I’m a vegetarian because of environmental (and more recently, ethical) reasons. I’m an enormous advocate of reducing the quantity of animal products that the world uses.
This is definitely not a “great thing”. There are much less invasive ways to influence behavior and nudge consumers to consume fewer harmful products. Like simply using product-specific taxes or labeling requirements. Or targeting the producers directly.
We don’t need to increase government surveillance, ever.
Seconded. I'm on an all-meat diet and I turned my health around thanks to it. Most often people who advocate eliminating meat look sickly, because they are.
I'm happy that worked for you, but nutrition is too complex to make sweeping statements like that. Some scientists say that animal fats are unhealthy, while others correlate the increase in lifestyle diseases with the increased consumption of vegetable fats. We just don't know enough about how the body works.
I'm all for meat, fish and vegetables. That's the healthiest slice of the available foods. Any reason you've cut out vegetables entirely? I'd consider eating lots of green veg, while avoiding the starchy ones. My entrance point was AIP which basically forces one to do this.
I think it has to do with gut biome somehow. I've seen excellent biome diversity scores from other people on the diet, but in my case it's from repeated experience with gradually eating more and more fruit (and nothing else), not necessarily large quantities even (though I did ocassionaly eat quite a lot apples).
I haven't really tried with vegetables (not interested taste-wise), so it might be the carbs / fruit sugars that weren't great for my gut biome, which I suspect is messed up as it is for many people nowadays.
I never needed to turn around my health as a vegetarian. There's about a 99.999% chance that I'm stronger and faster than you, I wish I could demonstrate. You'd be embarrassed saying what you just said in front of me!
However, I’ve identified many people that were vegans just by their looks before they (inevitably) announced it. You’re supposed to be able to supplement your way in to what you need but either the majority don’t or they’re still missing something.
There's no need for belief, all over the world vegetarians live around a decade longer. There could be any number of confounding factors of course but the burden of proof concerning health and diet is definitely on the pseudo-carnivores consuming their packaged flesh.
I don't, turns out transit works fine (actually much better) without it.
I won't speculate on whether this would apply to everybody but my hypothesis is my health issues stemmed from gut biome disregulation caused by - way too many causes to list - and somehow only total elimination of carbohydrates and plant matter fixes it.
Let's not stop there and let's profile people on everything they purchase and increase their taxes on everything that's not remotely considered healthy enough, because you know, they increase the burden on the whole society!
That's the recipe for the abolition of individual freedom.
There’s a lot of talk in N about the “people health” and how people need to eat less sugar etc. And how things like sugar should be taxed more. But you can still buy as much candy and whatever at the grocery store. And it doesn’t seem terribly expensive, either. (Alcohol is, though.)
There should be some opt-in assistance for making better lifestyle choices, I think. More walk, less talk. There are already self-help ideas that center around promising other people that you won’t do X, or that you will do Y, and then having to pay them money or something if you do/don’t. Why couldn’t the government help you do the same thing? As a not-for-profit alternative.
EDIT: I don’t mean that the disincentive should be that you give the government money if you fail. That would be a bad incentive for the government.
You can choose to pay more taxes/fees at least, people already do that for certain things that are designed to nudge people to behave properly (e.g. pay 10 cents for a bag to encourage you to bring reusable bags and some people just don't care). Sin taxes are not new things.
Meat is literally recycled grass. Zero net carbon footprint. Sure cows release methane, but it’s part of a cycle and doesn’t contribute to long-term climate change.
All other “C footprint” is a consequence of poor farming practices, not meat. Blame the process (and the energy source) not the product.
This is definitely not a “great thing”. There are much less invasive ways to influence behavior and nudge consumers to consume fewer harmful products. Like simply using product-specific taxes or labeling requirements. Or targeting the producers directly.
We don’t need to increase government surveillance, ever.