@ blue
true, my doctor said there is no general, healthy food intake everybody has different needs or requires more or less of some nutrients.

The only thing he said is "bad bad bad!" is too much alcohol and any tabacco consumptions, plus the usual suspects, fast food, grossly processed food, additive and color heavy stuff.

But I think it's logical that food made or processed with stuff from a lab isn't really the natural source.

Check out land or soil degradation, retrogression and erosion. It's massive and this will be the "other" thing next to the water struggle, except for kunming (after last Thursdays flooding..lol)

Come on people "not eating meat is not better for the environment" goes against all current thinking on the matter. Cows consume huge amounts of water (1 kg beef anywhere from 10k to 15k litres of water), produce a heap of methane (one of the worst global warming gasses) and produce copious amounts of sh*t which runs off into our waterways along with half the phosphates/nitrates sprayed on the land when it rains. None of those are particularly helpful for any environment. That's IF they are grass fed, if they are grain fed its dramatically worse.

Contrast that with growing say 2lb of beans, which would give you the same protein. Beans are carbon absorbers, breathing in CO2 (but producing your own methane at the "tailpipe"!), use less space, about 1/20th of the water and require marginal amounts of pest management depending on the farming method.

Sorry, to claim eating meat has no or marginal environmental effect is ridiculous. The last argument that should disabuse you of that notion is that hundreds of km of prime Amazon rainforest are cut down every year, why? To either plant grain which is then sent away to grow beef or is turned into pasture... to grow beef.

Pork is quite a bit better than beef and chickens are even better, but still nothing compared to the amount of space/water/energy or oil based inputs that is needed for veggies. Not even close.

Some people make the case that vegetarianism is worse for the environment. I'm not quite sure what to believe though. I'm on the fence.

Here's one article:
Why vegetarianism is bad for you and the environment

paleodietlifestyle.com/vegetarianism-bad-environment/

what's destroying the environment more than anything right now is our industrial farming practices and especially the big mono-cultures like wheat, corn and soy. Agriculture is the industry that consumes the most oil if you think about all the machinery used and food transportation needed. Therefore, the importance of eating locally produced meat and locally grown vegetables and fruits, when available, is huge.
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it's not wise to eat grains and grain derived products because most of the production of those grains is actually killing the top soil instead of feeding it. The soils become less and less fertile year after year. Most organic and animal friendly farms will try to produce with the help of the soil instead of against it.

Here's another argument from the same article. Not sure if he has the stats to back up his claims, but here it is:

Lastly, most of the animals we eat consume grass, we don't. We instead can take our energy from the meat that was fed something we can't eat. By growing crops of corn, wheat or soy where there would normally be grass, we destroy those animal's natural feeding grounds in larger and larger portions. Those animals often can't adapt to the ecosystem change and end-up dying. Therefore, eating lots of soy, wheat or corn based products indirectly kills more animals and top soil than eating a Paleo diet with lots of meat.

blobbs, I think you might be missing the point! not to mention beef is a complete protein....you could grow the beans, then you could grow the rice that would complete the protein...then only in countries where labor is borderline slavery would it be cheaper!

At some point you have to look at the effect your "beans" have on the population too, they do not just grow themselves! look at a rice farmer and a cow farmer and tell me who has a better life!!

Magnifico... oh dear. For a start, I should point out that I used to work for an organisation which was filled with scientists who would study exactly what inputs/outputs were required for different types of food. So I do have a little bit of knowledge on the matter!

What is soy mostly used for? Its used to feed cows or other animal feed. That's why we don't go and eat soybean xyz. And when it is fed to cows, around 6 pounds of soybean is required to make 1 pound of beef. That is a direct food loss of 5 pounds of soybeans. The cows convert to milk/fart/shit/piss out all the other nutrients. If we were to instead EAT the 6 pounds of soybeans, we would have about 6 meals, instead of the single meal that we would get for the 1 pound of beef. If you can't see that isn't inefficient, I give up. And where do the soybeans grow? Mostly on deforested land i.e. land that used to be a great big carbon sink. In order to feed an increasingly meat demanding world (mainly through increased population), we need more farmland for grazing and/or growing grain to feed to cows somewhere else. Remember that around 70% of all grains grown in the US are fed to animals as feed stock and the US alone has cleared around 250 million acres of forest to do so. The % is higher in places like Argentina/Brazil. Forests are being cleared at an alarming rate, right now, in Indonesia. Why? To plant palm oil, the used kernels of which are used as feedstock for livestock, the oil is extracted for use in food/cosmetic/cleaning products.

It is estimated that the total energy cost of growing vegetables to feed to stock is 11 times the total amount required to grow and eat the vegetables. This makes sense. If we were to just eat the vegetables, we would only need to transport them to markets. That would be the end of the cycle. But instead we transport them to farms where we feed them to cows. Cows do not convert all of the energy contained to meat, only around 10% is in usable products (including milk). Cows are then transported to abattoirs, killed, the meat transported to processing plants, which is then distributed to supermarkets. And after the cows are killed, refrigeration is required along every step of the way. The difference, when all of this is taken into about is around 11 times when compared to just eating the veggies. Sure meat is more nutritious, but only 40% more than most grains. That means we go from 11 to 1 to get 0.4 more nutrition.

And I haven't even started on the water resources which is even more shocking. Lets just say, in most western countries that have sizable farming systems (where we can measure it more accurately), between 80-90% of all fresh water resources are used for feeding livestock.

The argument that these animals use grass, which we can't eat, is pretty much absurd. Why? Because, for a start, we have again cut down forests to make space for this grass, again a huge net carbon release into the atmosphere (not to mention biodiversity). Secondly, there is a choice after we cut this forest down. We COULD use that land which we have just cleared to plant vegetables and eat those. How more efficient would that be? See above.

I could go on, but instead I would encourage you to read articles written by actual scientists on the matter. Try here: ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full for a start. There are hundreds of studies out there that back me up. Your link was one guys unresearched opinion. That doesn't come close to proof and really shouldn't even be looked considering there are zero numbers used, zero references and the person that wrote the article isn't even named!

bjtokm... what on earth are you talking about "a better life" and what has that got to do with the environment? I can't quite understand what you are on about. We are talking about the effect of the environment (earth/air/land resources and their interconnected systems) a meat diet has vs a veggo diet. Not about farmer happiness, slavery or.... whatever.

blobbles wrote: 'Sure meat is more nutritious, but only 40% more than most grains.' (this forum could use a quote function)

really? they're entirely different foods. i'm not even sure you can compare them. and also, there are all sorts of issues surrounding grains. for instance, gluten.

The link I posted references the book "The Vegetarian Myth" at the bottom of the page, which goes into this issue in a lot of depth.

Science is often in bed with big business, so the fact that hundreds of studies back you up doesn't prove anything. I'm not saying you're

wrong. Just saying there's a lot of corruption in science.

One point you made is about the grains being fed to cows. Well, we shouldn't be feeding them grains.

That is if you measure it in calorific value only. Yes there are lots of ways to measure nutritional value. Meat has many things veggies do not, veggies have many things meat does not, a major one being fibre.

Did you care to read any scientific articles on the matter? I have read many in my time and even the ones sponsored by the meat industry appear to show the inefficiencies of meat product as at least triple to quadruple that of vegetables. Inefficiencies in food production directly translate into environmental costs, disregarding examining the outputs, which in meat consumption is dramatically worse.

Put another way, we currently have 7 billion people on the world and that number is sky rocketing. Estimates that I have read indicated we could feed between 15-20 billion by converting land currently used for growing grain for the meat industry or grass lands into vegetable production while virtually halving our green house gas production. That is quite a big deal when thinking about climate change, the people that are currently going hungry in the world or really just thinking about it logically.

But the reality is, people just want to have nice big fat juicy steak or a burger because they think its tasty. This appears to over ride any environmental or ethical concerns. Greed, be it stomach or wallet, always seems to win.

www.treehugger.com/[...]

"Furthermore, let's not throw stones at cattle as methane culprits, when we have larger human-caused methane problems—namely from fossil fuel use and landfills. Our unrestrained use of coal, natural gas, oil, and petroleum products combined with our over-consumption of just-plain-stuff that ends up in landfills produces over three times the methane emissions as ruminants in this country"