The most bioavailable foods are animal foods. Plant form iron is not even remotely comparable to heme iron.
Heme iron is found only in meat, poultry, seafood, and fish.
Take a iron deficient person and give them plant iron and it will be weeks to never before their iron returns. Feed them a liver and see it spike up in a day.
The same can be said of vitamin A and many other vitamins. A No indigenous society on earth has ever been vegan. Even horses who eat grass sometimes eat birds.
Hong Kong has one of the highest life expectancies on earth and one of the highest meat consumption rates on earth.
Every “Vegan” body builder got their start on whey protein. And are in their 20’s usually. There is no good 50+ year old long term vegan body builders who aren’t on massive amount of steroids and who didn’t get their start on animal protein.
Vegan farming is unsustainable. Animals naturally help the soil become more nutritious.
Vegan foods are terrible for the environment. Mass produced mono crops destroy the soil.
Being a vegan is OK if you want to destroy your body. Pushing it on children is evil because it will limit their growth.
Well, a vegan diet is indeed less healthy than a balanced diet, but most people who follow such a diet don’t do it for health. Farm animals are typically fed monocrops, and they are very inefficient at turning them into meat: eating an animal that fed on plants wastes an order of magnitude more amount of the plant than directly consuming it. They also produce greenhouse gases and contribute to antimicrobial resistance (which is a HUGE problem right now).
Hello, lets talk about these topics and try not to feel emotional. I am going to challenge some to all of these ideas but please do not take offense.
This is completely false, or I should say 80% false. Farm animals are fed the scraps. Cows for example are not fed corn meant for human consumption most of the time. They are fed the leaf part, which represents over 80% of the plant. Humans cannot eat the green part. They are fed many other scraps that we can’t eat. They aren’t competing with us for food.
Most cows are also fed grass most of their life. And they are extremely efficient and converting grass to meat.
It is only until their last few weeks that they are fed corn humans could eat to fatten them up. In Japan they are fed rice.
You can slaughter them without feeding them grains and that is a better solution than not eating them. We cannot eat grass. Cows can, if you don’t eat cows you are wasting grass.
They produce methane, a very short lived greenhouse gas. Plants also produce methane. It was recently discovered that trees produce lots of methane,
You wouldn’t say we need less trees would you?
In either case, you can feed cows seaweed and their methane production goes to almost zero.
The answer to antimicrobial resistance is to just stop feeding them antibiotics and allow them to eat grass as they are supposed to. Not eating meat is not helping. Instead people should buy meat produced in healthy ways.
You’re right that livestock doesn’t compete with us for food. But I insist that it’s hugely inefficient.
Poultry, milk and eggs only contain about 20% of the protein input to the animal. I find this at least not that low of a figure, and thus personally don’t restrict those products in my diet. However, beef contains less than 5%. Since 1/3 of the total cultivated land is used as grassland, simply using it for crops would increase the total protein output.
Regarding energy output, it’s much lower than that in both cases. Even just burning the remaining parts of plants for energy, or turning them into biofuel, would be much more useful.
Antibiotic resistance is a problematic issue. On the one hand, you can avoid it by avoiding antibiotics altogether. On the other hand, this opens the door to numerous diseases to spread. Basically, it can be done, but you’d need government regulation everywhere, as…
This makes several incorrect assumptions.
That you can grow something that isn’t grass in those locations. There actually exist places in which you can grow grass but you can’t grow “corn,wheat,grains”. Many places in fact. We should be expanding our cows, goats, sheep into all those areas.
That there isn’t supposed to be cows in those locations. Grass needs ruminant animals to eat it in order to grow. Ruminants and grass have a symbiotic relationship. Having cows graze land will actually make it easier to grow corn and wheat in those locations in the future. This is called regenerative agriculture.
That there isn’t other things animals eat that we can’t or don’t want to. Chickens eat bugs. I don’t want to eat bugs but I do want to eat chicken. Let them eat the bugs and let me eat the chicken.
Again, the solution is the same either way. The only solution is to not use antibiotics. Whether you accomplish that by not eating animals or not giving animals antibiotics doesn’t make a difference so this isn’t even a point worth considering.
All of that may be true, but most cattle and chicken currently don’t graze on that land. Rather, the plants (grass, grain or plant remains) are brought to facilities where the animals live. This means that symbiotic relationship needn’t hold anymore.
You’re also assuming that those grasslands should actually be used that way. Nowadays, much of the land has been obtained by deforestation, and an increased demand for energy and protein, combined with the inefficiency of animals, is an important factor contributing to this.
Plus, I doubt that the fraction of those grasslands usable for crops is less than 5%. Even 20% seems like a stretch, plus the remaining 80% could return to their native state.
As for antibiotics, I believe you’re partially missing my point. While reducing the number of animals reduces resistant organism spread proportionally, applying counter-resistance policies would only have an effect if a very large proportion of the animals are under that policy, that is, if nearly every country enforces it.
Also, not using antibiotics at all is not an option. They can be vastly reduced, and their utilization can be subjected to some conditions, but having so many animals living together with untreated diseases is a recipe for disaster.
Incorrect, most cows in the U.S. Are raised on grass most of their life.
In fact, more than 97 percent of U.S. beef cattle farms and ranches are family farms. It’s a myth and one that has really gotten out of control. Vegans will hunt for the worst farm and take a picture at the worst time to make it look like all those farms are that way. False, fiction.
Again this isn’t really true. Pre colonial America, the Buffalo were everywhere. Grass lands everywhere. America is where horses evolved. That is how much grass land is here. (they left but came back long story). Grass lands are very common naturally.
Again I think you missed my point here. There is only one option either way. Stop using Antibiotics.
You can either stop using antibiotics by not eating meat or stop using antibiotics wile using meat. In either case you would have to force it in every country and in either case you will fail.
Yes it is. And actually, feeding animals more of their natural diet would make it more possible. One of the reasons cows get bacteria over growth is when they are fed to much corn. It messes with the ph balance of their stomach. If you feed them only grass, they won’t need antibiotics at nearly the amount the do now.
So antibiotics is a non issue.
Weird, 97% is a really high number… In my country it’s about 10%, even with the EU laws to promote extensivization. I’ll take it though.
Grass lands are common, but what about the animals? There couldn’t have been nearly that many if a few early colonists hunted them down so quickly. Also the kind of grassland those lived in was vastly different from what cows need, let alone chicken.
Messing with their pH balance? As in, giving them diarrhea? Yes, that’s usually treated with antibiotics if severe, but still insufficient. Cattle get many different kinds of infections, anything from infected cuts to insect-transmitted diseases.
If we humans get and transmit diseases today, animals do the same. The first risk factor for that is the total number of individuals, so that needs to be cut down, and livestock are much more numerous than us.
Most of what this person says is made up.
@pancake
this site says 90% family owned (edit: for beef): https://www.neogen.com/neocenter/blog/fast-facts-state-of-u-s-cattle-ranching/
this site says 97% of farms are family owned: https://ussoy.org/97-the-percentage-of-u-s-farms-that-are-family-owned/
@mrpotatoe
Said the guy who post blogs as a source.
Thanks
It wasn’t actually that quick. It was over many generations. White people did hunt them by the millions but also the natives were newly armed with horses and guns and so could hunt them down much more efficiently, then sell the hides.
Not just diarrhea, salmonella and other diseases. Their stomachs are not designed for corn. Feeding them mostly corn makes them vulnerable to lots of bacterial over growth. That is the reason they need antibiotics to begin with.
Maybe in parts of the EU people should protest cattle farming but here in the states I see lots of really happy cow farms.
The only source I can find for the claim that beef is 97% family farms is the Kansas Livestock Association.
Most others say 98% of farms are family farms - not cattle farms, just farms, and then use a weird definition of family farm. Small family farms are 89% but there is no indication of how much of the cattle farms are family owned.
USDA says “Finally, large-scale and non-family farms dominate production of beef production and high value crops which include vegetables, fruits/tree nuts, and nursery/greenhouse products.”
What’s your source? Save me from digging, I’m tired lol
Source: I own cows, they eat grass.
https://www.neogen.com/neocenter/blog/fast-facts-state-of-u-s-cattle-ranching/
https://ussoy.org/97-the-percentage-of-u-s-farms-that-are-family-owned/
thx for forwarding the links
I didn’t know this and it was fascinating to learn
Your own source says "Nobody is arguing that trees are therefore bad for climate and should be cut down. Indeed, in most cases, their carbon storage capability easily outweighs their methane emissions. "
Please tell me what about cow burps outweighs their methane emissions to make the comparison to trees sound.
Cows shit makes the ground so much more fertile the plants that grow where they live absorb so much carbon in balances out. Methane is a short lived greenhouse gas. Carbon a long lived. If you are worried about it you can also feed them seaweed.
Yeah but we don’t feed them seaweed. The article you linked says “There are approximately 1 billion cows used in the global meat and dairy industries, and, combined with other animals raised for livestock, are responsible for releasing the methane equivalent of some 3.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. If cows were a country, they would be the world’s third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, behind China and the U.S., and ahead of India.” Your own source says you’re wrong.
So feed them sea weed.
Only source I can find that beef are largely grass fed is various websites funded by the cattle industry. Citation?
All the farms where I live