Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 443 posts

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#331

Post by hardatwork »

haisch wrote: post #268

There are various moral dilemmas that are brought up when discussing diet involving animal foods: 1) Environmental impact 2) Animal suffering 3) Nutrition Often times people focus on number 1 in spite of number 2 or 3. What if moving away from animal foods in our diets causes an increase in heart disease, cancer and overall mortality? https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases... With 3% of emission…

> What if moving away from animal foods in our diets causes an increase in heart disease, cancer and overall mortality?

This seems like a very strange thing to say, given that the scientific consensus seems to suggest we'll see the opposite effect:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26853923 - This comprehensive meta-analysis reports a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet versus the incidence and/or mortality from ischemic heart disease (-25%) and incidence from total cancer (-8%). Vegan diet conferred a significant reduced risk (-15%) of incidence from total cancer.

Wrt driving less, people go for the easier option, and it's far easier to eat less meat than to drive less.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#332

Post by colechristensen »

viraptor wrote: post #313
colechristensen wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. Roundup-ready GMOs led to replacement of many more toxic herbicides with glyphosphate. BT GMOs led to much less usage of insecticides on crops.

Which has its own problems unfortunately, given that it's basically everywhere now ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971... ) and it damages DNA ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22331240/ ). So basically everything's terrible and we're all going to die...

The problem being that the signal to noise ratio is very low as to whether or not there are harmful effects. Normal exposure to glyphosphate in people is very low and at those levels you are exposed to many different substances even in wholly natural food.

Compounded with that is there are very few people doing research without an agenda.

You also have to realize that "organic" in the US doesn't mean treatment-free crops. There are a large number of substances approved to treat crops for pests and weeds and still be counted as organic with the rationale that those treatments are less synthetic. There is absolutely no guarantee that this means they have fewer negative effects.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#333

Post by [deleted] »

redisman wrote: post #35
hprotagonist wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seitan is nice! A lot of americans who are in the demographic to be into substitute meat won't touch it because it is literally a blob of gluten with sauce.

Seitan and tempeh are by far the tastiest "substitute meats" because they don't really try to morph into a "nugget" or a "burger" but just show what that plant protein is like at its best

[deleted]

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#334

Post by zizee »

avar wrote: post #158

I predict that the biggest market for lab-grown meat (in vitro cultivation) is going to be growing for meat grown from the cells of animals that aren't economical, practical or even legal as meat today. People seem to be assuming that just because they mostly eat beef and chicken today that they're going to be buying lab grown beef and chicken, but ultimately they only eat that because it's economical to raise those…

I wonder if they produced human lab-grown-meat, how many people would eat it out of curiosity.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#335

Post by 7952 »

meowface wrote: post #177
arawde wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the opposite side of this. I've eaten meat for the first 23 years of my life, but my current partner is vegan. A large part of our relationship has been discovering that vegetables are actually good to eat when they're not an afterthought to a meal. I go out of my way to try the meat substitutes now, because I'm holding out that one of them will actually be good enough for me to show my carnivore friends. For…

At risk of sparking an ethics debate, why do most people who turn vegetarian out of conscientiousness seem to very disproportionately do it for environmental reasons? I mean, on one hand, it makes complete rational sense, because it's self/species-interest: reduced meat consumption should decrease the effects of global warming and other issues, and you want a world that you and future generations of people can safely…

Why did you expect a vegetarian to be less selfish than anyone else?

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#336

Post by JackPoach »

jameslk wrote: post #131

Since we're making predictions here, I predict that shortly after we adopt meat substitutes, we'll start to question what's inside them. Then the conversation will change from meat substitutes being good and healthy to something akin to the GMO debate about meat substitutes not being natural. And just like GMOs, whether it's actually bad for you or not won't matter. This debate will be a proxy war between Big Meat an…

There might be a big regulatory war to ban using the word 'meat' in marking substitutes.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

#340

Post by intended »

jameslk wrote: post #131

Since we're making predictions here, I predict that shortly after we adopt meat substitutes, we'll start to question what's inside them. Then the conversation will change from meat substitutes being good and healthy to something akin to the GMO debate about meat substitutes not being natural. And just like GMOs, whether it's actually bad for you or not won't matter. This debate will be a proxy war between Big Meat an…

Also, 10 years later, there will be fads and forwards which talk about eating "Natural" protein, not this fake stuff.

15 years later, there will be science talking about how micro nutrients are missing from meat substitutes and how a natural, healthy and balanced diet is necessary for human beings.

Post reply on HN