How modern life makes us sick
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Things I really think we need to rollback include social media, which on paper seems like a good idea, but doesn't work well in practise. The same goes (highly) commercialized TV. The 24 hour news-cycle isn't providing any real value, but is still immensely harmful. You can just avoid those thing, but many people can't, they are mentally not equipped to do so. Even those of us who think that we're in control of our media consumption will often catch ourself slipping.
We've created a world that we can't mentally handle, but we're not willing to rollback the inventions that are clearly harmful, because they are profitable and we're bored. We can barely manage gambling, we not even trying to manage or just label media.
Think of how many parents now want their kids not to have a smartphone or social media. There's genuine, well researched evidence that this would be good. But there's also real harm to kids who see all their friends with iPhones and Instagram. It might sound silly to us but it's definitely real feeling to the kids.
A lot of the parents who let their kids use smartphones and social media probably could be easily convinced that it's a bad idea, they just don't know. Or they don't know how bad it is, and so something else, like displaying status via a nice phone, they value more highly.
But until we can reach critical mass, and fight the (not insignificant, and quite intentional) momentum to use social media, it will be hard.
A recent HN thread examined [0] the NYC ban on smartphones for teens at school. We see positive results so far.
Has anyone experienced walking a solid 8-10+ miles a day for a few weeks straight? It's counter intuitive but everything seems to work better. I'm less tired, eat less and I have more mental clarity.
It is a world of a difference compared to 3 miles a day broken up through out the day. I wonder if I've built up a tolerance or if there's something biologically different from putting in longer sessions.
On days when I end up walking further, like a long distance grocery trip or whatever, I'm tired that day but usually do feel better the next day.
This really stuck with me from studying comparative primate physiology as an undergrad. The human leg and foot is a total outlier in comparison to any other primate's limbs. Our bodies are incredibly specialized for walking and running.
Really? I'd think that living surrounded by a modern society whose benefits you fully enjoy does a lot more to really disconnect you from nature than some notion of not killing the meat you ate.
You're still fully participating in the daily destruction of nature, animals and living things just about as much as anyone who eats meat, you've simply removed yourself symbolically a bit more from one specific expression of it, so you can (entirely subjectively) feel as if it somehow makes much of a difference for any real connection to the planet.
I can also pet a dog with a good conscience, because I don’t turn around and eat an animal just like it. I don’t see one as a friend and the other as food just because society dictates that
In doing so, you dramatically expand your empathy and understanding of what it is to be a living thing, and hence you gain an inner connection to nature and animals that is hard to describe. At least that's my personal experience.
One should be free to avoid eating the meat of sentient life; but one should also be free to accept that their body functions best by eating like the apex predator they are. Seeing the world in black-and-white is what causes all the ills in the world: being human is accepting that we are a walking bag of paradoxes, and perfection is unattainable.
The lack of judgement is why I personally admire self-described vegetarians much more than militant vegans, always trying to convert the world to their righteous image. Live and let live.
Why don't we just poop wherever we want, for that matter?
Because we are more than animals. We can be better. We must be better.
Ironic to use 'live and let live' in that context.
I was vegetarian for close to a decade and felt terrible. Slowly reintroducing meat back to my diet(especially red meat) worked wonders for me.
Also, we can't be sure yet since nutrition "science" is almost indistinguishable from quackery but I have the strong feeling that eating only plants has some dysgenic effect. When you look at nature, the smartest animals are predators because it allows them to "delegate" the hard work of converting low quality food to something packed with energy and other necessary nutrients.
Then there is the issue of food security and virtuous cycle, much of large agriculture depends on fossil fuels and it's questionnable if we should let go of animals provided inputs.
Perfect is the enemy of good as we say and vegetarianism/veganism might be one of those cases I think.
My understanding is that the production of animal products is far more environmentally damaging and land intensive than plant agriculture. Don't forget that a large amount of plant agriculture actually exists to produce feed for animals, so a reduction in producing animal products has an accompanying reduction in plant agriculture. There would need to be an increase in plant agriculture to replace the calories/nutrition not coming from animals (although addressing food waste would mean that might not be huge).
This understanding was informed by recently reading "Not the end of the world" by Hannah Ritchie, but I'm open to contradicting evidence.
I'm already very skeptical of such high figures, to me it sounds like the absurdist argument of cow water use, that include all the water used for the lifecycle of the animal and more while conveniently forgetting that we use a ton of water to process plant both at the exploitation stage and consumption stage (good luck consuming cereals and legumes without water). To me it sounds like a reductionist argument that tries to compare things that really aren't comparable.
But even if we accept the premise, it seems based on a fantasy world where every land is equal to another and you can produce any kind of crop anywhere. Animal feeds are generally low-quality crops that farmers put on soil where the good stuff doesn't grow that well. It's also used for cycling, when soil is too depleted to support another growth with decent yields. Even if we would stop all animal farming overnight, the amount of land you could reclaim for plant agriculture would never match what was freed. If you look where they do intensive animal farming, it tends to be in places where plant farming would be very difficult at the very least. One easy example is the milk cows in the mountains.
I go running in semi-wild space near a river and I often find grazing cows in the swamps. A lot of the land near the river is actually used to graze cows or to grow hay that will feed the cows in the winter. You can't really use the land for anything else really, one year the farmer tried putting wheat and he never did it again. I suspect the yield and quality wasn't good enough, so it was mostly a waste of ressources. However, another nearby farmer has been farming corn, which is definitely used as animal feed. The crop is probably more tolerant to the environmental pressure of this land and has good yields (has been that way for over 20 years).
What's more, the thing is that animal farming fundamentally doesn't get you the same stuff as plant farming. The macro nutrient ratio is not the same and even the micro nutrient profile is very different. You can't say I'll substitute beef with some random cereals; they are definitely not the same. So, you need different crops, like legume, that are much more demanding on the soil and don't grow as well everywhere as the common cereals. Potentially you could re-arrange things around and optimise to get the best yield for every type of plant depending on what's needed at the level of a country for example. But this is an optimisation problem and those are already very hard but with many independent actors who will try to maximise their profits it's almost impossible. I guess we could go full on communism but I think you can understand why that would be even more undesirable than animal farming.
On top of that, animals are very often eating waste byproducts of plant farming. One example is cattle cake, derived from soybean oil production. This is just a single example and from what I coud find, it's not an insignificant amount of waste that gets "recycled" like that. It's not clear that we could do anything else with it, so in a way animal farming has a virtuous component where it "upcycles" waste.
I'll ask a question: if plant farming is so much more efficient, how come things like soya steaks are still expensive? They are not cheaper than most animal proteins, at every comparison point (weight, protein ratio, caloric density). It doesn't make any sense. Logically if getting proteins from plants is really more efficient than animals, they should be much cheaper, that's basic economics.
I believe this is because most arguments around plant farming do not factor everything in the equation and that makes plants look better. You can eat a steak with minimum preparation and energy use (technically you can eat it raw if you are sure there is no contamination risk), throw it in a pan for a few minutes and it's done. But plants like soya need a lot of processing, using both a lot of water and energy. Even if you get the raw stuff, it needs to be washed and cooked, and those things take a very long time. I make hummus from raw chickpeas very often and cooking time is at least 45 min. Suddenly you need to add energy cost, water cost at the very least (and time cost, but we can try to ignore it and pretend we are all money poor but time rich). In similar fashion, tofu needs a shit ton of water and lots of energy for cooking (they actually have problem with waste management from tofu production in Asia because the water used is often released directly in rivers and it kills the fishes).
I think that if plant food was that much more efficient, it would already be reflected in the consumer price. You could attribute high prices to greed and low volume but that doesn't make a lot of sense. If it was possible, producers would undercut to get larger parts of the market even if it is small compared to animal products (it is still a big market at the country level so there are definitely profits to be made if that was possible). For commodities like food, I think the price reflects the efficiency of ressource use to get the product to market, it's the concept of embodied energy. If plant-based products don't do better it's probably because they aren't actually any less wasteful than animal farming.
After you have considered those things, it is necessary to consider the impact on health/feeling. There are plenty of people who have tried veganism and couldn't stick to it for health-related reasons. Even if you are not technically sick, feeling good is not something most people would like to give up. Surviving is one thing but you'll have a hard time convincing people to give up animal foods if they end up feeling like an inmate in a concentration camp.
This is my experience. I have a very chaotic diet for many reasons and sometimes I "forget" to eat animal food. I become an unplanned vegetarian/vegan from time to time for a few days. When I start to feel weird and think about eating some meat, the feeling on the subsequent day is really incomparable. I suspect this is the same experience that many ex-vegans tell, and it is hard to handwave away. What's the point of protecting the environment, if your life ends up being miserable when doing so? It's a very hard sell and I think that short of a complete ban on animal products, people will never give them up.
Even if all of this was completely wrong, it seems preposterous to focus on diet as a way to reduce environnemental damage. Eating is a fundamental experience of life and it isn't just the thing that gets you to survive, it's a pleasurable thing and a social activity as well. Coming up with moral arguments to justify how people should eat is akin to religious behavior and unsurprisingly all religions have all kinds of diet requirements. It doesn't seem reasonable to completely rework diet solely to reduce environmental damage (it's not even clear how much reduction would be really possible in the first place). This is particularly true when there are many other things that we could do to reduce environnemental damage and wouldn't touch one of the fundamentals of human life. For example, the overuse of the single ownership car design lifestyle, abuse of international travel purely for leisure and in fact plenty of things we do solely for leisure or in social status. Or things like purchasing all kinds of crap we don't need and really most of the stuff of the capitalist economy where people buy stuff to use it a few times at best when it could be shared by many. Before requiring people to change their diet we could heavily tax consumer products coming from countries with very lax environmental laws and from companies that make things that don't last, fast fashion, etc...
All the arguments around vegetarianism/veganism always seems like virtue signaling and a cheap attempt at getting moral high ground. If one has to make an effort to reduce environmental harm, there are plenty of low hanging fruits of lifestyle change before having to touch at the diet.
For this reason, even if all the propaganda around the plant-based farming/diet turns out to be completely true, I don't think it matters all that much. That being said, I am still very much interested in the correct answer, I just want to know for sure, so I'll keep reading on the subject. Personally I already have a low impact lifestyle so I don't feel like giving up animal food on top of that, especially since it makes me feel like shit...
Unfortunately, the 40 percent figure for cropland used for animal feed isn’t propaganda; it’s consistent across FAO and peer-reviewed studies. The consumption argument you make (that we can’t consume those crops without water) also applies to animals. As you move further up the food chain you’re just multiplying inefficiencies.
When it comes to land use, you are right that some pasture land can’t grow crops. If the demand for meat limited us solely to grazing on those lands, things would be better. The issue is the demand is far greater: we are literally cutting down the Amazon rainforest to make room for grazing. Prime arable land, especially maize and soy, is also being used to feed animals rather than humans.
The price doesn’t reflect efficiency either. Meat is very heavily subsidised in the West and in Asia. It also benefits from massive economies of scale and externalises huge costs like emissions, water pollution, and antibiotic resistance. In any case, here in Europe tofu is already far cheaper than meat. See this: one euro (or dollar?) for 24 g of protein, hard to get more efficient than that: https://www.dm.de/dmbio-tofu-natur-p4067796251999.html
It’s also misleading to compare beef to cereals in isolation. Balanced plant-based diets with legumes, nuts, and vegetables are nutritionally adequate and offer a much richer microbiome diversity when supported with B12. There are reports of people feeling worse on vegan diets but normally that is because they aren’t eating a variety of fruits and vegetables but relying on processed stuff. Meat makes it easy to ‘cheat’ your way to getting all the nutrients you need in the short term. That works great until you have a coronary heart attack in your 50s.
Food systems are responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock accounting for about half of that. Many independent studies support this. Peer reviewed studies such as this one by Oxford, taking into account all the factors you mention above, also suggest vegan food emissions are 30% of those of meat eaters: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37474804
'All the arguments around vegetarianism/veganism always seems like virtue signaling and a cheap attempt at getting moral high ground' - To this I would just say, I was a meat eater for more than 30 years. I also found vegans 'annoying'. But if you really look into it the evidence is overwhelming. That's even before you take into account the fact that most vegans (such as myself) are doing it because of the massive suffering we are inflicting on living, sentient beings.
I find it ironic that we pet animals, or discuss here about AI/superintelligence ethics, when we literally torture animals in slaughterhouses. I doubt anyone here could tour a slaughterhouse and come out a meat eater.
So where is the real propaganda? From vegans? Or from the meat industry who force policymakers to rename 'Oat Milk' to 'Oat Drink'? Who subsidise the meat industry with vast sums? Who do everything in their power to hide the horrors of slaughterhouses from the public (even prosecuting people filming inside these facilities for 'defamation' here in Germany, and winning - even though they are literally just showing what happens inside). The so-called “free-range” or “happy cows” marketing is also propaganda: animals spend a few days outside a year, have their young taken from them, and are then transported long distances to be killed, often in extreme distress.
Let's not also forget the massive size of the meat industry compared to the tiny size of the plant-based industry. Who has the most money to create propaganda here? https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2022/messaging-uk-me...
That's the real propaganda.
Anyway, I got a bit carried away. It's good to discuss this stuff. I can recommend the book 'How to Love Animals' by the FT journalist Henry Mance, it was quite an important read for me. On general dietary topics (vegan or not), and eating well on a plant based diet, I can suggest anything by Tim Spector and his recommendation to get 30 types of plants a week in one's diet.
Honestly perhaps you should have tried going fully plant-based. I truly think dairy is the worst of both worlds. It's too easy to lean on cheese which is not nutritionally balanced. Dairy can also inhibit iron intake which might be why you felt tired.
The good thing about a plant based diet is that it forces you to eat a ton of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds etc. I try and follow the Tim Spector recommendation to get 30 different plants and vegetables per week and easily exceed that these days. I never felt better, and my blood vitals are fine.
(yes I take a B12 supplment as all vegans must, but B12 is artificially added to cattle feed anyway as most modern cows don't make enough)
All that said, I also just don't think it's natural to consume breast milk from another animal. There are literally legal limits to how much pus (somatic cell count) can be in each liter/gallon of milk. No thanks.
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- 3-5 mile run, 5 days a week (one long day at 6+)
- 5 days of lifting (upper/lower, PPL hybrid)
- walking 2-3 miles during the work day to supplement
All told, sticking to this would bring me up to a 1.8-2.5 PAL every day which should confer lots of longevity and body composition benefits over time.
Overall I find it pretty sustainable and I really look forward to the Sunday trail run.
We have a lot of technology so it’s expressed technologically (digital addictions). But overall, every human that has ever lived, lived out this prolonged lifelong depression.
Clinically, this would be considered dysfunctional. But subjectively, there’s no reason why you can’t be in grief forever. People will never want to accept this, but it’s something to think about.
So many people were depressed throughout time, and I think we need to see it more as a spiritual condition more than anything else, as it appears to be not bounded by time, or circumstance.
I love the adventure ig, it saddens me to see people trapped in nostalgia when there's a whole world of possibilities out there if you're just a little bit brave.
Good things that end should elicit mourning, and I do believe this can be an everlasting mourning that no human will escape.
And again, subjectively, there’s is no reason why you can’t mourn something good forever. In that way, depression is a way of life.
Or you might just be depressed.
Some stay in that cold bath, some even embrace the cold bath. The reason depression is not bounded to any time period or generation is because this is the human process that is constantly occurring.
You’d have to be oblivious if you keep moving forward happily, honestly.
In a sense, I’m suggesting it may be crazy to not be depressed.
Not GP, but this is absolutely wrong.
I had a good childhood with loving parents, I had many friends growing up, and I enjoyed my free time.
I also enjoy that it came to an end. All good things nust end, else they have no value.
This is mostly because I achieved nice things in life. In many ways the present is the best time of my life. I embrace change. I like my adulthood, and as I grow older I will enjoy my old age while my health allows to.
Dwelling in the past is unhealthy.
People are depressed today because they were depressed yesterday, and yesterday, and tomorrow and tomorrow. They were always depressed and will always be depressed. So, what do large amounts of people most likely have in common? It's a spiritual issue tied to emotional experiences, and under some ways of life, it's not even considered an "issue", it's considered discernment.
There's a lot of ways to meditate and live life. I can urge you to seek God, but you wouldn't appreciate it if I said that (so I won't say it).
If you only mean to say that depressive moments are an intrinsic and inevitable one-of-many flavors of life, I’d agree with that. This is much different from what I’d consider clinical, chronic depression of course.
You don’t need to urge me to seek God, that already comes from within.
Not forcing people to work would have us reverting to an animalistic state in a generation though.
The fundamental problem with many of these analyses is that they're basically stating: "things aren't ideal, boo hoo". Being human in a complex world full of threats internal and external, and both natural and artificial, by default will always make us sick as we individually make our choices to make it worse or better where we have any control at all.
How well we mitigate this compared to how well we mitigated it at any time in the past, and how many completely new options we have for mitigation are much more important than bemoaning the essential reality of the situation.
For example, a hunter gatherer could only do so very little to change any aspect of their diet, daily living habits or basic survival needs. Inside that range was their life and their death. An average modern human, saturated by junk food that their body isn't adapted to handling well, canon the other hand at any time completely remake their diet into something entirely new, or change their career, or take up all kinds of different exercise and sleep options.
When the value has fallen as AI is conveniently revealing, the principle remains.
I also started doing weight and resistance training for 2 hours a week.
I'm feeling much better as a result. YMMV.
This sentence is so surreal, I feel like I'm dreaming.
I used to walk 12000 steps every day, including on a treadmill at home. My leg muscles were awesome, and my cardio health was great. But my upper body was weak, and eventually I had to start physiotherapy to strengthen some muscle groups to correct for bad sitting posture that was causing pain.
So I started doing weight and resistance training, my muscle mass went up, and I'm much healthier as a result. I'm also saving tons of time commuting by car instead of having to walk.
And I still do weekend walks/jogs around the parks and my neighborhood for fun.