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Bye bye MEAT! How will the post-meat future look?

How reluctant are you to give up your meat habit?

  • I’m already veggie or vegan as any right thinking person should be!

    Votes: 49 25.0%

  • I can take it or leave it, I won’t miss meat

    Votes: 31 15.8%

  • I’d give up meat if I could think what else to cook, but I can’t

    Votes: 7 3.6%

  • I’m reluctant to change, but I accept the need

    Votes: 34 17.3%

  • It’s unimaginable that I won’t have meat in most / all meals - I’ll probably starve

    Votes: 8 4.1%

  • Fuck the planet, I’ll be eating meat till I die or the planet explodes

    Votes: 6 3.1%

  • Poll fail, answer below

    Votes: 15 7.7%

  • Don’t believe the hype - meat will be available forever, nothing much will change

    Votes: 46 23.5%
  • Total voters
    196
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Cid said:
It's not that it doesn't work as such... Making lifestyle changes is how you get a handle on these things. The problem is that the promoters of these systems deal in absolutes; you need to be low carb, if that doesn't work you're not doing it right etc. If it works for you and feels sustainable, that's great... though tbh I will caveat that as again we don't really know the impact of repeated ketosis, or even long-term low carb in general (especially for high meat/high meat fat stuff). Point is that there are numerous ways of doing these things, some will work great for some people and be crap for others (e.g no fucking way am I fasting - physical job)... But that isn't what the likes of Taubes will tell you, it's their pet theory or you're doomed.
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Agree. Fuck extremists in any sphere. I have a degree in food science and I worked for a while in the industry so I’m not coming to this uncritically or without measuring my physical responses.

I’m firmly of the opinion the food industry makes us sick and the Pharma industry makes us a little bit better. But thats a whole other argument.
 
 
NoXion said:
You absolutely do need carbs, especially if you are physically active. It's a source of energy that's more readily available to the body than fat or protein. That ready availability is also what makes it easy to over-eat them, especially if one isn't physically active and the carbs come in the form of sugars or refined flours. That's why obesity and diabetes are such big problems.

If I hadn't taken sandwiches and Kendal mint cake with me on my trip up Snowdon in 2018, I would have fucking collapsed. People can and do over-indulge in carbs without enough fibre to go with them, but the idea that we don't need carbs is just arrant nonsense.
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Its reductionism.

You need the other two macronutrients (fats, protein) to survive, and are therefore, essential. You can survive without carbs and some people (certain diabetics for example) seem to do better without them.
Just because you can survive without carbs, doesn't mean you should.

There does seem to be mounting evidence that highly processed foods do seem to be quite bad for you, but this could be because they are often both very palatable and very energy dense, and so it is easy to overconsume. There are also a lot of unknowns around your gut microbiome.

Re; "A calorie is a calorie" - whilst this is categorically true (its the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1KG of water by 1 degree celcius), your body, however is not a bomb calorimiter, which is the instrument used to measure the calorie content of foods. What it does, is combusts the food in pure oxygen and measure the amount of heat energy given off (I have used one in feed trials). Your body isn't that efficient. Here is an example - two slices of bread, one white, one wholemeal, both at 100Kcal per slice. Your body will derive more energy from the white slice because a higher percentage of the wholemeal slice is fibre, which we cannot digest (and is kind of the point of fibre). You would expend more energy breaking down a steak than steak mince as the latter has essentially been partially masticated and the collagen started to be broken down.

This is an interesting watch:
 
Protein takes around 30% of the energy in contains to digest. Carbs around 10%, fats even less.

This article features an experiment with processed food showing how processing reduces the energy to digest as well.

It repeats the idea that it takes more energy to digest celery than it contains - the eat yourself thin with celery idea, which isn't quite a clear-cut fact* – but the numbers for digestion of different food stuffs are about the same as I've seen elsewhere.

Research Review: A calorie isn't a calorie - Precision Nutrition


*For the celery idea, the point is that you will burn more calories during the time you're eating it than you receive. ie:

you’ll still starve on a diet of celery, just more slowly than not eating at all.
Click to expand...

Does eating celery really burn calories? | BBC Science Focus Magazine
 
Mr Retro said:
If your motivation comes from health, and as a herbivore if you are eating manufactured seed oils I really advise you to look into this.
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Thanks, I did follow through with your advice. It looks like there are studies pointing both ways and so it's not possible to conclude anything at the moment. Either way, the oils used for all the deep-fried junk food can't be great for you. My nutrition sensei Dr Greger doesn't use oil at all. I do use oil, including seed oil, as I've found the oil-free diet unpalatable. I'll be interested to see if any further studies will come out on this.
 
Funky_monks said:
Re; "A calorie is a calorie" - whilst this is categorically true (its the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1KG of water by 1 degree celcius), your body, however is not a bomb calorimiter, which is the instrument used to measure the calorie content of foods. What it does, is combusts the food in pure oxygen and measure the amount of heat energy given off (I have used one in feed trials). Your body isn't that efficient. Here is an example - two slices of bread, one white, one wholemeal, both at 100Kcal per slice. Your body will derive more energy from the white slice because a higher percentage of the wholemeal slice is fibre, which we cannot digest (and is kind of the point of fibre). You would expend more energy breaking down a steak than steak mince as the latter has essentially been partially masticated and the collagen started to be broken down.

This is an interesting watch:
Click to expand...

Yes. I mean, petrol is incredibly calorific but good luck obtaining metabolic energy from it.
 
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Mr Retro said:
Not Naturili per se but seed oils in general (but you knew this is what I was saying). Along with highly processed food, refined sugar and carbohydrates, these unnatural foods are loved by the food industry. Cheap, tasty and long shelf life. Practically devoid of nutrition. It’s why people are so fat now.
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So, no nutrients but also so many nutrients that everyone is now fat. Fascinating.
 
Mr Retro said:
I’m not in ketosis but I dip in and out. I work up to a few days fasting every 6 months and I find being in ketosis before you fast for a bit makes it easier. Agree it’s just anecdote but it works for me and measurably so.
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Oh good, a ketosis/fasting crank lecturing everyone about stuff which, if he understood it, he wouldn't be a ketosis/fasting crank.
 
Cid said:
Yeah but everyone says everything about Einstein. Sleep obviously is important - the problem is that the specific ideas raised in Walker's book do not stand up to scrutiny and have been widely spread through society in general. The Tl:dr is you're probably getting enough sleep, and worrying about it will only make it worse.

I apologise for embracing this whole tangent about diet and sleep, it just annoys the shit out of me that so much stuff is uncritically accepted in those spaces. And it is incredibly widespread and can be profoundly damaging; eating disorders, people swinging into depression because they ate a carb, keto/low carb ending up verging on being meat promo (you can low carb vegan of course, it's just harder), assumption that keto will be just fine (we have very little idea of long-term impacts).
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tbh one of my take-aways from things like the keto diet is that it's a demonstration of how flexible humans are. There are certain combinations of substances that we need from our food, but we can get those combinations in all kinds of different ways.

Another take-away from reading up on keto is that it's a decent demonstration of just how much we still need to learn about diet. We've learned a huge amount in the last 100 years, but there is still basic (non-crank) disagreement even about whether or not a high-cholesterol diet really is bad for your heart. It can take time for paradigms like this to change, but it is now more or less accepted that 'low-fat' products that reduce fat by raising carbohydrates are probably worse than useless. Plus, as ever, there is this problem with even respectable-looking research:

In 2016, it was revealed that influential research in the 1960s that had downplayed the role of sugar in coronary heart disease had been funded by the sugar industry7.
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Is there more to a healthy-heart diet than cholesterol?

There was an article in New Scientist a couple of years ago (I don't subscribe any more so can't link) whose main thrust was that it's wrongheaded to think of there being one good diet. We all react differently to things like carbs and fats, and something that works for one person won't work for another. Plus, someone who is very active needs a very different balance from someone who isn't. That feels right to me, while the old injunction to eat lots of different fresh fruit and veg plus some meat and fish but not too much, and combining that with a bit of exercise, is still sound for most people.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
tbh one of my take-aways from things like the keto diet is that it's a demonstration of how flexible humans are. There are certain combinations of substances that we need from our food, but we can get those combinations in all kinds of different ways.

Another take-away from reading up on keto is that it's a decent demonstration of just how much we still need to learn about diet. We've learned a huge amount in the last 100 years, but there is still basic (non-crank) disagreement even about whether or not a high-cholesterol diet really is bad for your heart. It can take time for paradigms like this to change, but it is now more or less accepted that 'low-fat' products that reduce fat by raising carbohydrates are probably worse than useless. Plus, as ever, there is this problem with even respectable-looking research:



Is there more to a healthy-heart diet than cholesterol?

There was an article in New Scientist a couple of years ago (I don't subscribe any more so can't link) whose main thrust was that it's wrongheaded to think of there being one good diet. We all react differently to things like carbs and fats, and something that works for one person won't work for another. Plus, someone who is very active needs a very different balance from someone who isn't. That feels right to me, while the old injunction to eat lots of different fresh fruit and veg plus some meat and fish but not too much, and combining that with a bit of exercise, is still sound for most people.
Click to expand...

I’d say some of the old injunctions were too heavy in their endorsement of refined carbs, but otherwise in agreement.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
tbh one of my take-aways from things like the keto diet is that it's a demonstration of how flexible humans are. There are certain combinations of substances that we need from our food, but we can get those combinations in all kinds of different ways.

Another take-away from reading up on keto is that it's a decent demonstration of just how much we still need to learn about diet. We've learned a huge amount in the last 100 years, but there is still basic (non-crank) disagreement even about whether or not a high-cholesterol diet really is bad for your heart. It can take time for paradigms like this to change, but it is now more or less accepted that 'low-fat' products that reduce fat by raising carbohydrates are probably worse than useless. Plus, as ever, there is this problem with even respectable-looking research:



Is there more to a healthy-heart diet than cholesterol?

There was an article in New Scientist a couple of years ago (I don't subscribe any more so can't link) whose main thrust was that it's wrongheaded to think of there being one good diet. We all react differently to things like carbs and fats, and something that works for one person won't work for another. Plus, someone who is very active needs a very different balance from someone who isn't. That feels right to me, while the old injunction to eat lots of different fresh fruit and veg plus some meat and fish but not too much, and combining that with a bit of exercise, is still sound for most people.
Click to expand...

To be clear what I'm talking about isn't carbs v fats, keto v whatever etc... I'm talking more about the framing of those things, and where that puts the advocates for one or another system. Because in reality I think those specific diets come less from a desire to understand health and outcomes, more from the fact that it's a lot easier to market them as 'the answer'. Keto particularly I think there are very good reasons to avoid; standard iterations increase meat consumption, we don't know a lot about long term impacts, it's difficult for it to be part of a long-term lifestyle change etc etc... but that's almost a tangential point. As you say diet is extremely complex, effects will vary from person to person, and certainly can vary over wider populations.

Even the old adage is kind of open to question - "eat food, not too much, mostly plants", that's from Michael Pollan... He is a specific person, with a particular agenda. As far as I can remember it's mostly pretty safe in his case, though I believe he's quite anti-gmo. He's absolutely not a scientist though. Hopefully you get what I mean here - so much of dietary advice (as opposed to dietary science, though as you mention of course that can be tainted too) is driven by people who are published authors, and whose books have caught on for one reason or another. The actual science is genuinely hard to do - you can only perform the highest standard of study for a few days (metabolic chamber), you can only perform good studies for a couple of months (where you have participants in a ward with controlled meals, exercise etc). Otherwise you have to rely on population studies that are really hard to control and highly vulnerable to stuff like p-hacking.

What frustrates me is that stuff with very little evidence behind it filters out into the mainstream... 'A calorie is not a calorie' might come from er... person you linked above, or from someone like Giles Yeo. Pretty sensible takes rooted in more well established metabolic science. But it might also come from the sugar is toxic, weight loss is entirely to do with insulin response crowd. And the latter get a lot of traction because they're very good at publicity and very confident in their presentation. And will happily appear with popular quacks like Dr Oz.

My own approach is to try and use the stuff that seems well established and... makes sense. Like sure, cut down on refined carbs, they are very obviously easy to over-consume. And I know that for me eating a decent amount of protein keeps me full. But at the same time I'm not going to over restrict... The reality is that I'm going to be fine if I have cake or pizza sometimes. But yeah, I also like cycling and am an excellent cook, so it's probably not advice I'd extend beyond myself. Er... Conclusion - diet is complex, anyone saying that their approach, specifically their restrict x or y approach, is the answer is probably full of shit.
 
Yes, main thing is not to be dogmatic, but to enter ketosis you need to be dogmatic. I would think that sets the keto diet a bit apart as it's something that requires long-term elimination of kinds of food that we are perfectly well evolved to eat. I don't think cutting out bread, rice and pasta is going to harm someone. But when I hear that bananas are off the menu, my eyebrows start to raise.

Having said that, the fact that the mechanism for ketosis switches on in humans when deprived of carbs shows that it has evolved in us at some point (quite possibly long before we became human) as a mechanism for surviving when there is a shortage of carbs. It's probably not going to kill you, and if it helps you lose weight, that might be a positive. Problem I've noted in two friends who go keto periodically is that they put the weight straight back on when they come off it. And when they're full keto, while they report that they feel great, seen from the outside they're not exactly bundles of energy.

ETA: I suspect that the subjective report of 'feeling good' when on keto is at least partly explained by the sense of achievement for reaching ketosis in the first place, reinforced by seeing the weight start to come off. They're not lying, our subjective reports just aren't always reliable.
 
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littlebabyjesus said:
Yes, main thing is not to be dogmatic, but to enter ketosis you need to be dogmatic. I would think that sets the keto diet a bit apart as it's something that requires long-term elimination of kinds of food that we are perfectly well evolved to eat. I don't think cutting out bread, rice and pasta is going to harm someone. But when I hear that bananas are off the menu, my eyebrows start to raise.
Click to expand...

Restricting is how you get to disordered eating... I think you've got to remember that these are things we frequently do in group settings; going for a pizza, birthday cake etc. If you regard a diet as something you 'go on' it makes intuitive sense that cutting out carbs for a while will work. And it will work in reality too... But only short term. The problem is that once people 'go back to normal' they will almost invariably put the weight back on... exactly why is where we get into more speculative stuff of course, but we can say that most diets fail and are often actually counterproductive. Personal theory (well, not mine obvs, one I think makes sense) is that there's something of a rebound effect going on; build up a bit of a complex around pizza, but really like pizza. Eat shitty pizza variants from time to time. Remember good pizza, watch friends eating it without worries. Eat good pizza, feel like you're a failure and nothing's worth it any more. Binge for for a few weeks. Diet. Repeat. Disordered eating.

So how do diets succeed? People who do are certainly in the minority (I think the figure that always gets bandied about is 10%, but that sounds suspicious). Again, not super clear. But as I recall (I'm sorry I'm not referencing this stuff, way too much to check over) it's usually by making changes that are long term sustainable. Cook more, cook better... Learn to enjoy that. Enjoy social eating, and don't feel there's some need to compensate. Of course then we get to the issue that this is really something you require a fair amount of privilege to do - cooking takes time, cooking well takes more time and money etc.

littlebabyjesus said:
Having said that, the fact that the mechanism for ketosis switches on in humans when deprived of carbs shows that it has evolved in us at some point (quite possibly long before we became human) as a mechanism for surviving when there is a shortage of carbs. It's probably not going to kill you, and if it helps you lose weight, that might be a positive. Problem I've noted in two friends who go keto periodically is that they put the weight straight back on when they come off it. And when they're full keto, while they report that they feel great, seen from the outside they're not exactly bundles of energy.

ETA: I suspect that the subjective report of 'feeling good' when on keto is at least partly explained by the sense of achievement for reaching ketosis in the first place, reinforced by seeing the weight start to come off. They're not lying, our subjective reports just aren't always reliable.
Click to expand...

Yep. See above.

Also worth noting that things our body does to survive are not always good for it. One of the groups that often gets brought up around low carb diets is Inuit peoples... Thing is though they actually have genetic adaptations that stop them from going into ketosis... Repeat ketosis put enough of a selection pressure on that group that it actually resulted in genetic change. That is a bit of a warning sign to me.
 
Next book on my reading list is Nick Lane's Transformer, which is all about the Krebs cycle. This is the cascade of chemical reactions that takes place within cells during respiration. Lane talks about how this cycle can go in either direction - one way during respiration to release stored energy from chemicals, but also in reverse to store energy by making chemicals. As we get older, this reverse-Krebs starts to happen more often, which is why we tend to put on weight - reverse-Krebs taking energy and making more of us. It's also what happens inside cancer cells, which stop using energy to do whatever work they're supposed to be doing and instead use it to make more of themselves.

Lane's solution to this problem is rather unsexy. As you get older, eat a bit less and exercise a bit more. This will help your cells maintain good Krebs-cycle habits, keeping your weight down and helping to prevent cancer.

Interesting point about the Inuit. Looking into it a bit further, it's not just humans that don't do permanent ketosis. Neither do other animals - obligate carnivores get glucose from gluconeogenesis using amino acids, which is what the Inuit are doing when they eat raw meat.

The T. Colin Campbell Center isn't an entirely neutral source, but this article is well-referenced, and pretty damning of ketosis as anything other than a temporary emergency state. Its analysis of the efficiency of ketones as an energy source versus glucose bears out by what I see subjectively in friends.

Even when exercising at a submaximal level (for example, biking at a moderate speed), heart rate and adrenaline levels rise more when people are eating a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet[4] vs. a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. This results in those on the high fat diet perceiving that they are working harder to achieve the same pace as the high-carbers, and they have much more difficulty speeding up their pace in sprints or climbs.
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Is the Ketogenic Diet Natural for Humans?

This is the study they cite:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1158881/pdf/jphysiol00293-0292.pdf

Ketosis is clearly suboptimal in terms of performance. That doesn't make it lethal - having reduced athletic ability is going to be a massive selection pressure in and of itself, and would explain it being rapidly selected out of human populations - but it rings alarm bells regarding sustainability.
 
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The thing that works for me is the 5/2. I first did it about five years ago and went from 14st to 11.5st. Now, every time I creep back up to 12st, I do it again for a while, which works out about once every year or two. It takes about 12 weeks to lose half a stone. The real trick of it on my brain is not so much the fast days themselves, but the fact that it trains me to just cope with less food, and I end up three months later just generally eating less.

I don’t evangelise about it though. It works for me, it doesn’t work for others. It’s more about psychology than special biometric shortcuts, I think.
 
butcher said:
Maybe a meat free future will look depressed, interesting meta analysis with good caveats

Eta the journal has a very high impact score too


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“[…] critics […] pointed out that Dobersek had recieved more than $10,000 in grant money from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association "to conduct a systematic review on 'Beef for a Happier and Healthier Life.'”

People who eat meat report lower levels of depression and anxiety than vegans do, a recent analysis suggests

The author is quoted in that piece:

“How many people have you met that are both happy and diet all the time?" Urska Dobersek, a psychologist at the University of Southern Indiana who co-authored the analysis, told Insider. "Probably very few - and there is a strong, scientific reason for that - restrictive diets make people unhealthy and unhappy in the long term."

Except veganism isn’t a weight-loss diet: it’s an ethical stance.
 
The journal article’s metric score is irrelevant… unlike the disclosure statement:

Disclosure statement​

UD, SA, JA, and GW have previously received funding from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

Funding​

This study was funded in part via an unrestricted research grant from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The sponsor of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.
 
If it's posting up nonsense studies time, why not go with this one:

Tracking Happiness asked 11,537 people in the USA to track their moods and asked about their diets. The results were then grouped into four categories: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian and meat-eater. Vegans reported 7% higher happiness rating than meat-eaters, who fell below the average rating of 6.90.

Interestingly, the study suggested that it wasn’t just the plants that were making people happier; happier people are more likely to turn plant-based. Out of the 8,988 meat-eaters surveyed, those who reported the highest happiness ratings were more likely to adopt a fully vegan diet in the future. The main driver for going vegan or vegetarian, according to the study, is the environment, with 32% of the surveyed herbivores saying that protecting the environment was their biggest motive, and these were the people who had the highest happiness scores. Those who cited animal cruelty tended to have the lowest ratings within the plant-based groups.
Click to expand...

www.stylist.co.uk

Is there any truth to vegans being happier than meat-eaters?

A new study claims that chomping on plant-based foods can make us happier than eating meat. Here's why.
www.stylist.co.uk www.stylist.co.uk
 
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