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Plant-heavy ‘flexitarian’ diets could help limit global heating, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Eating meat is not inherently wrong, raping is.
Life consumes other life to live. Humans have evolved to eat meat, we are living beings, a part of this planet just like a lion or hawk.
The lives we must take to live, whether they are plant, animal, or both, were not decided by us but by nature. Killing and eating to live is the only moral reason one has to harm another living being. This is not nice, it's just nature. Does the wild boar chased to it's death by a tiger not suffer a cruel death? Does that make the tiger evil?
Animal Agriculture and Massive Human Populations
Our modern animal agriculture industry is what's wrong, it is disgusting and evil and treats conscious beings as objects indifferent to their suffering. But feeding 8 billion people can only be accomplished using an industrial food industry.
The answer is not trying to turn 8 billion people into vegans, that is simply not going to happen. Rather, we should be striving to reduce our numbers and change culture to respect animals and their sacrifice for our food.
One of the more effective ways to do that are to eat like a "flexitarian" and reduce the amount of dependence on the animal agriculture industry. The other key way to reduce animal suffering is not something an individual has control over -- to have a human population that is not grotesquely oversized for the environment.
Our species has no entitlement to grow to maximum size and kill other beings to support this unnecessary growth. The Haber-Bosch process effectively caused human eutrophication, an imbalance, and like the overgrown algae causing fish kills in lakes, our numbers are causing the unnecessary death of a great many species in our environment and will lead to ecological failure if not taken care of. The solution to eutrophication in a lake is stop the overflow of nutrients.
While it's possible in modern times for a person to live on a vegan diet, it's not a normal, not healthy without significant effort and education, or more moral.
There will never be a time when no humans eat meat. Therefore, we should strive to reduce the suffering required to sustain our own life. Eating flexitarian is a highly practical way to do this. If an individual is willing to sacrifice their health and/or work to gain the knowledge required to be healthy without consuming animals at all (i.e. be vegan) then good for them, but this cannot be expected to occur globally.
There's one big flaw in your logic; humans don't need to eat meat. It's just a cultural thing, tastebuds. So whatever your justifications are they are for pleasure. So all there's left to say is that I hope that you are entertained by all the unnecessary suffering. The propaganda hit you good!
We can survive and with significant effort and education some can even thrive without meat in modern times with B12 supplementation. What you might be able to do as a wealthy American or similar cannot be expected of the rest of the world.
You are absolutely wrong, indian people eat a vegetarian diet for centuries with no problems. Asians used to consume no cheese or milk at all and eat very little meat. Our Western lifestyle is doing so much harm to us, to the planet and to our animal cousins. Eating processed meat daily is really bad, just look at our society, we are not healthy at all! We don't put significant efford in our diet and it really shows.
There's a huge difference between a little meat and no meat.
Pointing at a population known for vegetarian dishes doesn't prove anything
Indians are known for having nutritional deficiencies which lead to population wide vision problems.
Eating meat isn't the problem, human overpopulation is the problem.
I'm from a third world country you goon.
did you notice the "or simiar" part? That meant if you're from somewhere where you're wealthy enough to by vitamin supplements and do stuff like use the internet to post to Lemmy you're way ahead of much of the world who do not have access to these things.
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This man was able to be vegan over 1000 years ago while he was blind from the age of 6 due to smallpox and lived to the age of 83. All while he established himself as a renowned poet, writer and philosoph of the arabic world. Granted the B12 levels in soil were much higher back then. But what's bad about taking a pill a day vs destroying the livelihood of future generations?
Nothing for me and you,, but it's a literal impossibility for like 4 billion people.
Which would be the impossible factor(s) in your opinion?
We currently have hundreds of millions of people suffering food insecuring now according to the UN, if we can't feed everyone now, how do you propose to ensure they eat vegan and have adequate vitamin 12.
It's a logistical impossibility in our current global order. I want starving people to get food, my relatively rich ass has no place telling starving people that their food is immoral.
There are some vitamins we can only get from meats. Something tells me that industrial processes to make those vitamins into pills isn't exactly helping the planet either.
I've seen too many vegan body builders and MMA fighters to believe you can't get full nutrition from a vegan diet
Is it a diet of organic vegan food without any supplements? Or are they eating nutritionally enriched foods and taking vitamin supplements?
There's nothing wrong with the latter, and I should hope every vegan does the latter. A vegan diet without any of that will leave you deficient in some nutrients.
Meat is not a magical product; you can get all nutrients without eating animals. Except for B12, as it is produced by bacteria living in dirty environments. We get too little of it because of our sanitized way of living. However, we also don't get cholera anymore, which is a good development! Your B12 is added to animal feed, so you're taking the pill through the cow instead of directly. The twin study, which you can also watch on Netflix, shows that besides the nutrients in meat consumption, you also intake a lot of harmful substances into your body. Animal fats clog your arteries, antibiotics, fecal residues, growth hormones, moreover, red meat is classified as carcinogenic by the WHO.
There's still other vitamins that are present in higher quantities in meat versus plants, but I do see your point. And with where we are with food technology today, we can make it a moot point by enriching vegetables anyway.
The first priority I think should be making it more affordable and cheaper to buy these foods, and government subsidies sound like a good way to do that. Also, reducing red meat consumption and replacing it with chicken goes a long way too.
Either way, I appreciate how knowledgeable you are on this. You've clearly done your research!
Thanks! Beans, lentils and soy are superfoods and they are super cheap. If we'd eat a cup of these legumes a day, we (and our soil, climate, environment) would be much healthier. It's so easy as well, just replace ground meat with lentils, chicken with chickpeas, pork with soy shreds. My health insurance started promoting this as the planetary health diet, times are changing.
Give me one non-vegan bodybuilder that doesn't do any form of supplements (should we incl. B12 injections for livestock?).
It sounds like you're educated on the subject by big meat, you might want to question that.