It helps that we’re right. That it can’t be bad to eat what humans have eaten for 2 million years.
But 2 recent things I’ve looked at were studies done a few decades ago and shelved because they didn’t get the “right” answer, but were recovered recently and published showing the lipid hypothesis was wrong and the cause of metabolic disorder was carbohydrates
They were suppressed in the 70s and 80s, now they are published. Dietary guidelines in Australia (one of the biggest wheat exporters) now allow low carb for treating type 2 diabetes.
I do believe we’re watching a change in consensus (which as always is progressing one death at a time - perhaps it’s good that the other side is committed to a metabolically dangerous path)
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I agree with everything you say. The fact that it works, and people can measure many of their own metrics to show it works is huge. Everyone should be a scientist for their own body.
We are probably wrong about some things, but with the let’s verify spirit we will figure it out!
perhaps it’s good that the other side is committed to a metabolically dangerous path)
This makes me sad. I do my best when I see someone with a problem, I try to make sure they are aware of options.
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I discovered all of this, when I was diagnosed with essential hypertension. My medical provider at the time just said eat less and exercise more. I had to do my own research to find a way to reverse it. And ever since then I’ve been very invested
It helps that we’re right. That it can’t be bad to eat what humans have eaten for 2 million years.
The flaw in your logic is that nature’s only purpose is reproduction. As long as you make it at least that far, nothing else matters. Reproduction starts relatively early in our lifetime.
Thats a interesting point, reproductive success also encompass strategies where the longevity of the parent gives better chances to the offspring as well.
Only to a point. Even if you include raising kids, that’s only roughly halfway into our lifetime though.
Sure, but we are a community / social species, being a active member of a tribe even if outside of reproductive activities still gives benefits to the children of the community. Security, altruism, food availability, etc.
What does that have anything to do with our diet?
To the point of being social, living longer lets you help a younger generation survive and raise their kids
Were you fortunate enough to have a grandparent living with you when you were young? It makes things much easier for the parents, much nicer for the kids
You need to live to ~20, call it 45 to raise several children (you need probably 3 surviving ones per couple in an ice age) and the only food option is the animals that can eat the plants below the ice
You need to be able to live on meat your whole life or your line dies out when the cold comes, you need to be able to live on meat all winter in interglacials because no plants that we can eat are available
deleted by creator
Though of course pro meat people are still being deleted from wikipeida
And the lies about beef being bad for the environment have traction
And of course the opposition is an organised religious group, and we’re not.
Beef seems to need much more land and water usage than almost any other food. Since you need land to grow the food for the cattle and land for the cattle. Take the extra methane output which is a potent greenhouse gas. By almost any metric that will be worse for the environment than just growing a food source directly.
Perhaps a chocolate or something takes more water per kg. But many less kg’s will be consumed of chocolate than meat.
https://redtablemeats.com/fresh-meat/beef/how-much-water-is-needed-to-produce-1kg-of-beef/
(I eat beef and other meats periodically).
Ruminants, which include beef cows, are part of the normal carbon, and water cycles. The water ruminants drink is mostly peed out onto the land. Ruminants when eating their natural pastoral diet do NOT want grains, and do not need grain grown inputs.
- Arable land is about 11% of total land
- Pastoral land is about 30% which is not suitable for growing crops (topsoil!)
Regardless of where you sit on the Arable / Pastoral debate, one unifying thing that is critically important is top soil health and depletion. Ruminants are a critical part of maintaining and growing top soil! Most industrial grain production is monocroping using exogenous fertilizers. Sustainable agriculture requires we incorporate ruminants to replenish topsoil (crop rotation, etc). Those exogenous fertilizers will run out eventually (some reports say we have between 30-60 “traditional” crop cycles left in the current system).
In the industrial system grain waste is used to feed ruminants, but that isn’t super healthy for the ruminants
Permaculture cows in their fields are a negative carbon dioxide equivalent source.
Cows turn incomplete and hard to absorb proteins in wheat into 1. More protein, and 2. Complete and highly absorbable protein. It is more efficient to get your vital amino acids by feeding your crops to cows and then eating the cows
Beef is mostly grown on land that isn’t fit for growing crops
Beef returns practically all the water it consumes to the water cycle
How much land is dedicated to feeding pet dogs and cats?
Did you know America has more horses than dairy cows? Horses have the same digestive system as cows, they release as much methane
There are promising projects to make cows digest methane rather than expel it
Specifically mentioning dairy cows when it’s about meat seems like a false equivalence.
According to the USDA there are 88 million head of cattle. https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/h702q636h/6108x003v/kk91h696g/catl0124.pdf
While there are only around 9 million horses
https://www.ridewithequo.com/blog/the-horse-industry-by-the-numbers
That’s a 10 fold difference.
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In the end all water returns to the water cycle, but that can take such a long time that in human spans a shortage on clean drinkable water can definitely occur. Now meat consumption there isn’t the only factor of course.
I mentioned dairy cows because they happen to have a similar count to horses. We talk here about animal sourced food, which includes dairy. Dairy has all the fat soluble vitamins, if you have your cornflakes with dairy milk you increase the vitamin content enormously
Noting that beef cattle typically live in places where nothing people can eat will grow, so if we stopped eating them the land would be abandoned and would instead support the same biomass of just as thirsty, just as methane producing (but with no one invested in fixing the methane problem) grass eating animals, be they wild horses or deer or bison.
Meanwhile how much water do pet dogs and cats consume? How much extra is wasted by being in open containers in airconditioned spaces?
I like that you only found fault in the fun fact that dairy and horses have similar numbers, which you didn’t deny, and the fact that the water they drink isn’t wasted which you reckon takes too long but it has been going on for a very long time, it has to be in a steady state in natural grasslands. Before beef it was bison in America
There are multiple battles here
- Low Carb is a safe health tool
- Meat isn’t dangerous
- cholesterol is not a disease
- Seed oils have a huge impact on health, insulin resistance
- PBF have a inflammatory cost on the body
I think the best thing we can do is demonstrate what works for us, and be friendly resources to others if they have questions.
The Anti-Meat movement is a fascinating world to research, it’s not just economic interests, we have some faith thrown in there too
As far as I can tell low carb is fully accepted in psychiatric treatment, fairly accepted in diabetics, proven in weight loss but not widely prescribed, and nearly never used by for profit weight loss organisations because it’s so easy to DIY without any special products
Researchers have also noticed that they can get a thousand zero carb eaters from Reddit with high adherence to animal sourced food only, and likewise vegans and vegetarians since we separate ourselves so well, so some good epidemiological research is possible where you can actually compare some hundreds of people who eat only meat to others who eat only plants
It would probably be fairly straightforward to compare the spectrum from vegan through vegetarian, pescatarian, SAD, keto, ketovore, carnivore and all the shades of grey I missed though we’re probably unique in our ability to say exactly what we ate every day for years
fully accepted
I think that is optimistic, I don’t think lchf is embraced anywhere outside of niche research and novel practitioners. The change is happening, but it’s really slow.
There’s also so much money in the chain between a farm full of wheat to a box of highly processed “food”, compared to the simple path of meat varying from cheapest self harvested, self butchered, self stored through to using a professional butcher who buys from a meat packing plant through to the most expensive - supermarket meat
Money plus religion versus reality
The imagined path of wheat is the same as the feed for almost all of the meat that’s eaten today.
Cows don’t eat breakfast cereal, bread, or cookies
The cows I eat eat grass, the cheapest meat is raised on grass