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Comment by rovyko | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, I was under the impression that the link between heart disease meat consumption was more strongly established. It's important to note that this article is from 2013, so I wonder how much has changed since.

Joe Rogan hosted a nice debate between two scientists in the field, one of whom was a strict vegan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULtqCBimr6U.

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How is a layman supposed to differentiate between the author of this article and the authors of the studies done? I take it for granted that both sides consist of experts in the field, and yet the positions taken are radically different from one another.

I would assume a priori that the vegan side would be more widely supported amongst the experts (to say nothing of its merit), only on the basis of veganism being more congruent with the standard compassion of postmodernism.

Vegan/Vegetarianism is the driving differentiation in terms of opinion. Common sense sides more with the omnivore pov imho, but I don't hold it against individuals for choosing a vegetarian/vegan path.

You should hold it against them because veganism ( and to a lesser degree vegetarianism ) is morally wrong as it the most environmentally destructive and the most unnatural healthy diet. Veganism is the worst diet you can choose for your health, the health of the environment and causes the harm to animals ( mostly small mammals, insects and worms ).

You can see the absurdity of veganism as they proudly support locally sourced organic food but their diet makes "locally sourced organic food" an impossibility. A vegan anywhere on earth will die without importing avocados, all kinds of seeds, vegetation, etc from all over the world and still be lacking nutrients and have to resort to lab processed supplements. Real "natural" and "organic".

And omnivore ( a diet of every human society ) can have diet from locally sources. You can have a homestead almost anywhere and as an omnivore survive just from your own homestead. A vegan homestead can't exist anywhere because you can't grow all the necessary vegetation and supplements to survive.

Veganism is one of these great lies that seem "good" on surface but dig a little deeper and people will see what an absurd notion it is.

1) Since we already grow enough plants to feed the entire human population, we will only reduce animal suffering and land use by eating a vegan diet. It’s just that at the moment we feed grain to animals that we then slaughter instead of growing it to eat ourselves.

An overview: https://youtu.be/Hvdgz536ZLE

2) A vegan diet is very healthy.

An overview: https://youtu.be/iBs7TcBqeIc

Both these videos have references in their notes.

>1) Since we already grow enough plants to feed the entire human population, we will only reduce animal suffering and land use by eating a vegan diet. It’s just that at the moment we feed grain to animals that we then slaughter instead of growing it to eat ourselves

But do we grow enough plants to eat a vegan diet? A vegan diet requires a rather narrow set of plants in much higher quantities than we normally consume, eg beans, soy etc. You can't just look at the calories we get from corn or grain and say that we have enough.

>2) A vegan diet is very healthy.

As long as you supplement B12, maybe.

Feed conversion for beef is around 6:1, so you have 6 pounds of plants for every pound of beef. Lots of those plants are grass and other stuff humans don't really want to feed on though. Still, the large number of calories cattle need to make gains leave some room to adjust the crop mix.

Of course grazing animal migration patterns and grassland effects (desertification/deforestation) not withstanding. I would love to see an increase in variety and number of grassland mammals in general in order to preserve/expand grasslands.

Corn, wheat, rye, oats, beans and soy are staple foods for humans and are what is often fed to the animals we intensively farm. For the non human-edible crops like alfalfa, canola, etc there is some wriggle room to change to other crops. My main point is that it is a realistic change not an environmental and moral disaster as it was framed.

As far as supplementing B12, I say better safe than sorry, but even that is not straight forward when you look into it.

I don't advocate supplementing, but a ton of people already do it, so would that part really be much of an issue?

The best way I found to acquire information is to see what passed the test of time. For example, if humans have been eating red meat for 200,000 years, it's very unlikely it is net harmful. It's still possible, but the burden of proof is on who thinks it's harmful. (And it better be very strong evidence.) Mother nature has a very good filter for harmful things.

Humans didn't wash hands for 200,000 years and suffered from horrible diseases. Test of time is hardly conclusive.

Not doing something can't be tested against the test of time. Hygiene and antibiotics obviously improved our lives. So did cooking food and building civilizations. But if red meat was eaten for 200K years, we've very likely adapted ourselves to benefit from it... not only not get harmed by it. (Obviously in the right quantities.)

Interestingly, the overuse of antibiotics has the likelyhood of causing them to create superbugs that make the antibiotics completely useless.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_misuse

Also, while cleanliness is absolutely important, over cleanliness appears to be a potential cause of asthma and allergies in general.

https://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20140606/too-clean-home...

People only lived into their 50s (assuming they survived infancy). (Figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over... )

A life expectancy of 50 doesn’t mean “people only lived into their 50s”. We definitely didn’t just gain the ability to live until 90 in the last 50 years. We’ve been designed that way (by Mother Nature).

It's the average age of mortality, clearly you're dealing with the mean or mode here. People lived to be 80, 90,100 but that's only part of average lifespan.

Once you take out infant and childhood mortality you can see that rising over time.

I’d like to live to be a little older than prehistoric man.

Humans have been murdering and raping each other for centuries.

Humans descended from primates, which have been eating a mostly vegetarian diet for about 55 million years or so. Why not got with the diet that stood the the test of time for much longer?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...

Drawdown.org found that plant-based diets are a top solution for climate change-- something that wasn't a concern 200k years ago.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

Harvard research also found that we need to eliminate beef and dairy to avoid climate catastrophe.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2018.1...

Mother nature does have a good filter for harmful things: If humans don't address our contributions to climate change, we may be the thing that's filtered!

A lot of health study regarding food is junk "science" because a lot of them are funded by companies, industry, special interest groups or charlatans trying make money by selling you a diet plan.

Everything from "fat is bad" or "cholesterol is bad" for you has been pretty much walked back.

And nonsense like "cereal or orange juice is part of a healthy breakfast" are "science" funded by the cereal and orange industries. It's marketing pretending to be a science.

Now the vegan charlatans selling their eating disorder to young and impressionable kids. The saddest part is that it is mostly young females falling for when they are at a critical stage of development. Almost all of them will leave veganism eventually but the curse of veganism will stay with them for the rest of their lives. In 30 years, we are going to have an epidemic of medical issues like osteoporosis, especially among women.

Balanced diet. It's simple. An omnivore diet that was part of ever human society.

Too bad sensible comments like these are getting downvoted at HN, which clearly indicates where this community's biases lie.

You may be interested in https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...

Do you realize that has the same author as the primary article? It's not exactly a second perspective.

Do you have anything worthwhile to say directly addressing the content of the article instead of trying to discredit its author?

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