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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> we'll then have a lot less livestock to eat

Even if that's true, while meat is tasty, it's a luxury, and arguably a step in the food chain that's a waste.

If the entire industrial meat sector evaporated today, my guess is the biggest impact would be an economic disruption from large number of suddenly unemployed and businesses no longer buying services/products, rather than any kind of food shortage per se.

But if we're talking about an antibiotic ban, the impacts wouldn't even reach that far. ABX don't enable production, they enable cheaper production. The most likely outcome isn't a serious collapse in supply, it's some combination of an increase in costs and modest reduction in supply.

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Currently, meat serves the important function of regulating the supply of cereals. When there is overproduction, the grain producers can still sell for meat producers, not going out of business. Where the production reduces, meat producers sell thiner (and sometimes younger) animals, freeing more grains for human consumption.

Left alone, grain consumption is extremely inelastic, and production is extremely variable - not a good combination. But yes, it's not that hard to create other mechanisms for regulating that market, even world wide.

You don't think biofuels could take up an appreciable portion of that slack? I'd expect that buying up grain in bulk at surplus prices, and converting it into ethanol to be pretty profitable.

> Currently, meat serves the important function of regulating the supply of cereals.

  She swallowed the cow to catch the goat.
  She swallowed the goat to catch the dog.
  She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.
  She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.
  She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
  That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
  She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
  But I dunno why she swallowed that fly.
  Perhaps she'll use a combination of market forces and
    warehouses to accomplish the same thing much more 
    simply next time around.

This is so relatively unimportant compared to the issue of antibiotics becoming useless that it made me laugh. It needs a healthy dose of perspective.

> Even if that's true, while meat is tasty, it's a luxury

No more a luxury than, say, cancer treatments.

If you don't get your cancer treated, you die.

If you don't eat meat, you don't eat meat.

If you live in Tibet or any other 4000+ meter environment where growing things is quite a bit more difficult, and you don't eat meat, you die. Say whatever you want about the Chinese, but the Tibetans do very much welcome the fresh vegetables that they can now get via better transport links and internal trade.

I visited north Xinjiang once, and was quite over-exposed to meat so much that I was happy to get back to lower elevation lands where I could actually get some vegetables again.

That's completely off-topic in a conversation that is obviously about large-scale ranches. Do those Tibetans use antibiotics to promote growth?

In my defense, parent was an off-topic false dichotomy. Do two wrongs make a right?

In this context, Tibet is a rounding error on pretty much any metric you can imagine.

So what about medical treatments that save lives but have yet to be invented? How is humanity possibly surviving now when there are still medical conditions that lead to death?

If you don't eat your meat, how can you have any pudding?

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat!

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Stand still laddie!

The main difference being that cancer treatment saves your life while eating meat shortens it.

Arguable. According most low-carb diets, eating meat is good for you and it's carbs that screw you over.

Low-carb diets advocate replacing carbs with fat in addition to protein, and there are many non-meat sources of fat and protein.

And the premise of the diet is supported by sound scientific research rather than simply hearsay (as your comment implies).

> According most low-carb diets, eating meat is good for you

Those diets may be good for losing weight, but are they good for a healthy person?

After figuring low-carb on my own (I never had heard of it before), and making my nutrition person (forgot the name in english for that profession) cringe, it worked wonder.

First, I started to lose 1kg a week, until I was in a healthy weight (when the weight stabilized instead, without much adjustments to diet), and my choleterol that I was fighting for years, dropped to healthy levels in 4 months, also several other broken blood levels got fixed.

Also my sleep got better, and for the first time in my life going to the gym made a difference (before that, I could go to the gym all I wanted, and I would never get stronger, and I was very weak, sedentary 14 year old girls could lift more weight than me in the upper body).

But that is just a anecdote, it happened to me, I did no research to see WHY it happened, it just did, and now I stick with that diet.

nutrition person (forgot the name in english for that profession)

Either "nutritionist" or "dietitian".

There is a very wide range of low-carb sources of food that are well-rounded and excellent -- avocados, tomatoes, almonds/almond milk, spinach, cheeses, high-fat yoghurt, tofu, blueberries, raspberries.

And obviously many meats.

This is a thorough list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0Ah8MbmZepQxWdGo4...

Initially, it's definitely challenging, and switching to a wholly low-carb diet is not without an unpleasant transition period.

> eating meat shortens it

What a massive load of shit. Even if we're going to get on the train that eating meat vicariously results in antibiotics being rendered useless, the two are not any more directly related than watching Netflix destroys the environment (Netflix runs on computers, producing computers causes pollution, pollution destroys the environment).

Umm, I think he was referring to the (purported) health benefits of a meat-free diet. The ideal amount of meat in one's diet is perhaps debatable, but I wouldn't call the claim "a massive load of shit" (both because it overstates and because I would come up with something more civil).

Hold on, tiger. There appears to be some interesting research that supports this indirectly. It's not the meat, it's the methionine. It's highest in animal products (eggs are #1).

Methionine is an essential amino acid that is one of 2 that is used for the start codon for DNA transcription. It follows that if cancer is uncontrolled cell growth, that restricting the resource it needs would limit it's growth.

Appeal to authority: my wife, the molecular biologist pointed out the codon angle. It seems reasonable enough to me to have become a pseudo vegan (without the self-righteousness (at least in regards to that)).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methionine#Methionine_restricti...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11603655

Hmm interesting. I eat a few dozen eggs per month, mostly because they're the cheapest source of protein.

I may have to consider chicken or something else.

I eat at least a dozen per week, and plan to continue. This is non-sense. The "seems to make sense" part especially. You can take any thread from human biology and spin to extremes using inductive reasoning. Fortunately the body has myriad checks and balances.

I submit to you "free radicals". Oh-my-god-theyre-awful-help. Enter anti-oxidants, oh-my-god-theyre-great-yay. Let's supplement them right? Ouch, turns out, those dietary anti-oxidants were the bees knees, but supplementation to extremes might be a bad idea, and we might need some free radicals to prevent cancerous cell growth.

My moral here is, natural whole foods, mostly, will keep you pretty near balance. Eat your berries, whole grains, eggs, and proteins because the one thing we know is bad for us is a lack of balance.

Can you explain a bit more? I'm interested, but I'm interpreting your post as "helps with DNA copying so its good for cell reproduction means it causes cancer". I'm sure I have it wrong. I mean.... loads of things we eat are good for cell reproduction. It's almost like saying "living makes you more likely to die"

I'd probably make it more confusing :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_codon

Note the reference to methionine. My understanding is that the body recycles methionine as well. So give your body just enough to let it do it's thing but don't pour gasoline on the cancer fire by supply a surplus of a critical component.

I'm still slowly doing the research on this. It was spurred by my daughter telling me about "the Blue Zone healing cancer". Googled that, and checked out the dietary element, and that led to the topic we're discussing now.

It seems reasonable enough. And simple enough. And you don't have to be vegan, but mindful of intake.

Just trying to share a recent discovery that seems like a possible life changer.

Whoa whoa whoa, this is a huge huge huge stretch in terms of causing cancer, and is not consistent with any current beliefs and thoughts on oncogenesis. Methionine availability is much more like the Warburg Effect [1], an effect where cells mostly perform anaerobic instead of aerobic metabolism.

Changing one's diet based on this speculation would be absolute quackery.

A cell's addiction to methionine is an effect of cancer, and restricting methionine can be potentially be used to treat cells that are already cancerous, but there's no thought on how this could possible cause cancer. Dump a bunch of methionine in cells and they're not going to develop cancer, as far as anything I've ever seen. Interestingly enough, diabetes patients that use metformin to treat their diabetes seem to have slightly lower cancer rates than diabetes patients that don't use metformin, which has triggered interest in insulin receptors as possible treatment targets or causes, which are vaguely related to metabolism, but such work is extremely early and no conclusions should be drawn. And that's on far far more solid ground than methionine as a cancer risk.

We understand caloric restriction far better than methionine restriction in terms of extending lifespans of lab animals, so if one wants to speculate on dietary changes, this seems like a far better speculative, pre-knowledge, gamble than methionine restriction.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect#Oncology

I don't think I said (and know that I didn't mean to imply) that excess methionine causes cancer.

Methionine restriction by avoiding methionine rich foods doesn't strike me as harmful at all, since there's still plenty in even a vegan diet. And in my case, I said pseudo-vegan -- it's more a mindset than dogma.

That wasn't my point. What if there was a cancer treatment that costs literally billions of dollars, so that only a few people in the world could afford it? Would that cancer treatment be a "luxury," or would you consider it a basic need for all humans?

I'd say it (the expensive treatment) was a basic need. A need that was not being met. You could tell it was a need because those who needed it but didn't get it would die.

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