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The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

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Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#121

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…

I'd like to know if you think any of the claims on this page are incorrect and if so what evidence you have against them https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#122
post #86

I 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/

For the benefit of other readers, the closest I could find in there to answer my question was:

> 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

#124
post #89

Earlier 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.

It doesn't deserve a generous interpretation; it began with a generalisation about a group of people and an unfounded assertion.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#125
post #111

No 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.…

> 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

#126
post #111

Earlier 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…

Yes I am saying that to get the same Nutritional value that you would get from a cow you would need much more amound of land to grow the plants that would subtitute it. Plants that would require a lot more care and a lot more automation/pesticides that the plants cows are eating. Even the volume of the needed transport/storage/refiregeration would be way bigger. Ask anyone living in a rural area, what amount of land/effort would be the equivalent of a cow. Hopefully everyone agrees now that BioFueld are a joke but this same discussion was held some 25 years ago and BioFuels became a reality because everyone opposing them then was beaten down with the "scientific" stick. Because we are using "scientific" to camuflage the fact that we are acting out of fear and we don't really know what to do. That would be the first step. IPCC raccomends a plant-free diet MIGHT help the enviornment? Good as long as it is clear that is a Test and we need to evaluate maybe on a smaller scale first, and not the God-given truth that allows us to stone everyone who thinks eitherwise. If the IPCC says This not Might but this WILL, that I'm gonna file it together with the Biofuels and for once be glad that some lobies, for their own interests are doing us all a favour.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#127

I 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…

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 impossible to make work, so much that the alternative people who embrace every other fad like that warn against it.

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

#128

Earlier 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…

Many concerns are a matter of degree and involve complex fuzzy boundaries. It's difficult to find hard and fast rules when it comes to processed foods. When talking about processing, you need to do research to determine which sorts of processing are harmful and why. There is a lot of information available. This means understanding what you are putting into your body and what happens inside your body when you take in various food products. How deep you take this is also a choice. It doesn't matter what diet you choose.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#129
post #85

Earlier 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.

I don't quite follow, is that a reference to Exxon? They started looking at those claims in 1977 but temperatures had been falling (by the records of the time) from 1940 to 1975ish, so that would have been a big problem for concluding that fossil fuels = warming. It still is, which is why one of the things the IPCC did in its reports was start truncating its graphs and changing temperature data to try and erase the fact that climatology was once predicting a new ice age.

"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

#130

It 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,…

"I think the solution is to blanket ban corporate speech. It really is different than individuals speaking"

Does that apply to universities, government employees and claims about the "consensus" too? Or are they all individuals?

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