Hacker News Reader

Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

I basically survive on grass finished beef. It's for my health, but it is also among the most ethical animal choices. They roam undeveloped wilderness (adjacent to my home) almost entirely uninterferred with until their last day, then are killed with little pain. I wouldn't make such a trade off over a life of more freedom and risk, but I know people who would and do.

View on HN

> undeveloped wilderness

No, that is now pasture. Be truthful to yourself. Cattle ranching, particularly in "undeveloped wilderness" is incredibly destructive of the local environment.

Not saying GP does, but it's been so long since we cut all the trees down in Britain that people here think grass fields are undeveloped wilderness

I am a pro wildlife photographer and spend hours studying birds. And there is so little undeveloped wilderness left that it's just very sad. Even relatively wild places usually have some human influence.

I've traveled many tens of thousands of miles of gravel/dirt roads and 4wd trails all over the USA. There is essentially no place left in the lower 48 that is actually untouched. You can be 100 miles from the nearest paved road and still find trash and other impacts.

> Cattle ranching, particularly in "undeveloped wilderness" is incredibly destructive of the local environment.

This is the opposite of the truth. In fact cows are cultivating, manure spreading and seeding machines that vastly improve their future forage just by doing their thing, if not over grazed. I know a local rancher who makes all of his money as an elk hunting guide on his property. He keeps a herd of cattle for the purpose of improving the forage for the elk, and for his own table.

I invite you to come and hike on this land. I very much doubt that you would conclude that it has been damaged by the cows. In most places you could walk through a time warp to three hundred years ago and you couldn't tell the difference.

Cattle produce extreme amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It might be ethical for the cows, but not for the climate unfortunately.

Cattle produce a normal amount of methane for ruminants, and we evolved to eat ruminants, following them around in their migrations, and eating grass indirectly through them. I was a vegan for years and my health deteriorated. I honestly believe that I would be dead now if I didn't change. I do not feel morally ambiguous about eating the food that I was evolved to eat, for the purpose of my own survival, and emitting the necessary quantity of greenhouse gasses in the process.

I'm not willing to live the smallest, least healthy life I can tolerate in order to make room for more people to do the same. A high population count does not strike me as a worthy goal, but a healthy and happy one does.

Same here bro/sis, eating only beef was transformative for autoimmune issues I had for years. There was simply no alternative that would give me a good quality of life, just heavy medication with awful side effects.

Wait, you eat only beef? Or beef as the only source of meat?

Only beef, it's a variant of the carnivore diet that excludes common autoimmune triggers, like eggs & dairy.

Won't that give you gout?

No, there are people following a leaner version of the diet who have no such issues. I eat moderate protein though (80-100g).

  > Only beef, it's a variant of the carnivore diet that excludes common autoimmune triggers, like eggs & dairy.

what about chicken, or fish? are those considered auto-immune triggers?

There is a lot of low quality chicken, both fish and chicken have very little fat. And their fatty acid profile is not ideal.

> a vegan for years and my health deteriorated

That’s unfortunate and I’m sorry to hear that.

For others reading, know that this is extremely rare. Most people on a vegan diet are healthy (you have to make sure you’re eating a balanced diet, and you don’t need nearly as much protein as you think you do). For iron (which can be lacking especially in women), cook on a cast iron or high carbon steel pan and it will transfer iron into your food that you’ll absorb.

I encourage people who are curious about it to watch « Game Changers » where top athletes (Lewis Hamilton, Schwarzenegger, others) talk about switching to a vegan diet and it’s effect on their health and performance. https://www.netflix.com/title/81157840

It's not so rare in my experience. I was deeply into the vegan scene in Santa Cruz CA with a crowd of quite committed people. Perhaps excessively so. Very clean, mostly raw diets. Several good friends dropped out for health issues like brain fog, cold sensitivity, heart palpitations. Others did quite well. I only know of one who is still vegan two decades later but there are probably others. And of course people who start down such a path are liable to have pre existing conditions. But it's sad to see the people that it isn't working for stay with it for too long out of a sense of shame or a need for community. I wish it were less a matter of identity.

Does this pan trick really gives you iron in a form you can assimilate and in a miningfull quantity?

Surprisingly, yes. My partner had iron deficiency problems and had to take iron pills (which are made from animal blood afaik and give bad stomach aches).

If you use the pan very regularly, the trace amounts are enough to add up to enough iron. She doesn’t have that problem anymore for years now.

It’s also the idea behind the lucky iron fish[0] to supplement the diet of people in Cambodia where anemia seems to be a problem.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_iron_fish

Reply on news.ycombinator.com