Eat your meat, put down the car.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Eating less meat isn’t going to save the climate or improve health.  That is the point.  

He pointed out there are arguments to be made for reducing deforestation ot being vegetarian for ethical reasons as an individual consenting adult.  The idea that vegetable oil filled beyond meat artificially flavored naturally dyed pea protein patties is good for you or the planet is a feat of eco-capitalist marketing and propaganda...and you’ve fallen for it.

The food industry and organizations and extremely wealthy vegetarian/vegan individuals got a whole lot of airtime promoting their (planetary health diet) lifestyle choice as a cure for our ailing planet.  They literally encourage you to lubricate your body with harmful highly processed vegetable oils and become deficient in vital nutrients like vitamin D, iron, and vitamin B12.  This will lead to inflammation related disease and sickness, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, depression, rickets...you name it.  All that is profitable for them too.  

I wasn't particularly interested in debating the human health aspects of this but anecdotally as a vegetarian (for seven years) with many vegetarian friends I don't really see very much evidence of any nutrient deficiency. Many of those nutrients you list (particularly vit D and iron) are easily obtainable through other means and, aside from anemia from lowered iron consumption (which can be remedied by eating more leafy greens) nobody I know has been put in any serious health risk from vegetarianism. Adding to this, my Mom has been a vegan for over 20 years now and is in amazing physical condition for a woman in her 60s.

Also there are forms of vegetarianism that don't rely on eating fake meats. I've still never tried an Impossible burger (or whatever those things are called) or a Beyond Meat burger. I've started in the last several months but for those other six months I was subsisting just fine on legumes.

Furthermore, posing this as a risk between processed foods or meat is ridiculous. The amount of
raw ground beef through diet modification and other treatments applied to the meats e.g. for preservation also means that the meat that a wide majority of meat-eating Americans eat is processed as well. And I haven't even begun to address, e.g., meat served at most restaurants, or pre-processed meals like Hamburger helper or frozen pizza which is a staple of many diets. Furthermore, if processed vegetable oil is your concern, then you're quite out of luck, because most meals (including most meat meals) are prepared in some sort of processed vegetable oils. If you are interested in avoiding oils, you can move to a rawer diet, but this makes consuming meat (and many other things) more difficult.

Also, I wasn't saying (nor was anybody else) that eating meat and taking no other actions was sufficient for halting climate change. There's probably a high degree of intersection between people who believe in consuming less meat for the climate and people who are interested in driving their cars less for the same reasons.

This plan would also relegate currently productive vast grazing areas around the world to unproductive wilderness, reducing the ability of entire nations to produce their own food which centralizes the control of the food supply even more.

If you're talking about areas unsuitable for conventional farming (e.g., the Great Basin in Nevada) then I don't really know what the problem is with letting these areas run fallow.

[Ban my account ffs!]

The problem is that you think I’m attacking your dietary practices...I’m not.  I am fully aware that a carefully planned vegetarian or vegan diet can be perfectly healthy. 

My worry is on a global scale, carefully planning isn’t going to work.  People will develop deficiencies due to poor habits or lack of access.  Furthermore, fortifying foods, while a good thing, still centralizes food production in a way that may not be au good thing.

You are using the same argument that in practice the ideal is rarely met and problems arise.  That is my argument as well.  Just as you said with processed vegetable oils and also with things like corn syrup, meat isn’t going anywhere.  We should be focusing on reducing refined grains, processed vegetable oils, and sugar.  Basically the main ingredients of every mass produced baked good you’ve ever had.

And for the last part:  i’m talking central Asia, Mongolia, the grasslands of Africa, etc.  you are being very myopic.

[Mopsus]

It should go without saying that any study which fails to take into account Eskimos’ recent large-scale conversion to the modern diet is worthless.

 Can you tell me where on Earth these populations exist where people are eating large quantities of meat and living healthy long lives?

 Or you could google "Blue Zones" and see what the longest living and healthiest people on Earth mostly eat and what is the primary basis of their diets.

The Eskimo and Maasai have both been known to exhibit impressive health outcomes while maintaining diets made mostly of animal products. Of course, the most important thing for overall health and wellness isn’t the ratio of animal to plant food in the diet, but an absence of processed foods and added sugar.

  There is a distinction between the percentage of animal foods they eat and the quantity. They eat less calories than Americans on average, they raise their own animals since they're nomadic herders, and they also eat more animal products(mostly milk) than actual meat. I've seen studies that show Maasai women and children eat meat 2 to 5 times a month.

Nomadic people's good health baffle scientists


It is clear though that meat features only rarely on the Maasai menu. The main part -- more than 50 percent -- consists of vegetarian food. The preferred meat is that of sheep and goats, whereas the meat of traditional Zebu cattle is only rarely eaten. "A cow will only be slaughtered for ritual festivities by the Maasai," says Knoll.

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

[GP270watch]

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

 This thread started about meat consumption and the industrial meat industry effects on climate change. The Maasai were traditionally nomadic herders. Like many herders they don't actually butcher their animals on the regular as it wouldn't make sense to, they rely on the products of the animal more so than the meat.

 

[Mopsus]

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

 This thread started about meat consumption and the industrial meat industry effects on climate change. The Maasai were traditionally nomadic herders. Like many herders they don't actually butcher their animals on the regular as it wouldn't make sense to, they rely on the products of the animal more so than the meat.

Why wouldn’t it make sense for a herder society to regularly butcher its animals?

[GP270watch]

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

 This thread started about meat consumption and the industrial meat industry effects on climate change. The Maasai were traditionally nomadic herders. Like many herders they don't actually butcher their animals on the regular as it wouldn't make sense to, they rely on the products of the animal more so than the meat.

Why wouldn’t it make sense for a herder society to regularly butcher its animals?

  Because they rely on the byproducts like milk, fermented milk, blood, and butter for sustenance. Once you kill the animal how are you going to get products from it? The Massai do consume meat usually during celebrations and festival that they observe. This is the way traditional herders usually consumed meat, several time a year during celebrations.

[Mopsus]

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

 This thread started about meat consumption and the industrial meat industry effects on climate change. The Maasai were traditionally nomadic herders. Like many herders they don't actually butcher their animals on the regular as it wouldn't make sense to, they rely on the products of the animal more so than the meat.

Why wouldn’t it make sense for a herder society to regularly butcher its animals?

  Because they rely on the byproducts like milk, fermented milk, blood, and butter for sustenance. Once you kill the animal how are you going to get products from it? The Massai do consume meat usually during celebrations and festival that they observe. This is the way traditional herders usually consumed meat, several time a year during celebrations.

Dairy products come from female animals, not from male animals. As herd animals don’t practice pair bonding, there’s always going to be more male animals than is absolutely necessary to continue propagating the herd. This is where your meat (and blood, apparently) comes from.

[GP270watch]

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

 This thread started about meat consumption and the industrial meat industry effects on climate change. The Maasai were traditionally nomadic herders. Like many herders they don't actually butcher their animals on the regular as it wouldn't make sense to, they rely on the products of the animal more so than the meat.

Why wouldn’t it make sense for a herder society to regularly butcher its animals?

  Because they rely on the byproducts like milk, fermented milk, blood, and butter for sustenance. Once you kill the animal how are you going to get products from it? The Massai do consume meat usually during celebrations and festival that they observe. This is the way traditional herders usually consumed meat, several time a year during celebrations.

Dairy products come from female animals, not from male animals. As herd animals don’t practice pair bonding, there’s always going to be more male animals than is absolutely necessary to continue propagating the herd. This is where your meat (and blood, apparently) comes from.

 This book has a lot of detailed info on the Maasai.

 Maasai Herding: An Analysis of the Livestock Production System of Maasai pastoralists

On page 109 it explains their diet and clearly states that meat was eaten irregularly.

[Mopsus]

Again, it makes sense that as the Maasai have been integrated into the global economy, their diet would change. But the earliest studies show that their traditional diet included almost no plant matter, for which they did not appear to suffer negative health consequences.

 This thread started about meat consumption and the industrial meat industry effects on climate change. The Maasai were traditionally nomadic herders. Like many herders they don't actually butcher their animals on the regular as it wouldn't make sense to, they rely on the products of the animal more so than the meat.

Why wouldn’t it make sense for a herder society to regularly butcher its animals?

  Because they rely on the byproducts like milk, fermented milk, blood, and butter for sustenance. Once you kill the animal how are you going to get products from it? The Massai do consume meat usually during celebrations and festival that they observe. This is the way traditional herders usually consumed meat, several time a year during celebrations.

Dairy products come from female animals, not from male animals. As herd animals don’t practice pair bonding, there’s always going to be more male animals than is absolutely necessary to continue propagating the herd. This is where your meat (and blood, apparently) comes from.

 This book has a lot of detailed info on the Maasai.

 Maasai Herding: An Analysis of the Livestock Production System of Maasai pastoralists

On page 109 it explains their diet and clearly states that meat was eaten irregularly.

I don’t know when “was” refers to; your source also indicates that the Maasai diet has recently changed from formerly being comprised almost entirely of animal products. But the Maasai are pastoralists, not hunter-gatherers, so their diet isn’t going to reflect that of our ancestors anyway, even if it does prove that humans don’t need to eat as much plant matter as the conventional wisdom suggests.

[dead0man]

I'm not sure why we're focusing on this one group, as my earlier link pointed out, hunter gatherers ate a lot more meat than plants, despite what the grass eaters claim.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I'm not sure why we're focusing on this one group, as my earlier link pointed out, hunter gatherers ate a lot more meat than plants, despite what the grass eaters claim.

The future is known.  It is the past that keeps changing.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

We should obviously eat less meat, but the real problems causing climate change are cars and coal, and everything else is peripheral.

[GP270watch]

I'm not sure why we're focusing on this one group, as my earlier link pointed out, hunter gatherers ate a lot more meat than plants, despite what the grass eaters claim.