optimism that most are unwilling to do even this.
Even if you factor in the fertilizer, fuel, electricity used for those cattle and double the number, it still wouldn't come close to putting us carbon negative.
The United States gets roughly 30% of its power from coal, China roughly 70%.
Commercial aviation last year was responsible for at LEAST 0.55 gigatonnes of CO2 last year and in a decade the fuel use is up 30.5%. That's also a low figure for the CO2, it could be as much as 13% higher as there are various types of aviation fuel, it also does not include military figures. By the time you factor in all of electricity and fuel use supporting aviation by non-aircraft sources, commercial aviation is likely as bad as the cows of the world.
Last year in the United States 142.86 billion gallons of gasoline was sold. If it was all consumed that is 1.3 gigatonnes. That doesn't include diesel or kerosene, and that's just the United States... keep in mind China is adding so many new drivers to the road annually that they have a lottery just to decide who gets to sit for a license. As of last year China alone has 369 million registered drivers. If each of them averages 7.45 gallons of gasoline a week they're using as much as the United States.
An estimate that is several years old puts the world at 3 BILLION hours of video games a week. Assume an average of 50w per hour (to factor in handhelds as well as modern consoles on giant televisions and hardcore gaming rigs) and that is 7.8TWh of electricity just for video games, using U.S. electricity source averages, thats' 1.77 gigatonnes of CO2.
Another older figure puts U.S. gamers over the age of 13 spending 6.3 hours a week playing games, this was before games like fortnite so may be higher now. imagine just shaving that in half and reading library books, gardening, taking a walk, using a reel mower instead of a gas powered mower, riding your bike to a friend's house instead of driving, walking to go get your food instead of uber eats... a small change in lifestyle and we could save a quarter or a half a gigatonne of carbon.
Now what if we could get lots of people to make lots of changes!
People, however, generally don't like change and when you have a lot of startups marketing things that rely heavily on fossil fuels - Cyrpto companies rely on massive amounts of processing directly or indirectly (exchanges), cloud-based services have gobs of power hungry servers with data often kept in multiple copies, food delivery services, subscription box services, even more established companies like Amazon encourage impulse buying instead of planning out what you need to buy and getting it once a week or month when you go to the store "get it in 2 hours!" "same day delivery!" "next day delivery!" "free shipping!".
We need a radical shift in companies and consumers or our energy demands, and our greenhouse gas emissions, are only going to continue to climb. Air travel fuel use for example is up 30% in a decade because travel is 'in' and 'influencers' are pushing it with their curated lifestyles and we're just shipping a whole lot more by air, now look at a dozen of other industries and you see similar. When I was a kid in the early 90's it was "4-6 weeks delivery" standard for everything, now you can get a stranger to go to the grocery for you and drive it to your house without leaving your couch because you want some chips and dip.
And vegetarians struggle quite a bit with getting proper dietary nutrition, not just with iron, but also Vitamin B12, Zinc, Omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, Calcium, Protein and Riboflavin. So it is not quite just "simply" adjust your diet you lazy meat eater.
All of those listed able to be met easily by plant based sources with a well balanced diet.
And it's not like the average meat American is eating a healthy diet. I would be shocked if the standard American diet actually met all recommended nutritional intakes.
B12 is only in significant amounts of meat because it is heavily supplemented and present in the soil, today's clean produce strips most of those bacteria from the food supply.
The solution is really simple, though: eat less meat. We don't need meat every day. Once or twice a week is more than enough, and if everybody did that, it would greatly reduce this problem.
I checked Wikipedia though, and it agrees with you, which makes me wonder even more why I've heard this exact same experience from several unconnected vegetarians.
Although I do wonder, if we're wrong about B12 only coming from animals, is it possible that we, or possible even Dutch physicians, are under-informed about our options?
I'm a vegetarian (yes, not a vegan yet) living in India and I'm not deficient in any of these. Also, never have been.
e.g. take the case of protein, I eat pulses almost daily (and a variety of) with rice, never felt I have less protein than required.
Vit B12 - you can get from fermented foods like Idli etc. Also, from the water soaked overnight in rice (actually rice is soaked in water).
Vegetarianism had been practised in India since time immemorial. One can say the food has been perfected here to stay healthy.
It runs in my family. My poor mother is so bad that she has had to have a couple of blood transfusions because nothing else would bring her back from a bad state when she got there (the alternative being just lie down and die). Supplementation hasn’t helped her many times†. They also rarely eat red meat.
Here’s hoping I or my sister don’t end up the same way. My sister has already devolved to anemic and has had her own complications with that.
† edit: Rereading this it sounds confusing. I meant that supplementation has not helped her either prevent or recover from those cases until after the transfusion where her doctor stressed diet.
Vegetarians are self-selected. We can have reasonably high confidence it would be fine, but we can't be sure, and some people literally will not be able to tolerate it.
> I am not aware of have any health problems that are most efficiently solved by adding meat.
Depends how you define "efficient". There are plenty of nutrients that are most concentrated in meat, such that small portions of meat can replace the need to consume large portions of plant matter.
Even if meat is super healthy, I sill doubt factory produced meat is good - with all its chemicals.
I’d guess that most people eat meat because of its taste and because they were raised by their parents to eat meat, and not because they truly believe it is superior to vegetarian food
The problem is not eating meat. It's the amount of meat people eat that's unsustainable.
1. That's the most popular diet, and foods have been fortified to add vitamins and minerals the diet tends to be deficient in.
2. Well, they're not exactly beacons of health, anyway.
There are billions of vegetarians in the world. They tend to live longer and have lower rates of cancer and heart disease than their meat-eating counterparts. "Thinking" seems like worthwhile effort.
If we take India, which is the country with more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined. It's estimated that 30-40% are vegetarians. A country with a strong cultural history of vegetarianism, religious beliefs that vegetarianism is "right", have the most developed vegetarian cuisine, and a system that makes it super simple to see if something is vegetarian or not - 60-70% still eat meat. If you move to the coast less than 5% are strictly vegetarians.
The issue is not consumption of meat - it's the amount. If you add nuts, beans, and protein heavy vegetables - a family of 4 can get by with 1-1.5kg of meat weekly and make sure all their micro nutrient needs are met without even trying. 1 day with fish, 1 day with red meat, and 1 day with white meat. It's a significantly more achievable goal than cutting meat all together, and it would probably result in a more healthy population than cutting meat all together because it covers all nutritional needs.
> They tend to live longer and have lower rates of cancer and heart disease than their meat-eating counterparts
As far as I've read it's not the meat that causes this, but the lack of vegetables, browning of meat, and addition of processed meat - so while a vegetarian diet solves the problem, you can retain meat in the diet and get the benefit anyway. If you have some peer reviewed scientific papers that show otherwise, I would like to see them because I have papers showing the opposite in abundance.
In the end, there are hugely interconnected issues and most people take one small facet, extrapolate it to infinity and ignore all the ripple effects and consequences of even the smallest change.
Where do those animals get their calories from? And how efficient are they at converting those calories into consumable flesh?
Which is very unfortunate, in my opinion. It might get people to switch to a more animal-friendly diet, but I simply can't think of how meat replacements are healthier than real meat.
And they're certainly healthier for the environment.
My point is that food is the one thing that's globally almost evenly distributed part of economy. And even if we all change diet's, it wont safe anyone's climate, if the rest is catching up with "western" lifestyles at their current emmisions footprint. Pretty much anything else is easier to change technically, if it wasnt for lobbyism.
I grew up in GDR and still had livestock of our own, this not just about food ethics, but also diversity/robustness of food supply in any more fragile economy.
There are dozens of crops that we can and absolutely should dispense with. The problem with agriculture is farmers don't farm what uses the least resources and brings about the most nutrients per land area, they farm what returns the most. We also subsidize a lot of these crops.
Go and look at a decent resource like nutrition data and compare what you get with milk vs the alternatives. Milk is far more nutritionally dense, and I'm not just referring to calories/macros. It has vitamins, a lot of minerals, and even omegas.
This is the first I’ve heard of this, how strong is the link?
>Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed chance, bias, or confounding) could not be ruled out.[1]
## Bonus content on processed meats ##
>Processed meat was classified as Group 1, carcinogenic to humans. What does this mean? This category is used when there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans. In other words, there is convincing evidence that the agent causes cancer. The evaluation is usually based on epidemiological studies showing the development of cancer in exposed humans.
>In the case of processed meat, this classification is based on sufficient evidence from epidemiological studies that eating processed meat causes colorectal cancer.
They classified coffee, mate, and "very hot beverages" the same way. I'll worry about red meat the exact same way I worry about coffee: not at all, and enjoy every bit I consume.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2A_carcinog...
I'm going to go with the Canadian Cancer Society on red meat. They also, as a matter of fact, say alcohol is carcinogenic and to use alcohol in moderation.
"Other people give up their SUVs" is easy sell to people who don't drive SUVs.
So with the help of tech, we'll find less and less excuses not to switch, at least partially, to a plant based diet.
[1]: https://www.quorn.co.uk/ [2]: https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/ [3]: https://impossiblefoods.com/food/