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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

I agree that dietary research needs to continue but I think the back and forth about what to eat (saturated vs non saturated, no salt vs salt ok etc) needs to slow down. I think the best advice is that by Michael Pollan "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

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I think to the contrary, and agree with Amber Heard, "Eat meat. Not too little. Mostly fat."

http://www.empiri.ca/p/eat-meat-not-too-little-mostly-fat.ht...

But ultimately what we should all agree on is: eat less processed foods, less sugar, don't overeat, fasting is cool, exercise often.

I’d like to see lower carbon cost become an important goal of keto dieters. Eggs, fish, etc count for keto as I understand it. I don’t like the fetishisation of red meat.

I hope farmed fish has a low carbon cost because I'm not trying to poison myself with mercury.

Farmed salmon is often high in mercury[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsbtit20DLo

Sheesh, how does that even happen? Does Hg just spontaneously appear?

Sorry, can't watch video at work.

Farmed salmon usually has fish meal (sourced from wild-caught fish that has lower economic value) as a significant part of its diet. Those wild-caught fish concentrate organomercury compounds like other wild fish, and the compounds pass on to farmed salmon who eat them.

I haven't watched it in a few months, but salmon farming happens in net-enclosed partitions of natural bodies of water that are polluted with industrial waste. Pesticides are sprayed directly into the farms in order to combat disease. The pollution from the farms themselves makes the situation even worse as time goes on.

Here's a resource[1] for anyone who is curious but doesn't want to sit through a YouTube video.

[1] https://livingoceans.org/initiatives/salmon-farming

I'd like people to stop pitching diets as a way to fix climate change. It makes people take global warming less seriously and it won't help enough to matter.

What would?

Fewer children.

That's absolute nonsense. We don't have a population problem. We have a resource use problem where the wealthiest humans use incredibly disproportionate amounts of resources. Fewer children will not fix this problem.

worldwide plague or nuclear war

What would you like people to pitch as an alternative effective action?

It's something that most people can look at immediately. You eat every day so what you eat does have a relatively large impact on your personal carbon footprint. It's also something people can do that doesn't have to cost them a cent.

Change the way people talk about global warming.

It’s not about saving the rain forest, endangered species, pigs and cows. It’s about power and survival. That other stuff is just feel good moral values that won’t matter if we go extinct.

A technological innovation is the only way to get us out of this mess. Whoever figures it first and establishes control over the method is going to have a significant amount of global power. If you can control the worlds climate you’d basically be the most powerful person in the world. Everyone is at least a little intrigued by the quest for power.

I just am sick of how bad people are at selling the fight against global warming. We need everyone working on it and don’t have the luxury to divide ourselves into good and bad groups.

A person's carbon footprint is approximately proportional to the amount of stuff they consume, measured in dollars. Getting into the weeds on what's more or less carbon intensive and other details is just a way to evade living like someone much poorer than you are. Look around and see if there are people who live on half your income. If there are, then you could too, if you really cared.

If you can't help spending all you make, maybe you could start by getting a new job that pays much less than your old one...

That won't save the planet, but it is the way to do your part.

It can't be the only change, but diet is one of the biggest individual contributors to our C02 output. It should absolutely be part of the conversation.

There's nothing a single individual can do to stop global warming. We need radical technological innovation to get out of this mess. Everyone needs to be encouraged to participate. Dividing ourselves into good and bad group over diets and lifestyles is waste of everyone's time.

One incorrect purchase or vacation by a vegan washes away a life time of good choices. It's not enough to matter and you'll never get the entire world on board without an inquisition force.

> There's nothing a single individual can do to stop global warming. We need radical technological innovation to get out of this mess. Everyone needs to be encouraged to participate. Dividing ourselves into good and bad group over diets and lifestyles is waste of everyone's time.

I don't disagree with any of that except that encouraging diets amounts to "Dividing ourselves into good and bad group". It's also not an actual counterargument. I also happen to think economics and technology will be the drivers that push plant-based diets to the majority.

> One incorrect purchase or vacation by a vegan washes away a life time of good choices.

You're either minimizing the impact of diet or vacation like a Captain Planet villain.

> I don't disagree with any of that except that encouraging diets amounts to "Dividing ourselves into good and bad group". It's also not an actual counterargument. I also happen to think economics and technology will be the drivers that push plant-based diets to the majority.

Sure but it could also make meat intensive diets have less of a carbon footprint. Once you start preaching that certain lifestyles are better at stopping climate change than others, I feel you're effectively judging which life styles are good or bad for the world. You're right it's jumping to a conclusion that people are making moral judgments on others... but I don't think it's that big a stretch.

I really don't think it makes sense to address climate change at an individual level. Most people have little to no control over how they live their lives. Even if they did, it'd be an enormous ask to have everyone understand their carbon footprint due to supply chain complexity.

> Once you start preaching that certain lifestyles are better at stopping climate change than others, I feel you're effectively judging which life styles are good or bad for the world.

Certain lifestyles are better than others. You can argue that it's not effective to discuss individual contributions, but you can't pretend this isn't the case.

>I really don't think it makes sense to address climate change at an individual level. Most people have little to no control over how they live their lives. Even if they did, it'd be an enormous ask to have everyone understand their carbon footprint due to supply chain complexity.

This is _such_ a strange attitude that people apply selectively to issues. Poverty requires systematic solutions, but that doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility to help those in our communities. Diseases require systemic solutions, but that doesn't resolve us from doing what we can individually to prevent the spread of diseases. Violence, crime, education, pollution. Most big problems require big solutions, but that doesn't mean we should ignore individual contributions.

Ruminant grass-fed meat is the best thing for the environment. It requires no pesticides, no herbicides, and the manure their bodies produce act as fertilizer and cause grasslands to expand and sequester carbon. Meanwhile, wildlife can actually live on a pasture. Rabbits, squirrels, birds, tons of insects, snakes, even coyotes. Wheat, corn and soy fields by contrast require artificial fertilization, insecticide application, rodent poison to protect crops, and harvesters also kill small mammals.

> Ruminant grass-fed meat is the best thing for the environment.

It's really not.

Should we ignore the massive scale deforestation?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed...

How much keto/carno red meat is raised in such an idyllic settings?

Most red meat is factory-raised and fed tons of those artificially fertilized/pest-controlled grains, belching massive amounts of methane before getting trucked around the country - toxic for the environment.

Environmentally friendly meat does exist, by some definitions, but those locally-raised antibiotic-free grass-fed pasture-raised free-range sustainable meats are expensive.

just buy an ethically raised cow/bison etc and freeze it. i've been living off the same 1/2 cow since probably 2014 or so.

The best thing for the environment is not cutting down forests to replace them with grasslands. I just got back from Maui where this was standard practice for hundreds of years, and in fact one of the neighboring islands(Kaho'olawe) no longer catches rain because the ruminant grass-fed beef cattle that were ranched on that island ate all of the vegetation year after year resulting in massive erosion of the topsoil. What you would call "wildlife living on a pasture" is actually the invasion of endemic ecology with one that is alien to the area, and this has a significant impact on the endemic species.

So no, grass-fed beef is not particularly good for the environment.

That's in environments where forests exist. I would agree with you there. In the U.S. the Great Plains were not forests in any recent millenia. I'm comparing corn and soy fields to grasslands.

Consider though that most "grass-fed" beef is grown in places like Brazil or Argentina where the native forest is cut down to make space for it. Or as an alternative consider how many cows are grown in feedlots and would instead need grassland to roam on and you can see how everyone indulging in red meat at their current level but with grass-fed beef could result in another environmental disaster.

A better way to think about this is to consider how many acres of land and how much fuel input is required to grow 2000 calories of food with an appropriate mix of macronutrients. I don't have a complete picture of what this would look like for a traditional American diet with the huge amount of meat we consume here, so I can't make an argument from that.

I do know that if we focus on acres of land and fuel inputs needed to grow protein from various sources, that plant-based proteins are much more space and fuel efficient than taking those same proteins and growing cows or chickens from them. Arguments for not eating soybeans, for example, center around how much land is being cleared to grow soybeans. But those same arguments ignore how much of those soybeans are being fed to cattle.

The best solutions in my mind are to significantly reduce our intake from meat sources regardless of how those sources were raised. Eating meat at the level we are used to is not a tenable situation.

Very few soybeans are used for cattle. The meal from soybeans is used on chickens and pigs. Cattle cannot stomach very much soy at all. They are more likely to be fed some grain, but their diet is 90+% hay and grass even on feed lot cattle. Soy meal is the leftover part of the soy bean. About 20% of a soy bean is used to produce soy oil, which is the primary source of human nutrition in soy. That's what's used to make soy milk, soy protein, etc. The meal component of the bean is not useful for all these other byproducts that soy acts as an ingredient of. So it would be a waste of perfectly good food not to feed that to chickens and pigs.

Land use management in Brazil sounds like an incredibly nuanced topic that I know next to nothing about. I'm much more familiar with American agriculture. And we make most of our own food here, including our own beef.

Source: https://ncsoy.org/media-resources/uses-of-soybeans/

This says that American beef production will be upwards of 27 billion pounds this year:

https://beef2live.com/story-beef-production-year-0-107550

If American beef production went to 100% grass-fed beef, no feedlots, how much beef could be produced domestically? Do you have any sources handy?

Where I live, grass-fed beef is significantly more expensive than generic beef that presumably encountered a feedlot at some point in its lifecycle. If that is generally true, urging the public to consume grass-fed beef is also effectively urging the public to consume less beef. A universal switch to grass-fed beef would increase beef prices without increasing consumer buying power.

But it's possible that a pound of grass-fed beef is really no more costly to produce than average beef and it's just the niche status/labeling that commands higher prices. I haven't found an analysis addressing this question.

I asked a grass fed cattle rancher that question and he just said thats a hard question, but also grain fed will always be cheaper because they use a breed that can about grow twice as fast/large. I doubt those steers could get the same calorie intake from grass feeding. Which is a separate question from “if we used all land available for cattle grazing how much grass fed beef would we max out at”? I suspect not near the level of demand for beef unless we also took back huge areas of crops and forest.

Good thing I don't have to listen to you.

I agree that carbon footprint should be something that people keep in mind when they're eating. What's worth noting though is that regenerative agriculture (where the goal is to be sustainable and can be carbon net negative) requires ruminant grazing as part of the integrative crop production cycle.

A recently commissioned LCA study done by Quantis showed that for White Oak Pastures, estimated carbon footprint was -3.5kg CO2e/kg (vs 30+ for conventional beef): http://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grassf...

This seems to jibe well with the research coming out of the Rodale Institute and peer review (I've written previously about this so instead of rewriting, I'll just link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652657).

WOP sells 1 lb of their ground beef for $10/lb (either a 90/10 or 80/20 blend), so it's about twice as expensive as conventional beef: https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/averageretailf... (you could probably match the price if you are able to buy and store in bulk from a local regenerative-practice farm), but I think for most people reading this comment, the price difference is still de minimis compared to their overall daily cost/expenditure.

Another thing to keep in mind is the latest and most detailed FAO put full LCA (this includes supply chain, etc) of CO2e of global livestock production at 14.5%: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/

IMO the anti-beef climate story seems to be very overblown/disproportionate compared to its relative GHG impact (lets not distracted, switching off of fossil fuels is by far the priority).

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

Even this seemingly simple advice can change depending on metabolism and exercise habits. As someone with a fast metabolism who exercises a lot, it's difficult to impossible for me to each too much whole/non-processed food. The more I eat (including meat/proteins, vegetables/fruit, carbs, fat, and non-junk food calories in general), the better and stronger I feel, both physically and mentally. My challenge is the opposite: if I'm not fairly disciplined about eating nutritionally dense foods every few hours during the day, I won't be at my best.

So for me it's more like "Eat food, as much as you can, with as much nutritional density and variety as possible".

As long as we don't call corn syrup or bleached wheat flour plants, sounds good.

Veggies, not grains.

No sorry, you're thinking of the great American vegetable of ketchup.

Pickled tomato syrup?

USDA only updates their dietary guidelines every 5 years. Its simple, specific, and well researched advice. So I like to share it with people who are interested in living healthier.

https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/

Yes, the food pyramid is dead, and there are other changes that come and go through the years. The issue is that "eat your veggies" is so boring it won't make any news.

-----------

> A healthy eating pattern includes:[1]

> A variety of vegetables from all of the subgroups—dark green, red and orange, legumes (beans and peas), starchy, and other

> Fruits, especially whole fruits

> Grains, at least half of which are whole grains

> Fat-free or low-fat dairy, including milk, yogurt, cheese, and/or fortified soy beverages

> A variety of protein foods, including seafood, lean meats and poultry, eggs, legumes (beans and peas), and nuts, seeds, and soy products

> Oils

> A healthy eating pattern limits:

> Saturated fats and trans fats, added sugars, and sodium

Dark Green is "Spinach / Kale", red/orange is carrots and tomatoes, starchy is corn or potatoes. There are also survey results in how well the US Population overall is doing. USA doesn't eat enough veggies, and eats too much refined grains (white bread). The typical American needs to reduce refined grains, increase whole-grains, increase veggies, and increase fruits in their diet.

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EDIT: Can someone explain why I've gotten a lot of downvotes? I'm genuinely curious. I don't think I've said anything close to controversial here.

Anything that skirts near advocating anything other than vegetarianism tends to be unpopular.

Few things bring out such zealotry as food choices. In a world that is largely out of control, it is something that people can take control of, and they often twine that choice around their very identity.

Deciding what needs to be popular stinks of authortarianism. Price in the external costs and let people decide for themselves.

If you want to be fit, the best results I've had are to eat meat and vegetables, and not much else.

Going fully vegetarian is just too joyless.

I get that there's too much back-and-forth on diet advice -- but I also don't see why we should throw out the scientific method and go all-in on a journalist's non-scitentific advice.

Besides, bread and sugar are made from plants and they'll make you fat. A lot of people would lose weight eating more animal products including eggs, milk, butter, cheese, and meat.

With his definition, things like bread and sugar wouldn't count as food so they would fail the first rule.

Meat is also very calorically dense. And I think the advice to eat plants means when they're still unprocessed. Vegetables in their unprocessed form have a good amount of nutrients with relatively few calories.

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