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Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

nature.com

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Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#381
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which broader implications you are concerned with ?

Your post from two days ago is an example: > While i understand it sucks for you but for many people factory including me, factory farming is awesome and animal suffering is not important at all. A rapist could make a similar case about how awesome the vagina feels. That the woman doesn't like it is not all that important. If you think about it, it's just some body parts touching, women really blow it out of proporti…

>Why should the government limit my freedoms?

Government consist of people, because to this group of people, its in their best interest, its ethical for them to not allow rape.

Does the government care about this rapist freedom ? No, in their perspective its wrong.

So whichever side that can force other to comply (persuasively or physically) get to decide the ethics.

In the case of rape, the government get to decide whether you can rape.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#382
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been trying to cut our meat consumption, but the cooking complexity is exactly my issue. We're lazy but healthy eaters, meaning our regular entrees are a meat and a couple veggie sides. We also do low carb, mainly because it's just easier to limit calorie intake that way. Most of the dinner work is usually cutting and preparing vegetables. When we cut meat, it cuts the main portion of the entree, which can some…

Yeah, as a vegetarian I can do some awesome things with lentils, but I remember the days when I could rub some spice on a pork chop and throw it on the grill and then have something boxed and starchy on the side and have a pretty decent meal. Meanwhile, a good lentil stew is a much more involved project. Much less home-made veggie burger patties which have dozens of ingredients and elaborate preparation processes. Go…

I think the trick to reducing food prep labor is larger batches. Maybe that means you eat the same thing 4 or more times in a week. Or maybe that means you freeze some of it for later. But it doesn't really take any more work to make a 3x batch of lentil stew than it does to make the regular sized batch.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#383
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethics is personal You may want to consider the broader implications of using this reasoning.

which broader implications you are concerned with ?

Individual ethics being absolute.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#384

I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. You have to make decisions that will hurt the meat industry and make it infeasible. This would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.

There is no need to go from one extreme to the other. This is about eating "less" meat. People do not traditionally eat that much meat because meat used to be expensive and its supply limited. This is still the case in poor countries. In developed countries, people started to eat more and more meat as they got richer because we naturally like meat and because of clever marketing. We now eat too much meat, and also co…

> One solution would be measures to increase price, but that is a political minefield.

It's only a political minefield because of corporate influence (dictation?) in politics.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#385
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandmother told me that before the second world war for a typical peasant family in Belarus the meat meant a single chicken 2-4 times in a month for the whole family. Only on big celebrations few times in a year people could afford to slaughter a pig or a caw. Even eggs were considered expensive. Milk was more available as most families had a cow. The real staple food was potato and bread. In cities meat was more…

Its interesting to hear anecdotal stories like these because they contradict the conventional wisdom nowadays that says you have to eat meat as protein every day - clearly that wasn't the case in prior centuries.

Not for poor people, those better situated would eat it more often. More importantly, people were not eating just steaks, but all parts of animals, so (in case of my grandparents in Yugoslavia) they'd eat a chicken or pork on Sundays and holidays, but on other days they'd perhaps have a cooked meat and bone marrow from a soup, or fried liver, or stew made from Sunday's leftovers. Also eggs, milk, cheese and other dairy products, that were affordable to everyone.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#386
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlawing meat and depriving us life's finest pleasures (eating delicious, succulent meat) would have catastrophic effects on society. It would wreck havoc on low income people, obliterate all the great meat heavy cuisine of the many immigrants across the USA and Europe, and turn us into weak, dispirited, sanctimonious saps.

> turn us into weak, dispirited, sanctimonious saps. Citation needed

Undisputed:Red meat increases testosterone.

Disputed:Phytoestrogens(soy) increases estrogen levels.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#387
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been trying to cut our meat consumption, but the cooking complexity is exactly my issue. We're lazy but healthy eaters, meaning our regular entrees are a meat and a couple veggie sides. We also do low carb, mainly because it's just easier to limit calorie intake that way. Most of the dinner work is usually cutting and preparing vegetables. When we cut meat, it cuts the main portion of the entree, which can some…

Healthiest way to go about it is to go low-fat, high carb. The body uses glucose for energy most easily. Whole-foods plant based diets, as shown in documentaries like Forks Over Knives, have been shown to let people lose weight and reverse diseases like diabetes. A cooked carb like a potato or rice is like 1 calorie/gram, including the water. Oil is 9 calories/gram. Without oil, sheer food volume and fiber will make…

I was 200 lbs when I cut out sugar and complex carbs from my diet - no more pasta, potatoes, also no bread. I lost 20 lbs fairly quickly. For carbs I still ate sweet potatoes and brown rice. To fill some of the hunger from lower carbs intake I ate high fat avocados. Fastest weight I ever lost. Dairy was fair game though. It's amazing how bloated bread makes your body. Once I cut bread I never again felt bloated.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#388

From https://skepticalscience.com/animal-agriculture-meat-global-... "Animal agriculture is responsible for 13–18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and less in developed countries (e.g. 3% in the USA). Fossil fuel combustion for energy and transportation is responsible for approximately 64% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and more in developed countries (e.g. 80% in the USA)." I t…

Is that 3% number associated with meat production in the USA or with meat consumption in the USA? If it's the former, then 3% would be an underestimate of the impact of reducing meat consumption, since the 3% doesn't include the emissions impact of feed and livestock that is imported.

That is true, but I think the point stands. As (mostly) programmers we're quick to understand and make use of practical rules like Ahmdal's law[1] for optimizing software, and know that you always start by looking at the parts that take the longest. Yet in real life we're sometimes tempted to optimize at the fringes first and ignore the obvious biggest contributing factors first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law#Serial_programs

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#389

I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. You have to make decisions that will hurt the meat industry and make it infeasible. This would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.

Apparently the Indian way is death by lynching on suspicion of cow slaughter with govt doing a 'wink wink' I was looking the other way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_Indi...

The govt's behavior is not motivated by climate.

Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

#390
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this just being down voted because of tone? The premise seems valid: just because you can "survive" off of a low-to-no protein diet doesn't mean it should be espoused.

This post demonstrates the success of marketing "protein is meat". Such that when someone mentions reducing meat consumption, someone else thinks they are referring to a low-to-no protein diet.

That is true. But people rarely develop allergies to meat based protein. The same cannot be said for plant based proteins.
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