Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotGMan | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Are you saying that opting for a beyond burger patty instead of a beef patty is going to "poison and destroy" your health? That's a bit of a stretch no? Are they really any worse for you than a regular burger from a fast food joint or something?

There are no studies I’m aware of where focusing on a plant-based diet makes you “very ill” and gives you “chronic diseases”. On the contrary, it’s not that hard to be healthier.

Meat, on the other hand, is linked to diseases. Especially red meat and cancer.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...

So your scenario is more like “imagine telling a parent ‘Give meat to your kid. They will get sick, unnecessarily kill animals (as we all know, kids hate animals, right?), and accelerate destroying the environment (who needs to live in a good environment, anyway, as long as there are burgers?)’”.

"Linked to" in the sense that someone guessed that red meat might cause cancer, devised a bunch of experiments to prove it, and ended up after incredible amounts of effort with a result that shows just on the very limits of statistical significance that perhaps one person in a population the size of the UK might have a slightly elevated risk of cancer, maybe going from one in 15 to one in 14.

So, yes, "linked to".

You're going to die of heart disease, not bowel cancer caused by eating meat, even if you are a vegan. In fact, especially if you are a vegan, as it turns out, if you believe another ever-so-slightly-sketchy set of statistics. I personally don't, but I have noticed a lot of the people I know who eat a vegan diet don't eat particularly healthy stuff.

> I have noticed a lot of the people I know who eat a vegan diet don't eat particularly healthy stuff.

Neither do people who don’t eat vegan, so that’s irrelevant to the point. I couldn’t help notice you skipped over the points of killing animals and accelerating destroying the environment.

You need livestock farming to have arable farming. Growing only plants is phenomenally destructive to the soil.

Every time you eat a "Beyond Meat" burger, you have permanently destroyed a patch of what used to be rain forest and is now crappy farmland about the size of a car parking space.

You need far far far more land for raising livestock for eating than for vegetables. Furthermore, we’re discussing vegan diets in general. No one is vegan and survives solely on Beyond Burgers.

Yes, but you don't use land you could use for arable crops for raising animals all the time.

Also, if you don't turn some of the land you use for arable crops for pasture every few years and chuck some ruminants (cows, preferably, sheep will work too but you need to add lime afterwards) then the soil dies.

Do you know how to grow food?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com