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[...] Agricultural data from 38,700 farms plus details of processing and retailing in 119 countries show wide differences in environmental impacts — from greenhouse gas emissions to water used — even between producers of the same product, says environmental scientist Joseph Poore of the University of Oxford. The amount of climate-warming gases released in the making of a pint of beer, for example, can more than double under high-impact production scenarios. For dairy and beef cattle combined, high-impact providers released about 12 times as many greenhouse gases as low-impact producers, Poore and colleague Thomas Nemecek report in the June 1 Science.
[...] The greatest changes in the effect of a person’s diet on the planet, however, would still come from choosing certain kinds of food over others. On average, producing 100 grams of protein from beef leads to the release of 50 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions, which the researchers calculated as a carbon-dioxide equivalent. By comparison, 100 grams of protein from cheese releases 11 kg in production, from poultry 5.7 kg and from tofu 2 kg.
[...] Producing food overall accounts for 26 percent of global climate-warming emissions, and takes up about 43 percent of the land that’s not desert or covered in ice, the researchers found. Out of the total carbon footprint from food, 57 percent comes from field agriculture, livestock and farmed fish. Clearing land for agriculture accounts for 24 percent and transporting food accounts for another 6 percent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by leftover on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:14AM (30 children)
You switch your family to an all-plant diet for a generation or two. Measure your grandchildren's physical and mental development. Then we can talk.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:20AM (1 child)
The Truth About Soy Boys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTSvLKY7HEk [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:57AM
The Truth About Buzzwords.
I don't see why it matters as long as you're getting the right amount of calories, nutrients, minerals, and so on. And you don't need to go near soy, even if you're a vegetarian or a vegan.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:25AM (14 children)
Anecdotal evidence, but:
I'm a second-generation vegetarian. Both my sister and I were solidly near the top in mental abilities by available objective measures. Physically, I'm reasonably healthy, she's doing triathlons for fun. So I'm not convinced that a vegetarian diet = unhealthy or underdeveloped.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @02:47AM (1 child)
You might be smart. If you don't short yourself on nutrients, you have a chance for this.
Mental development is more than just being capable of intellectual pursuits. For example, with maturity comes a change in priorities. Additional changes happen as people settle down and raise families.
From numerous things you've posted on SoylenNews, we see that you retain some immature viewpoints past childhood. You fit the soyboy stereotype pretty well in fact. You're a leftist; that is an immature viewpoint.
Sadly, it isn't easy to run a proper controlled experiment on you. We'd have to make a few hundred clones of you, then raise them on different diets.
It would be even better if we could run the experiment with the clones born in the same time and place as you, but that requires time travel and extra universes. Maybe the clones fed more meat would end up very different than you are today: They'd support UKIP, BNP, Trump, LePen, or similar. They'd each own 42 guns. They'd have more money. They'd have beautiful stay-at-home wives and huge families.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:31PM
String theory can provide this.
(Score: 5, Informative) by boltronics on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:08AM (11 children)
I'm 36. Been vegan for 5-6 years, and vegetarian for many years before that - easily the majority of my adult life. I'm a sysadmin as my day job. Strava says I ran a total of 208km last month, and 306km during April (I recently purchased a Garmin watch to start tracking). I've also been riding to and from work for years. I deliberately don't own a car so I force myself to ride my bike more often.
You don't need to eat meat products to be healthy. It's a myth. What you do need is a well balanced diet and exercise. I'm typing this on my lunch break eating a bowl of carrots, bean shoots, capsicum, bok choy, corn, broccoli and some mashed up veggie burger. For breakfast I ate plenty of Weet-Bix with muesli and soy milk. I also eat a lot of nuts, seeds and fruit every day.
I take vitamin tablets just to be safe, but I'm pretty sure that's just overkill. Feeling great, aside from currently being sore from over-training!
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:08AM
Question: is it the bike riding or the vegan diet that made you into a whiney bitch?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @08:39AM (7 children)
But you've eaten meat during your development period, mate, isn't it so?
(Score: 3, Touché) by boltronics on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:00AM (6 children)
Have you not reached maturity?
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @12:15AM
I don't like assertions that are supposed to be true no matter the circumstances, even more when they are supported by a single anecdote.
I would have said nothing if your claim sounded like
Notice any shift in meaning?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @01:05AM (4 children)
My mother, over 75 yo, an observant orthodox christian, used to fast until recently on Wed and Fri - nothing of animal origin.
This needed to stop, though - her body started to eat its own muscles - shown by the physiological and pathology analyses (ketonic compounds through the roof in her blood with visible muscles atrophy).
I guess you'll see how your diet goes for you in 40+ years time.
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Friday June 08 2018, @01:48AM (3 children)
When you say "fasting", is that all she cut out? Did she cut out other food that normally goes with meat too? What did she replace that with?
I can tell you that I eat a *lot*. I'd never use the word "fasting" to describe my diet because that (to me anyway) implies just skipping some or all food, as opposed to replacing it with alternatives.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @02:48AM (2 children)
The rules of fast on Wed and Fri in christian orthodoxy [abbamoses.com]
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Unfortunately, she did - restricted herself on two meals on those days (skipping breakfast).
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Friday June 08 2018, @03:54AM (1 child)
Understood. Sorry, I wasn't aware.
I figure vegans probably need to eat a lot more food than normal to keep up their health as a general rule, but I'm no health expert.
I used to skip breakfast for years (but would easily make up for it in other meals). These days though, with all the running I've been doing, I have a strong craving for food at breakfast time.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @04:12AM
No apologies needed.
Just keep in mind "an anecdote doesn't a dataset make" next time you are tempted by "You don't need to eat meat products to be healthy." kind of generalizations.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:16PM (1 child)
Study Finds No Benefit to Taking Multivitamins and Some Other Supplements
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/05/30/0153253 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 07 2018, @07:19PM
Vegetarians are sometimes advised to take iron supplements, because meat is an important source of iron. It's entirely possibly to get enough iron via a vegetarian diet, but you have to pay some attention or risk getting anemia.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:27AM (1 child)
https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Foods-Diet-Lifesaving-Longevity/dp/1478944919 [amazon.com]
"THE WHOLE FOODS DIET simplifies the huge body of science, research, and advice that is available today and reveals the undeniable consensus: a whole foods, plant-based diet is the optimum diet for health and longevity. "
Or, also Dr. Joel Fuhrman's Eat To Live -- as a Nutritarian:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/get-started [drfuhrman.com]
You don't have to be an extreme vegan. Keep high-quality animal protein to less than 10% of your calories. That's what the longest lived peopel studied generally do in "Blue Zones". One can quibble about the exact percentage, given even Gorillas eat animal protein from termites and such and Deer have been known to snack on baby birds in nests. But, it is a far lower percentage than most people on a Standard American Diet (SAD).
Of course, there are other aspects of health than nutrition...
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @09:04AM
Yeah I thought of something like that too. It is not a eat meat or not eat meat political/ethical divide, there is a continuous spectrum there.
Ample plant based food with only as much meat as to provide the flavors is more satisfying for the palate and the belly than a meat-heavy meal.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by qzm on Thursday June 07 2018, @04:28AM (9 children)
It appears to be the usual 'i know the answer, lets make figures to prove it!' kinds of research.
For example they do not allow for the fact that grasslands, and the cattle that feed on them, are a rather significant carbon sink.
They also do not appear to adjust for the detrimental effects of crop fertiliser overuse (which is also a huge factor, must more present in cropping than cattle farming).
They allow for global warming effects of cattle 'emmissions' (of the gaseous kind) as a huge impact, but have NO allowance for rotting cropping leftovers, which produce EXACTLY THE SAME GAS.
In other words it appears to be a bunch of cherry picked numbers to support someones personal worldview.
What a surprise.
Pity the days of investigative journalism, where actual questions may have been asked, are long LONG gone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @06:58AM
75 million American bison were killed (Seton 1929) in order to be replaced by 94.4 million cows (https://www.quora.com/How-many-cows-are-there-in-the-US).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @07:04AM
Carl Popper, regarded as the 20th century's greatest philosopher of science, called this pseudo science.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tfried on Thursday June 07 2018, @08:33AM
Well, climate gas emissions are a global problem, and when looking at meat production at a global scale, you will get to realize that most meat-eating countries do not have anything remotely close to the Great Plains. And thus, while the US can cover most of its enormous meat consumption from ok-ish sources, the global reality is that the current levels of meat consumption require huge amounts of stock feeding, combining the negative effects of growing crops and growing meat.
If the US were to reduce meat consumption, it could hugely expand its net meat exports, replacing more costly and more problematic stock feeding elsewhere.
I have a certain (small) level of understanding for USians who will equate domestic meat production and domestic meat consumption, and conclude that US meat consumption is ok, then, while only meat consumption in other parts of the world is the problem. But if you do care about global climate emissions then you will easily see the flaws in this reasoning - and if you do not care about global climate gas emissions, then please don't pretend you do.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday June 07 2018, @08:52AM (4 children)
Actually no, it won't produce exactly the same gas. Methane is produced by anaerobic fermentation ( in the ruminants' guts), the grass let 'on itself' to degrade will produce mainly carbon dioxide by aerobic processes (with fungi/moulds as the main cause of cellulose degradation).
Which means a good amount of carbon sequestered by grassland will be stored into the soil even if the majority of it will be released as carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @09:42AM (3 children)
Plant matter ferments in cow guts, cow farts methane.
Plant matter ferments in human guts, human farts methane.
Let's all turn vegetarians and outstrip the cattle in fart production, yessss!
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:07AM (2 children)
Except that humans produce much less methane, due to more varied sources of food.
Cows need to use a lot of bacteria to break down the cellulose, because the cows won't get too much of simple sugars and lipids and proteins from other sources.
Look, there's very little fat in the grass they eat - and yet the more marbled the beef meat, the better the taste/price. Ever wondered where that fat comes from? (a good part of it comes from the phospholipidic membranes of the bacteria in cows guts).
Humans eat fruit and cereals/tubers and nuts and pulses etc, something you won't find in ruminant's diet. Much less a need for anaerobic bacteria to break down cellulose - you, as a human, will actually shit that cellulose entirely (the nutritionists use to call it "dietary fibers") - thus much less methane.
Same goes for poultry and pork.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:21PM (1 child)
Bacteria don't care much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulence#Cause [wikipedia.org]
BZZT wrong. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1432575/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday June 07 2018, @11:35PM
Humans eliminate methane through farts:
Typical composition of human fart [fartshare.com]
Nitrogen and oxygen will come mainly from aerophagia (air swallowed), the rest is decomposition of organic matter from food.
And the typical volume a human farts in a day? a bit over half a litter/day [scientopia.org] - with 20%, greenhouse gases emission = 0.5 x .2 = 0.1 litre/day
Ruminants eliminate methane mainly on burps (primary fermentation in rumen). How much methane? Some estimates: [gizmodo.com.au]
Well, that between 120 to 190L/day of methane/day. Something tells me that the cows and human digestive systems are very different in regards with the amount of greenhouse gasses they produce, no matter how much you claim that the bacteria don't care.
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For the bottom line, we need the populations: the humans ,- about 7.5B; the cows about 1B. I trust you can do the math from here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday June 07 2018, @10:09PM
Not to mention nitrogen fixing bacteria [sciencedaily.com] (produced by the most important vegetarian protein sources) produce methane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @10:00AM
This seems like a cop out given that
This 26% figure can be reduced greatly if only environmentalists would stop eating.