271–280 of 947 posts
Personally I avoid their stuff. I'd rather have a locally raised steak from one of my neighbors who loves their cattle and their job. Eating highly processed food just isn't good for you.
I agree. I once tried beyond meat by accident (some vegans were visiting and did a switcheroo on me) and it was one of the most repulsive things I had ever tasted.
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The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant and the environmental impacts have been greatly exaggerated. See below: Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just 0.7%. At the same time, both transitions woul…
YMMV, but it's much more than 2.6% in the US. Livestock is 40% of of ag's GHG emissions. https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#agriculture... And ag is ~10% of US emissions https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/#allsectors/... So eliminating livestock would reduce emissions by 4%. With that said, 4% is still low, but it doesn't account for all the GHG emissions needed to grow feed for livestock,…
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How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.
I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs. If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.
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Lentils, tofu, peanuts, and seitan are 25%, 20%, 28%, and 80% protein by weight. Meat is about 26%, according to WolframAlpha. Not that you actually need very many grams of protein each day to be healthy.
I find seitan and tofu completely unpalatable, and I can’t rely on eating hundreds of grams of peanuts to fill my protein needs. Lentils are fine... I lift heavy, which I believe is integral to my good health (the evidence on the health benefits of strength training is overwhelming). You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence. Designing 3000-4000kca…
(Also: I just picked four ingredients I just happen to have; there are others).
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> The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. This seems to presume two things: 1) That vegans and vegetarians are primarily doing it for the environment. 2) That vegans and vegetarians can't do basic math. To the first point, I'd be fully supportive of plant-based diets even if the only reason was concern over the treatment of the animals themselves. The focus on the environmental benefits is real…
I'm a fairly recent convert to being mostly (like, >99% of my calories, probably) vegetarian actually due to the health benefits. Environmental and animal welfare concerns are nice bonuses, but weren't enough to make me reach the tipping point, I guess.
HN masses cheering on the success of Soylent Red or Soylent Yellow?? Just eat less meat if you think meat production is bad/bad for the planet, don't cheer on meat substitutes, which are just processed foods made from entirely processed ingredients. Eating meat for every meal is not good for you, but you can bet that Beyond and Impossible will advertise themselves as something that can be eaten for breakfast, lunch a…
I assume you're being downvoted because of the tone of your comment, but this is actually a really valuable point: > processed foods made from entirely processed ingredients There's evidence that suggests the degree to which foods are processed (generally) correlates with unhealthiness. And there's also good evidence that meat is unhealthy in various ways. So, it's difficult to know where the balance would lie: unpro…
I would expect that soon someone will come out with a plant-based meat substitute that is marketed as "Only five ingredients, made in a kitchen not a factory".
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Lentils, tofu, peanuts, and seitan are 25%, 20%, 28%, and 80% protein by weight. Meat is about 26%, according to WolframAlpha. Not that you actually need very many grams of protein each day to be healthy.
I find seitan and tofu completely unpalatable, and I can’t rely on eating hundreds of grams of peanuts to fill my protein needs. Lentils are fine... I lift heavy, which I believe is integral to my good health (the evidence on the health benefits of strength training is overwhelming). You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence. Designing 3000-4000kca…
Specialized athletic hobbies like powerlifting are sort of irrelevant to discussions involving reducing GHG emissions by scaling up plant based meat substitutes. Niches like that aren't the target market.
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There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies t…
It would be interesting to see the stats of a country like India though, where you don't have confounders like vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the developed world. Although the more I look into it, the more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label there. What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty b…
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I think you missed the point -- that if you tried to replace meat with plants providing the same nutritional profile, then the impact is far less than anticipated by most calculations.
Plus an even larger issue is soil erosion, which reduces the soil's capacity to act as a carbon sink: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/soil-erosion-decreases-soil... Returning to the most sustainable method of raising cattle, grazing, (such as simply letting cows graze) is pound for pound the most effective way to greatly reduce the carbon footprint left by industrialized livestock production, and restore soil qualit…
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The popular crusade against meat is one of the more misguided. Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant and the environmental impacts have been greatly exaggerated. See below: Regarding carbon: "removal of livestock in the US would only lead to a net GHG reduction of 2.6% in national emissions. Similarly, removing all dairy would lead to a reduction of just 0.7%. At the same time, both transitions woul…
I'm less inclined to believe a blog post than I am to believe published & cited articles. Most estimates I've found put overall GHG from diet at about 15-20% of total per capita. And sources like [1] indicate that switching to a plant-based diet cuts that number in half for western countries (the UK in this study). That's 3x your number. Granted, meat substitutes are higher on GHG than eating straight plant-based mea…
Of course, plant based burgers might not reduce total final product shipping emissions but they might reduce a lot of the intermediary shipping emissions since cattle require feed.
Also, there’s that thing where we apparently ship chicken to china to be cleaned and then back sometimes? That seems bad, but I don’t really know any of the numbers. I can only assume it’s on those cargo ships which use very crudely refined fuels with little emission caps.