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Comment by likpok | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the article is mostly talking about micronutrients like iron and zinc absorption rather than the protein.

While important to keep in mind it doesn't seems like a big indictment of meat substitutes. Take a supplement and move on with your life! Vegans (less so vegetarians) need to supplement anyway, things like creatine or B12 have few natural plant sources.

My personal beef with meat substitutes is that they aren't particularly good substitutes so I'd rather eat the real thing. But if you're eating a burger you're not really thinking about your health anyway.

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Fun fact, animals don't produce B12. Historically meat contained B12 because animals got it from drinking water and eating food that had the microorganisms which do produce it, but in contemporary industrial scale agriculture, where animals are drinking chlorinated water piped into their pen, eating grains from a trough and being given antibiotics, they no longer get it from microorganisms which would have been in their natural environment.

The people running hog confinement operations, cattle feedlots or chicken warehouses give the animals B-vitamin fortified food to make up for the deficiency.

So vegans should take a B vitamin directly, but it's the same B vitamin being given to the animals for it to end up in meat.

What do you think a cow eats? Grass. No, it eats micro organisms grown on the grass/food. Its a walking bioreactor. And a B12 source, due to the micro organism s it carries.

It's depressing to read that animals are treated somewhere like that. Meanwhile I can see funny looking highland cattle grazing in the pasture from my window. It's so delicious and comes with zero ethical issues (for me, I'm a proud carnivore but I despise mistreating animals) when contrasted with the horror stories of cattle spending all their lives indoors and such. Heck, I am grateful that the locally produced quality meat is basically prized the same here as the stuff you know nothing of when bought directly from the farmer.

Meanwhile I can see funny looking highland cattle grazing in the pasture from my window.

"Oh, I eat only pasture-raised beef" is all well and good, and I can commend doing so if one is going to eat meat anyway. But AFAICT, it unfortunately doesn't scale well enough to supply a burger-hungry world, and certainly is not an affordable option for all.

A lot of it, imo, is cultural more than mass production. Chickens are kind of a prime example of that. Factory raise them for the breasts and maybe thighs and essentially discard the rest from a consumer standpoint. I'd wager the ratio of chicken raised primarily for chicken breasts far outweigh the added consumption of thighs and wings. Wings in particular are so funny to me... most places sell "boneless wings" alongside actual wings that are just cubed chicken breasts.

If culturally, there was more emphasis on using other parts of animals in our (presumably American diet) we'd definitely get more mileage out of every raised cow, chicken, and pig.

...but this actually brings it into a more 'chicken or egg' (pun intended) contradiction. Because farm raised animals typically don't make the base for good stock since they don't consume good food. They don't consume good food because they're mass produced on a budget. They're mass produced on a budget because consumers typically pick only a few cuts of an animal and discard the rest.

You don't need to worry about it scaling to supply a burger hungry world. The market for burgers will clear, no central planner needed. Maybe they wont be available for $6 they will cost $12. Then again, not everyone needs to get the bulk of their calories from burgers.

The U.S. needs to stop trying to feed the world, especially with extremely cheap (and low quality) corn and soy that are exported primarily for use as feedstock or for biofuels.

We have created enormous imbalances in global food supply by driving out of business local producers, making many countries dependent on a small number of producers for global staple crops, which is a dangerous proposition that puts the world at risk of famine should trade be disrupted.

We pay the price for lack of nutritious food in higher health care costs and lower quality of life in our later years.

That's a very extreme form of communism, where you believe that if a good is available to anyone it must be available to everyone.

Do you actually believe that or is it limited to burgers?

Why did you decide to stop eating plants? Or were you raised as a carnivore?

Those are the harder ones to hit than protein anyway, makes sense it's looking at those. In a way it would make a lot of sense for these kinds of products to intentionally add them - just like your 'take a supplement', why not have it added to the food? Can't really do that with raw vegetables, but processed vegetarian (especially 'meat substitute') stuff...

According to the article the problem is anti-nutrients. I’m not sure how powerful the effect is, but it could mean phytates in beans disable added supplements. Maybe the advice is don’t take supplements when eating high phytate foods.

Supplements are expensive, and meat substitutes are expensive, so you are really compounding the cost compared to just eating meat.

Supplements may not necessarily be vegan either. If a supplement you’re taking is a byproduct of meat production, what is even the point?

Some supplements are expensive, some are not. Creatine, B12, iron and zinc are all cheap. They are also specifically all available in vegan forms.

You're better off getting micronutrients from food sure but there are other options if for some reason you can't or won't.

> If a supplement you’re taking is a byproduct of meat production, what is even the point

Most vegans I know are vegan for ethical reasons which is consistent with minimizing the "animal footprint" even if you can't 100% remove it.

>Supplements are expensive

I don’t know where people buy theirs but i spend more in Spotify than in supps.

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