Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? The problem is that cattle consumes orders of magnitude more water compared to plants, on top of the fact that they also eat plants, of which they convert a small portion of into (edible) mass. Their urine, en masse, is highly toxic to the local environment as it kills plants (high salt content, fertilizer burn) and pollutes rivers (pH, over-fertilization, algae blooming).
That water claim was based on a flawed accounting that's been repeated over and over so much without source. The debunking was posted right here on HN a few years back, don't have time to find it for now, maybe later. Other than that, what you describe only applies to industrial farming, not grazing cattle. Cows graze pasture, they shit and piss in pasture, it's almost a closed cycle except for the added salt the her…
The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
121–130 of 225 posts
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#122I find it bad that scientific results get censored, and I am also wondering if there is proof that a plant-based diet is more healthy. My suspicion is it might be for the average American, but it is based on gut feeling (pun intended). I remember margarine (plant-based) was all the rage too and IIRC it was much less healthy than butter (animal-based). My guess is it depends on the specific meals.
There’s pretty good evidence that an unprocessed plant-based diet is the healthiest option. This is a good place to start: https://nutritionfacts.org/
> Only one diet has ever been proven to reverse the progression of heart disease, our number one killer, and be effective in treating, arresting, and even reversing other deadly diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. And, that same diet—a whole food, plant-based diet—appears to be the most effective diet for healthy weight loss.
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#123I'm guessing their impact is mostly from deforestation. Does somebody know more?
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
You concede being a layman yet lay out a conclusion as though you are not. Was there any real point to your comment beyond taking a stab at 'zealous vegans'?
The point was that black-and-white thinking / reducing decisions to be made over single variables leads to suboptimal outcomes. Please try a bit harder to be generous with your reading interpretation.
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#125No matter where you stand (some meat eaters tend to become extremely emotional on this): The fact that the scientific results and recommendations get utterly censored like this before publication makes me really angry. It’s somewhat fine for me if people/governments choose to ignore or argue against these results after publication, but this is just absurd… and is then used from people all over the world to point to „…
No matter where you stand, these type naive recommandations are responsible for some of the greatest enviornmental dissasters of the last century. "Bio"-Fuels being one of the main culprits of deforestation that has created way bigger problems than the ones they were trying to fix. In this case a Plant based Diet would require much more agricultural land for the same calorie intake than a balanced meat and plant one.…
Where do you think the calories in meat ultimately comes from?
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
No matter where you stand, these type naive recommandations are responsible for some of the greatest enviornmental dissasters of the last century. "Bio"-Fuels being one of the main culprits of deforestation that has created way bigger problems than the ones they were trying to fix. In this case a Plant based Diet would require much more agricultural land for the same calorie intake than a balanced meat and plant one.…
so you say that the amount of land and water needed to grow a cow that ultimately I can eat is LESS than if I would use that land to grow food to eat directly? thats pretty wild, I'd think. Not even thinking about the methane issues with cows and other things they add ontop of land use. BioFuels are a joke, though, a result of lobbyism, fully agree. Individually owned ICEs on a large scale are the problem here, that…
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#127I find it bad that scientific results get censored, and I am also wondering if there is proof that a plant-based diet is more healthy. My suspicion is it might be for the average American, but it is based on gut feeling (pun intended). I remember margarine (plant-based) was all the rage too and IIRC it was much less healthy than butter (animal-based). My guess is it depends on the specific meals.
Margarine is a synthetic product, with the oil created in complex refineries then hydrogenated. You can't compare this to something like lentil stew or a salad. If the recommendation is that eating anything you want as long as the origin can be traced back to plants, then I agree, plant based diets aren't necessarily healthier. A WFPB (whole foods plant based) diet is undeniably healthy though. The problem with marga…
It is specific forms of processing which are bad, in specific circumstances. Smoking is, sadly, bad because the substances which preserve the food are carcinogenic. Partial hydrogenation of oils is bad because half of the partially hydrogenated products will be trans fats which the body really isn't good at handling.
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Margarine is a synthetic product, with the oil created in complex refineries then hydrogenated. You can't compare this to something like lentil stew or a salad. If the recommendation is that eating anything you want as long as the origin can be traced back to plants, then I agree, plant based diets aren't necessarily healthier. A WFPB (whole foods plant based) diet is undeniably healthy though. The problem with marga…
The idea that "processed food" is bad annoys me, because it's so impossibly broad. Milling, roasting, fermenting, freezing, drying, smoking, chopping, soaking, skimming, distilling, salting, curing, pickling, sieving, threshing, squeezing, and yes, hydrogenation - Anything we do to food is processing, and a lot of food is not safe to eat without processing. Veganism is one thing, but the "raw food" diet is damn near…
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
But exactly? Your first link is supporting my points and the second isn't related to it, are you aware of that or is this a sort of knee jerk reaction based on keyword matching? The first article is about how the Medieval Warm Period did indeed happen. That isn't a rebuttal, it's support for the fact that Michael Mann's "getting rid of it" from the IPCC reports was biased censorship of scientific results, the thing t…
i don't think you need a model to look at temperature records and see they have been increasing without a natural climate explanation. Unless there is some large igneous province spewing carbon into the atmosphere that you are aware of that the rest of us is not.
"they have been increasing without a natural climate explanation"
There are natural explanations, that's what the whole debate is about: how much temperature/sea level/etc change is natural vs man made. IPCC modelling starts from the assumption that the climate would be entirely stable if not for human activity which is why they were so keen on erasing the MWP.
Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet
#130It really does feel like we’re living in bizzaro world. If you want to make recommendations based on evidence, make sure it doesn’t impact the profits of powerful groups. Many negative things we see in public policy stem from this fact. Lack of right to repair, lack of broadband in America, lack of cyber security in corporations, US tax law. Maybe you like your meat. That’s fine. You can make decisions for your self,…
Does that apply to universities, government employees and claims about the "consensus" too? Or are they all individuals?