Hacker News Reader

Comment by distant_hat | Hacker News Reader

"Sustainable diets" are often unhealthy, ultraprocessed, soy based carb heavy stuff that kills you off early. It is possible that people dying would rein in global warming but I'd like to pass on it. What most people need is a healthy mix of meat, dairy, veggies, and fruits. If you are not overweight, that alone saves a fair amount in GHG emissions.

View on HN

As a child my family grew vegetables in a sustainable low carbon footprint way and I was very healthy by every metric. I don’t know what concept of “sustainable diets” you’ve been sold but whatever it is strikes me as very odd. Is the way I ate scalable? With vertical farming, I think quite likely actually.

Also if soy “kills you off” early then the longevity of the Japanese is quite a puzzle.

It’s not possible to feed a small family of 3-4 without having acreage. I’ve done container gardens (20-30 containers) to 20x20 plots. It was nice to have supplemental fresh veggies but it was expensive and not sustainable. It was a hobby so the expense was worth it.

I'm in a similar place. I do small scale biointensive urban backyard gardening, but it's almost certainly <1% of our annual food intake. Even with an aggressive preservation programme (freezing, canning, whatever), I can't imagine it really making a dent in our overall food footprint.

One thing I want to improve upon is staging plants, even plants of the same type. It doesn’t help if almost all of my cherry or heirloom tomatoes are ripe in the same couple weeks.

I’ve moved this year and have a bigger yard but too many trees for a garden. Trying to figure out where I can squeeze plants. What do you mean by biointensive?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biointensive_agriculture

Companion planting and composting is most of what we do. Also just overall density— for example, we have probably 2-3x the recommended number of tomato plants in a 4x10 raised bed, and are managing it by aggressively cutting back blighted leaves and controlling sucker growth + providing lots of physical support for the plants themselves.

Agree on staging as a challenge; I haven't figured out a good system for that. Conventionally, preserving has been the answer, but it's a lot of work to make that much tomato sauce and salsa, and better hope you like it if you'll be stuck eating it all winter!

Do you have a source given that vegetarians seem healthy and blue zones* (high frequency of centenarians) frequently have diets low in meat and/or dairy? Osaka, Seventh Day Adventist communities, etc. come to mind

(* at least the ones with reliable birth certificates)

Osaka has population of about 15 million - I'm not sure you can use that as any homogeneous community.

Some cultures eschew dairy almost entirely. Most of the world is lactose "intolerant" actually. Not sure why it would be considered an important part of ones diet.

Dairy is a key part of the diet of hundreds of millions of vegetarians. It's undeniably important to the diet of a large portion of India's population, for example.

A different sort of vegetarian diet might work without any dairy (I'm pretty sure this describes some traditional Buddhist food). Not everyone uses the same stuff.

And Inuits have tradirionally had an essentially carnivorous diet. Diets have adapted to niches from long ago - even though lactose tolerance is technically the mutation instead of lactose intolerance.

I think the biggest villain to healthy and environment is not animal products, but the industrialization of food.

It would be even worse for the environment if it wasn't industrialized actually. There is a reason why farms acreage is dropping - because less land is needed for the already overabundant food production.

Ironically industrialization of food saves habitats.

For industrialized I mean canned, over packaged, processed and refined stuff, also produces from vary far away on our daily diet, not against it but we do over consume this stuff. (Obs: thats what I see around me)

But also, mono-crops are another issue which comes from industrialization too. I'm not against machines and robots, but we are still figuring out a way of working with this stuff together with forests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

Here farms acreage is increasing, more mono-crops and less forests, all with the help of industrialization, crops from other side of the world and endemic fruits, nuts disappearing and because of that loosing habitats.

At least eucalyptus is winning, even though native wood is better in so many ways, but the iron industry here don't buy the charcoal if not from mono-crops of eucalyptus.

I thought meat and diary farming was the biggest strain on environment? You can live pretty healthy while minimizing those product intake.

Not even close. Meat and dairy farming has been occurring for centuries, man-made climate change only recently.

Increase and demand.

Maybe that is because the scale is much larger nowadays?

You definitely don’t need dairy. The jury‘s still out on whether consuming cow milk is even healthy. E.g. broccoli is a good enough calcium source.

Meat might be necessary (vegans will disagree), but previous generations have done fine with only a couple of meals per week containing meat. Research suggests that we do better on less meat. Definitely stick to poultry if you want a smaller carbon footprint.

Fruit is not necessary, as some northern populations clearly demonstrated (they didn’t have any).

Meat is not necessary. Plenty of lifelong vegans healthy enough to disagree on that. However it's pretty well documented that a diet with an amount of meat is healthier than straight veganism, though in much lower amounts than we generally consume. Animal husbandry is also likely an important part of sustainable large scale agriculture, but again not in a way that remotely resembles modern mass scale cattle production.

Pretty well documented? That a pure vegetarian diet is good for longevity is very well established. Eg this study of 73000 people published in JAMA https://www.livescience.com/37102-vegetarians-live-longer.ht...

These are, of course, micro optimisations versus the importance of good genes and there’s a lot of uncertainty regarding these studies... but the notion that meat is important for good health is absolutely false.

Compared to veganism, not lacto-ovo vegetarianism. It's of course a difficult issue due to conflating factors, i.e. to speculate wildly the mental heath effects of being vegan in a world that hates them.

Your article puts pescatarians at the top in longevity but has vegans above lacto-ovo vegetarians. Maybe dairy is an issue and just ovo vegetarian is the answer.

Indeed.

My speculation: diets high in vegetables and low in meat reduce inflammation and improve gut bacteria (this is true). So I’m guessing since there are connections between mental health and both perhaps the diet itself is beneficial to mental health?

Fact: And as for hated... it’s so mainstream in London now that if you’re a supermarket or restaurant without vegan options you’re going to lose a lot of business. Many explicitly advertise selling vegan stuff. I think it’s very accepted here now and I expect that to be a trend everywhere.

My speculation: it seems that the key component in fish is the oil and for that there’s algae alternatives. So perhaps a vegan diet with fish oil is the ideal one.

Single data point and context; I’m 100% vegetarian, 99% vegan, eat algae oil and am very healthy. Do with that info as you please ;)

Nothing processed about a tin of chickpeas.

I was talking about things like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger.

Sure, I agree but that's not a whole foods plant-based diet anyway (which is what the article is actually relating to).

Those vegan burger patties are explicitly a replacement for regular patties, which are also pretty ultraprocessed (esp. when you consider what goes into the cow before its meat gets ground down).

That stuff really has no place in a healthy diet. It’s is indeed highly processed and mainly designed for taste and texture. If you want to go vegetarian stay away from things that try to emulate meat. That’s not a good path. Instead look at real vegetarian dishes that stand in their own . Indian cuisine is full of them for example. Italian cooking also has lots of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com