I agree. Would be better to have CO2 per calorie or protein.
I will defend coffee as essential even though it has no calories or protein.
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We must face facts - meat is the problem
- Thread starter mspohr
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I will defend coffee as essential even though it has no calories or protein.
I feel compelled to educate you about coffee. 10% reduction in all cause deaths in people over 50 when they drink 4 "cups" or more a day in one EU study. (Huge study. Good metrics).
What medication does that?
And, beef?
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Village Idiot
Disturbingly the carnivore diet seems to be gaining in popularity. At least according to my YouTube feed. Seems like a pretty selfish diet, and the proponents don't seem too worried about the environmental impact.
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Village Idiot
Probably because coffee provides some of the only antioxidants a lot of people get, do to their poor eating habits. If you think you need coffee, it's just because you're addicted to a powerful drug.
Well, you are not mistaken that there may have been poor eating habits in some of the coffee drinkers.
However, your point falls flat in that the benefit vs non coffee drinkers was in spite of the poorer habits.
Further, your pejorative "addicted to a powerful drug" comment is presumably based on the assumption that the benefits somehow relate to the caffeine in coffee. But they controlled for that, and with only slight exception at lower levels of consumption, presence or absence of caffeine has nothing to do with the benefits and the impact on mortality.
There are over 1000 components in coffee. Only one of them is caffeine.
Over 500000 people were studied. 10 diverse countries. 16 year follow up. They controlled for diet, cigarette smoking, lifestyle etc.
You need to flesh out your arguments a little better. You said "powerful addictive drug" as if it is a bad thing. But you failed to say what's bad. Coffee is not opium. The benefit is "all cause." This includes suicides!
You seem to be arguing that people should die rather than drink coffee! Not sure I can find common ground there.
Coffee drinkers have reduced mortality compared to non users. How is that a problem? Take a stab at it.
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‘Everything is parched’: Amazon struggles with drought amid deforestation
By now, the rivers should be full. But large-scale cattle farming, the climate crisis and weather events like El Niño mean Brazil is near the point of no return
www.theguardian.com
An unusually fierce dry season has taken a horrific toll on the Amazonian landscape, swathes of which are already denuded by cattle ranches. Together, they threaten the integrity of the world’s biggest tropical forest.
This is where my bovine neighbours come into the picture. The beef industry is the biggest driver of Amazon deforestation. Nothing else comes close. Land-grabbers use cows as occupying armies to strengthen their claims on stolen and cleared forest. This has become one of the world’s most heinous climate crimes. A mind-boggling new report by the Climate Observatory notes that Brazil’s beef industry now has a bigger carbon footprint than Japan. Dwell on that for a moment. This country has 220 million cows, 43% of which are in the Amazon. Their global heating emissions – from their burps and farts, but mostly through their owners’ connections to forest clearance and fires – are now greater than all the cars, factories, air conditioners, electric gadgets and other forms of carbon consumption of 125 million Japanese people living in one of the most industrialised economies on Earth. When slaughtered, the cattle make billions of dollars for global food conglomerates. Through cows, these companies intensify the climate crisis and, thus, probably help to make El Niños more likely.
Plant-based swaps may cut diabetes and heart disease risk, major review finds
Analysis of 37 studies finds largest health benefits come from replacing processed meat, with 20% reduction in type 2 diabetes
www.theguardian.com
Replacing meat and dairy with whole grains, beans, nuts and olive oil may significantly reduce cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, according to a major review into the impact of diet on health.
Plans to present meat as ‘sustainable nutrition’ at Cop28 revealed
Documents show industry intends to go ‘full force’ in arguing meat is beneficial to the environment at climate summit
www.theguardian.com
Animal agriculture is the largest emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide when measured over a 20-year period. Scientists said that unless swift action is taken, methane from agriculture alone will push the world beyond a 1.5C (2.7F) rise in temperature above preindustrial levels that risks tipping the world into irreversible climate breakdown.
A study this year found that in the EU, meat and dairy farmers received 1,200 times more public funding than new alternative protein sources, while in the US, they received 800 times more support.
Meat eating worldwide is very unequal. Europeans eat more than twice the global average, and consumption levels in north America and Australia are even higher. One 2018 study found western countries would have to reduce their meat intake by 90% to limit global heating to acceptable levels.
Guess Oxygen and Water are also highly addictive drugs. Perhaps people do not need coffee, but want the benefits of coffee.
Asking tech workers to give up coffee is like asking them to give up their smart phones
One identical twin went vegan while the other didn’t. This is what Bay Area scientists found.
Healthy twins who ate a vegan diet for eight weeks had lower “bad” low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol, better blood sugar levels, and greater weight loss than siblings who ate a diet of m…
www.mercurynews.com
Healthy twins who ate a vegan diet for eight weeks had lower “bad” low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol, better blood sugar levels, and greater weight loss than siblings who ate a diet of meat and vegetables, a new study found. “There was a 10% to 15% drop in LDL cholesterol, a 25% drop in insulin, and a 3% drop in body weight in just eight weeks, all by eating real food without animal products,” said lead study author Christopher Gardner, a research professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in Palo Alto, California.
The diet with more unsaturated relative to saturated fat, more whole grains relative to refined grains, fewer calories, more fiber and vegetables, and less cholesterol resulted in a more favorable cardiovascular disease risk factor profile than the comparison diet,” she said.
Even the grasshoppers are threatened by forest clearing
www.theguardian.com
“I have been doing this since 25 October,” says Damba, adjusting his skullcap. Damba is a grasshopper trapper in central Uganda. Between October and December his nights are spent waiting for the insects to hit the metal sheets and fall into the drums. The protein-rich bugs are wrapped and transported to market.
The insects are a welcome part of Ugandans’ daily diet: they are high in fibre and omega-3 fatty acids and when fried and sprinkled with salt make a nutritious crunchy snack.
Grasshopper populations have been dwindling for years as the forests, grassland and swamps in which they feed and breed are destroyed. The country has lost almost a third of its forests in the last three decades. The central region has seen the most intense clearance of protected habitats.
Where have all the grasshoppers gone?: Uganda’s insect traders struggle to find protein-rich bugs
Professional trappers find it increasingly hard to fill their sacks for market as the country’s forests, grassland and swamps where the insects breed are lost
www.theguardian.com
“I have been doing this since 25 October,” says Damba, adjusting his skullcap. Damba is a grasshopper trapper in central Uganda. Between October and December his nights are spent waiting for the insects to hit the metal sheets and fall into the drums. The protein-rich bugs are wrapped and transported to market.
The insects are a welcome part of Ugandans’ daily diet: they are high in fibre and omega-3 fatty acids and when fried and sprinkled with salt make a nutritious crunchy snack.
Grasshopper populations have been dwindling for years as the forests, grassland and swamps in which they feed and breed are destroyed. The country has lost almost a third of its forests in the last three decades. The central region has seen the most intense clearance of protected habitats.
Like so many other certainties of the 20th century, however — American hegemony, ground water, Social Security, fossil fuels — Cather’s “great fact” is now in question. North America has already destroyed more than 60 percent of its native prairie. We’ve plowed the sod, left the topsoil to blow away, traded wildflowers for row crops, switch grass for suburbs, hay meadows for Home Depots. We’ve cleaved it apart with freeways, transmission lines, irrigation canals and oil pipelines. And now the Eastern redcedar tree is hungry for what’s left.
But white settlers were slow to catch on. Confronted by fire, wild or not, they fought back, desperate to save their homes, their crops, their livestock, their culture at large. At the same time, they planted trees in a land without: for shelter, for timber, for shade, for a touch of their forested homelands back east.
Allergies. Wildfires. Tick-borne disease. All of these problems climb while stream flow and groundwater recharge rates often decline. True, a juniper woodland sequesters more carbon. But the grassland it muscled out was a more reliable carbon sink, storing more than 90 percent of its capture underground, safe from wildfires that would send that carbon into the atmosphere. From virtually every angle — environmental or economic, livestock or literature, air quality or landscape aesthetics — the Green Glacier is a problem. “The Great Plains biome is dying,” Dr. Twidwell said. “Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs.”
Big meat and dairy lobbyists turn out in record numbers at Cop28
Food and agriculture firms have sent three times as many delegates to the climate summit as last year
www.theguardian.com
Representatives are present from some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies – such as the meat supplier JBS, the fertiliser giant Nutrien, the food giant Nestlé and the pesticide company Bayer – as well as powerful industry lobby groups. Meat and dairy are particularly well-represented with 120 delegates, but an analysis of the list of delegates by DeSmog shows that the number of lobbyists representing the interests of agribusiness more broadly have more than doubled since 2022 to reach 340.
Meat and dairy firms in particular are coming under increasing scrutiny due to pollution from livestock, which emits about a third of the global output of methane, a short-lived greenhouse gas, the cutting of which is identified as the quickest route to slowing global heating.
The world’s top five meat companies’ emissions are estimated to be significantly larger than those of the oil firms Shell and BP, while the dairy industry’s 3.4% contribution to global human-induced emissions is a higher share than aviation.
Big food and farming representatives are keen to steer conversations away from dietary change, which is under discussion at the summit. On Sunday, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation will release the first draft of its plan for achieving a sustainable global food system, which is expected to call on rich nations to cut meat consumption. This follows the recommendation of the Eat-Lancet Commission, which suggests people consume no more than 15.7 kg a year. In 2020, the average American consumed 126kg of meat.
Call me all the names you want – I won’t stop telling the truth about livestock farming | George Monbiot
I’ve been accused of being a ‘soyboy’ and ‘in the pay of Big Lettuce’ by one of the most destructive industries on Earth, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
Everything that makes campaigning against fossil fuels difficult is 10 times harder when it comes to opposing livestock farming. Here you will find a similar suite of science denial, misinformation and greenwashing. But in this case, it’s accompanied by a toxic combination of identity politics, nostalgia, machismo and the demonisation of alternatives. If you engage with this issue, you don’t just need a thick skin; you need the skin of a glyptodon. You will be vilified daily as a “soyboy”, a “hater of farmers” and a dictator who would force everyone to eat insects. You will be charged with undermining western civilisation, destroying its masculinity and threatening its health. You will be denounced as an enemy of Indigenous people, though generally not by Indigenous people themselves, for many of whom livestock farming is and has long been by far the greatest cause of land-grabbing, displacement and the destruction of their homes.
Tempting as it is to turn away, we simply cannot afford to ignore this sector. A remarkably wide and intense range of impacts – from global-scale habitat destruction to the mass slaughter of predators, river pollution, air pollution, dead zones at sea, antibiotic resistance and greenhouse gas emissions – reveal livestock farming, alongside fossil fuels, as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth.
Huge and powerful as these forces are, we need to be brave in confronting livestock production and the dark arts used to promote it. Those of us who do so don’t hate farmers, however much some of them might profess to hate us. We simply seek to apply the same standards to this industry as we’d apply to any other. But when we raise our hands in objection, they are met with fists raised in aggression. That’s the strategy, working as intended.
Just don't call it vegan...
www.sciencealert.com
In an experiment involving more than 7,300 participants, people were far more likely to choose the meat and dairy-free option if it wasn't referred to as vegan. 'Plant-based' labels didn't fare much better. Food with this label was chosen 27 percent of the time, compared to the food labeled vegan being chosen only 20 percent of the time.
Anti-vegan groups have sprung up across the internet and the bias against vegans is so strong only those stigmatized with drug-use disorders elicit the same degree of negativity. Yet at the same time, multiple studies suggest most regular consumers of meat do actually support the health, environmental, and ethical principles behind veganism. What's more, there's no denying the wealth of evidence pointing towards clear health benefits including weight loss, reduced blood pressure, lower diabetes risks, and heart problems across different ethnic groups.
One Simple Trick Could Make More People Eat Vegan Food
Despite an avalanche of evidence pointing to the health and environmental benefits of plant-based diets, researchers have uncovered an unexpected obstacle preventing many of us from making any significant shift from meat and animal products.
www.sciencealert.com
In an experiment involving more than 7,300 participants, people were far more likely to choose the meat and dairy-free option if it wasn't referred to as vegan. 'Plant-based' labels didn't fare much better. Food with this label was chosen 27 percent of the time, compared to the food labeled vegan being chosen only 20 percent of the time.
Anti-vegan groups have sprung up across the internet and the bias against vegans is so strong only those stigmatized with drug-use disorders elicit the same degree of negativity. Yet at the same time, multiple studies suggest most regular consumers of meat do actually support the health, environmental, and ethical principles behind veganism. What's more, there's no denying the wealth of evidence pointing towards clear health benefits including weight loss, reduced blood pressure, lower diabetes risks, and heart problems across different ethnic groups.
Please be thankful that we have enough food to eat to maintain our bodies. We have the education and freedom to choose from so many life sustaining foods. People should be open to not judging others on their food choices. Resist being smug and clinging to science or believe to deny anyone the food choices they wish.
God has created us to be able to sustain ourselves with so many food choices. Some are healthier, cheaper, more tasty, more available, more convenient or more traditional than others.
Please let all your fellow human beings make their own nurishment choices withour condesending judgement.
Some consider vegans to simply be picky eaters. Point of view is important.
God has created us to be able to sustain ourselves with so many food choices. Some are healthier, cheaper, more tasty, more available, more convenient or more traditional than others.
Please let all your fellow human beings make their own nurishment choices withour condesending judgement.
Some consider vegans to simply be picky eaters. Point of view is important.
There are a lot of emotions related to food since it is literally vital to life.
Unfortunately people react to these emotions rather than looking objectively at the science.
TFA pointed out one way to bypass some of these irrational emotions.
‘Zombie deer disease’ epidemic spreads in Yellowstone as scientists raise fears it may jump to humans
Warnings that ‘slow-moving disaster’ in North America raises chances of fatal mad cow-type disease jumping species barrier
www.theguardian.com
With the hunting season under way in the US, the US Centers for Disease Control and individual states strongly recommend that harvested game animals be tested for disease, and that meat from cervids that appear ill should not be consumed.
A major policy contradiction, wildlife conservationists say, is that Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, the three states that make up the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which some estimate to stretch for 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles), encourage the liberal killing of wolves and cougars for sport and livestock protection, even when doing so is unnecessary and may be counterproductive to controlling CWD.
The science of what’s needed to help slow the spread of CWD is clear, and has been known for a long time,” Roffe says. “You don’t feed wildlife in the face of a growing disease pandemic.”