editor
hiraethified
If it's so difficult to get a healthy amount of choline, then why aren't there any records of millions of people suffering?
It's just the same tired old vegan bashing, with some unpleasant mental health slurs thrown into the mix.
Bye bye MEAT! How will the post-meat future look?
- Thread starter MrCurry
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It's just the same tired old vegan bashing, with some unpleasant mental health slurs thrown into the mix.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
When I came out of the article you linked to, another article came up that states that virtually no one (including meat eaters) get the full daily allowance of choline. So there's no vegan bashing.
As I've said before I don't care what anyone eats as long as you make sure you're getting all the nutrients you need.
editor
hiraethified
Try reading the thread and perhaps focus in on the 'hilarious' suggestions of mental health problems that choline-deficient vegans/veggies are supposedly suffering.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
From a bit of reading around choline, it does appear that there are high levels of uncertainty about how much we need. Soybeans have decent levels, plus a few other plants but not that many. Main take-home I would have from that is that it illustrates how a vegan diet does need to be constructed with care. If you eat dairy or eggs, that makes things a whole lot simpler.
The human race has always managed with an omnivore diet. It brought us to where we are today.
Flights to New York less so. The latter shouldn’t be giving lectures to the former imho.
Flights to New York less so. The latter shouldn’t be giving lectures to the former imho.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It is interesting how offal is extremely high in choline. Almost like we evolved to be omnivores who eat the whole animal when we kill one to eat, not just the muscle.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
To be fair, the not eating offal trend is only a generation old really.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I blame school dinners. Overcooked pig's liver you could bounce off the floor, with hard white tubes running through it.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
Yeah, school liver was horrible, but I loved the lamb's liver my mum cooked, steak and kidney (sometimes pie if she could be arsed to make pastry), black pudding is still a favourite, pate etc etc
butcher
boner at the ready
Devilled kidneys on toast for Sunday breakfast too
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
Nice - we used to do devilled kidney in the pub where I had my first job. May have been on toast, can't remember. They were lush though.
Maggot
The Cake of Liberty
Really? I would love to see this paper, cos it sounds like nonsense to me.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
what do you suppose will happen to all that habitat suitable for ruminants that is not being farmed/in crops? There's more deer than anyone has ever known on the arable lands of the south. Land that used to have dairy cattle and sheep. No competition for food now.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Is it so unbelievable? In North America, pre-European colonisation, there were estimated to be somewhere between 30 and 60 million bison. Nowadays there are maybe double that number of cattle. More but not loads and loads more. And then there's deer, which, like bison, are now only a tiny fraction of their previous numbers in North America.
It's true of course that new grasslands have been created by cutting down trees, but plenty of wide grasslands have existed since before farming and they will always have been teeming with ruminants. Cos that's their speciality - grass.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
The US has 29 million beef cattle, 9.4 million dairy cows and 5.2 million sheep, so that's towards the lower estimate of Bison numbers in the early 1800s. That's just one singluar ruminant species. The USA has loads of species of deer, elk, wild sheep etc etc
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
And of course an appropriately grazed grassland sequesters more carbon in soil and roots and also stimulates growth to increase the rate of cycling of carbon. Then, as you've pointed out, there are the methanotrophic bacteria that live in healthy, biodiverse grasslands. It's a cycle.
So it's not as simple as putting a cow inside a tank, measuring how much methane it burps out and adding it to the account.
And yeah, quite possible that there were more ruminants belching away in North America pre-European colonisation.
So it's not as simple as putting a cow inside a tank, measuring how much methane it burps out and adding it to the account.
And yeah, quite possible that there were more ruminants belching away in North America pre-European colonisation.
Maggot
The Cake of Liberty
Most of the dairy cattle are kept indoors. That land is not gonna be used for wild animals.
Any land that is used by wild ruminants is gonna have much lower population density than when it was farmed.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
No they aren't.
No graze dairies are pretty new and uncommon - probably more common in the US than Europe, where they are more common in turn than NZ. They also still need to grow the grass to feed those dairy cows, mow it and store it as silage.
Lots of dairy cows are housed in winter but, as I hope you realise, the grass doesn't grow in winter. Often sheep are brought on after the cows are housed in the UK (its winter, in most cases the ground is too wet for cows, unless you want a mudbath) to graze down whats left ready for spring. I know, I used to do it with my sheep.
The only reason that land might have a lower density unfarmed is the ability we have to make hay to feed animals in the winter when the grass doesn't grow. In the wild, older animals might start to starve when the grass gets short and then are predated upon.
Also, look at the numbers that have just been posted - total cattle now are at the lower end of the estmates of the Bison population in the early 1800s (when some cattle were already being farmed in the US).
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Is it? If it's overgrazed, sure. But an ecosystem tends to support as much life as it can. A properly sustainable cattle farm won't overgraze. And it will promote good soils and biodiversity. It will, in short, mimic many of the ways that grasslands are sustained without humans.
In terms of environmental degradation, turning over areas such as the world's steppes to monoculture crop cultivation, as has happened extensively in both North America and Eurasia, is more harmful than a well-managed extensive cattle farm.
That's why it's important to be asking the right questions here. Otherwise you have little hope of producing the right answers.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
But the one overriding factor might be the on to concentrate most of the efforts on. Otherwise it is a case of shifting deckchairs on the titanic.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
“To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
Given that temperatures have already risen by 1.2 degrees and will continue to rise for decades even if we stopped all GHG production overnight, it’s hardly a surprise that meeting 1.5 will prove impossible regardless of what we do with agriculture. You might as well blame Bob for putting his plastic wrapper in the wrong recycling bin.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Eliminating oil-derived fertiliser would of course help. We need to stop adding new carbon to the cycle.
But that is part of the effort to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
But that is part of the effort to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
butcher
boner at the ready
More natural fertiliser from livestock would help with that
newme
Giant in Pastyland now
I worked based on the data you provided, you seem to assume an agenda that is not there. My mum was been a vegetarian for 20 years, my FIL was a vegan for 20 then a vegetarian for the last 10. I've been eating vegan without actually meaning to for several days just playing about with different sources of proteins after watching the blue zone documentary on netflix. The three sisters being a complete amino acid protein replacement for meat is very appealing and I am looking to grow it myself.
I specifically included meat eating diets as also having issues with balancing dietary intake of recommended nutrients. Maybe the recommended amount of choline is incorrect? Maybe it is less relevant in a vegan diet for some reason? Maybe it is affecting huge numbers of people regardless of diet type because they are all low in choline and we simply do no know what the affect is?
For all I know I am choline deficient, bloods came back fine lately but I doubt they test for that. All I did was take the information on choline sources for a vegan diet and extrapolate the difficulty of meeting the RDA as that is what was presented. The standard diet of people in general could be deficient in many vitamins and minerals however that was not discussed, potassium and magnesium are often deficient, iodine was added to salt in the US specifically because people were no getting enough through their diet. In general people can also exist on deficient diets for quite some time before issues are evident, the guy with an eating disorder that contained I believe mainly cheese and potato or similar took 20 years to take his vision and that was a very very much more restrictive diet than any other.
RDA's are also based on the average, so I would no expect my daughter at 100lbs to require the same amount as I would at more than twice that.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Do you mean 'regardless of what we do with fossil fuels', which was the paper's claim? At any rate you're just conceding the claim of the anti-animal agriculture side here (as well as the IPCC, the UNFAO, the UNEP, the Food Climate Research Network, the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, the Environmental Change Institute, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, EAT-Lancet, tens of thousands of scientists...). Given the margins are so tight for avoiding the 1.5 and 2 degree increase thresholds, dramatic action is needed across multiple domains of human activity, including energy production and agricultural production. And wrt agricultural production this in part means moving to, in the words of the above study, 'plant-rich' diets. This should not be a matter of controversy ffs!
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
That study uses very strange wording to characterise what is being done to end fossil fuel use.
We're not reducing GHG emissions from fossil fuels.
Even the use of coal, the dirtiest FF of them all, isn't going down yet.
We have maybe, just maybe, reached a peak, but FF use was still increasing steadily as recently as 2018. And to be clear, levelling off is no good at all. It just means that next year will do the same amount of damage as this year.
'Efforts' :|
And to repeat, there are two kinds of carbon emissions, which are very different from one another: those that form part of the existing carbon cycle and those that are adding new carbon to the carbon cycle. It is the latter that have caused this emergency and need to stop.
That is primarily the burning of fossil fuels, but it is also done when you chop down a forest to create farmland, when you turn petrol into fertiliser and when you degrade soils to grow monoculture crops.
All of these things need to stop. So yes, farming needs to be reformed. But first and foremost, and with the most urgency, in the name of not adding new carbon to the cycle.
We're not reducing GHG emissions from fossil fuels.
Even the use of coal, the dirtiest FF of them all, isn't going down yet.
We have maybe, just maybe, reached a peak, but FF use was still increasing steadily as recently as 2018. And to be clear, levelling off is no good at all. It just means that next year will do the same amount of damage as this year.
'Efforts' :|
And to repeat, there are two kinds of carbon emissions, which are very different from one another: those that form part of the existing carbon cycle and those that are adding new carbon to the carbon cycle. It is the latter that have caused this emergency and need to stop.
That is primarily the burning of fossil fuels, but it is also done when you chop down a forest to create farmland, when you turn petrol into fertiliser and when you degrade soils to grow monoculture crops.
All of these things need to stop. So yes, farming needs to be reformed. But first and foremost, and with the most urgency, in the name of not adding new carbon to the cycle.
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Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
It doesn't say they're good efforts.
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
It is, but unlike a lot of fossil fuel products it makes food available, often cheaply for millions. This is why it is not a "quick fix" to stop using it. Transitioning out of it is going to take a long time if we are going to avoid food price volatility and hunger. It is also going to require the re-integration of animal and crop agriculture.
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