Philosophical Vegan Forum

Yet another link from sciencealert.

sciencealert.com/vegetarian-and-healthy-diets-may-actually-be-worse-for-the-environment-study-finds

What do you think of this ?

Well, my thoughts:

First of all fish isn't vegetarian, so right off the bat the article fails horribly. I'm not paying $40 to access the study so I only got the abstract, and the "journalist" who wrote the article has changed the meaning of vegetarian, so I don't have much to work with ... but it seems really dumb to use calories/energy as the metric. Why would they not use something like nutrients/calories/energy? When you leave out crucial variables you can get any result you want. It doesn't account for all the beneficial micronutrients of plants or the enormous health costs associated with eating meat because of all the toxic shit it has. It also ignores the fact that superbugs created by animal agriculture are threatening to cause a global outbreak. Just some tiny details that don't fit well into a clickbait propaganda article ;P

It's also very convenient and disingenuous to compare lettuce to bacon instead of using more calorically dense plant foods

knot wrote:Well, my thoughts:

First of all fish isn't vegetarian, so right off the bat the article fails horribly. I'm not paying $40 to access the study so I only got the abstract, and the "journalist" who wrote the article has changed the meaning of vegetarian, so I don't have much to work with ... but it seems really dumb to use calories/energy as the metric. Why would they not use something like nutrients/calories/energy? When you leave out crucial variables you can get any result you want. It doesn't account for all the beneficial micronutrients of plants or the enormous health costs associated with eating meat because of all the toxic shit it has. It also ignores the fact that superbugs created by animal agriculture are threatening to cause a global outbreak. Just some tiny details that don't fit well into a clickbait propaganda article ;P

It's also very convenient and disingenuous to compare lettuce to bacon instead of using more calorically dense plant foods

Thats actually a very good point...i used to ask other vegetarians why they consume fish ? Because i do not. Also i had found out that there is a plant that tastes just like bacon and have a hell of a lot of more proteins.

this http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-seaweed-that-tastes-like-bacon-but-is-better-for-you-than-kale

I think knot covered it well.

Vegetarians don't eat fish, so they have no idea what they're talking about.

Also, you can't compare a healthy diet of beans and grains (which are very agriculturally efficient), with less efficient vegetables and fruit and just claim that vegetarian diets are bad for the environment.

A diet based on fruit of course uses up more land than factory farmed meat. But grains and beans use less.
People shouldn't eat so much fruit; it's inefficient in terms of land use, and not very nutritious so if you live on fruit you're forced to eat (mostly waste) something like 5,000 calories or more a day.