Other things to remember:

- Personal health and nutrition is one of several criteria by which diets can be compared - A carnivore diet is harmful to the environment - A carnivore diet causes more suffering to sentient animals

It doesn’t necessarily cause more suffering. The only thing it necessitates is more death. Suffering of livestock is not a given, though it’s very likely.

Yes, I was indeed making a point about the actual conditions of farmed animals; not an abstract one about what may hypothetically be possible. I do consider what happens in the world to be more relevant here, than what we imagine could be happening.

Death, even if painless, is usually something we prefer not to have happen to us, most of the time.

FWIW, a lot of people who are really into meat also care about the living conditions of the animals they eat.

And regarding death: the alternative for livestock is not a life of leisure where they get to meander through the country side and nibbling a little here and a little there. No, the alternative is never being alive. And death on a farm is usually much more humane than death in nature.

> No, the alternative is never being alive.

Interesting. If we accept this argument -- that one who has brought someone else into existence is allowed to use lethal force on them (although "gently") -- because otherwise this someone wouldn't be in existence; then wouldn't we then also have to allow human parents to euthanise their children?

> And death on a farm is usually much more humane than death in nature.

Non-human animals are usually transported in trucks or on trains for many hours or days on their way to the slaughterhouse, with little access to food and water, under conditions you surely wouldn't want to travel.

Regardless, if we ignore that, and assume the trip to the slaughterhouse is 100% painless, would you still want someone to give you a "humane" death at the time of their choosing? Often animals are gassed; and I wonder how the same method of causing someone's death can be "humane" when applied to non-humans, but not (and here I'm of course making an assumption on your behalf and might be wrong) when done to humans?

Humane is perhaps a poor word choice on my part.

But, no, I do not consider animals to be morally equivalent to humans, so I am okay having a different moral system for animals. And I, personally, would rather live to be executed than never get a chance to be alive. Life is precious. I think we forget that. Here’s something that will perhaps drive home just how precious it is. Almost every black American is the descendant of people who thought it was A) worth living in cruel and brutal bondage, and B) worth bringing children into such a life.

> Life is precious. I think we forget that.

Life is precious. So why do we allow suffering and killing to please our taste buds?

While existing life is precious, do you also believe that not-yet-existing life of a calf is so precious, that we need to forcefully inseminate cows at the highest possible rate their bodies can handle?

If life is that sacred, do you support doing that to human women, too? Because otherwise we'd be acting unfairly to all the unborn children who would otherwise "never get a chance to be alive", right? If we don't do that we'll take away the life of millions of hypothetical humans, right?

> But, no, I do not consider animals to be morally equivalent to humans, so I am okay having a different moral system for animals.

This is somewhat agreeable. Non-humans are not equivalent to humans, and therefore it would be non-sense to argue that dogs should have the right to vote, and pigs should be allowed drivers license. They are so different from humans that they lack the capacity to do any of this.

However, many mammals (dogs, cats, cows, pigs, horses) can feel pain and distress and react to it in a way very similar to humans, by screaming and wrenching and sweating, by trying to escape. Why should their interest in not feeling pain be considered?

If we are OK to just say that we have a "different moral system" for a anyone who is not a member of our species -- regardless of what capacities they may have -- then surely it's also OK to have a "different moral system" for anyone who is of a different gender, or different race, or different nationality than ours, isn't it?

> Almost every black American is the descendant of people who thought it was A) worth living in cruel and brutal bondage, and B) worth bringing children into such a life.

Is your point that life is so precious that it's fine to enslave animals (both human and non-human) because even when someone is living under horrid conditions, it is still "worth bringing children into such a life" and "worth living in cruel and brutal bondage", and that makes it somehow justifiable?

It doesn’t necessarily even necessitate more death.

If you ate only meat you eat the equivalent of 1 cow per year.

Compare that with the amount of bugs, nematodes, rodents, etc. killed by modern farming methods.

Consider that it takes anywhere from 6 to 20 pounds of feed to get a pound of beef. That's way more resources used, environmental harm done and creatures killed to produce meat.

Only if you replace meat consumption with grains. A quick look at vegan and vegetarian recipes on social media makes it obvious that is not happening. Plants have a 50x range in the amount of calories they provide for $1, which suggests a similar range in their environmental burden.

What do you think most farmed cows eat?

> weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet

Most people are near-totally uninterested in their actuarial life expectancy. As a result, close to 100% of people on a diet are looking for weight loss.

Whether you should consider it a "health" objective is a more interesting question. From a Darwinian perspective, attracting a mate is much more important than whether you live to be 67 or 72.

While you are right, it's not a choice between pure life extension on one side and pure weight loss for attractiveness... Because the "healthiness" of a diet, in my opinion, includes its sustainability (do you regain the weight immediately after stopping?), reliability (can you use the diet to reduce your weight in a controlled way?), compatibility with exercise (which can also work to make you more attractive and therefore more successful in the Darwinian sexual selection sense). Another reason that "scale weight" is a poor indicator of the healthiness of a diet is that depending on the diet you may be losing mass via fat loss, muscle loss, water loss, etc. What's more important is body fat percentage reduction if we are talking about both traditional Western attractiveness and (usually) physical health overall. There are diets and lifestyles that make you more attractive and also increase your life expectancy.

Sustainability should be whether or not you are going around hungry. Because if not, then why would you ever stop the diet, or even worse go back to the old habits? Why would it be surprising that you would then gain your weight back?

And yeah muscle tissue is the important one. Any diet is sustainable until you burn through all your secondary reserves. How many buff vegetarians do you see? In my experience, you need to be a bona fide nutritional expert to maintain muscle mass on an exclusively plant-based diet.

Chronic reflux, constipation, nocturnal urination etc also make these diets unsustainable.

As buff vegan the proportion of buff vegans among vegans is probably the same as proportion of buff non-vegans among non-vegans. You have to be braindead not to be able to figure out what to eat as vegan to grow muscle, in the worst case I guess you can go to factory farmers who have mastered the art of growing muscle from plants..

How about 20 years? http://meatheals.com/2018/02/04/charlene-andersen/