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Comment by shortcake27 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if you responded to the wrong comment or what because the parent is referencing environment impact but you’re referencing health impacts.

From an environmental point of view, there’s a linear relationship between your consumption of beef and environmental impact. There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.

From a health point of view, it’s debated, however there are more studies that show red/processed meats having negative health effects than neutral or positive effects. Of course, you can cherry pick the studies that align with your beliefs, but the prevailing data, evidence, and research show beef actually _is_ bad per se.

Note: there is no nutrient (that we know of) that you can only get from beef and no other food source. So it isn’t necessary to include it in your diet.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...

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> There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.

With a low enough amount of cows bred in more traditional ways, there would be a cycle where an equivalent amount of carbon would be captured by plants vs what is excreted by the cow. That's why animal farming has not been a source of net CO2 for the thousands of years that we have been doing it before industrial times.

However, going back to historic sustainable levels means a drastic reduction in consumption of meat and dairy - probably a few times per year or something like that. Putting all livestock together, it would mean people could eat meat maybe once a month. Eggs and dairy may be a little more common, as those are collected throughout the life of the animal.

> There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.

That's a tautology. In that strict sense, there's no amount of you that's good for the environment, either. Unless we all commit suicide, we have to accept the fact that our behavior changes the environment. So, yes, quantities matter a lot.

If you define “sustainable” in the sense of “enabling human life on earth”, you should be fine.

Dairy from cows grazing on marginal land that is not otherwise suitable / efficient for other cultures is very competitive as far as producing proteins is concerned. Proteins are a necessary nutrient.

Industrial cattle fed corn is an entirely different story and should almost certainly be counted as a different category as far as climate impact is concerned.

No. Those cows live longer and therefor produce more methane. They are worse in terms of ghg.

The bovid methane drumbeat is bandied by people who conveniently fail to account for the millions of missing American bison that used to produce comparable output.

Did they? Did anyone measure that? Or is that simply an assumption? Relatively small dietary changes can greatly reduce the amount of methane produced by cows (I believe you add something like 15% seaweed to the feed), so it's not at all clear that a free range bison would be similar.

Wild Bison aren't eating seaweed in the great plains. Cows in the plains spend their majority of their life eating the same grasses that the bison ate, then they spend a few months on a corn diet.

Do you have a reference for this that tries to quantify the CO2/CH4 emissions per kg beef? For chicken, I've seen estimates of 3.3 kg CO2/kg of industrial chicken meat compared to 5.3 kg CO2/kg of organic chicken meat. Of course, from an animal welfare point of view, organic chicken is a lot better.

Carbon emissions from cattle comes from their feed. They're not fed petroleum. There is some incidental fossil fuel consumption involved particularly in producing industrial feed (corn), but that doesn't really apply for pasture-fed cattle. All that carbon was just captured by the grass or otherwise corn used to feed them.

CH4 is another issue, but again, unless I'm missing something, total CH4 from cattle in the atmosphere should be proportional to the average number of heads alive. If we don't increase herd size, it won't go up — unlike CO2 from fossil fuel use.

Plant based is superior to all the common animal based foods, from grazing as well as factory farms. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/

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