This viewpoint is expressed often but there are many counter arguments.

Nutrition is not a solved equation. We simply do not know how exactly various foods affect our health, the extent that human genetics and microbiome affect “proper” nutrition for a person, what all the essential nutrients are, what the immunoresponse to various foods are, and any number of unknown unknowns about diet. Any claims to the contrary are irresponsible at best.

You mention biodiversity but seem to be glossing over the role of ruminants in the ecological system, and the severe lack of biodiversity which can be the consequence of large scale crop production.

These and other reasons lead me to be concerned that this viewpoint is to some degree tainted by ideological blind spots.

> You mention biodiversity but seem to be glossing over the role of ruminants in the ecological system, and the severe lack of biodiversity which can be the consequence of large scale crop production.

That is true, but it's very likely the meat you buy was not grazing freely, and instead was stuffed with feed in a feedlot space or sometimes let to graze on a tiny plot to be "grass-fed". This is how the scale of our industrial animal agriculture is met.

[0] https://www.splendidtable.org/story/inside-the-factory-farm-...

> While doing research for his book Pig Tales, author Barry Estabrook visited a farmer in Iowa who raised 150,000 pigs a year. What he saw at this factory farm -- the way 97 percent of pigs in the U.S. are raised -- is a far cry from Old MacDonald's.

> "[The pigs] never see the light of day," he says. "They never set foot on anything but a bare, hard floor. They breathe that poisoned air 24/7."

[1] https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...

>According to the latest Sentience Institute analysis, the percent of U.S. farmed animals living on factory farms is…

* Broiler chickens (99.9%) live on factory farms

* Turkeys (99.8%) live on factory farms

* Egg chickens (98.2%) live on factory farms

* Pigs (98.3%) live on factory farms

* Cows (70.4%) live on factory farms

Completely removing meat is not solved. I think we can say with high confidence that Americans in particular eat way too much meat, in way too large of servings, far too often. If you just start having one meal a day without meat, you'll start to feel how odd it is to eat meat 3 times a day like most Americans do.

> Nutrition is not a solved equation. We simply do not know how exactly various foods affect our health, the extent that human genetics and microbiome affect “proper” nutrition for a person, what all the essential nutrients are, what the immunoresponse to various foods are, and any number of unknown unknowns about diet. Any claims to the contrary are irresponsible at best.

Nevertheless the same applies to the way we changed our diets in relatively recent times, and yet that hasn't stopped us.

And there's the whole problem of I don't want to and you're going to have to make me.

My bet is that as soon as there are sensible arguments to counteract your counter arguments, you will come up with new counter arguments.

To resolve this cycle let me propose a radical idea: Tell us when you would change your mind! Then we have something to work towards to.

What is the level of evidence and rigor that you require until you accept that plant based diets generally have better consequences for all beings involved and should be promoted over „western“ heavy meat based diets?

This is not universal.

Yes, the expansion of agricultural land is almost always bad. Unless its expansion into desert, and isn't depleting water (which is almost never the case).

But, sheep, cattle and especially pigs provide useful products in the farming cycle, essential if you want to cut out oil based fertilisers.

Thats not to mention that most of the country side of Europe looks the way it does because if farming sheep or cattle.

Pasture has its own biodiversity. Simply stopping all animal consumption would leave us more dependent on fertilisers in the short to medium term. It would also cause rapid local environmental changes, that would have interesting side effects.

We don’t need ruminants to go away, we just need carbon to be fairly priced so that if factors in the negative externalities that are currently ignored. This will make beef a luxury purchase, which will drive down the level of consumption.

Some of that cost could be offset by incentivizing carbon capturing farming practices like silvopasture and agroforestry. But while healthy pastures can sequester a lot of carbon, it’s nowhere near the numbers of a healthy forest. Ultimately we need to reforest a lot of land, which will reduce the grazing carrying load of the planet, and again make beef more expensive.

I get it: beef is easy, and people love it. So are fossil fuels. You can make a strong argument that both have done a lot of good in bringing the world out of poverty. But, where things stand today, it’s unsustainable.

People tend to focus just on the methane emissions of cows, but that’s probably somewhat solvable with changes to their diets — adding seaweed, etc. The real carbon cost is in land use change, chemical fertilizer production, transport, etc. The majority of our food system is set up to produce feed for animals. And the EPA numbers for agricultural emissions only focus on direct emissions from things like tilling, or gas burned by tractors. The true carbon cost of farming is likely to be much, much bigger than conventional estimates suggest.

There seems to be a fear that a mostly vegetarian / vegan diet is somehow less healthy. I’d argue that there’s plenty of contemporary science on the subject to suggest that it’s just as healthy a way to live, and perhaps even more so. But even if it’s a tossup, there’s an undeniable fact: global warming is happening, and the health effects of that greatly outweigh the health effects that can probably be solved with a couple of supplements. (Anecdotal evidence, but my kids are vegan due to allergies, and they’re thriving. It’s never been easier to be vegan. My parents were for a time when I was a kid, and let me tell you, things have come a long way.)

Luckily there's no risk at all of us suddenly stopping all animal consumption from one day to another. Just getting everybody to eat just a little less meat is already almost too much of a challenge. (This might partly be due to discussions often devolving into these grandiose-but-unlikely visions of a sudden animal-free society.)

That is a very bold claim. If we ignore everything else, then growing and getting enough nutritious plant based food out to everyone would be impossible without years of planning and changing. We cannot grow that much varied crop at the moment and we don't have facilities to process it.

We are on the right track with getting people to switch red with white meat, a single weekly day without meat, ect. But it is with all likelihood not something that we can do over the next decade. It's something we instill in the younger generations and as they grow up it will happen.

I think we're saying the same thing? We're not going to be able to switch everyone to plant-based food without years of planning of changing, so there's no need to worry about that happening - and it's potentially distracting from the thing we hopefully can manage, i.e. instilling in younger generations to eat less meat.

I must be misunderstanding it. I was reading it as a claim that we can switch at the snap of fingers without any risk or issue at all. Apologies if that was not correct.

That was indeed not what I was trying to say; I was trying to say we cannot switch at the snap of our fingers at all, so since we're not going to do that, whatever risk might be associated with that is not relevant to this discussion. Apologies for not clearly communicating :)

This reminds me of all the small dairy farms that used to exist where I grew up. My grandfathers' farm was pretty typical at 100 acres; 40 acres of rough pasture and wood lot ("the back 40"), almost 60 acres of fields that rotated as hay/grain and temporary pasture. Everything self-contained and fertilized with cow manure until the '70s when everything started ratcheting up.

At some point the land would be useless, unless biomass from the outside was added. Every product that leaves the farm is from the land and it's ability to support that cycle will be depleted sooner or later.

That's not how biomass works, biomass is not a zero-sum game. The main issue with sustainable dairy farming is secondary elements and nitrogen fixing. My grandfathers both planted clover in rotation for this reason.

Eventually, the ground will become depleted of phosphorous and potassium. Other trace elements tend to take a really long time to deplete, especially in clay.

That was my point. What we see today in conventional farming is just what your grandfathers did "on steroids". We've become really good at farming, so the depletion happens significantly faster.

For every product that leaves the farm, it takes something from the ground. Some can be amended with legume plants, but minerals will deplete at some point - adding them yearly is responsible farming.

Biomass does come from the outside though on earth - rainfall and photosynthesis are sufficient to increase the mass unless said farm is a closed cycle hermetically sealed dome.

That said it still could run into problems with other requisite elemental depletion in soil even with assistance of things like bacteria. If the plants need calcium and it is all extracted then thr farm would be limited to simpler life that doesn't need any trace elements. If say algae can get by on just atmospheric gas components, water, and sunlight indefinitely then a hypothetical algae farm could run indefinitely. But there isn't much of a market for algae.

I like meat, eat good quality meat 3-4 a week and enjoy it. However I see a bigger problem - insane amounts of food thrown away. Secondary problems imho is good packaging. If I buy 2 bags of food at local LIDL, I have 1 bag of plastic waste at the end. Nobody wants to solve this, zero profit here. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/20/f...

I'm not sure if this is what you were suggesting, but there seems to be some misconception that vegetarians don't like meat.

I like meat, in fact I love it. I used to contribute to a food blog reviewing steak restaurants. I love the smell and (the thought of) the taste. I haven't eaten meat for about five years because of environmental reasons, not because I dislike it.

Not eating meat is such an easy thing for most people to do, the facts are in front of us and it would make a significant difference. It does not fill with me with optimism that most are unwilling to do even this.

Reducing food waste comes in at #3 of ways to reduce CO2, while switching to a plant based diet comes in at #4 [1]. That said, #3 is about agriculture/business waste of food, not what you and I are tossing from our plates.

> "A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork"

Seriously though, the top thing in our control is eating plant based food!

1. https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

The GHG effect of Beef is much larger than wasted food, and it's x10 easier problem to solve.

An average cow produces 70 and 120 kg of methane a year, with 1.3-1.5 billion cows worldwide that's 91,000,000 metric tons of methane. That's 2.73 gigatonnes CO2 equivalent. Cows are the worst, if we exterminated every cow on earth it would only be a drop in the annual bucket given that we created 37.1 gigatonnes of just CO2 last year.

Even if you factor in the fertilizer, fuel, electricity used for those cattle and double the number, it still wouldn't come close to putting us carbon negative.

The United States gets roughly 30% of its power from coal, China roughly 70%.

Commercial aviation last year was responsible for at LEAST 0.55 gigatonnes of CO2 last year and in a decade the fuel use is up 30.5%. That's also a low figure for the CO2, it could be as much as 13% higher as there are various types of aviation fuel, it also does not include military figures. By the time you factor in all of electricity and fuel use supporting aviation by non-aircraft sources, commercial aviation is likely as bad as the cows of the world.

Last year in the United States 142.86 billion gallons of gasoline was sold. If it was all consumed that is 1.3 gigatonnes. That doesn't include diesel or kerosene, and that's just the United States... keep in mind China is adding so many new drivers to the road annually that they have a lottery just to decide who gets to sit for a license. As of last year China alone has 369 million registered drivers. If each of them averages 7.45 gallons of gasoline a week they're using as much as the United States.

I'm getting the feeling you think those numbers are supposed to make me give up on fighting climate change and feel like reducing meat is pointless, but if anything, you made and extremely compelling case for removing cow products from our diets. Thanks!

No those numbers are supposed to make you go "Oh my god! We need to stop taking vacations, road trips, ordering crap from China on AliExpress once a week, stop eating fruit and veg out of season unless it is canned, start buying local, stop commuting 20 miles to work each way, stop streaming tens of gigabytes a day and hosting everything on multiple cloud solutions, cut down our beef consumption, reduce-reuse-recycle, garden, buy used, stop buying a new phone/tablet/macbook every 18 months!!! I need to tell all of my friends and family about this, I need to show them the facts, it's going to take a lot more than just me to correct course! And crypto currencies, for the love of god, we have to stop with this nonsnese, it is responsible for tens of TWh of electricity usage!!!"

An estimate that is several years old puts the world at 3 BILLION hours of video games a week. Assume an average of 50w per hour (to factor in handhelds as well as modern consoles on giant televisions and hardcore gaming rigs) and that is 7.8TWh of electricity just for video games, using U.S. electricity source averages, thats' 1.77 gigatonnes of CO2.

Another older figure puts U.S. gamers over the age of 13 spending 6.3 hours a week playing games, this was before games like fortnite so may be higher now. imagine just shaving that in half and reading library books, gardening, taking a walk, using a reel mower instead of a gas powered mower, riding your bike to a friend's house instead of driving, walking to go get your food instead of uber eats... a small change in lifestyle and we could save a quarter or a half a gigatonne of carbon.

Now what if we could get lots of people to make lots of changes!

People, however, generally don't like change and when you have a lot of startups marketing things that rely heavily on fossil fuels - Cyrpto companies rely on massive amounts of processing directly or indirectly (exchanges), cloud-based services have gobs of power hungry servers with data often kept in multiple copies, food delivery services, subscription box services, even more established companies like Amazon encourage impulse buying instead of planning out what you need to buy and getting it once a week or month when you go to the store "get it in 2 hours!" "same day delivery!" "next day delivery!" "free shipping!".

We need a radical shift in companies and consumers or our energy demands, and our greenhouse gas emissions, are only going to continue to climb. Air travel fuel use for example is up 30% in a decade because travel is 'in' and 'influencers' are pushing it with their curated lifestyles and we're just shipping a whole lot more by air, now look at a dozen of other industries and you see similar. When I was a kid in the early 90's it was "4-6 weeks delivery" standard for everything, now you can get a stranger to go to the grocery for you and drive it to your house without leaving your couch because you want some chips and dip.

There's two sides to everything. Have you looked at the downside of not eating meat?

Assuming you adjust your diet instead of just subtracting meat (increase broccoli/beans/lentils/spinach for iron, etc), are there really any downsides? We've had vegetarians for a thousands of years, and I am not aware of have any health problems that are most efficiently solved by adding meat.

Don't eat spinach for iron, spinach is a very poor source of iron...[1] [multiple other sources you can google as well]

And vegetarians struggle quite a bit with getting proper dietary nutrition, not just with iron, but also Vitamin B12, Zinc, Omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, Calcium, Protein and Riboflavin. So it is not quite just "simply" adjust your diet you lazy meat eater.

[1] https://www.compoundchem.com/2018/07/17/spinach/

> And vegetarians struggle quite a bit with getting proper dietary nutrition, not just with iron, but also Vitamin B12, Zinc, Omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, Calcium, Protein and Riboflavin. So it is not quite just "simply" adjust your diet you lazy meat eater.

All of those listed able to be met easily by plant based sources with a well balanced diet.

And it's not like the average meat American is eating a healthy diet. I would be shocked if the standard American diet actually met all recommended nutritional intakes.

B12 is only in significant amounts of meat because it is heavily supplemented and present in the soil, today's clean produce strips most of those bacteria from the food supply.

B12 is the one I know a number of vegetarians have trouble getting from plant based sources. I've had trouble with it ages ago, and a friend of mine has been told by his doctor that he has to eat meat because of this.

The solution is really simple, though: eat less meat. We don't need meat every day. Once or twice a week is more than enough, and if everybody did that, it would greatly reduce this problem.

A doctor suggested eating meat to resolve a B12 deficiency? I find that strange. Low B12 is common among meat-eaters and vegetarians alike. It's a bacteria-byproduct and easily supplementable.

This is the first time I've heard that. I know a number of vegetarians who specifically had b12 deficiency, and every single time, the answer was that we could only get b12 from animal products. One of them gets b12 supplements aware that it's the only animal product she consumes.

I checked Wikipedia though, and it agrees with you, which makes me wonder even more why I've heard this exact same experience from several unconnected vegetarians.

Fermented foods like Idli can get you enough Vit B12. No need to eat meat.

Your friend couldn't take a B12 supplement?

Apparently not. I don't know his medical details, though.

Although I do wonder, if we're wrong about B12 only coming from animals, is it possible that we, or possible even Dutch physicians, are under-informed about our options?

> And vegetarians struggle quite a bit with getting proper dietary nutrition, not just with iron, but also Vitamin B12, Zinc, Omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, Calcium, Protein and Riboflavin. So it is not quite just "simply" adjust your diet you lazy meat eater.

I'm a vegetarian (yes, not a vegan yet) living in India and I'm not deficient in any of these. Also, never have been.

e.g. take the case of protein, I eat pulses almost daily (and a variety of) with rice, never felt I have less protein than required.

Vit B12 - you can get from fermented foods like Idli etc. Also, from the water soaked overnight in rice (actually rice is soaked in water).

Vegetarianism had been practised in India since time immemorial. One can say the food has been perfected here to stay healthy.

Time for a multivitamin?

> are there really any downsides? We've had vegetarians for a thousands of years

Vegetarians are self-selected. We can have reasonably high confidence it would be fine, but we can't be sure, and some people literally will not be able to tolerate it.

> I am not aware of have any health problems that are most efficiently solved by adding meat.

Depends how you define "efficient". There are plenty of nutrients that are most concentrated in meat, such that small portions of meat can replace the need to consume large portions of plant matter.

I always have to pipe in here. I’m probably in a smaller contingent but I’m a male with a B12 and Iron deficiency and the most effective solution has been to eat more red meat (according to my doctor) while taking a daily sublingual methylcobalamin. Even with the supplement if I go too long without making sure I eat some red meat I start noticing the old side effects return. If I don’t I literally lose red blood cells and they’re not replenished. Not so good.

It runs in my family. My poor mother is so bad that she has had to have a couple of blood transfusions because nothing else would bring her back from a bad state when she got there (the alternative being just lie down and die). Supplementation hasn’t helped her many times†. They also rarely eat red meat.

Here’s hoping I or my sister don’t end up the same way. My sister has already devolved to anemic and has had her own complications with that.

† edit: Rereading this it sounds confusing. I meant that supplementation has not helped her either prevent or recover from those cases until after the transfusion where her doctor stressed diet.

There are millions of vegetarians around the world who are perfectly healthy, my family included.

Even if meat is super healthy, I sill doubt factory produced meat is good - with all its chemicals.

I’d guess that most people eat meat because of its taste and because they were raised by their parents to eat meat, and not because they truly believe it is superior to vegetarian food

Not talking about meat vs vegetables being better or not but do you think that vegetables aren't factory produced? Do you think that fruits and vegetables aren't picked before fresh and sprayed with chemicals to make them the 'right' color or slow ripening or keep them from spoiling? There is also the often un-talked about issue of calorie density by weight or volume. All these things need shipped from where they are grown to your store/house. Meat is generally 10 times more calorie dense. So to ship the same calories we would need 10 times the trucks which would have a huge CO2 implication. Fruits and vegetables have tons of fiber and water which are good for us but it costs to ship them. The only way to make fruits and vegetables more weight/volume dense and reduce the fiber would be to blend them up into something akin to a smoothie. But then this will require more chemicals to keep it fresh. Also, I don't want to eat all my vegetables as a liquid so....

In the end, there are hugely interconnected issues and most people take one small facet, extrapolate it to infinity and ignore all the ripple effects and consequences of even the smallest change.

> Meat is generally 10 times more calorie dense. So to ship the same calories we would need 10 times the trucks which would have a huge CO2 implication

Where do those animals get their calories from? And how efficient are they at converting those calories into consumable flesh?

Meat and animal products is a good source for essential nutritional components that you have to make a conscious effort get from a pure plant base diet.

The problem is not eating meat. It's the amount of meat people eat that's unsustainable.

"I would have to think" isn't a very compelling argument here, imo. People eating the standard American diet don't have to think because:

1. That's the most popular diet, and foods have been fortified to add vitamins and minerals the diet tends to be deficient in.

2. Well, they're not exactly beacons of health, anyway.

There are billions of vegetarians in the world. They tend to live longer and have lower rates of cancer and heart disease than their meat-eating counterparts. "Thinking" seems like worthwhile effort.

Including poor people that cannot afford meat in this statistic make your argument seem like you're not serious.

If we take India, which is the country with more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined. It's estimated that 30-40% are vegetarians. A country with a strong cultural history of vegetarianism, religious beliefs that vegetarianism is "right", have the most developed vegetarian cuisine, and a system that makes it super simple to see if something is vegetarian or not - 60-70% still eat meat. If you move to the coast less than 5% are strictly vegetarians.

The issue is not consumption of meat - it's the amount. If you add nuts, beans, and protein heavy vegetables - a family of 4 can get by with 1-1.5kg of meat weekly and make sure all their micro nutrient needs are met without even trying. 1 day with fish, 1 day with red meat, and 1 day with white meat. It's a significantly more achievable goal than cutting meat all together, and it would probably result in a more healthy population than cutting meat all together because it covers all nutritional needs.

> They tend to live longer and have lower rates of cancer and heart disease than their meat-eating counterparts

As far as I've read it's not the meat that causes this, but the lack of vegetables, browning of meat, and addition of processed meat - so while a vegetarian diet solves the problem, you can retain meat in the diet and get the benefit anyway. If you have some peer reviewed scientific papers that show otherwise, I would like to see them because I have papers showing the opposite in abundance.

There are plenty good meat replacements. Plus, you can also exchange some meat for fish. From a diet viewpoint, you can easily do with meat just once a week.

More and more people I know have become partly vegetarian and it seems that the meat replacements are also becoming more popular. But I can't say much about the scale of things.

> it seems that the meat replacements are also becoming more popular

Which is very unfortunate, in my opinion. It might get people to switch to a more animal-friendly diet, but I simply can't think of how meat replacements are healthier than real meat.

What meat substitutes did you have in mind? How about tofu? Compared to say, cured meats, which contain cancer-causing nitrates, and far more heart disease-causing saturated fats, it's got to be significantly healthier.

And they're certainly healthier for the environment.

It really depends on what you call meat replacements. There are vegan dishes that can work as a decent barbecue sausage substitutes and I heard that synthetic-heme-based products can have a meaty feel... it's not like meat in super healthy when abused, so I wouldn't be surprised if a plant-based version could actually be better.

But if health is the main concern, the challenges are far greater than just meat consumption...

This is true in the US; and is becoming true elsewhere simply because meat has become so expensive. I know several friends who have gone vegetarian for a combination of health, financial and environmental benefits. It’s pretty common in progressive circles in the US at least.

This is all of this, but not THE single pressing climate issue, food is the one issue where most people from most economies have already cought up, besides some excessive outliers, there is little to catch up in consumption worldwide and it's still a low percentage on climate impact. The big consumer driven issues by climate impact are all other consumption housing and transportation. If we want to allow the rest of the world to catch up to our standard of living, food choices is not the one area where radical change is needed to make this sustainable.

Well, this is not really true. Animal agriculture is more or less the same total GHG emissions as the whole transportation sector, and it's technically way easier to switch to a vegetarian diet than stopping people from moving or finding new technological avances. So why not start with the low hanging fruits?

? any sources for those percentages. https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-common-flawed-com...

My point is that food is the one thing that's globally almost evenly distributed part of economy. And even if we all change diet's, it wont safe anyone's climate, if the rest is catching up with "western" lifestyles at their current emmisions footprint. Pretty much anything else is easier to change technically, if it wasnt for lobbyism.

I grew up in GDR and still had livestock of our own, this not just about food ethics, but also diversity/robustness of food supply in any more fragile economy.

Take a road trip to the central valley and take a look at what's being farmed. Almonds. Cotton for mattress stuffing (too shit a grade for anything else). Lettuce. All very high water use crops that don't give you hardly any nutrition save for the almond.

There are dozens of crops that we can and absolutely should dispense with. The problem with agriculture is farmers don't farm what uses the least resources and brings about the most nutrients per land area, they farm what returns the most. We also subsidize a lot of these crops.

1 liter of almonds milk require about 350 liter of water, while 1 liter of milk is about 1000 liter of water. So, still better to grow almonds than using dairy. Soy and oat are also better than almonds milk.

The problem is these alternatives need to have other nutrients added to them and be fortified with the things they lack compared to milk.

Go and look at a decent resource like nutrition data and compare what you get with milk vs the alternatives. Milk is far more nutritionally dense, and I'm not just referring to calories/macros. It has vitamins, a lot of minerals, and even omegas.

> less cancers due to red meat

This is the first I’ve heard of this, how strong is the link?

>Red meat was classified as Group 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans. What does this mean exactly? In the case of red meat, the classification is based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies showing positive associations between eating red meat and developing colorectal cancer as well as strong mechanistic evidence.

>Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed chance, bias, or confounding) could not be ruled out.[1]

## Bonus content on processed meats ##

>Processed meat was classified as Group 1, carcinogenic to humans. What does this mean? This category is used when there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans. In other words, there is convincing evidence that the agent causes cancer. The evaluation is usually based on epidemiological studies showing the development of cancer in exposed humans.

>In the case of processed meat, this classification is based on sufficient evidence from epidemiological studies that eating processed meat causes colorectal cancer.

[1] https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/

>Red meat was classified as Group 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans.

They classified coffee, mate, and "very hot beverages" the same way. I'll worry about red meat the exact same way I worry about coffee: not at all, and enjoy every bit I consume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2A_carcinog...

Here is a Q&A from WHO.

https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/

Here is some work looking at a possible connection between contact with bovine viruses and colorectal cancer. I wonder how many of human cancers are caused by viruses.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22212999

Pretty strong; red meat is classified as a probable cause of colorectal cancer. Canadian Cancer Society recommends reducing red meat intake. Processed meats are classified as a Group 1 Carcinogen.

Be careful there. A probable cause doesn't tell you anything about rates. Alcohol is a probable cause as well, and from what I can tell is more likely to cause cancer than meat.

Be careful? This advice makes no sense.

I'm going to go with the Canadian Cancer Society on red meat. They also, as a matter of fact, say alcohol is carcinogenic and to use alcohol in moderation.

Be careful because risk level isn't included in there.

Almost certainly. I don't think anyone was making the case that meat is more dangerous than alcohol though.

Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouAccsTzlGU

It's not good news...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47947965

Even just eating less beef would make a big difference; it has a much higher carboon footprint than other forms of meat: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714

It's a good litmus test. If we can't convince people to switch beef for chicken we're doomed.

You thought climate skeptics had too many "we don't know the full story..." type arguments? Trying convincing people to give up meat, as you're experience now.

"Other people give up their SUVs" is easy sell to people who don't drive SUVs.

Statements like this just prove that climate change is intellectual Puritanism adapted to the 21st century- we're doomed unless we all live lives of ascetic contemplation the way Emerson or Cotton Mather would have advocated.

I'm not a vegetarian myself, however I only eat meat products one per week. I can tell you that there's plenty of alternatives that taste good. To name a few Quorn[1] and Beyond Meat[2] and from what I read Impossible Food[3] as well.

So with the help of tech, we'll find less and less excuses not to switch, at least partially, to a plant based diet.

[1]: https://www.quorn.co.uk/ [2]: https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/ [3]: https://impossiblefoods.com/food/

"simply"

I don't need an "excuse" to continue eating meat. I like it, I eat measured amounts in a health way, and don't believe in this "veganism is healthier" nonsense. I'm going to continue eating it unless some one gives me a darn good reason not to.