Study finds vegetarian diets may actually be worse for the environment
Replies
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I find headlines used for the article and some of its presentation to be click-baity.
They aren't really comparing a vegetarian diet, but a diet based on the USDA dietary recommendations.
Taking a look at their actual indexes from the paper itself:
It becomes immediately obvious that any time you replace meat or poultry with nuts, seeds, and soy, you're vastly reducing GHG and energy use (water use goes up). Eggs also trump the meat category. Vegetables and juice require more energy but less GHG than meat or poultry.
Oddly, they mention increasing seafood per recommendations by the USDA, except, eating seafood would is kind of against the term vegetarian isn't it? Kind of part of the proof of how the headlines and presentation of it is click-baiting and kind of taking shots at vegetarianism. You can see that seafood use can easily make a huge impact when used in place of meat or poultry, but actual vegetarianism would involve subbing meat and poultry with, again nuts, seeds, and soy.
A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.0 -
PeachyCarol wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ericGold15 wrote: »
I wrote earlier:lemurcat12 wrote: »it is talking about the environmental cost of producing the types of foods that we are all recommended to eat more of -- meat-eaters as well as vegetarians.
The general ecological argument, which IS true, is that the foods grown and fed to animals are much better utilized as direct foods to humanity. For example, eat corn rather than feeding it to animals that are later butchered. Less misery and much more environmentally sound. I've calculated the conversion efficiency of grains to consumable animal products before; if memory serves me it is ~ 1:7.
Comparing lettuce or broccoli to animal products is a straw man. Diets that substitute plants for animal products typically do so with beans, legumes, soya and grains. These meat substitutes are vastly more sustainable, ecological, and rational in a world beleaguered by starvation and climate change.
It's not a straw man. It's what the study and piece linked were about: the cost of eating more like our dietary recommendations, more vegetables and fruit (and fish!, obviously not vegetarian) vs. meat and starches too.
To frame it as about vegetarianism vs. meat eating is the straw man, and was a fault in the way the article was initially framed and how the discussion progressed here.
As I quoted before:The researchers acknowledge that their findings may be somewhat surprising in light of the zeitgeist over meat's impact. "These perhaps counterintuitive results are primarily due to USDA recommendations for greater caloric intake of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and fish/seafood, which have relatively high resource use and emissions per calorie," they write in Environment Systems & Decisions....
Inevitably, producing far greater amounts of foods like broccoli to compensate for the calories lost from meat and other high-energy food sources involves larger amounts of energy, water and emissions than any simple kilo-for-kilo comparison of environmental footprint allows. Take a look at the graphic here to see how the impact of foods is reordered when they're ranked by calorie content as opposed to by weight....
Update: The researchers did not find that vegetarians or vegetarianism are harmful to the environment, or that producing vegetables is more harmful to the environment than producing meat.
What they found, in light of the data they examined, is that producing some vegetables and other foods results in high use of natural resources – and that eating more of those foods (as recommended for health by the USDA) in two particular scenarios results in higher energy use, blue water footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.
If you have issues with the conclusions in the actual study (which I have not read or formed any opinions on, except that it seemed quite different than what was being discussed here), I would be interested. Maybe I will actually read it myself.
Well, while I'm not as up to date with what Eric is arguing in this thread, I'm a little confused by this study.
Can anyone clarify for me why they feel this was anything to take seriously when they had people replacing a protein source with broccoli and based the comparisons on caloric content rather than direct nutrient content?
Vegetarians don't eat broccoli instead of beef. Vegetarians eat beans or soy or eggs instead of beef.
The study was meaningless, and the update sort of paid lip service to that.
Yes, but the study was about replacing the current standard American diet with the USDA recommended diet, unless I'm confused. The standard American diet contains too much meat and not enough fruits and vegetables as compared to the USDA recommendations. And is particularly low in leafy greens and cruciferous veg. So the study is about reducing (but not eliminating) the meat consumption, and increasing the fruits and vegetables.
That is different than when vegetarians give up meat - they are looking to replace with high protein substitutes, hence the eggs, soya, etc. That is not the goal, here.
ETA: Some sentence restructuring for clarity.
ETA2: Also, the study is clearly operating on theory only - practically speaking, it isn't likely most people would replace unneeded meat with veg and fruit they lack.0 -
^^ If the article is available through the internet for free, pls provide a link.
"Could" does not mean anything. State the menu and the underlying assumptions and dispense with "could." Otherwise we can just compare a 100% caviar diet flown in from Siberia on a Concorde Vs the by now well known 100% by diet broccoli man and have the same informed results as the idiotic blog post.A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.
THE WEIGHTED BY CALORIC INTAKE OF THE DIFFERENT FOOD GROUPS MUST BE CONSIDERED IN GHG CALCULATIONS.
This graphic is from Grist, based on a course given at UC Berkeley:
Lets change it into a weighted table normalized to 100x, equal to 100y GHG for total daily calories:
Vegetables: 4.56x
Fruit: 3.22x
Meat, Eggs & Dairy*: 27.6x
Remainder: 64.62x
Modified diets:
Example #1: Increase vegetables by 50%. Now Vegetables are (4.56*1.5)x/(100), equal to 6.8x
Apply your GHG footprint estimate for vegetables to 6.8x instead of 4.56x. Now the GHG footprint will increase to ! 102.25y. Call it 2% increase
Example #2: Reduce everything by 10%: Multiply your weighted GHG footprints by 0.9. 90y -- hooray
Example #3: Reduce meat, eggs and dairy by say 80% for a lacto vegetarian: Since the substituted products have about 1/7th the GHG footprint, multiply 27.6x by 0.8 by (1-0.14) for a reduction of 19y and a new average GHG footprint of 81y
Example #4, Combine #3 and #1: About 83y
*I ignored nuts in the info-graphic0 -
PeachyCarol wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ericGold15 wrote: »
I wrote earlier:lemurcat12 wrote: »it is talking about the environmental cost of producing the types of foods that we are all recommended to eat more of -- meat-eaters as well as vegetarians.
The general ecological argument, which IS true, is that the foods grown and fed to animals are much better utilized as direct foods to humanity. For example, eat corn rather than feeding it to animals that are later butchered. Less misery and much more environmentally sound. I've calculated the conversion efficiency of grains to consumable animal products before; if memory serves me it is ~ 1:7.
Comparing lettuce or broccoli to animal products is a straw man. Diets that substitute plants for animal products typically do so with beans, legumes, soya and grains. These meat substitutes are vastly more sustainable, ecological, and rational in a world beleaguered by starvation and climate change.
It's not a straw man. It's what the study and piece linked were about: the cost of eating more like our dietary recommendations, more vegetables and fruit (and fish!, obviously not vegetarian) vs. meat and starches too.
To frame it as about vegetarianism vs. meat eating is the straw man, and was a fault in the way the article was initially framed and how the discussion progressed here.
As I quoted before:The researchers acknowledge that their findings may be somewhat surprising in light of the zeitgeist over meat's impact. "These perhaps counterintuitive results are primarily due to USDA recommendations for greater caloric intake of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and fish/seafood, which have relatively high resource use and emissions per calorie," they write in Environment Systems & Decisions....
Inevitably, producing far greater amounts of foods like broccoli to compensate for the calories lost from meat and other high-energy food sources involves larger amounts of energy, water and emissions than any simple kilo-for-kilo comparison of environmental footprint allows. Take a look at the graphic here to see how the impact of foods is reordered when they're ranked by calorie content as opposed to by weight....
Update: The researchers did not find that vegetarians or vegetarianism are harmful to the environment, or that producing vegetables is more harmful to the environment than producing meat.
What they found, in light of the data they examined, is that producing some vegetables and other foods results in high use of natural resources – and that eating more of those foods (as recommended for health by the USDA) in two particular scenarios results in higher energy use, blue water footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.
If you have issues with the conclusions in the actual study (which I have not read or formed any opinions on, except that it seemed quite different than what was being discussed here), I would be interested. Maybe I will actually read it myself.
Well, while I'm not as up to date with what Eric is arguing in this thread, I'm a little confused by this study.
Can anyone clarify for me why they feel this was anything to take seriously when they had people replacing a protein source with broccoli and based the comparisons on caloric content rather than direct nutrient content?
Vegetarians don't eat broccoli instead of beef. Vegetarians eat beans or soy or eggs instead of beef.
The study was meaningless, and the update sort of paid lip service to that.
I don't think the study was necessarily meaningless, but it's not about vegetarianism. It was reported about poorly in the linked article (and then in the discussion here).
For example, part of the increased environmental cost of adhering more closely to dietary recommendations is from eating more fish, which vegetarians wouldn't eat.0 -
PeachyCarol wrote: »juggernaut1974 wrote: »PeachyCarol wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »ericGold15 wrote: »
I wrote earlier:lemurcat12 wrote: »it is talking about the environmental cost of producing the types of foods that we are all recommended to eat more of -- meat-eaters as well as vegetarians.
The general ecological argument, which IS true, is that the foods grown and fed to animals are much better utilized as direct foods to humanity. For example, eat corn rather than feeding it to animals that are later butchered. Less misery and much more environmentally sound. I've calculated the conversion efficiency of grains to consumable animal products before; if memory serves me it is ~ 1:7.
Comparing lettuce or broccoli to animal products is a straw man. Diets that substitute plants for animal products typically do so with beans, legumes, soya and grains. These meat substitutes are vastly more sustainable, ecological, and rational in a world beleaguered by starvation and climate change.
It's not a straw man. It's what the study and piece linked were about: the cost of eating more like our dietary recommendations, more vegetables and fruit (and fish!, obviously not vegetarian) vs. meat and starches too.
To frame it as about vegetarianism vs. meat eating is the straw man, and was a fault in the way the article was initially framed and how the discussion progressed here.
As I quoted before:The researchers acknowledge that their findings may be somewhat surprising in light of the zeitgeist over meat's impact. "These perhaps counterintuitive results are primarily due to USDA recommendations for greater caloric intake of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and fish/seafood, which have relatively high resource use and emissions per calorie," they write in Environment Systems & Decisions....
Inevitably, producing far greater amounts of foods like broccoli to compensate for the calories lost from meat and other high-energy food sources involves larger amounts of energy, water and emissions than any simple kilo-for-kilo comparison of environmental footprint allows. Take a look at the graphic here to see how the impact of foods is reordered when they're ranked by calorie content as opposed to by weight....
Update: The researchers did not find that vegetarians or vegetarianism are harmful to the environment, or that producing vegetables is more harmful to the environment than producing meat.
What they found, in light of the data they examined, is that producing some vegetables and other foods results in high use of natural resources – and that eating more of those foods (as recommended for health by the USDA) in two particular scenarios results in higher energy use, blue water footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.
If you have issues with the conclusions in the actual study (which I have not read or formed any opinions on, except that it seemed quite different than what was being discussed here), I would be interested. Maybe I will actually read it myself.
Well, while I'm not as up to date with what Eric is arguing in this thread, I'm a little confused by this study.
Can anyone clarify for me why they feel this was anything to take seriously when they had people replacing a protein source with broccoli and based the comparisons on caloric content rather than direct nutrient content?
Vegetarians don't eat broccoli instead of beef. Vegetarians eat beans or soy or eggs instead of beef.
The study was meaningless, and the update sort of paid lip service to that.
You're just trying to distract us so you can steal our souls...
I only do that at night. I need a new day time hobby. I'm thinking of taking up tap dancing.
The claim that soul sucking must be done before 5 am or else you won't be able to burn off the calories is false, you know. So feel free to continue during the day if it pleases you.0 -
ericGold15 wrote: »
Correct.lemurcat12 wrote: »Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) say that adopting the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) current recommendations that people incorporate more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood in their diet would actually be worse for the environment than what Americans currently eat.
And now for last time I am telling you that the main WEIGHTED change by daily calories in the Govt recommendation is in the substitution of red meats by plants eaten directly rather than processed through animals, which carries a very strong environmental advantage.
How many times do I need to say this: the study is not about switching from a meat-eating to a vegetarian diet. Therefore, the difference between what the dietary guidelines are for vegetarians and what they are for meat-eaters is not, in fact, relevant to its conclusions.
You are being insulting to me, but you continue to miss the point. Again: the study is NOT about vegetarianism. I do not personally believe that being a vegetarian is environmentally costly, and I don't think the study says that either. To the extent you are arguing against such a claim, you are not addressing the study.0 -
ericGold15 wrote: »^^ If the article is available through the internet for free, pls provide a link.
"Could" does not mean anything. State the menu and the underlying assumptions and dispense with "could." Otherwise we can just compare a 100% caviar diet flown in from Siberia on a Concorde Vs the by now well known 100% by diet broccoli man and have the same informed results as the idiotic blog post.A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.
THE WEIGHTED BY CALORIC INTAKE OF THE DIFFERENT FOOD GROUPS MUST BE CONSIDERED IN GHG CALCULATIONS.
This graphic is from Grist, based on a course given at UC Berkeley:
Lets change it into a weighted table normalized to 100x, equal to 100y GHG for total daily calories:
Vegetables: 4.56x
Fruit: 3.22x
Meat, Eggs & Dairy*: 27.6x
Remainder: 64.62x
Modified diets:
Example #1: Increase vegetables by 50%. Now Vegetables are (4.56*1.5)x/(100+4.56/2), equal to 6.8x
Apply your GHG footprint estimate for vegetables to 6.8x instead of 4.56x. Now the GHG footprint will increase to ! 102.25y. Call it 2% increase
Example #2: Reduce everything by 10%: Multiply your weighted GHG footprints by 0.9. 90y -- hooray
Example #3: Reduce meat, eggs and dairy by say 80% for a lacto vegetarian: Since the substituted products have about 1/7th the GHG footprint, multiply 27.6x by 0.8 by (1-0.14) for a reduction of 19y and a new average GHG footprint of 81y
Example #4, Combine #3 and #1: About 83y
*I ignored nuts in the info-graphic
I said could exactly because it looks like there might be questionable assumptions in the underlying menu and the figures used for it.
If you follow the link for the Reddit quote, there is a link in the overall Reddit thread that leads to a hosted copy of the paper.0 -
@ericGold15
Sorry, I didn't realize this post hadn't gone through. This is the article I mentioned as having a link.
I found this person on Reddit's analysis of the sources used for their environmental figures:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/3wycjy/article_energy_use_blue_water_footprint_and/cy0okgzI've been looking into their sources for energy use; looking at beef:
Pelletier et al. numbers are in MJ/kg live-weight, later they say you can eat about 43% of the live-weight
Williams et al. number is in MJ/kg carcass-weight, the internet says you can eat 2/3 of that
Foster et al. uses Williams number (still in carcass-weight) and add some wastage at the retail/ home level
Carlsson-Kanyama et al. give numbers for cooked food but i didn't dig into where it came from...
Just glancing at their other sources it looks like these numbers are all over the place: some of their vegetables are fresh, while some are frozen, shipped across europe, and cooked. Estimating calories with their source, I get similar numbers to their MJ/cal values so I don't think they're doing anything more. It looks like a pretty haphazard analysis; comparing cooked broccoli with live cow, assuming that beef stew is 100% beef by weight, not considering travel distances etc... looks pretty bad to me.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »ericGold15 wrote: »Are you under the impression that Govt reccs are to eat a large fraction of your daily calories from leafy vegetables ?
The study is not about that. It is largely about the cost if people were to eat the recommended servings of fruit and veg, which most people in the US do not do. (And for the record, I think they should, and don't consider this study a reason not to do so myself -- I like to eat more than the recommended amount of non starchy veg and don't plan to stop.)
Again:Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) say that adopting the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) current recommendations that people incorporate more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood in their diet would actually be worse for the environment than what Americans currently eat.
And from the abstract:The three dietary scenarios we examine include (1) reducing Caloric intake levels to achieve “normal” weight without shifting food mix, (2) switching current food mix to USDA recommended food patterns, without reducing Caloric intake, and (3) reducing Caloric intake levels and shifting current food mix to USDA recommended food patterns, which support healthy weight. This study finds that shifting from the current US diet to dietary Scenario 1 decreases energy use, blue water footprint, and GHG emissions by around 9 %, while shifting to dietary Scenario 2 increases energy use by 43 %, blue water footprint by 16 %, and GHG emissions by 11 %. Shifting to dietary Scenario 3, which accounts for both reduced Caloric intake and a shift to the USDA recommended food mix, increases energy use by 38 %, blue water footprint by 10 %, and GHG emissions by 6 %. These perhaps counterintuitive results are primarily due to USDA recommendations for greater Caloric intake of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and fish/seafood, which have relatively high resource use and emissions per Calorie.
I've said several times now that not having read the study I don't have an opinion on its methodology or conclusions, but it would be nice if people would stop pretending like it said something that it does not.
I am quite aware of the gov't recommendations. Your need to argue with things people are not saying is becoming tiresome.
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Just remember soy is destructive. It is grown where the rainforest used to be and is often part of a monocrop style of farming, destroying the nutrients in the soil.0
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Another similar article by Heller, this table shows the GHG footprint data. Note that it is averaged meta data. The original articles really need to be looked at with attention to dairy and meat to know how they are calculating the footprint for grazed and/or feedlot "food animals."
I'll say though that in a rational world a reduction in red meat consumption would first target the most GHG damaging practices, so the current averages are under-estimates of the benefit.0 -
Just remember soy is destructive. It is grown where the rainforest used to be and is often part of a monocrop style of farming, destroying the nutrients in the soil.
Soy? Of all the crops likely to come from growing in the rainforest, soy doesn't seem very high on the list. The world's largest producer and exporter of Soybeans is the United States. While the US does have rainforest, much of it isn't tropical rainforest (what most people think of as rainforest) and the US is currently increasing its forests, not decreasing.0 -
Yeah, we grow tons of it in Illinois. Probably on old prairie land that was used for other sorts of farming first.0
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Hooray, thanks senecarr for the link to the article.
Look at this figure in conjunction with the indexed GHG figure you posted:
This is supposed to represent the changes in a daily diet as envisioned by the Govt panel: 100 kCal a day less meat, 300 kCal a day more dairy, and some lesser changes from a GHG footprint standpoint. It is most certainly not a typical vegetarian diet, and I don't think it is a fair representation of the Govt panel intended diet, either. The table does however explain how the authors can end up with a higher GHG than before: replace processed sugars by dairy! The increased fruit and vegetables, both of which have an index score of 0.2 compared to meat, are obviously minor GHG additions to the combined footprint.
So the obvious still holds: a diet that replaces meat and dairy with plant foods is extremely advantageous from an environmental standpoint, but
Replacing sugar (derived from plants) with dairy is not.
Who wudda thunk !?
What you called click-bait I called trollish. Your choice of word is perhaps more politically correct ?
So lets summarize all the nonsense:
1.The exercise overall replaces plant based food with animal products, not the headline replacement of meat by vegetables.
2. The proposed diet is most certainly not vegetarian, and is a very doubtful representation of the Govt recommendation except for one possible interpretation.
3. Even the most GHG intensive fruit or vegetable is no more than half compared of meat.0 -
I find headlines used for the article and some of its presentation to be click-baity.
They aren't really comparing a vegetarian diet, but a diet based on the USDA dietary recommendations.
Taking a look at their actual indexes from the paper itself:
It becomes immediately obvious that any time you replace meat or poultry with nuts, seeds, and soy, you're vastly reducing GHG and energy use (water use goes up). Eggs also trump the meat category. Vegetables and juice require more energy but less GHG than meat or poultry.
Oddly, they mention increasing seafood per recommendations by the USDA, except, eating seafood would is kind of against the term vegetarian isn't it? Kind of part of the proof of how the headlines and presentation of it is click-baiting and kind of taking shots at vegetarianism. You can see that seafood use can easily make a huge impact when used in place of meat or poultry, but actual vegetarianism would involve subbing meat and poultry with, again nuts, seeds, and soy.
A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.
Ideally, from that graph I should switch to an added sugar snickers diet.0 -
ericGold15 wrote: »This is supposed to represent the changes in a daily diet as envisioned by the Govt panel: 100 kCal a day less meat, 300 kCal a day more dairy, and some lesser changes from a GHG footprint standpoint. It is most certainly not a typical vegetarian diet, and I don't think it is a fair representation of the Govt panel intended diet, either.
Again, it wasn't supposed to be a typical vegetarian diet. (The inclusion of fish makes that pretty obvious, and vegetarians in the US often eat as poorly as others in many ways.)
As for not a fair representation of the recommended diet -- the thing that strikes me is the dairy being too high. Otherwise it looks pretty correct. What are you taking issue with? Or is it mainly the dairy?0 -
EvgeniZyntx wrote: »I find headlines used for the article and some of its presentation to be click-baity.
They aren't really comparing a vegetarian diet, but a diet based on the USDA dietary recommendations.
Taking a look at their actual indexes from the paper itself:
It becomes immediately obvious that any time you replace meat or poultry with nuts, seeds, and soy, you're vastly reducing GHG and energy use (water use goes up). Eggs also trump the meat category. Vegetables and juice require more energy but less GHG than meat or poultry.
Oddly, they mention increasing seafood per recommendations by the USDA, except, eating seafood would is kind of against the term vegetarian isn't it? Kind of part of the proof of how the headlines and presentation of it is click-baiting and kind of taking shots at vegetarianism. You can see that seafood use can easily make a huge impact when used in place of meat or poultry, but actual vegetarianism would involve subbing meat and poultry with, again nuts, seeds, and soy.
A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.
Ideally, from that graph I should switch to an added sugar snickers diet.
I'm in0 -
EvgeniZyntx wrote: »I find headlines used for the article and some of its presentation to be click-baity.
They aren't really comparing a vegetarian diet, but a diet based on the USDA dietary recommendations.
Taking a look at their actual indexes from the paper itself:
It becomes immediately obvious that any time you replace meat or poultry with nuts, seeds, and soy, you're vastly reducing GHG and energy use (water use goes up). Eggs also trump the meat category. Vegetables and juice require more energy but less GHG than meat or poultry.
Oddly, they mention increasing seafood per recommendations by the USDA, except, eating seafood would is kind of against the term vegetarian isn't it? Kind of part of the proof of how the headlines and presentation of it is click-baiting and kind of taking shots at vegetarianism. You can see that seafood use can easily make a huge impact when used in place of meat or poultry, but actual vegetarianism would involve subbing meat and poultry with, again nuts, seeds, and soy.
A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.
Ideally, from that graph I should switch to an added sugar snickers diet.
Peeps could work too, but I suppose we shouldn't point that out.0 -
As I pointed out in the post you partially quoted, the study result of increased GHG from adoption of their interpretation of the Govt diet is mostly due to substitution of processed sugar by dairy, in other words by introducing *more* animal products in favor of less plant derived processed sugar.lemurcat12 wrote: »ericGold15 wrote: »This is supposed to represent the changes in a daily diet as envisioned by the Govt panel: 100 kCal a day less meat, 300 kCal a day more dairy, and some lesser changes from a GHG footprint standpoint. It is most certainly not a typical vegetarian diet, and I don't think it is a fair representation of the Govt panel intended diet, either.
Again, it wasn't supposed to be a typical vegetarian diet. (The inclusion of fish makes that pretty obvious, and vegetarians in the US often eat as poorly as others in many ways.)
As for not a fair representation of the recommended diet -- the thing that strikes me is the dairy being too high. Otherwise it looks pretty correct. What are you taking issue with? Or is it mainly the dairy?
An equally valid implementation, (and more along the lines that the panel envisioned judging by the vegetarian example diet they refer to) increases soya, beans and lentils rather than milk. Had the study used that compliant diet the results would have shown a substantial ecologic benefit.
At the risk of slight over-simplification, the Govt panel wanted more calcium in the diet, and less HFCS. Oh, and some more vegetables, too. One compliant substitution is with dairy. The increase in vegetables is a minor footnote to the GHG analysis, which is what I have been saying for days now. I am surprised though that dairy is not closer to beef, which would have made the BS headlines all the more strident.
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lemurcat12 wrote: »
XXXXX could work too, but I suppose we shouldn't point that out.EvgeniZyntx wrote: »I find headlines used for the article and some of its presentation to be click-baity.
They aren't really comparing a vegetarian diet, but a diet based on the USDA dietary recommendations.
Taking a look at their actual indexes from the paper itself:
It becomes immediately obvious that any time you replace meat or poultry with nuts, seeds, and soy, you're vastly reducing GHG and energy use (water use goes up). Eggs also trump the meat category. Vegetables and juice require more energy but less GHG than meat or poultry.
Oddly, they mention increasing seafood per recommendations by the USDA, except, eating seafood would is kind of against the term vegetarian isn't it? Kind of part of the proof of how the headlines and presentation of it is click-baiting and kind of taking shots at vegetarianism. You can see that seafood use can easily make a huge impact when used in place of meat or poultry, but actual vegetarianism would involve subbing meat and poultry with, again nuts, seeds, and soy.
A more honest summary of the findings would be that a more nutritious diet per the USDA's recommendations and current evidence could have an increased environmental cost compared to purely reducing calories in the standard American diet.
Ideally, from that graph I should switch to an added sugar snickers diet.
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One thing that's bothering me a bit in this thread is people talking about "eating plants INSTEAD of meat". A lot of vegetarians have a culture of eating a plant-based diet. They are not SUBSTITUTING. If anything, when they start eating meat they now eat meat INSTEAD of... whatever they were eating before0
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One thing that's bothering me a bit in this thread is people talking about "eating plants INSTEAD of meat". A lot of vegetarians have a culture of eating a plant-based diet. They are not SUBSTITUTING. If anything, when they start eating meat they now eat meat INSTEAD of... whatever they were eating before
I'm not understanding this.0 -
This study from the U of AK is I think one of the reference articles used by the data aggregators in GHG footprint analyses.
I tried to parse out the assumed contribution of feedlot type energy inputs to their results unsuccessfully. Perhaps others will have more success. Perhaps the (surprising to me) difference between milk and meat's GHG footprint is the relative fat content of each. It's just a guess -- I really do not know.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »I assumed she meant blood sausage, but yeah. ;-)
Aren't all sausages made with blood?
Disclaimer: I do eat the odd fish or chicken once in a while
No, sausages are made with meat. Meat has blood. But chickens and fish have blood too.
All the blood...0 -
Presuming that the opening post has been adequately debunked and beaten to death, here is a summary graphic from shrinkthatfootprint.com that I think is a reasonable summary:
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Just remember soy is destructive. It is grown where the rainforest used to be and is often part of a monocrop style of farming, destroying the nutrients in the soil.
Soy? Of all the crops likely to come from growing in the rainforest, soy doesn't seem very high on the list. The world's largest producer and exporter of Soybeans is the United States. While the US does have rainforest, much of it isn't tropical rainforest (what most people think of as rainforest) and the US is currently increasing its forests, not decreasing.
well, if we aren't growing it in the rainforest, i guess we don't have to worry about US soybeans. and here we at least do duocrop rotation. but still, in developing countries, soy is responsible for destruction of the rainforest just like the cattle industry0 -
Is this thread a green thing0
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ericGold15 wrote: »
As I pointed out in the post you partially quoted, the study result of increased GHG from adoption of their interpretation of the Govt diet is mostly due to substitution of processed sugar by dairy, in other words by introducing *more* animal products in favor of less plant derived processed sugar.lemurcat12 wrote: »ericGold15 wrote: »This is supposed to represent the changes in a daily diet as envisioned by the Govt panel: 100 kCal a day less meat, 300 kCal a day more dairy, and some lesser changes from a GHG footprint standpoint. It is most certainly not a typical vegetarian diet, and I don't think it is a fair representation of the Govt panel intended diet, either.
Again, it wasn't supposed to be a typical vegetarian diet. (The inclusion of fish makes that pretty obvious, and vegetarians in the US often eat as poorly as others in many ways.)
As for not a fair representation of the recommended diet -- the thing that strikes me is the dairy being too high. Otherwise it looks pretty correct. What are you taking issue with? Or is it mainly the dairy?
An equally valid implementation, (and more along the lines that the panel envisioned judging by the vegetarian example diet they refer to) increases soya, beans and lentils rather than milk. Had the study used that compliant diet the results would have shown a substantial ecologic benefit.
At the risk of slight over-simplification, the Govt panel wanted more calcium in the diet, and less HFCS. Oh, and some more vegetables, too. One compliant substitution is with dairy. The increase in vegetables is a minor footnote to the GHG analysis, which is what I have been saying for days now. I am surprised though that dairy is not closer to beef, which would have made the BS headlines all the more strident.
Yeah, I agree that the dairy bit is questionable. Just wanted to know if it was more.
Your commentary continues to assume that the study was about vegetarian diets or reducing animal products, when it was not.0 -
One thing that's bothering me a bit in this thread is people talking about "eating plants INSTEAD of meat". A lot of vegetarians have a culture of eating a plant-based diet. They are not SUBSTITUTING. If anything, when they start eating meat they now eat meat INSTEAD of... whatever they were eating before
Humans are naturally omnivores. Also, most of us are probably not in cultures that are vegetarian, so when people become vegetarians at some point in life they replace the protein and calories they got from meat with other foods (like grains and legumes). That's not a slam on vegetarians.
I agree that it's ridiculous to talk about eating plants instead of meat, though. Most of my diet is plant-based, and yet I'm not a vegetarian.0 -
Just remember soy is destructive. It is grown where the rainforest used to be and is often part of a monocrop style of farming, destroying the nutrients in the soil.
Soy? Of all the crops likely to come from growing in the rainforest, soy doesn't seem very high on the list. The world's largest producer and exporter of Soybeans is the United States. While the US does have rainforest, much of it isn't tropical rainforest (what most people think of as rainforest) and the US is currently increasing its forests, not decreasing.
well, if we aren't growing it in the rainforest, i guess we don't have to worry about US soybeans. and here we at least do duocrop rotation. but still, in developing countries, soy is responsible for destruction of the rainforest just like the cattle industry
I tend to think that a lot of claims of destroying the rainforest are first world hypocrisy. The countries with rainforest are catching up in industrialization, but now that the US and Europe have already destroyed a lot of their trees and reached the point of regrowing, we're going to chastise them for using their resources, probably less wastefully than the first world did during its development.
It is an environmental concern, but it certainly isn't without a bit of hypocrisy.0
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