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Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Golden Rice is cool. And it's "nice" that the intellectual property owner has relaxed royalties for now. But it will be interesting to see how fast ancient local strains of rice disappear and there is less biodiversity. How hard is it to mix in a few greens with rice to get vitamin A?

As far as I understand, it doesn't have any kind of boosted resistance or anything, so it shouldn't dominate and replace wild rice the way other modified rice might. That said, if farmers move from producing a wide variety of rice strains to only golden rice, that's still a significant reduction in biodiversity. Maybe they should make beta-carotene versions of more kinds of rice. Mixing in a few greens is surprisingl…

Biodiversity, I think is the biggest problem. The potato blight spread so rampently because mostly one clone of the exact potato was being grown everywhere. Some sort of rice or corn blight would be catastrophic.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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These 4 points you mentioned are true facts. But your conclusion is still not true. Saying carbs should be avoided is like saying water should be avoided because people died from drinking too much. Biochemistry and psychology is complicated. But a healthy diet is well known and not complicated. Basically: Whole food plant based diet with vitamin supplements (notably vitamin B12) and e.g. linseed oil for the essential…

I think there are significantly more people who eat too many carbs than people who drink too much water. Speaking for just myself, I used to feel that sugar low after my lunch, and I know that craving for more carbs. I gained too much weight as a result. Now I've cut down on my carbs and I mostly snack on veggies these days and try not to overdo carbs at lunch, and that seems to help at least with that sugar low.

When I write carbs I mean staple food and fruits and not candy or sweet fat in the form of chocolate and caramel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_food

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Why is hunting better than being vegan?

Farming at any scale results in unintended animal deaths, serving no purpose other than to "get out of the way" so we can farm here. Hunting results in the death of a single animal, and that animal is then directly used for food. There is virtually no environmental impact as a result of well regulated hunting.

A vegan would argue that the death of a single animal should be prevented if at all possible. They would probably argue that hunting is much more ethical than factory farming, but still very unethical.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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The people in Texas are doing far more damage to the environment than any number of hogs could.

That doesn't make your parent comment wrong, though.

If you honestly believe hogs are destroying the environment in Texas, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s about as hyperbolic as it gets.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Hey Dennis, sorry about whoever downvoted you - if you look far enough back in my posts you'll see my opinion on why downvotes are lazy and don't add anything to civil conversation; I get downvotes too often for reasons I can't understand, I feel I have a couple of losers following me around with nothing more to contribute than click a downvote to feel some lame satisfaction and reward in their life. I would say I've…

> Unfortunately I have to wait 4 months between stem cell treatments Would a 5 day water fast help you? Ref: "Fasting boosts stem cells’ regenerative capacity" http://news.mit.edu/2018/fasting-boosts-stem-cells-regenerat...

Thanks for the link and reaching out with the suggestion.

I've been rotating between water fasting (with Himalayan salt for electrolytes) and carnivore diet since beginning of January. I started off doing a 6.5 day water fast (I had done a 10 day one in the past), and was planning to go longer, however the inflammation goes down and makes the pain more sharp - and at 6.5 days became too much and so started to eat again. Recently I finished an 8 day water fast - ended a week ago. I'm down a stable 30+ Lbs in the nearly 2 months, and losing 2-5 Lbs depending on how active I am, even when not fasting. I also generally eat only one meal a day, which ends up being intermittent fasting of 1:23; occasionally I'll have a second smaller meal later in day.

I've also been doing ozone therapy with amino acid IV drip afterward for a month now, and a few weeks ago started LDN - low-dose Naltrexone - which has had a significant impact as well, in part it acts as a powerful anti-inflammatory; https://www.ldnresearchtrust.org/ for more information on that + a short documentary on LDN: https://vimeo.com/295993909

P.S. Just thought I'd point out you have "karma: 1337" right now. :P

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Most people are omnivores, not carnivores as PG stated - however the trend seems to be moving towards the health benefits of eating as carnivore - a purely meat diet; it's the food you don't eat that improves health, meat is a healthy food for most people. We have the sugar lobby who paid researchers to create propaganda that fat was the culprit. We have companies incentivized to sell fad diets, we have every partici…

No surprise to see this comment getting downvoted. :-P Meat eaters (and haters), see for yourself the recent discussion on meat vs plants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19235684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177116

Thanks for the links. I decided to respond to a comment in one of those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19248599

I'm writing a book that will be comprehensive with all of this, there's too much misinformation/outdated information and misunderstanding out there to do combat one-on-one.. Shoot me an email matt@engn.com or follow me on Twitter @mattamyers if you want to keep in touch, probably will be a few years before I publish the book.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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I briefly looked at those links. The first one, "Beliefs and Attitudes toward Vegetarian Lifestyle across Generations", says in the introduction "Younger people significantly agreed more with the moral reason and with the environmental reason. People ages 41–60 significantly agreed more with the health reason. [i.e. not in absolute terms, just compared with other age groups] A study publish[sic] in 1992 found that th…

You know, I actually agree somewhat. I almost noted that I was having trouble finding more reliable sources, particularly concerning vegetarianism and veganism in the USA, but thought that would have completely torpedoed my argument. ;) More seriously: the "environmental" claim rang hollow to me, so I set out in search of some facts, and I think what I found supports that intuition, but the burden of proof is not rea…

The burden of proof should've been on me, for sure. I was going off of anecdote. Now I'm not so sure on what the actual percentages are, though I do still think that description probably does apply to a large number of vegetarians and perhaps vegans.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Farming at any scale results in unintended animal deaths, serving no purpose other than to "get out of the way" so we can farm here. Hunting results in the death of a single animal, and that animal is then directly used for food. There is virtually no environmental impact as a result of well regulated hunting.

A vegan would argue that the death of a single animal should be prevented if at all possible. They would probably argue that hunting is much more ethical than factory farming, but still very unethical.

I know, I've had these arguments. But it's asinine because it is quite literally impossible for any human to exist without animals dying as a result of it. There are a small percentage of vegans that are convinced that their existence results in zero animal deaths. These people are delusional. Luckily there aren't many of them.

The reasonable vegans admit that it's a matter of causing as little animal death or suffering as possible. And then some percentage of what I've deemed "reasonable vegans" will also agree that hunting is about as good as any other options.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Most of the preprocessed meat maybe. I've never put chicken in my meatballs. And meatballs are easy enough to make that for the life of me I can't figure out why anybody would buy them premade. Make a large batch and freeze them yourself. They'll be a thousand times better than the trash you can buy at the store.

This. Or even making your own marinara sauce. It’s payoff for the amount of time invested. NYtimes has a good recipe that takes about 20 minutes. The only trick is to find really good canned tomatoes. https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara...

Even bad canned tomatoes are probably better than whatever fresh plastic balls you can find in your market.

Re: Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes

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Well that’s the complete opposite of the keto diet which is high fat low carb and is the top diet in America in 2019

Yes. It shows again that marketing and personal fantasy trump science and truth in the USA and probably elsewhere too. But not eternally. Science will prevail eventually.

Science will prevail eventually, on that I will agree. Unfortunately most nutrition science today is complete garbage. The evidence doesn't back up the results they claim.

Basically, at this point each person has to try various things and figure out what works best for themself.

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