Maybe it's orthogonal, but this article doesn't discuss at all the nutritional advantages and disadvantages of eating meat. It may taste like meat, but the nutritional profile is nothing like meat.
Also, I'm curious what the actual impact of it is. One of the main arguments against meat is that it takes a great deal more energy and work to create 1 pound of plant food than 1 pound of meat. From what I've seen, beyond meat uses some sort of manufacturing process to create it. How much energy does it take to ship all those materials and run that factory?
It's about 6 times more energy intensive to order chemicals from new jersey and stir them in a vat than it is to ship live cattle to a slaughter house and butcher them.
Essentially all the cost of feeding and cleaning the cattle is very low, and storage of raw meat after slaughter is very cheap.
Alternatively storing the raw products for fake chicken are incredibly complicated. Furthermore, once the product is produced there is a ton of regulation about its care and handling. What's perhaps most troubling is the risk to workers while producing the product. They require fairly risky industrial tools, and not every manufacturer is really dillagent about providing good guards for people's hands.
The raw products for fake chicken are mostly soybeans or chick peas, hot water, and a mineral coagulating agent. The biggest energy input is for boiling the water and growing the crops.
Cows require 50 times more protein from grain as input than they provide after being slaughtered (you can google this, it's research from Cornell). You are 180 degrees wrong on that point, the cost of feeding them is _very high_. Unless you can genetically engineer them to have more efficient metabolisms, this is a fundamental problem for beef.
I can't tell if you're serious about the last paragraph. Citations would be great, because it's hard to believe that real meat is less regulated than plant-protein based fake meat or that the risk to workers that make it is less than to those working in an industrial slaughterhouse.
I'm not sure that it supports the conclusions that you (and its author) make. For example: (quoting)
"> For every kilogram of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed nearly 6 kg of plant protein."
6 << 50. And, a lot of that "plant protein" isn't available to people.
"More than 302 million hectares of land are devoted to producing feed for the U.S. livestock population -- about 272 million hectares in pasture and about 30 million hectares for cultivated feed grains."
Much pasture land is pasture because it isn't all that suitable for other purposes. Unless you eat grass/hay....
"THIRSTY PRODUCTION SYSTEMS. U.S. agriculture accounts for 87 percent of all the fresh water consumed each year. Livestock directly use only 1.3 percent of that water. But when the water required for forage and grain production is included, livestock's water usage rises dramatically. Every kilogram of beef produced takes 100,000 liters of water. [wheat and potatoes take much less]"
It appears that he's counting rain as "use". While technically true, that water can't be used elsewhere. (Grain land is rarely irrigated and pasture almost never is.)
The main point of making this in the first place is to save energy and resources.
The chemicals you're talking about are pea powder, soy, carrot fiber, and flour.
The slaughtering houses have some of the worst working conditions you can find anywhere in the U.S.. I don't think you'll find any casualties for workers who mix some ingredients together in comparison to chopping up cows.
Sorry if it was just joking, but it was kind of hard to tell.
Not defending the article's glossing over the subject, but the nutrition facts don't look completely different from one randomly selected meaty equivalent. Both have protein, fat, sodium, iron and carbs in similar proportions, plus or minus a brick.
"Protein" and "carbs" and "fat" are useful as high level indications of what you're eating, but e.g. the different compositions of amino acids making up the protein can be drastically different and is known to have substantially different impacts on your diet in various ways. It may or may not be different enough to matter, but it'd need a lot more detail to be able to tell (to the extent we even known enough about how to compose the "right" diet).
> The problem with observational studies like those run by Willett and his colleagues is that they do none of this [test their hypotheses with real randomized controlled experiments]. That’s why it’s so frustrating. The hard part of science is left out and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should all change our diets accordingly.
> Moreover, this meat-eating association with disease is a tiny association. Tiny. It’s not the 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer that pack-a-day smokers have compared to non-smokers. It’s a 0.2-fold increased risk — 1/100th the size.
20% increased risk of death or disease over the span of a generation is not worth getting excited about? For someone who's healthy, it may seem insignificant when the baseline risk is low, but for someone who develops a chronic disease, in hindsight a 20% reduction may be very appealing. Minimizing regret is important.
As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible. What kind of person is going to volunteer to have someone else dictate their diet? What kind of person is going to comply with that diet long-term? If you want to do a blind study, you have to turn all food into unidentifiable mush. You can't have people seeing broccoli florets or pork chops.
There is a proposed theory for why red meat has those effects: Neu5gc consumption causing persistent low-level immune response. Less conclusive dietary studies have noted a difference, but without doing a scientific study giving one group Neu5gc supplements and another placebo, how can we know? Ethics boards might have a problem with that, since Neu5gc can be demonstrated in vitro to trigger an immune response.
Perhaps the most general and plausible theory is that it has nothing to do with inherent unhealthiness of red meat or meat in general. Rather, more meat consumption means less dietary fiber, fewer fruits and vegetables, assuming the same total caloric consumption. Meat consumption probably also correlates to excess calorie intake, which is a risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases.
> 20% increased risk of death or disease over the span of a generation is not worth getting excited about? For someone who's healthy, it may seem insignificant when the baseline risk is low, but for someone who develops a chronic disease, in hindsight a 20% reduction may be very appealing. Minimizing regret is important.T
You should read the article; the rest of the paragraph is as follows:
> So with lung cancer we could buy as a society the observation that cigarettes cause lung cancer because it was and remains virtually impossible to imagine what other factor could explain an association so huge and dramatic. Experiments didn’t need to be done to test the hypothesis because, well, the signal was just so big that the epidemiologists of the time could safely believe it was real. And then experiments were, in effect, done anyway. People quit smoking and lung cancer rates came down, or at least I assume they did. (If not, we’re in trouble here.) When I first wrote about the pseudoscience of epidemiology in Science back in 1995, “Epidemiology Faces It’s Limits”, I noted that very few epidemiologists would ever take seriously an association smaller than a 3- or 4-fold increase in risk. These Harvard people are discussing, and getting an extraordinary amount of media attention, over a 0.2-fold increased risk. (Horn-blowing alert: my Science article has since been cited by over 400 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature, according to Thomson Reuter’s Web of Knowledge.)
The point is that we don't know if there's a 20% increase of risk if you start eating more red meat. We only know that the people who elected to do, and were sampled in the study (the top quintile), did have a 20% increase. There's a big difference here; statistics is subtle.
> As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible.
I agree, but then we should refrain from telling people that meat, and red meat in particular, is what's killing them. Especially when there are much more likely targets, like sugar.
If you blame sugar, you get the sugar lobby making similar arguments about poor scientific data for the proposition "sugar increases risk of diseases" that you're making against the proposition "red meat increases risk of diseases".
I disagree. The vegetarians I know are more concerned about the handling and treatment of animals than the environment or their own health. And veganism's whole premise is based on the reduction of suffering.
