The human species needs to eat less meat. Why? Take your pick of reasons, from the detrimental impact global meat consumption has on the climate, to the ethics of the mass farming of sentient animals. Or, here’s one that might sink in for the more selfish carnivores among us: not dying of a chronic illness.
One of the more popular myths in society is that eating red meat is a healthy, natural part of the human diet. But a consensus among members of the scientific community is beginning to refute that claim. Last year, a study published in the journal BMJ showed that eating “both processed and unprocessed red meat was associated with all-cause and cause-specific mortality in nine different chronic diseases.”
Before jumping to the defense of your beloved bacon burger, it’s worth taking a closer look at how the study’s authors reached their conclusion. The researchers drew on the dietary data of 536,969 participants over the course of 16 years. All of these participants, drawn from the general population of six states and two metropolitan areas in the US, had signed up to have their diets tracked as part of an NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, which specifically tracked each individual’s meat and iron intakes.
The results of the study revealed a number of startling trends. For one, participants who ate both processed and unprocessed beef, lamb and pork products over the course of that period showed “an increased chance of death from conditions such as diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and kidney disease.” Another trend the study noted was an increase in general mortality rates due to the high consumption of “heme iron and nitrites/nitrates found in processed meat.”
In 2015 the World Health Organization issued a similar report warning people about the health hazards associated with eating processed meat. This study, conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, found a strong correlation between processed meat and colorectal cancer.
This is fair and fine. I think it’s common knowledge that we really should eat less meat, or at the very least, eat more chicken and fish.
Jose Garcia
veganism is the healthiest
Xavier Sanders
fish are pretty bad too desu, about 90% of large predatory fishes are already gone and global fisheries are collapsing at a pretty alarming rate
Christopher Flores
>the detrimental impact global meat consumption has on the climate Just need the planet to survive longer than me >to the ethics of the mass farming of sentient animals They died so that I may live >not dying of a chronic illness Would rather live 60 years eating meat than 95 of beans and lentils
Moving on
Liam Gutierrez
large predatory fishes include tuna, cod, salmon etc.
Dominic Martinez
The real fucking global issue is the fact that Africans, Muslims, Indians and pretty much every other shit country you can think of multiply at an extremely high rate. In western society where birthrate for natives is like 1.5 to 1.7 per couple, we wouldn't have to worry about overpopulation and planet running out of it's resources because we're already slowly decreasing our numbers. But fucking Fatima shits out 8 Mohammed's and Shaniqua got 5 kids from 4 different fathers. This is the real issue for the longer term because every major global issue is derived from human overpopulation. I'm not even a /pol/ faggot.. but this is the truth honestly.
Michael Kelly
reminder that western countries account for more of an impact than everybody but the Indians and Chinese simply because their per capita resource usage is fucking insane
Lucas Lopez
And this is why I eat a lot less meat than I used to. I’ve not gone full vegan (and I never will), but I’ve restricted my meat intake to one glorious-straight-from-the-farmer steak a week, one good piece of salmon every week and that’s it.
Colton Wilson
Ask me how I know that you’re an American
Julian Scott
Close but no sikar.
Tyler Hill
For now yes, I didn't say there was no issue. Talk to me again in 40 years.
Grayson Adams
a lot can change in 40 years man, we might have finally blown ourselves up by then
John Myers
Yeah this is pretty obvious honestly. I'm vegetarian by religion (Hindu Brahmin), not ethical reasons, but anyone with a moderate knowledge of biology and trophic levels should realize how resource intensive raising livestock is. The amount of farmland to produce enough beef to feed a person is 100 times the amount of farmland needed to produce enough vegetables to feed a person.
And you know the biggest cause of deforestation? Clearing land for farming. Most of which is used to produce livestock feed anyway.
By going vegetarian we can literally save the planet. It's unlikely that nonvegetarians will ever give up their precious meat, though, so until producing meat from genetically engineered plants is cheaper than raising livestock, nothing is going to change.
Landon Hernandez
I've been thinking about meat produced by crispr'd plants for a few days, the whole idea really blows my mind.
I hope the spacex mars missions really work out because i feel like that's going to be one of the biggest pushes to sustainable nutrition in the next few decades, necessity is the mother of invention and all that
Jackson Ward
>hindu brahmin POO
Samuel Allen
It depends a lot on the type of fish and how it's caught too. If you're eating pole caught albacore tuna from Canada, we could do that forever and not hurt the population because they grow fast and breed a lot. But longline caught bluefin tuna has a much worse effect because they grow and breed more slowly and the catching process is very destructive to other marine life.
So if people did research first and were okay with paying a bit more it would help a lot, but that's not going to happen anytime soon...
It already exists, but it needs to be promoted by the government to overtake the current meat industry.
>inb4 muh farmers and jobs
It won't happen under this presidency, that's for sure
Charles Robinson
this seems like just a fortified vegetable patty to me, which is a step in the right direction, but not really what I mean.
using modern genetic techniques and a better understanding of muscle structure, target animal genetics, and target plant genetics we could get plants to directly make actual meat.
Kevin Stewart
I see. I'm honestly not sure if that's even possible. Muscle cells are insanely dissimilar to plant cells, and on top of that there's the extracellular matrix. Then you get into all the different types of cells that actually comprise meat.
Very complicated, if possible.
Jack Gray
Are you aware cat frown meat is reality I don't care what I eat as long as it's cheap and gives gains and doesn't kill the planet. Like chicken and vegetables.
Hudson Cook
Vat grown, fuck
Adam Brown
life is too short for this bullshit im enjoying real meat before its all completely artificially cloned in labs
Michael Carter
100 years ago, the idea of a machine that did calculations was nothing but an occasional flight of fancy, now we have machines that can perform more calculations per second than ever even were performed before the advent of computing. I'm not saying it will be an easy problem to solve, but to say it's impossible seems kind of defeatist.
Lucas Cruz
One thread at a time, OP.
Jordan Howard
I have schizophrenia with Jacksonian seizures. In other words I hear voices, have visual hallucinations, feel things that aren’t touching me, and go catatonic now and then. A low carbohydrate/ high fat diet changed everything and after 4 years of eating a roughly 95% all meat diet all of my symptoms have completely gone away. Please explain why I should go back to following a diet that literally makes me insane.
Carter Perez
you are a genetic failure saved by the luxury and decadence of modern western life
Asher Robinson
Says the guy that needs to inject b12 in his ass. Get off your fucking high horse, nigger
Charles Diaz
>Just need the planet to survive longer than me The planet isn't dying anyway. It's just changing, and if humans aren't smart enough to engineer solutions to keep things habitable for our species, then we weren't ment to make it anyway. Life doesnt give a fuck, it'll just adapt and press on like always.
Josiah Williams
sucks to be an abomination man, i feel for you
Isaiah Rivera
I eat what I want.
Landon Cooper
Remember user, it's better to live 100 years as a skeleton with multiple vitamin deficiencies, than to live 80 years with gains and happiness.
Aiden Gonzalez
Im not the crazy guy, just pointing out the irony. Veganism is only a thing because of spoiled westerners. Good luck convincing 1 billion chinese or Africans to give a shit about your "ethics" lmao
Thomas Roberts
this. fuck off vegans i could give less shit about some niggers dying in the future when im gone.
Blake Barnes
the day is not far where the choice is eat plants or nothing at all
Jack Torres
>vegans being orwellian as always You'll have to pry the meat from my hands, you spineless fuck
Sebastian Sanders
nice prophecy there vegan cuck. what else the vegans bible tell us?
Connor Kelly
Good thread
Isaac Stewart
not even a vegan lol
Grayson Perez
Processed meat, or processed shit in general, is shit. What else is new? One of the few reasons as to why even unprocessed meat would be terrible is the meat industry in general. US is a great example.
Try hunting your own food for a change or get it fresh from people who don't stuff their animals with growth hormones and antibiotics. Oh look, suddenly all of these health ''issues'' are non-existent.
Austin Baker
Until as recently as the early 2000s, population control was a key pillar of basically every environmentalist platform. Why do you think it’s been so heavily downplayed if late?
Carter Gonzalez
you make me think that no one will care, be sad if you die
Ethan Brown
Wouldn't be a bad thing all things considered.. depending where the nukes hit of course.
Dominic Morris
...
Michael Jenkins
Generation Z soyboys are really mad about meat, huh?
Nathaniel Jones
>if you raise kids vegan you literally need to give them pills and other supplements so they can somewhat grow up >natural
Fuck you
Bentley Robinson
>Historically, we are at a point of eating a lot less meat than any culture before us >We need to eat less No.