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0·1 个月前Yep, there is not much way around the fact that meat production and consumption must go down substantially to reduce disease risk. More intensive animal agriculture is worse for reasons like antibiotic overuse. Less intensive animal agriculture substantially raises land use which means more deforestation and more human contact with wildlife and higher disease. See the infectious disease trap of animal agriculture
The research comparing plant-based meats to animal-based meats generally has found plant-based meats to come out ahead health wise, though a whole food plant-based diet is even better
2·2 个月前I suggest read the original study instead of a paper’s interpretation of it. They suggest action, and that’s changing the suggested inhalers people use in most cases. It’s not “blame people for thing”, it’s “here’s a problem and how we can dramatically reduce it with some minor systemic changes”
All but 2 therapeutic classes (short-acting muscarinic antagonists and ICS-SABAs) had dry powder and/or soft mist inhalers available. If patients during the study period had received the inhalers with the lowest emissions intensity available at the time in each therapeutic class, total emissions would have decreased by 92%, from 24.9 million mtCO2e to 2.1 million mtCO2e (eTable 6 in Supplement 1).
[…]
This study identifies a high ceiling for potential climate-related gains from switching patients to therapeutically equivalent alternatives. Any such efforts to shift prescribing will likely depend on broadscale formulary changes—and the policies required to incentivize such changes—rather than just individual actions by patients and physicians, who may be limited by payer formularies when choosing particular inhalers
That is misunderstanding the graph. That’s only counting direct emissions. Feed production is a major source of emissions for animal agriculture
From the article:
“Livestock” emissions here include direct emissions from livestock only — they do not consider impacts of land use change for pasture or animal feed.
17·3 个月前The question science isn’t ready to answer
No, it doesn’t tell us nothing. These kinds of limitations are not uncommon for nutrition studies. It just is weaker evidence that doesn’t tell everything we ever might want. Studies will always have some methodological limitations. There is always some factor you might be forgetting or could do better. Science doesn’t work by looking at induvidial studies alone. We take things in aggregate
That being said, of course things like RCTs will always be preferred and considered much stronger evidence. On that front, there have been some RCTs in other related health risk incidents with similar findings. For instance, I have read about some RCT studies for cardiovascular health. One meat industry funded review of RCT studies on cardiovascular risk for red meat found plant substitution improved predictors of cardiovascular health
Substituting red meat with high-quality plant protein sources, but not with fish or low-quality carbohydrates, leads to more favorable changes in blood lipids and lipoproteins.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.118.035225#d3646671e1
Or from another review looking at larger changes
Nevertheless, several RCTs have examined the effect of vegetarian diets on intermediate risk factors of cardiovascular diseases (Table 1). In a meta-analysis of RCTs, Wang et al. (22) found vegetarian diets to significantly lower blood concentrations of total, LDL, HDL, and non-HDL cholesterol relative to a range of omnivorous control diets. Other meta-analyses have found vegetarian diets to lower blood pressure, enhance weight loss, and improve glycemic control to greater extent than omnivorous comparison diets (23-25). Taken together, the beneficial effects of such diets on established proximal determinants of cardiovascular diseases found in RCTs, and their inverse associations with hard cardiovascular endpoints found in prospective cohort studies provide strong support for the adoption of healthful plant-based diets for cardiovascular disease prevention
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S1050173818300240
Also for people who prefer roasted, but don’t want to go through the effort of waiting for an oven to preheat: using an air fryer has changed how I cook vegetables. It’s amazing how “what if we made a convention oven, but smaller” is actually really helpful because it heats up super fast. Very convenient to roast them with an air fryer and very tasty
Yes, this new study has limitations. The authors do note that and aren’t pretending otherwise. This is coming in the context of other studies with similar conclusions which the original article talks about. This new study is a singular imperfect data point, but is combined with other data points that point in the same direction.
What it is primarily helpful for is in that it has a large N value of 79,468 participants and the population they are looking at doesn’t partake in as many carcinogens that make it harder to tell cancer rates apart (which is both a strength and also a study limitation too)
From the study
This study has several other strengths. 1) This is probably the single cancer cohort with the largest number of vegetarians, and especially vegans, who have rarely been studied effectively for cancer incidence. This allows consistent definitions and methods to be applied across all variables; 2) in many studies of vegetarians, vegetarian diets may be relatively transient for some subjects, but less so in AHS-2; 3) the level of validation available for the main variables on which the assignment to vegetarian diets is based; 4) the relatively large Black subgroup in which vegetarian diets have rarely been studied. Race is always a co-variate in our statistical models; and 5) the absence (practically) of cigarette smoking, a common confounder for many cancers, and very little alcohol
There are also study limitations, the most prominent of which is still the relatively small numbers of less common cancers, particularly among the less common dietary patterns (vegans and pesco-vegetarians) that diminish statistical power; second, there is the relatively health-conscious low-meat-consuming reference group, the Adventist nonvegetarians, that also limits power; third, that we were able to measure dietary and other data only at study baseline and not during follow-up. Finally, there are the limitations of all observational studies, particularly the possibility of unmeasured confounding, which can be limited but never avoided
This is an article that talks about multiple studies with differing methodology, including one new one. Posting without reading the article does not help actually advance discussion in general. Posting without reading just reaffirm existing beliefs
For instance, the new study itself did not use the term “plant heavy”, they looked at different sub groups
Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here’s another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed
we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121
I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it
More modern research does not suggest this made up most of the consumption for humans even before agriculture. For instance,
Our results unequivocally demonstrate a substantial plant-based component in the diets of these hunter-gatherers. This distinct dietary pattern challenges the prevailing notion of high reliance on animal proteins among pre-agricultural human groups
Does the Lemmy post title not have “in mice” in it for you? I added it to the title of the post to clarify this. It should show as
Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in study on mice
Whereas the original title of the article was:
Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease
My point is that it was way more rare than what people’s diets look like today. Not zero but not dominant. Wide reliance on plants is even true before modern agriculture. For example:
Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia
Humans historically, also didn’t eat much meat up until very recently. More recent research suggests our ancient human ancestors were eating far more plants than meat
EDIT: For example:
Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia
That is ignoring the vast majority of usage. Read about what professors, teachers, etc. are saying about its use and you will not hear it being used as tool as the major use. Everyone claims they are using it as a tool, but most people are using them to outsource thinking, unfortunately. Which is highly problematic when the outputs of LLMs are highly wrong much of the time. You need to use the same skills to evaluate the output that people are outsourcing away. Tools like calculators at least do their tasks correctly as long as your inputs are correct. The same is not true of LLMs. Moreover, people are blindly trusting the LLMs to a point where they are completely stuck whenever the LLM can’t do something or are wrong
Tools like calculators do not take away your ability to think logically, just to do route computation. Research is still emerging, but suggests long term negative effects on cognitive abilities from high LLM use
Also: Regardless of if this graph is caused by schools getting out or not, it’s still very highly used in schools.
Honey production is not exactly exploitation free. For instance, queen bees often have their wings clipped or are intentionally killed to be replaced by another
Moreover, honey production also out competes native/wild bee populations which hurts them. Especially since honeybees are heavily used well outside their native ranges
We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.3939
10·4 个月前First they fixate over protein metrics, and now they don’t want the actual protein synthesis? Having high intake of amino acids was already not doing most of what they claimed, but now we’re just gonna have our body not even use them? What a waste of resources. 0/10 (/s)
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
That’s taking a really short term view of it. As demand has stayed low enough for long enough, they have cut back on the amount and paid dairy farmers to not operate. These kinds of programs can only prop something up for so long
but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws
Animal welfare laws do not fix the fundamental issue with these systems. As long as the industry exists in a large scale capacity, it will find the cruelest ways to operate. As long as meat, dairy, etc. are consumed in mass, factory farming will exist
For instance, US beef consumption cannot be supplied by a pasture-based system. There is only enough land to support 27% of the consumption, and that still raises methane emissions by 8% so we would need to be consuming even less if we wanted to avoid emission reductions from a move like that
Various laws and larger action can be effective though. Like putting plant-based options by default has been tested in some places, has substantially reduced demand and still kept satisfaction high. Or things like prohibiting the production of Fur, Foie Gras, etc.
25·4 个月前Maybe the EU will pass some legislation that will carry over to the US
GDPR requires the right to have your data deleted at least, but a lot of companies will only allow that if you are within the EU (because of profit and spite, I suppose). Though some just allowed it for everyone instead
Similar for California Consumer Privacy Act where a lot of companies will only let you do the stuff it requires if you are within California
Sort of like the “unsubscribe” button you get at the bottom of some emails. Did they have to pass a law to get that enacted?
Yes, see the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
5·4 个月前There already are a bunch out there and increasing. Everything from aquafaba as a binder to things like Just Egg (both cooks & bakes like eggs from Mung beans), and even starting to see some newer companies using precision fermentation to make plant-based eggs with identical proteins to chicken-based eggs
We at least wouldn’t be at the same starting point since regardless of what happens, we’d still be with much lower environmental impact, zoonetic disease risk for society at large, number of animals in factory farms, etc.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html