[wolfgangK]

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ? Or some "farmland" can be used for grazing but not for agriculture, maybe ? Same for proteins : all amino acids are not equal, a a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat proteins. And don't get me started on nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12). As far as CO₂ emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?

[arghwhat]

Yes, some land is not suitable for agriculture. No, this does mean that having cattle is a neutral usage as each cattle requires agriculture to feed for 3-4 years before they are slaughtered.

Yes, cattle emissions are largely from the food. No, this is not just grass that was already there and would decompose anyway - the majority of agricultural production is to feed cattle and would not be necessary without (the efficiency of raising an animal for years to get a few steaks is horrible), and even if fed naturally it significantly increases the rate of plant turnover.

Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. Both have diets ranging from super healthy to obesity inducing. Being carnivorous or vegetarian is itself not a significant health factor - chips and crisps are often vegan, and Big Macs contain meat.

[AmericanChopper]

> Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition.

It’s not magic, but the protein from animal sources is just scientifically better than protein from plant sources. If you want to compare the nutritional benefits of different protein sources you need to account for how bioavailable they are. Some plant sources aren’t bad, but none are as good as animal sources, and some of the them aren’t very good at all.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905294/

[arghwhat]

Quoting your linked paper:

> Vegetable proteins, when combined to provide for all of the essential amino acids, provide an excellent source for protein considering that they will likely result in a reduction in the intake of saturated fat and cholesterol.

> [..] When the more accurate PDCAAS scale is used, soy protein was reported to be equivalent to animal protein with a score of 1.0, the highest possible rating (Hasler, 2002).

> Soy is a complete protein with a high concentration of BCAA’s.

So not only does the paper say that soy protein is a "complete" protein like beef, it scores soy higher than beef in Table 1 (which only gets a score of 0.92!), and states that it has associated health benefits (several mentioned throughout the paper).

Whey also scores a 1.0 for the curious, suggesting we do not have to eat the cow to get its protein.

Furthermore, it should be noted that the paper studies protein uptake efficiency and coverage ("quality") in the context of elite athletes and their very high protein requirements that range from difficult to dangerous to maintain (the paper mentions concerns of cardiovascular issues and bone loss risk when using beef protein for example). These concerns do not apply to those without extreme dietary needs.

Even if you cannot eat soy, the concerns of coverage or quality of individual protein sources are largely irrelevant when combined with a varied diet that contains more than one source - arguably a requirement to discussing dietary health, and suggested by the paper as a solution.

So while the reference to the paper is good, it is important to read it - thoroughly - in its intended context.

[hansvm]

Complete protein or not, you can get your sulfur-containing amino acids 32oz of tofu or 6oz of turkey (less of both if you're smaller), and other vegan sources are significantly worse, so a properly varied diet has higher demands. It's not impossible, but it's not as easy as just replacing all your animal proteins with equivalent masses of plant proteins either.

[AmericanChopper]

You could revise your claim that vegetable proteins are just as good as animal sourced proteins, to the far more specific claim that soy proteins being as good as animal proteins if you like. Because soy is the only plant source that is comparable in quality to animal sourced proteins (which is why the majority of vegan protein supplements are soy-based).

Even then, if you were to get all or a majority of your protein requirements from soy, then that's a lot of soy. You'd have to eat 1-2 pounds or more of boiled soy beans per day. Which aside from being a very atypical diet, would also be above the level of isoflavone consumption that has been studied to be safe (incidentally, consuming large quantities of whey protein also has some unpleasant side-effects in most people, like extreme flatulence, constipation and the associated discomfort).

Implementing a highly restrictive diet, that eliminates entire food groups that you've evolved to rely on, is unsurprisingly complicated. It also unsurprisingly puts you at risk of deficiencies in the nutrients that your new diet is deficient in. Which is why vegans are unsurprisingly at an increased risk of negative health outcomes associated with those deficiencies.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...

Your claim that vegetable protein is just as good as animal protein is honestly just misinformation, as well as being dangerous health advice. You can eat a healthy vegan diet if you put the effort into planning it properly, which anybody following your erroneous advice would not be doing.

[arghwhat]

No, my claim that vegetable are a good source of high quality protein in general - and not just soy - is taken straight from your paper. You are cherry-picking data and ignoring the most basic dietary advice to support your pro-beef argument at this point. Not only that, you are adding completely bogus claims such as to the amount of food required from sources you find inferior: A steak contains roughly 25 grams of protein per 100 gram. Boiled soy contains 17 grams of protein, while dry roasted soy contains 40 grams of protein per 100 gram - almost double that of beef. Someone weighing 80kg would need eat 240 grams of steak, 352 grams of boiled soy, or just 150 grams of dry roasted soy! Not only are the numbers similar, but they are beat by soy yet again.

And yet again, basic dietary advice is that you should eat varied. Suggesting that you should cover your entire nutritional requirements from a single source - steak, soy or anything else - or in a single serving is objectively bad advice.

As a proud carnivore who has difficulty finding comfort in vegetarian diets, I find this sort of backwards justification for our environmental load highly disappointing. Eating meat is one thing - as a steak lover, I would be a hypocrite to fault you for that - but trying to make it sound like a necessity or a sensible choice is just... Wrong.

[HelloMcFly]

That paper would suggest to me that perhaps eggs are as animal as we need to get. I agree with your specific point here, but it feels like a small thing when considering the overall societal and environmental cost of animal protein (esp. beef, pork, lamb).

[AmericanChopper]

If you tried to get all your calories from eating eggs, your diet would have too much fat and not enough carbs. In reality you need a balanced and varied diet, and the world couldn’t support 7 billion people all deciding to get their protein intake from one specific food item anyway. Animal products are simply better at providing the protein you need. You _can_ get all of it from plant based sources (I’m not sure whether it would be theoretically possible for all humans to adopt such a diet), but it’s more difficult. Meaning if you want to meet your nutritional requirements without having a big calorie excess, you have to plan your diet very carefully, and implement a highly restrictive program. If you want to do that without eating highly processed foods such as soy protein isolate (which is a popular dietary restriction), then you’re going to have an even harder time.

[pg_1234]

"not enough carbs" is the easiest problem to solve (just add wheat/rice/potato etc.) ... in fact the normal problem is too much carbs.

[AmericanChopper]

That depends on whether you care about eating too many calories. If your average person got all their protein from eggs, they’d eat too much fat, way too much saturated fat, and have very few calories left to get in all of their other nutritional needs.

Incidentally, that’s why it is possible to eat a healthy plant based diet if you’re very active. If you burn 2000 active calories a day, then it matters less if you’re eating nutritionally inefficient food, because you can make up for it in volume.

[HelloMcFly]

I'm not arguing for some sort of protein gruel or standard diet; my comment wasn't advocating for "only eggs", just reacting to what you share.

I am stating that it seems inarguable to me that the benefits of meaningfully reducing or even eliminating animal consumption far outweigh the negatives (note: I'm not a vegetarian). The concerns about protein completeness are real, but they have to stand in the sunlight of the full picture, and when viewed that way it doesn't appear to be some unsolveable riddle.

So I'm not arguing the point, I'm arguing against the implicit takeaway that comments like yours can appear to make: that meaningfully reducing or eliminating animals from our diets isn't a goal worth pursuing.

[specialist]

Yup.

My SO and I reverted to omnivore for health reasons. Basically Dr Wahls' "Minding You Mitochondria" thesis. Still eat a lot of rice and beans. But now make sure to get a minimum amount of meat too.

I'm so eager for vat grown protein. But only if it has the same macronutrients as real meat.

[yamtaddle]

> Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ?

This is one of those "not even wrong" kind of things. The conditions that led to famine-cycles plaguing the Old World until the arrival of New World crops, and later the Green Revolution, have nothing at all to do with modern farming or land use, not even in the way you're trying to make the connection. This is all just completely irrelevant to the point you're trying to use it to make.

"Were pre-contact old-world farmers just too dumb to kill their cows so they could plant more wheat and stop starving every few years?", asked rhetorically to imply that reducing meat farming can't possibly help with any modern problems. I mean... it's just a nonsense question, the context they were operating in, the global population size, and their farming practices are so far removed from what we do now that it doesn't make any sense to frame it this way. No, they weren't too dumb to think of that, and no, it wouldn't have helped if they had tried it, but neither of those things are relevant to the modern situation, at all.

[scns]

> a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat proteins.

True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%.

> nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12)

Fe3 from animal sources has a better uptake by the body. Fe2 from plants is good enough if you combine it with Vitamin C. Parsley contains both.

Animals in conventional agriculture have to be fed B12, for them to stay healthy and their meat to contain any. The B12 producing bacteria in the soil get killed by pesticides.

The 83% of farmland which is used to feed and raise animals taken together is the size of Africa.

Source: Game Changers, the movie [0]. Highly recommended, stopped cooking wirh organic meat, i take B12 directly instead. If someone else cooks for me, i still eat meat and enjoy it. Knowing full well that it damages my body, like alcohol and sugar. Completly banning fun sounds awful.

[UberFly]

"Game Changers" is a terrible place to plant your fact-flag. Like all documentaries of its type, there is no balanced fact-checking, questionable "experts" basing their opinions on small inconclusive studies, etc, etc.

[pvaldes]

> Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%.

Big claim. Can you provide a source for this? [Updated, if your source is a movie, is not a real source and is useless. People fly in the movies]

In any case to avoid falling in a tunnel vision spot we would need a comparison with the effect of vegetable pesticides on inflammation markers also.

We humans, eat meat since... forever in our history. After that idea ancient people should have inflammation markers skyrocketing so could be easy to check it. Have you consider the possibility that the problem could be other than the meat like for example diesel contamination or plastic wrappings?

[scns]

Watch it if you can, it has a lot more on offer. I ate meat before i saw it, since i need B12. Now i rarely do, usually when someone else cooked for me.

[Shocka1]

> True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I would think that the average vegetarian is going to be much more health conscious than the person buying a steak and 24 pack of Bud Light every Friday. I haven't watched the doc - is this mentioned?

[ramblenode]

This is a kind of "wronger than wrong" fallacy [0]. Yes, not all pasture land is suitable for cereal crops. But that doesn't negate the fact that most livestock production does present an inefficient tradeoff when optimizing for nutrition and land/climate impact.

This is because a) a large portion of cereal crops are diverted to feed livestock and b) very little livestock comes from natural pasture land. So only a miniscule percent of livestock production represents no land use tradeoff whatsoever.

a) 40% of cereal crops go toward animal feed [1] and most modern animal agriculture would be impossible without this. Arable land that could be feeding humans is being used to feed animals which then feed humans. That represents roughly a 90% loss of potential biological productivity [2].

b) Despite the US having some of the largest natural pasture, only 4% of retail beef in the US is grass-fed--meaning only a tiny percent are fed exclusively from pasture [3]. Additionally, most pasture land has been converted from forest. 40% of deforestation overall is due to animal agriculture [4]. This is only a little less than plant-based agriculture which provides sinificantly more food.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level

[3] https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr...

[4] https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/cop26-agricultural-expan...

[CuriousCosmic]

I think one of the bigger questions than "why does the US raise so much livestock" is "why doesn't the US raise bison & buffalo instead of cows"?

I'd imagine a lot of the US' livestock needs could be handled by just re-wilding pasture lands with native plant and animal species (including bison). And just as a guess I'd imagine it'd be more sustainable than trying to raise cows.

[runsWphotons]

"Arable land that could be used to feed humans..."

Is there a shortage of food for humans? I dont think there is a supply issue, rather where famines occur it seems political?

[adrianN]

If we needed less land to feed humans we could instead use the land to sequester carbon and provide habitats for wild animals, e.g. by planting forests.

[jimnotgym]

Of course your point a is true, but it doesn't need to be. In other parts of the world cattle are not fed on cereals at all, or minimally. Equally cereal production has been a major cause of native grassland being plowed up, with much of the biomass turning back into CO2. If it were turned back to pasture it would begin to sequester carbon again. Grazing animals could be grown on that pasture, but not at the intensity of a US factory farm.

The answer is that the system is complex and there are no easy fixes.

[ramblenode]

The problem is that most pasture is not natural; most of it was converted from forest at some point. In that way it is still an environmental tradeoff.

Pasture doesn't really sequester carbon either, and grazing is still a big net GHG emitter because of methane (more potent than C02).

Forest, on the other hand, sequesters carbon, produces oxygen, and creates microclimates that are more hospitable to humans and which buffer against extreme weather changes.

[jimnotgym]

Hang on a minute, 'most' pasture might not be natural, but no arable ground to grow the alternative food is natural at all! And even if 'most' pasture is not natural we should not ignore that significant pasture was natural. Lets take the Great Plains of North America as an example. Ploughing it up to turn it into arable land was not natural and released much carbon.

> Pasture doesn't really sequester carbon either

Simply untrue. In the UK if I had pasture land I could even get paid for the carbon I had added to the soil. Here is a nice quote that says the complete opposite of your unreferenced comment:

"Prairies have the ability to store as much carbon below the ground as forests can store above the ground. When carbon is stored below ground it will remain locked there and be unable to enter the atmosphere."

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ageconugensc/73/#:~:text=Prai....

I think you are making the same mistake as everyone else by pretending there is a simple solution. Special interest groups, like those who are dogmatically opposed to meat production, are twisting the science just as much as their opposition is.

[blacksmith_tb]

Certainly some cattle are grazed on land that would be too hilly / rocky etc. to farm. And that's not a terrible use of land, but enormous numbers of cattle are raised in feedlots, and fed cereal crops like corn (maize) which have to farmed on the better farmland, which is far less reasonable.

[hombre_fatal]

The non-arable land meme comes from a paper that considered land non-arable if it had 25% crop yield (due to things like bad soil or too rocky or too much of a grade). Yet the things that make land non-arable also reduce their yield for animal ag on that same land.

[jldugger]

>I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories

"every statistic you will ever encounter online or from coworkers"

[richardw]

“The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?”

It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would return because we need less of that land, capturing carbon more permanently because it’s released more slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening: deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing for that deforestation?

[DuckFeathers]

>Are you arguing for that deforestation?

Not the same user but I will argue for deforestation any day. Humans are grassland creatures and trees are our enemy. Trees shadow the grass and affect our natural habitat. Even elephants know this and get rid of trees when they see them. [1]

In fact, when the wooly mammoths went extinct, Pleistocene Park turned from a grassland to a forest, and now an ecological disaster [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvC2MHJezF0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXAirenteRA

[tfourb]

That's just dump. If you really want to over simplify human history, we are Savanna creatures, and Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants. I also don't get why you are bringing elephants into this, especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling.

As are humans, by the way. Plenty of human civilizations have historically specialized to live in heavily forested biomes, ranging from the rain forests of the tropics to the boreal forests in northern Europe, the North America and Asia. Agroforestry as a practice goes back thousands of years in both the old and the new world.

[DuckFeathers]

>I also don't get why you are bringing elephants into this

Because trees are invasive plants and elephants keep them out of the grassland ecosystems.

>especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling.

Yes, trees did win that battle... potentially because of sudden drop in elephant population because of disease or famine... but it doesn't have to be the case everywhere.

>Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants.

This is a cause for concern and it is a direct result of the drop in African elephant population from several million to around half a million now.

[insane_dreamer]

> As far as CO₂ emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?

I don't know about other countries, but the percentage of meat in the U.S. that comes from cattle roaming pastures and eating grass is very small (because it costs so much more).

[imtringued]

You don't seem to understand how factory farming works. No, the animals don't get to go outside.

[recycledmatt]

It’s called a red herring argument - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring