361–370 of 409 posts
I feel like I read this same story once a year or so for the past 5-6 years. Why hasn't this been commercialized yet?
No commercial incentive to do so. If we had any effective climate regulation, you'd see these things rapidly put into practice.
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That's an interesting way to put it into words. In paper sounds like a really unefficient pipeline (vegetables -> animals -> humans). Thanks for that, made me reflect on how stupid it sounds but how common it is.
It's not really stupid, the idea is cows eat plant matter that humans can't eat. Cellulose mainly from grass and other plants. They aren't eating the same plants that you eat.
Humans don't eat corn and soy? Because that's what is fed to industrially raised beef cattle.
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Bad gas corresponds to times when I'm more symptomatic. My condition causes serious gut dysfunction. Bad gassiness is one of many side effects when my gut is a mess. I've spent over eighteen years pursuing dietary and lifestyle changes to mitigate my incurable condition. I have a lot less gas than I used to.
My point is, if your medical condition is causing the gas then reducing gas wouldn't help.
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You can not grow enough fruits, vegetables and nuts to feed the human population without severe deforestation. Also, agriculture uses up pretty much most of the obtainable drinkable water.
I'm also sceptical that the recently proposed diets of fruits, vegetables and nuts actually work out. AFAICT it's an outstanding problem in nutrition science concerning how many of the calories in nuts that humans are able to digest. And yet it seems like the proposed diets just assume "all calories are equal". I've seen reports from journalists who have tried following those diets saying they were constantly hungry.
Last I checked, combustion was not one of the stages of digestion in the human digestive tract. I'm not a nutrition researcher, but it's always seemed intuitive to me that different compounds behave differently in a complex, gradual chemical system even if they behave similarly in a simple, rapid high-energy reaction. This is already acknowledged in the fact that dietary fiber is known to be mostly excreted and so isn't counted along with other carbohydrates.
This story is much about a small change by proportion changing several aspects of how digestion works in a mammalian digestive tract, including how efficiently the energy is taken up from other parts of the diet. Now in vitro is not in vivo and cattle aren't humans. But I think we're still far from settled on all calories being the same, and more evidence is building for the opposite conclusion. There are even multiple cases of fecal transplants leading to weight gain or weight loss, with the recipient's digestion suddenly resembling that of the donor causing body weight changes.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manuf...
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I would prefer being skeptical instead of blindly accepting things. This behavior will instigate another to provide evidence or a counter-argument. This makes for great discussion, in most cases I think it is healthy.
Aren't you just blindly accepting the skeptical response? What did you learn from this great conversation: OP: This study has never been reproduced!!!! Response: Uh, yes it has.
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"is based on a single study with 12 cows." Its not - most often "skeptical science remarks" although popular, are poorly informed and misleading. A quick scholar search shows numerous studies broadly agreeing with the one featured here, including the seaweeds effects on sheep digestion and microbial and metabolic details: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=asparagopsis+methane
Its not about skeptical remarks being poorly informed. It's about taking a thought that could occur to anyone thinking about the issue at hand without having all the information, presenting it, and having an informed reply. It's part of the dialog, and shouldn't be demonized!
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I really think it is irresponsible to keep repeating dietary hypothesis as fact. The notion that red meat is bad for you does not have compelling evidence, based all my years of obsessively researching this ... and with the help of equally obsessive and more qualified friends. As far as I can tell, how a diet makes you feel and presents visually is the closest thing we have to a reliable indicator of the health effec…
Yes, I hear you. But please note, I was intentional about the words I used. That is, "Generally unhealthy." The way I've heard it said best is this: "Cows' milk is a nutritional and hormonal cocktail intended specifically for the growth and development needs of baby calves. Needless to say, if anyone is reading this, they are of the cow species, and should be mindful of their dietary consumption.
These are two very different things, and within each group there are many variations.
What even is “red meat?” Does it include pork? Or only goats, sheep, and cows because they are all ruminants. Is chicken really so much better? How is meat different from fish? Does red meat just mean beef muscle meat? What about organ meat? I could write 1,000 words trying to even define this term.
Dairy can come from many different kinds of animals, can be fermented, aged, and processed to remove some or all fats. Lactose tolerance has a huge genetic component, arose much later in human evolution, and can vary with a human being’s age. Whole books have been written on this topic.
The whole thing, if you are scientifically and medically rigorous, descends into endless details and speculative biological mechanisms, ambitiously scoped epidemiology and tiny little short term controlled trials.
What your comment does is try to simplify the discussion so what is healthy aligns with what seems to be environmentally advantageous. It does thus by cherry picking data, glossing over basic details such as even defining terms, and boiling all that down to an often repeated heuristic that just doesn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny.
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My point is, if your medical condition is causing the gas then reducing gas wouldn't help.
The same mechanism that reduces the gas may also fix the underlying issue.
If you have a mental model as to what is going on and you try X and it works, then you infer that maybe you are on to something, which may be the best metric you have.
I saw some math once... not sure how correct it is, but it was something like given the co2-equivalent emissions of methane, even if all cows simply disappeared tomorrow, it would still only take care of about 5% of our global GHG emissions. So if that's true it wouldn't really be a gamechanger. Still worth doing though (the seaweed, not the mass slaughtering)! And if everyone plants 350 trees then maybe we'll get so…
Some variant of this same comment is on every single thread about this here. We need to tackle all of the "only 5%" issues.
Another is to use it as some sort of premise to implicitly argue we shouldn't do anything, which is completely different, and which I explicitly disavowed.