51–60 of 116 posts
Earth! What do I win? Seriously though, check out https://xkcd.com/1338/ "Land Mammals" it's one of the more mind-blowing XKCDs IMO. > Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight [[A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type…
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Maybe because it's a biased POV, that doesn't take into account that the isssue is simply being human, nobody can call themselves out or blame some activity more than others. For example many vegans and animalists own pets to "save them from cruelty" But Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are t…
Nothing about what you said is antithetical to veganism, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
muslims don't eat pork, Hindu don't eat cows, every religion impose dietary restriction, doesn't mean that non believers have to follow them.
Veganism is no exception to the rule: if you believe you're reducing animal suffering, good for you, go on with your religion and be happy.
But in truth you aren't, vegans kill a lot of animals too, there are billions of people in the World that cause much less damages than us westerners, even if we lived only on rainwater and rocks.
So you might be a "true vegan (TM)" but you aren't better for the environment or for animal suffering than anybody else.
That's what I was trying to say.
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Superfood animals because they eat literal garbage; you're still not escaping the order of magnitude conversion loss going through a trophic level. In addition we don't know all the long-term impacts of eating poultry (or any animal for that matter) given growth hormone stimulating factors. We also know that red and processed meats definitely cause cancer, and cooking "lean" meats / fish creates compounds likely to c…
While the food given to chicken could provide calories to humans, it cannot provide a concentrated source of proteins. That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories. There are methods to extract proteins from vegetables, but for some reason the current methods are inadequate, because the price of vegetab…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein...
"The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men. And while protein malnutrition is a problem for millions of people around the globe, for the average adult in developed countries, we are eating far more protein than we actually need.
Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of protein throughout the day from foods like beans, legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains."
> so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
Chickpeas, soybeans and other beans can be about 20% protein, lentils about 10%, and they're cheap.
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72B of those 80 are chickens, cattle come in at 325M. At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food, and generally being lower impact than cattle, pork, etc.
> At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72 billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency "In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there is a clear difference in magni…
For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper than calories from animals.
Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins.
When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
When vegetable protein extracts are compared with meat, all the energy and chemicals consumed for protein separation and any other additional costs must be taken into account.
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> At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72 billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency "In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there is a clear difference in magni…
Comparing food efficiencies by energy content, i.e. by calories, between vegetables and animals, is completely futile and irrelevant. For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper th…
> When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how much protein people need and underestimating how much protein regular plant-based food contain.
Potatoes are about the cheapest food, not renowned to be high in protein and yet eating 2000g of them a day will give you ~40g of protein and ~2000 calories which is close to the recommended amounts even if you're not trying to get protein. A cheap can of cooked chickpeas or beans is an easy 40g of protein, even cheaper if you cook from dry beans. Seitan (you make it by washing flour dough with water until it's mostly protein + gluten left) is about 75% protein, even more than steak: https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-drink/a25976250...
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Comparing food efficiencies by energy content, i.e. by calories, between vegetables and animals, is completely futile and irrelevant. For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper th…
> Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins. > When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content. Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how much protein people need and underestimating how much protein regular plant-based food contai…
gluten is protein.
Denmark 5.8 million people, 13.5 million pigs
5.46 million people, 6.83 million sheep.
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While the food given to chicken could provide calories to humans, it cannot provide a concentrated source of proteins. That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories. There are methods to extract proteins from vegetables, but for some reason the current methods are inadequate, because the price of vegetab…
> That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein... "The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men. And while protein malnutrition is a problem for millions of people around the globe, fo…
Nevertheless, even if the dry legumes have about the same protein content as raw lean meat, while in raw lean meat the rest of the content is mainly water, dry legumes contains at least twice as much starch as proteins, so when eating the same quantity of proteins as legumes instead of meat, one will eat at least 3 times more calories.
I actually eat about 2 thirds of my daily protein intake from high-protein vegetables, e.g. lentils or peas, and only 1 third from meat, but if I would replace the last third, of proteins from meat, also with proteins from vegetables I could not avoid gaining weight. I have made various experiments with different diets, so I know this for sure.
Moreover, I am able to eat 2 thirds of the protein intake from vegetable sources only because I normally do not eat any cereals or any other starchy food that would provide additional calories over those that are automatically ingested together with the vegetable proteins. So this is a problem that I have studied during a long time, until succeeding to find a balance between protein intake and energy intake, without gaining weight. Most people, who also eat things like bread or sweets, would not be able to eat such a large part of their protein intake from vegetable sources, without becoming overweight.
That recommended protein intake of 46 g / 56 g per day, quoted by you, comes from an older study whose methodology has been severely criticized. Other studies, which are more credible in my opinion, conclude that the real recommended protein intake should be at least 50% higher, so closer to 100 g per day than to 56 g per day (and the 56 g per day was for a 70 kg male, any bigger individual must eat a proportionally greater quantity).
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Comparing food efficiencies by energy content, i.e. by calories, between vegetables and animals, is completely futile and irrelevant. For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper th…
> Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins. > When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content. Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how much protein people need and underestimating how much protein regular plant-based food contai…
I cook and eat chickpeas from time to time, but less frequently than lentils or peas, which have a higher protein content than chickpeas, so I am aware of their properties.
While you are right that 200 g of chickpeas would provide 40 g of proteins and this is not a quantity of chickpeas too large for being eaten during a day, that is only at most a half of the recommended protein intake for a 75 kg human.
While the energy requirements for doing some hard physical work are more similar between different people, the basal energy consumption rates when doing sedentary work in front of a computer, only interspersed with short exercises or walks, vary much more from human to human.
Eating 2 kg of potatoes in a single day, i.e. 2000 calories, would be enough for a large gain of weight per day in my case. I eat around 1600-1700 calories for a stable weight around 76 kg (before starting to count calories, during many years I had a stable weight of over 110 kg).
Moreover, counting all the 40 g of proteins from 2 kg potatoes as part of the necessary protein intake is incorrect.
There exists indeed a minimum protein intake, which is required to ensure a sufficient nitrogen intake, in the form of the amino- group, which can be transferred from amino-acids that are in excess to those that are deficient, to balance their proportions.
However, the real required protein intake is frequently much larger than that needed to provide enough nitrogen. The required protein intake must be high enough so that the required intakes are satisfied for all of the essential amino-acids.
So the recommended protein intake, which varies between studies, depending on methodology, from 0.8 to 1.2 g of protein per kilogram of body weight, is valid only for proteins from animal sources.
The proteins from vegetables like potatoes or chickpeas, have an unbalanced amino-acid profile, so they must provide a higher protein quantity to also contain enough of their more scarce amino-acids.
I am too lazy to make the computation now, but it is likely that a 75 kg human would have to eat no less than 5 kg of potatoes per day, i.e. more than 4000 calories, to get enough proteins, with enough of each amino-acid. Unless doing a lot of hard work, that would be impossible.
About seitan, even if wheat has a high-protein content in comparison with most other cereals, where I live the price of wheat flour divided by its protein content is only 3 times less than the price of chicken breast divided by its protein content.
However, proteins from wheat have only half of the lysine needed by humans, so you need a double quantity of wheat proteins. So correcting for the lysine content makes chicken breast only 1.5 times more expensive than wheat flour.
If you add the value of the time lost with making seitan from wheat flour, it is hard to compete in price with chicken breast.
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I think it would be more useful to track weight produced. This statistic is probably hard to track... A good proxy would be to multiply the number of animals by the Animal Unit Equivalents (AUE).
Calories could be a good measure - a whole chicken appears to be about 1200 and a cow between 500,000 and 600,000 - so a cow is about 500 chickens or so.