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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

Meat is a driver of deforestation if you ignore where it goes. The real driver of deforestation is the human.

Human behavior. Specifically, meat consumption.

Or human behaviour, reproducing too much. Meat wouldn't be a problem with a reduced population.

I lived a vegetarian diet for over 30 years but eventually the effects of health problems caused by nutritional deficiencies were impossible to ignore. We evolved as omnivorous animals, to deny this history for philosophical reasons seems good and just for a while until the physical reality of our biology kicks in. If you can do a diet like this for 40 or more years without health problems you're better at it than I was, but I'm dubious that its very common.

What kind of health problems did you have? I'm at 30 years vegetarian and my blood work has even improved when I started eating mostly vegan. I won't say I'm super fit, but I feel that's mostly due to lack of exercise. No problems for sure.

I generally eat lots of vegetables and supplement B12 and D.

I felt super healthy for years then a variety of problems hit me at once. It started off with excessive bruising from minor bumps, headaches, then extreme tiredness. I would get small cuts and they wouldn't seem to heal, doctors baffled. A few years after that I was getting extreme pain in various joints, eventually leading to regular bursitis in the arms and legs. Yeah I know, a vegetarian diet is supposed to reduce inflammation but it didn't. I found it almost impossibly repulsive but I eventually worked up the courage to eat a pastrami sandwich and the effects were almost immediate. Various aches and pains were gone within 24 hours, I could sleep much more comfortably, a bounce returned to my step. I eat very small amounts of meat a month because I still find it a bit disgusting but I seem to be in better shape than I was 5 years ago.

Haha what. The magic pastrami saved your life with the magic ingredient of what? What did the blood test show?

"I have been vegetarian for 30 years and all it took was one pastrami sandwich to cure all my health problems"

Yeah sure.

This is a common anecdote. Long time vegan/vegetarian has onset of pain or tiredness and after one encounter with magic meat all problems go away immediately. No one ever knows what was missing in the diet, because it does not matter anymore. For you it is pastrami for others it is organic grass fed cattle, chicken, fish, or oysters.

The disease you were likely suffering from was mental. Being different wears on you and the micro aggressions of being a minority wears on you after a while. The food industry ads, cooking shows, bbqs, nostalgia, that random guy that says being vegetarian is dumb or deadly, etc. The mental pain builds up and causes the damn to break after a while.

> I would get small cuts and they wouldn't seem to heal, doctors baffled.

I had a similar experience in the brief time that I went vegetarian. Plus I was skinny at the time and lost weight.

This could be a B12 deficiency.

B12 deficiency stores can deplete over 2-4 years so it will be a while before you notice. You also need very small amounts (monkeys get their B12 intake by accidentally eating bugs on their bananas).

I tried going vegetarian for a period of my life and I started feeling extremely tired after a while. I stopped doing it mainly because getting protein is hard and I didn't notice any other positive changes.

I'm usually surprised when people say they struggled with protein intake. Protein is widely available and eating seeds, pulses, nuts, oats, grains and a load of veggies should get most people to that required ~50g of daily protein intake.

What was your specific deficiency and why didn't you fix it?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with eating meat, the problem is in over consumption of meat, unsustainable agriculture to feed animals and the bad treatment of animals.

Restricting yourself to expensive, high quality meat is a perfectly fair way of sustaining yourself and making sure the environment doesn't suffer too much.

If everyone only ate as much meat as they needed things wouldn't be so out of whack.

> There is absolutely nothing wrong with eating meat

The unnecessary slaughtering of animals is a problem all by itself in my opinion.

> Restricting yourself to expensive, high quality meat

What about people who can only afford dollar menu quality beef?

> If everyone only ate as much meat as they needed things wouldn't be so out of whack.

A corollary statement from other threads are if only we limit population size meat would be environmentally viable.

Large parts of India are vegetarian. I can understand that a balanced vegan diet is difficult, but vegetarian? You can still eat eggs and dairy, that makes it fairly easy to get a balanced diet.

I am not disagreeing to your point, but in most parts of India vegetarians do not eat eggs.

Interesting, thanks for pointing that out. Do you also know why?

Though, most of them do consume dairy.

I was vegetarian for around 10 years with the last 3 being vegan, I supplement B12 and my blood work is fine. B12 deficiency is apparently quite common in modern humans, vegetarian or not. I don’t doubt you, just wondering what health problems you had so I and others here can avoid the same.

Not to deride your experience, but a healthy diet is possible (and not necessarily difficult) with any of these options. Most of us, no matter the diet, could do better in finding the right balance. There are people living healthy and unhealthy diets with or without meat.

One thing I don't understand is the absolutism around diets. Either people eat meat on every meal or none at all. Neither is healthy. Why the general discourse is dominated by these ultimates?

I eat meat once or twice per week. Works really well.

Soy is a great crop with many use casers. The chart in the article which shows different use cases is really cool. We can't say that about many other crops!

Would you prefer to get rid of billions of humans so that the remainder can continue to eat meat?

I know you are saying this because it sounds absurd, but in a way it seems to be kind of what we're doing right now, but slowly. The rich are eating the poor.

I don't think the rich necessarily intend to, but in consumerist societies the consequences of our actions are so far removed from the moment of decision they usually don't even register for a lot of people, and surely don't make an impact on our ethical radar.

As a moderately well off Dutch guy, I am one of those rich people, and I'm constantly finding out how I am consuming rather than using the earth. I'm losing trust in our society, it's like discovering we are governed by a bunch of children instead of adults. I guess I'm still naive at 40 years old.

Can you elaborate? Generally poverty is on the decline, except for unstable countries is this what you mean with the rich are eating the poor (by them beeing not poor anymore)?

Yes, but it would be more efficient to eat those humans for the planet.

Well, getting rid of them is one step too much, but yes, if you have fewer humans each human will be wealthier [0] and this does mean continuing to eat meat.

[0] Assuming automation takes care of labor shortages, the only meaningful restriction is the availability of resources and less humans mean more resources per human to be exploited.

> if you have fewer humans each human will be wealthier

You have no historical evidence that the wealthy will better distribute the wealth once the population shrinks.

Would you prefer to live on Earth of ~1 billion who can enjoy their lives or an Earth of ~1 trillion confined to bunks and soylent?

Eating meat allowed people to evolve and we're hardwired to strive to eat it.

"We" are already diminishing in numbers, the problem is to stop at a reasonable number and make sure "the others" follow suit.

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