[cgh]

>> stating also that there are enormous health benefits to eating meat - being surely wrong.

No, Bill knows what he's talking about. Animal-based foods are the most nutritious foods for humans. Beef liver, for example, is one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat, outclassing vegetables in every way save fibre content.

Animal consumption is an evolutionarily and culturally significant behaviour. Arguments about energy usage aren't enough to overcome these things.

[crackpotbaker]

How much food does a cow need to filter to get that nutrient-dense liver?

My estimate is that it's probably equivalent to several families dining on protein rich, nutrient rich grains throughout the whole year.

Your arguments that appeal to tradition, history, and culture, cannot be considered rational arguments. They also aren't derived from morals (product of rationalism). They are empty.

I wonder how did the Chinese solve their food crisis, I guess it was raising billions of cattle to feed their hungry people beef liver?

It's a luxurious food, not necessary, and given Bill's arguments - he obviously is missing the point. Given the recent WHO report and thousands of papers, including the discovery of mechanistic-molecular processes, causal link to meat consumption and heart disease (LDL cholesterol), they are just papers away from finding the causal link between cancer and meat consumption (sugars found in animal flesh alone). Given the huge amount of evidence it is not rational to call it a healthy food.

Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising.

Same will happen with dairy and milk, for dairy there are also hundreds of papers linking consumption with iron and calcium deficiency.

Claiming that meat, dairy and eggs is good food for developing nations is irrational, incorrect and contrary to the majority of evidence available.

Linking cigarettes with lung disease was done decades before they decided to make laws to ban the marketing. Thousands of papers were written, and everyone was denying it, because cigarettes were the cultural thing of the first-world countries. Call to tradition isn't a rational argument.

[ars]

> How much food does a cow need to filter to get that nutrient-dense liver?

Cows eat food humans can't. That's the entire point of having them!

In some places they feed them other things, but it doesn't have to be that way.

[crackpotbaker]

most of the USA cattle industry is based on dirt cheap soybean and corn, grass-fed beef is less sustainable and productive, you just cannot expect the same growth of cows body given that low protein intake, + the area needed is extremely huge and simple calculations dictate that one would have to grass-feed the cows using the whole area of North America and north parts of the South (assuming all of it is rich soil) to replace the environmentally destructive soybean-corn-based meat production. It isn't sustainable, it's hugely inefficient and isn't a solution.

[clock_tower]

But all the same, there's room for some meat (and more milk and eggs) in the diet, thanks to cows, chickens, and so on being able to eat things that humans can't. Eating meat every day is probably unsustainable, but veganism is too far the other way.

[crackpotbaker]

This repetition is irrational.

Given all the evidence there should be no meat, milk and eggs in the diet of developing countries.

How does a growing economy cope with costs of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer?

WHO report said 50 grams of processed meat per day significantly increases chances of colorectal cancer (causation proof). 50 grams of red meat correlates with all-cause mortality (causation being published). White meat is filled with cholesterol which is the main cause of heart related diseases.

This is something that from an economic perspective shouldn't plague the developing countries, ignoring the energy needs.

50 grams daily is 350 grams weekly, about 18kg of meat per year per person. USA consumes ~100kg of meat per year per person. China is 50kg - and has just in the last 40 years risen from poverty. Just imagine India doing the same, Africa.

If you think people are being moderate, they aren't. This luxurious culture cannot be rationally apologized.

[DanBC]

> WHO report said 50 grams of processed meat per day significantly increases chances of colorectal cancer (causational proof).

Go careful. WHO said we now know that processed meat causes cancer. But the risk was tiny, and the increased risk is still tiny.

[clock_tower]

No meat, milk, or eggs at all means leaving a lot of potential nutrition on the table. Chickens (and goats) can eat vegetable waste and the like; cows can eat waste from harvesting, and of course can graze -- an activity that doesn't require significant human labor or expenditure on fuel and tools.