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Comment by exfatloss | Hacker News Reader

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Why do you think this is good?

I think animal foods are very healthy and the CO2 emissions/environmental effects of cattle are usually overblown.

One "study" I saw claimed cattle used 1000000x more water than grains. But they counted the rainfall on the entire grazing area as consumed by the cattle, which is obviously nonsense. It goes back into the cycle. (As does the water the cattle consume, of course.)

> CO2 emissions/environmental effects of cattle are usually overblown.

Methane production from cattle is not a blip. Whatever statistic you pick, it's one of the major contributing factors to agricultural emissions.

We tend to consume too much meat. The US in particular is the top consumer of meat per inhabitant, like 300% more than the recommended meat consumption for a healthy diet (about 100g/day of red meat, before cooking).

So you can argue that an omnivorous diet is healthy, but we clearly over-produce meat and over-eat it by a very large margin.

I think quite the opposite - a beef-only diet, very high in fat, is probably the evolutionary diet we're most adapted too. After all we only started cultivating grains about 10,000 years ago. It was large, fatty megafauna for hundreds of thousands of years before that.

That study (if true) is obviously exaggerated, but the main issue is water diverted from rivers like the Colorado. Cows milk requires something like double the water of almond milk and an order of magnitude more water than oat milk.

> I think animal foods are very healthy

There are countless studies showing a link between red meat and negative health effects, and there is probably no safe amount. Are you saying all the studies are wrong? What evidence do you have to support your claim?

Those studies have been debunked. Current state of science is that there is no indication that reduction of red meat consumption would bring any health benefits.

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