The discussion here seems to have ignored what seems like the interesting/new part of this. There has been plenty of prior research and media around blanket use of antibiotics creating _drug resistant_ bacteria which are harder to fight with drugs. But this is saying that additionally because some antibiotics are similar to chemicals endogenously produced within our own bodies, they also produce bacteria which our bodies are less effective at fighting on their own.
I.e. this isn't just about the use of antibiotics -- this is about the use of antibiotics which are _similar to parts of our own immune systems_. Using antibiotics which are more dissimilar to our own immune responses would create _drug resistant_ bacteria but not _immune resistant_ bacteria.
Physiologically it's well known that that the antibacterial peptides are part of the immune system. They were discovered as a part of the pathogen defense mechanisms of insects, found to be present also in vertebrates as well and only then, of course, exploited for chemical mimicry as pharmaca.
How anybody could believe taking that component out from the rest of the defense system, and breed pathogen resistance against it in isolation, could be anything but begging for calamity is beyond me. It boggles the mind that this has been permitted to go on, but particularly unexpected it is not at all, sadly.
> How anybody could believe taking that component out from the rest of the defense system, and breed pathogen resistance against it in isolation, could be anything but begging for calamity is beyond me. It boggles the mind that this has been permitted to go on, but particularly unexpected it is not at all, sadly.
Every irreplaceable natural resource (in this case, human immunity) is somebody's profit waiting to be taken, unless stopped.
And this in a pharma sub-field infamous for not getting enough investment in corporate research because the effect of novel substances is almost instantly destroyed by precisely the sort of misuse the article points to.
One's tempted to dismiss any attempts to adequately explain the exploitation with either greed or stupidity as impossible, and just chalk it up to pure malice...
Maybe ok if used just as medicine for rare cases where it's the last hope.. but for what do we use it? To have more of mass-produced meat every day, meat with meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, yay!
One of the drivers of antibiotic use in farming is the fact that price points for food need to remain low because of stagnant wages. In order to eke out a profit, industrial amounts of food are needed at lower costs and those costs need to go down even in the face of inflation.
It's yet another perverse incentive and market failure that'll lead to ruin.
> In the study, E coli carrying a resistance gene, called MCR-1, were exposed to AMPs known to play important roles in innate immunity in chickens, pigs, and humans.
If the same kinds of AMPs appear across mammals and birds, breaking the monoculture (by e.g. raising animals of different breeds and species etc) but still using this class of antibiotics would still seem likely to cause the immune resistance problem. I'm not advocating for the monoculture-based practices, but I don't see how it's related to this specific mechanism.
I think the connection to monoculture is that specific pathogens could decimate homogenous populations (see Irish potato famine), making widespread antibiotic use necessary in a much more preventative way
Monocultures have a history of disaster. The Great Irish Famine happened, in part, because the economic system at the time forced the working class to depend on a potato monoculture for sustenance.
We see a similar result happening where our economic system forces us to depend on monocultures for food production.
Tangent, but my wife's side of the family is Korean, whereas myself and my side of the family is Korean American.
I was surprised at how liberally antibiotics are given out in the Korean medical system, even for health issues that shouldn't be bacterial. Many members of her family routinely pop antibiotic pills to treat the common cold or flu. They don't take a "full course" either - just a pill a day for a few days until they feel better. When they got Covid, they were again popping antibiotic pills to "treat" it. They swear it works, and this behavior is apparently commonplace there.
I have very positive views on the Korean medical system, and think it generally beats the American one in almost every aspect. But this attitude towards antibiotics was shocking.
My wife doesn't partake in this mainly because antibiotics are extremely rough on her stomach.
I don't think they're having problems with antibiotic resistance there either, so what gives?
The idea that you need to take a full course of antibiotics came from studies which were done in patients with tuberculosis, which is very recalcitrant to treatment.
Depending on the infection that you have, finishing the course may not always be the best option since it nukes your microbiota and selects for more resistant pathogens. It depends on the rate of mutation of each pathogen, amongst other factors.
In the cancer field, where resistance is also very common, there are some groups exploring 'adaptive therapy' also known as 'press-pulse' therapy, where you intentionally stop treatment when symptoms go away, in order to maintain a population of the drug-sensitive cells, which will compete with the drug-resistant cells (since being resistant takes energy). It's not curative but when resistance is inevitable, could pro-long life of the patient. I wonder if this type of thing has already been tried with antibiotics.
Modifying Adaptive Therapy to Enhance Competitive Suppression
I appreciate this comment, but I think it's misplaced as the real issue is the candid handing out of antibiotics instead of controlling their use both in livestock and humans.
I am surprised this happens in Korea. I know such attitudes about antibiotics are commonplace in the developing world. Pharmacists are in the business of selling pills - a doctor's prescription isn't always necessary, but Korea is a high income, well educated country...
"NDM-1[1] is an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of beta-lactam antibiotics. These include the antibiotics of the carbapenem family, which are a mainstay for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections."
"Ten years ago, a review on the status of resistance in Mexico was bleak: with antibiotics freely sold over the counter and poor regulation of generic drugs, among other conditions, resistance among relevant pathogens often ranked top, either among Latin American countries, or even worldwide. "
Antibiotic overuse is shockingly common in a lot of countries. A company I worked for had a lot of remote offices around the world that I interacted with over video. Whenever I had allergies or a runny nose, I'd get a lot of people asking me why I'm not taking antibiotics. They'd recommend different types of antibiotics that they thought "cured" their last cold.
There are many countries where pharmacies don't require prescriptions for common drugs. People can stop by the pharmacy and grab some antibiotics whenever they feel like taking some.
The United States isn't totally immune. Many people go to the doctor at the first signs of a cold and demand antibiotics. Most doctors will refuse, but some of them start writing prescriptions so the patients will go away and leave a good review. Anecdotally, online local parenting groups always seem to have some group of people swapping tips about which doctors will prescribe antibiotics so they can go get the drugs they want. There are also the people who order fish antibiotics and take it themselves, too.
Antibiotic resistance is only part of the problem. Unnecessarily destroying gut bacteria is not great. Getting C. Diff. Colitis is not fun.
The US may have gone too far the opposite way. Under-dosing also leads to resistance. I had pneumonia and was under prescribed repeatedly for 2 months before going to a doctor who was willing to write give me a high enough dose of simple amoxicillin (!!) to knock it out in two days.
My whole family had strep throat for a month. I'm convinced it's because they were reticent to prescribe antibiotics strong enough. They said "You'll feel better in 24 hours, promise", and when I called 3 days later with a fever still, they just told me to ride out the course.
I don’t think it’s clear that antibiotic resistance is a sustainable effective trait for bacteria to survive in an ecosystem that is not constantly under antibiotics (more so than what you’re implying about Korea). Thinking of it as a passive trait without trade offs may not be correct.
On the other hand, if that does hold true and it does become a common passive trait, then the world is fucked.
I think human use of antibiotics, even when used frivolously like that, are less of a problem than agricultural use.
Antibiotics-resistance is typically an expensive trait for bacteria to maintain, and without selective pressure, it'll typically be selected against. (It's why rotating antibiotics works.)
Also a pill a day, infrequently, is probably also not a big deal.
The problem arises in agricultural use when antibiotics are fed to cattle every single day, with every meal, to every head of cattle, in every ranch. That creates an environment where you're selecting for bacteria resistant to antibiotics. But even if antiobotics start being resisted, we just need to stop using them for a while and they'll become effective again. Sucks for the people infected the the bacteria though. So we can take some amount of heart in that abusing antibiotics is unlikely to end humanity, it just might create a huge humanitarian disaster at some point, which as we've seen, modern capitalism is very prepared to ~handle~ ignore.
We live in an interconnected world so I don't think there would be any localized antibiotic resistance - the effect of that will diffuse across the planet quickly.
That said, I wonder what their IBS rates are like. That can't be great for their gut biome.
Sample size of one, but even a half course of antibiotics wreaks havoc on my wife's gut. Which is why she doesn't follow the rest of her family in popping antibiotics for the common cold.
In contrast though, she had a surgical operation last year (in the US). The hospital refused to give her antibiotics immediately following the operation, saying she probably wouldn't need it. This was shocking for her - and the surgical site actually did end up getting mildly infected.
I constantly hear about this, but I've never experience bowel issues from antibiotics, nor has anyone in my family, adults or children, from a wide array of them.
I know gut biomes must be different but they must be orders of magnitude more different than I assumed. I don't know what else would explain a little dose nuking people's gut biomes, while we experience absolutely nothing.
My gut is only healthy when I'm mostly eating plants, it's crazy to make a blanket statement that eating plants is bad for your gut. How are you supposed to get fiber without plants?
Perhaps it has to do with Koreans eating kimchi, which are high in probiotics (compared to food in typical western diet)?
Antibiotics would wipe out much of the bacteria in your gut, providing space for deadly bacteria to colonize the gut. But kimchi's probiotics would repopulate the gut bacteria to reduce the chances for deadly bacteria to grow.
Of course, we're Korean, so that goes without saying.
However my understanding is that while antibiotics will wipe out your gut bacteria pretty quickly, it takes a much longer time for it to repopulate, probiotics or otherwise.
I believe this is partly caused by competition. As I'm sure you are aware, there are gazilion private clinics in one block competiting for business. You could be a sensible doctor and tell the patient with the common cold that it will get better naturally and send them home (or maybe prescribe them some painkillers). But giving them big piles of antibiotics makes the patients more content as they believe it is going to help. And content patients leads to better businesses.
Those small clinics live and die by local ajummas' word of mouth, so anything helps.
e.g.
"I went to Haeng-bok clinic and the doctor told me to just rest up but it just won't go away"
"Aigo, Unnie~ I went to Sa-rang clinic last time I caught a cold - you know the one at that intersection - and the doctor gave me all these pills. The cold was gone the next day!"
It’s the same in China. My wife’s family is from there, and they hand out antibiotics for everything. Everyone seems to have a stash of them as well.
When my in-laws were visiting Australia for a couple of months and my wife’s mother got a minor cold, she started demanding we get her some antibiotics. We tried to explain that there’s no way a doctor would prescribe them for a minor sniffle, and she totally went if the deep end, acting as if she was going to die if she didn’t get them. But in the end, she survived.
Same. Every doc relative would have some, despite their current crackdown on antibiotics prescribing online (not sales -- you can still fudge some paper and get it done).
The most striking thing about antibiotics use is not human use, however. Colistin, mentioned in the article, became the last line of defense against resistant bacteria while China was still liberally giving it to livestock. Thankfully use of this one is going to end…
This happens in a lot of developing countries, but I'm surprised at SK. I've spent a lot of time in Mexico and Colombia. It's that way down there - antibiotics for everything.
Just because it's a first world country doesn't mean its people have first rate knowledge of biology. Japan also overuses antibiotics, as does many other countries we might think know better.
The simple fact of the matter is most people don't differentiate between bacteria and viruses, they're both germs that cause disease and antibiotics are just one kind of medicine that can cure the disease. Placebo effect also obviously is a significant factor because of that.
"Occasional" is a vast understatement. Yes, you had to have a prescription but you could get that by phone, without getting an appointment. Or the doctor would give you a prescription "just in case" when you were in for some other reason or with something obviously viral.
Oh, and "In 2014, 266.1 million courses of antibiotics are dispensed to outpatients in U.S. community pharmacies. This equates to more than 5 prescriptions written each year for every 6 people in the United States." (Which is somewhat later than the time I was thinking about.) (https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/data/outpatient-prescribi...)
For comparison, that page links to annual reports:
Another aspect to this story is that people stockpile antibiotics - probably resulting from doctors prescribing a very large number of doses to begin with.
For even her family that reside in the US, whenever they make a trip back to Korea, they come back with bags full of antibiotic pills to replenish their local supply.
Many of these beyond a surface-level inspection break down upon a closer inspection
Inefficient land and resource use
Land degradation
Loss of biodiversity
Soil erosion
In the US, most of the land used for grazing is already insufficient for farming most crops. You take cows and such off of them, you're left with near-useless land.
Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
Not exclusive to livestock and their feed, feels weird to attribute it to just them.
Widely-available meat in the Western world is a Pandora's Box; it's just not going away. It's better to find ways to make it more efficient than to go all pissed-off-vegan and want to ban meat everywhere in favor of ultra-processed replacement monstrosities. You'll win more people to your side too.
Furthermore, attacking the end-consumer does absolutely nothing. It's like banning plastic bags/straws, It just makes liberal lawmakers feel good about themselves. You want to really change our diets? Go after the billions in subsidies handed out to farmers for growing corn/soybeans/dairy and such in order to stay competitive against cheaper products overseas. Good luck.
> Go after the billions in subsidies handed out to farmers for growing corn/soybeans/dairy and such in order to stay competitive against cheaper products overseas. Good luck.
We deliberately overproduce food so that when, say, corrupt regimes attack one of the world's largest wheat growers, we don't end up starving. It's a necessary adaptation for a country that has to worry about food security in the event of wars, even if it has 2nd order effects that are not so good.
Exactly, when it comes to essential matters like food, stability is much more important than efficiency. I don't want the food supply chain optimized for efficiency, nobody should. Optimize it for reliable output.
Much of that "marginal land" originally had animals grazing on it anyway. We have barely more cows in this country now than buffalo at their peak. "Re-wilding" land would just mean we have animals grazing at that we don't eat.
Before the arrival of European settlers in North America, it is estimated that there were approximately 30 to 60 million bison (also known as buffalo) roaming the continent.
We are currently consuming upto three times as many cows each year as there were wild buffalos.
Those shortcomings are more relevant to intensive, wrong, unregulated and mindless practice. There is a form of farming which keeps those shortcomings contained - with different costs (but also with different quality).
It is mostly a matter of raising less animals. No other factor or approach or combination of them can address these things alone, reduction is a necessary step.
Defining any of this as "sensible" is an error imo. In a sense it's certainly sensible to have the goal of providing accessibly-priced meat to every member of a large country. Each step along the way is sensible, I'm sure.
But then we end up here and there is nothing sensible about it. The sheer scale required to provide all that flesh is nearly profane in its own right. There is simply and frankly no way to do it responsibly at the scale we've chosen to do it.
It seems meat will either remain built on human, animal and ecological exploitation at an incomprehensible scale, or it will revert to a rare and expensive luxury mostly available only to an economic elite. I haven't seen a compelling vision of any alternative.
That's only a paraphrasing to the extent that it means higher cost, which means lower demand, which means lower supply. It's not the point that was made, and the 'harm saving' would be greater than proportional to the consequent reduction in supply (ceteris paribus).
Right, but the amount of meat we could get from non-intensive agriculture is likely an order of magnitude lower, meaning an order of magnitude rise in price.
Tell us more about the form of farming that contains the high energy consumption shortcoming listed above. As a crop farmer, even a comparatively small reduction in energy availability from a cloudy year can cause a noticeable impact on yields. I wonder what we would eat if we saw a dramatic decline in available energy.
He's probably referring to one of a variety of permaculture setups that integrates animals and a food forest into their operation. Carbon zero and super cheap to maintain, but challenging to setup and harder to sell some of the products.
Still incredibly energy intensive. I honestly cannot think of any food that isn't, at least indirectly if not directly, so I want to know more about these farming practices that can contain the energy need.
There is a spectrum of permaculture that ranges from low yield totally self managing systems where you basically hunt and forage, to high yield partially automated systems that almost look like slick modern farms. Those low yield systems can still be very productive, but you have to go get it, so it's obviously more of a subsistence farmer or agritourism thing.
None of this addresses the intense energy requirements. Even the self-managed permacultures would have little chance of survival if the bulk of the energy received was removed.
What other source of energy results in a decline in plant yields when clouds obscure the energy output? Of course we're talking about the sun. Is there some reason we want to keep avoiding the original question while sharing nothing that farmers, of which you know I am from the same comment, haven't already heard of a million times before? This is like the tech equivalent of someone asking how to prove P=NP and, in return, getting: Have you heard of microservices?
> Tell us more about the form of farming that contains the high energy consumption shortcoming listed above ... even a comparatively small reduction in energy availability from a cloudy year can cause a noticeable impact on yields.
Sorry, I may have some trouble getting your meaning - maybe it's too late here.
Are you trying to imply that my point above (High energy consumption) is somehow related to sun's energy, or that all crops need sun to grow (that would be trolling).
- Feed production: Growing crops for animal feed requires energy for cultivation, irrigation, and the production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Additionally, energy is needed to harvest, transport, and process these crops into feed for livestock.
- Livestock management: Maintaining the well-being of animals in farms demands energy for heating, cooling, and lighting of barns and other facilities, as well as for powering equipment used for feeding, cleaning, and waste management.
- Transportation: Energy is required for transporting animals to and from farms, feedlots, and slaughterhouses. This includes the transportation of feed, water, and other supplies to farms, as well as the transportation of animal products to processing plants and markets.
- Processing and packaging: The slaughter, processing, and packaging of animal products also consume energy. This includes the operation of slaughterhouses and processing plants, refrigeration, and the production of packaging materials.
- Refrigeration and storage: Animal products typically need to be stored at low temperatures to prevent spoilage. Energy is consumed in maintaining refrigeration units at the necessary temperature both during transportation and storage at processing facilities, warehouses, and retail outlets.
> I wonder what we would eat if we saw a dramatic decline in available energy
Cloudy skies, or maybe volcano eruptions darkening the sky for months/years, or snow in summer? Most would starve, i suppose. What we would eat? Do you mean grow? Mushrooms, maybe?
If I'm still off, could you reformulate your question?
> permaculture setups that integrates animals and a food forest into their operation.
This is a premise from a bygone era. Replace modern farming with integrated permaculture and billions will starve. Such farming techniques only persist in developed countries today as niche activities to amuse yuppies who want to buy some connection to nature at the grocery store.
Food instability will lead to mass starvation, which in turn will lead to wars. Wars will trash this planet more surely than modern mechanized farming.
I think you missed the part where modern mechanized farming is going to destroy fertility to the point that we have food instability anyhow, which was my original point. The answer is to rethink how we feed our populations, but by all means keep kicking the doomsday can down the line without a plan.
Raising SOME animals in SOME places is an efficient way to produce protein, including dairy – like zebu cattle and goat, hardy animals that graze on land that will grow nothing. There are human populations outside the western bubble surviving with minimal resources for a long time thanks to that.
Raising large quantities of animals in the rhythm necessary to feed meat daily to a large population is irrational and creates these shortcomings.
IMO animal agriculture is just another one of those topics that, if you really deep-dive, turns into a discussion of overpopulation and capitalism.
"everyone should stop eating meat" is red herring. People often point out outside of "western bubble" so they can get rid of responsibility inside that "bubble". Really poor people do not eat meat in scale that is now so common in rich countries.
True, but in the last few decades so many people world wide have stopped being so poor that they do not eat meat in large scale. In China, meat consumption per person has increased more than sixfold since 1980, getting close to EU levels, and that is a natural outcome of Chinese people becoming less poor; the same is likely to happen elsewhere around the world unless some factor keeps the developing world so poor that they can't afford to do so.
> animals that graze on land that will grow nothing
You must not literally mean nothing, but I still don't understand where the nutrients are supposed to come from if the land is so poor that food crops won't grow, yet there is supposed to be enough nutritious grass for grazing?
Of course I mean figuratively. Humans don’t have a rumen, so our capability of extracting energy from vegetables is much more limited, basically we need starch (grains or tubers). These animals can feed on grass where these nitrogen-intensive crops won’t grow without fertilizers.
Seriously, if you ever dealt with land in your life, you would know agriculture is anything but “easy”. It only exists in today’s shape and form thanks to fossil fuels, massive government incentives and cost externalities.
OK fine it's hard we still have to do it though you can't just throw up your hands and say "eugenics time!"
It still seems pretty clear to me that the problem is resource overconsumption, not simple overpopulation. Let's address that first bit first then see where we are.
The problem is you can’t discuss consumption without addressing the population. The current economic model simply pushes the rest of world to consume at the unsustainable levels of a North American or European citizen. One of those will have to give.
Absolutely. You think piles of grains are good for you? If you take 2 people and have one eat steak all the time and the other eat wheat all the time, the wheat eater will be obese and have all sorts of auto-immune diseases.
Stop believing the anti-meat FDA. Meat is good for you.
Additionally, I see you negated to full read my comment where I said FROSTED mini wheats. Yes, the FDA put sugary cereal higher up than meat products.
THE single universal defining trait of humans is our refusal to be bound by the limits set for us by our biological past.
But regardless, the alternative to an economically catastrophic meat-centric diet isn't starvation and malnutrition come on. It's not even vegetarianism per se.
Most humans most places through most of time have eaten much much less meat than we currently do. They've eaten a lot more plants and yes bugs and lichen and seaweed and shit than we do. We don't need to idealize that or try to return to it, but we should remember it.
We are extreme outliers among humans who have lived, in this particular way, among others. We should consider the consequences of occupying this extreme and choose where we stand with it deliberately now that we understand what it is.
No, it isn't. In fact, the entire developed world, plus Russia and China, is facing significant demographic cliffs in the near future because people stopped having too many damned babies decades ago. Human population will peak at 10B and start declining from there. In fact, several countries are trying to restart excess-replacement fertility specifically because the decline in working-age population is already too steep and the alternative is to starve the elderly to death[0].
The real root of the problem is that there is no root of the problem. There are hundreds of causes that all feed back into one another. If you try to boil this down into a root-cause narrative, what you will inevitably end up with is a cartoon caricature that, at best, pushes an anti-human narrative; and worse / more likely, blames some proxy for the poor, racial minorities, or foreigners. I know this because the whole 'population bomb' thing wound up being used by fascists to try and paint their shenanigans as environmentally friendly.
[0] In Russia, this is literally the only thing that will get Putin chucked out a window. A very large chunk of the country moved to mining towns in the 70s and 80s to take advantage of the Soviet Union equivalent of FIRE[1]. Those pensions are a crushing burden upon the government and any attempt to reduce them causes massive protests and riots.
> A very large chunk of the country moved to mining towns in the 70s and 80s to take advantage of the Soviet Union equivalent of FIRE[1]. Those pensions are a crushing burden upon the government
Sources?
In particular, what proportion of the population?
To summarize: in Soviet Russia you got early retirement if you worked in mining, or moved to certain smaller towns. A lot of people in Russia maximized their early retirement by doing this. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia went through Hard Times. Their fertility rate fell off a cliff and never recovered. While other countries also had falling fertility rates, they also have lots of immigration to offset that, but nobody wants to move to Russia. So imagine America, but with no millenials, no immigrants, twice as many boomers, and they all only care about keeping Medicare functional for exclusively themselves.
One of Putin's first acts was to attempt pension reform, because it's the $3600 spent on candles[0] in the Russian budget. This led to massive protests, so he backed down. He tried again around the time COVID started, and again, massive protests. It's the one thing that reliably causes Putin's popularity numbers to fall. Not even an unpopular invasion will do that. Because, for a large proportion of older Russians, the government exists solely as the medium by which treasure is pilfered from the rest of the world and into their pocket.
I don't remember the exact proportion of Russian pensioners to the rest of the population, I just remember that it's unusually dire.
I thought the root cause isn't the total number of people, it's the fact that developed-nation lifestyles are a lot more environmentally impactful than developing ones; (6B * current developed-nation avg carbon footprint) > (8B * current global avg carbon footprint)
They're both causes.
E.g. if there were only 500 million people in the world there'd be no issue. Similarly, if everyone lived a somali lifestyle it wouldn't be that bad environmentally.
Actually lots of people are now talking about the problem of too few babies especially in Europe. Many countries are looking to their populations halving by 2100. A recent report says there are 79 countries with fertility rates (mean=1.59) below the replacement level rate (mean=2.08).
There are some negative consequences or at least difficult questions to wrestle with. Where is the tax coming from in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly and who looks after them? Will retirement remain an option in those countries and will those folk get a pension? Others can comment on the positive aspects of declining fertility.
By large part most of the problem is due to overconsumption from a minority of the world population.
But I don't blame most individuals: people buy what's available in shops and have little choice to do otherwise. The problem is in the economical system.
Absolutely not. This a massive lie propped up by nihilistic ant-humanist rhetoric.
The population is going down. People aren't having enough babies for replacement. You're going to have a rude awakening when you get old and there's not enough people to take care of you, pay into the retirement system etc.
The good news is that it's reversible. When you stop feeding antibiotics to animals, the amount of resistance bacteria in the gut seems to reduce as well.
Additionally, good management practices (clean pens, good hygiene, low stress) and proper feed could make the use of antibiotics in animals (almost) obsolete.
While bacteria evolution can't be reversed, stopping antibiotics in animals can help lower the number of resistant bacteria. Good care practices can reduce the need for antibiotics.
It actually can. Bacteria reproduce and die off rapidly. That means the rates of mutation are high. If there's no selective pressure from the antibiotics, then there's nothing reinforcing that resistance and it can mutate away in a few generations. This has actually been tested in laboratory settings: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6707769/
While bacteria evolution can't be reversed, the antibiotic resistance usually have a cost to maintain (the fitness cost¹) and without the evolutive pressure cause by the antibiotic, bacteria without those costly genes will eventually dominate.
The latter is not really the case. There seems to be something that causes animals being fed antibiotics to gain weight faster than without, all other circumstances being equal. This might have something to do with gut flora.
While it's true they experience more weight gain, that's more of an off-label use. That doesn't negate the claim that proper procedures/care/environment could make the use of animal antibiotics more rare. There are other alternatives to increasing weight gain, although the use of any medication to induce weight gain should require careful consideration.
The off label use of "makes animals gain weight faster" is why the entire industrial animal meat industry has been feeding antibiotics to cows for over a generation now. It's why "antibiotic free" is a marketing label now, because the opposite was the previous default. The antibiotic properties of antibiotics are basically a side effect.
Eh, sort of. It's still mostly secondary. If you aren't feeding cattle antibiotic in a CAFO where they're crowded, eating spent brewers grain (mostly from fuel production), and living in filth, then they will get sick and die. Same thing for most chicken houses until changes were made a few years ago. The 10% or so of production that takes place on small farms generally didn't use antibiotics as a standard ration because they didn't need to, even if it would have slightly improved weight gain. Even the industry is try to voluntarily eliminate it in pork because they want access to international markets.
> If you aren't feeding cattle antibiotic in a CAFO where they're crowded, eating spent brewers grain (mostly from fuel production), and living in filth, then they will get sick and die
Much citation needed. I don't know exactly what you mean by CAFO when it comes to cattle, but the EU banned routine administration of antibiotics with no noticable effect on the practice of permanently housing cows or beef cattle
Thanks for the patronizing answer to a question I didn't ask
The EU has no shortage of feedlots and zero-grazed cow herds, and yet has phased out routine administration of antibiotics without any noticeable reduction in the animals in these conditions.
Therefore...
I'm asking for a citation for your claim that it's not possible to keep animals alive in these conditions without the use of antibiotics
> If you aren't feeding cattle antibiotic in a CAFO where they're crowded, eating spent brewers grain (mostly from fuel production), and living in filth, then they will get sick and die
Greater weight gain is the PRIMARY use of antibiotics on animals. There are not given to the animals because they are sick, or to ward off sickness; they are given to ALL animals in a flock/herd to increase their size and therefore their value.
Even supposing that’s true, perhaps the same effect can be achieved without antibiotics? For example maybe some kind of probiotic feed that displaces the undesirable gut flora?
Far be it from me to defend something as generally odious as the use of antibiotics in agriculture, but this article refers to one specific class of antibiotics, described as "antimicrobial peptides" but more precisely polymyxins, and particularly to colistin. You may be familiar with colistin as an "antibiotic of last resort" which is heavily restricted even in medicine.
You will notice that all but two are not peptides. "Peptides" are themselves a broad class of chemical, not implying a mechanism of action — contrast beta-lactams which damage cell walls — and bacitracin (which is distinct) has been used in poultry in the United States for fifty years without creating any immune-bypassing microorganisms. It should be distinguished from the polymyxins, the colistin family, which share a mechanism of action and are particularly important in the treatment of infections which have become resistant to other antibiotics.
I was unable to find any evidence of polymyxins being used in agriculture in the United States or the West more broadly.
>Polymyxin is not labeled for oral or parental use for any veterinary species in the US.
That is not to justify the use of antibiotics in agriculture, which threatens millions of lives by endangering one of the most valuable medical technologies in human history, but it is not helpful to make claims which are not supported by the evidence. The use of colistin — or any polymyxins — in pigs in China is egregious (and has been belatedly banned by Chinese authorities in 2016). Linking this to meat consumption in the United States, where polymyxins are not used in agriculture, is suspect.
I went vegetarian and things were going great. I was checking my micro and macro nutrients, things were perfect. I got a new job and I had to take a drug test. My creatine levels were too low and I failed/had to repeat the drug test. I ended up having to pee first thing in the morning to make my creatine levels higher. This was the most painful thing I've experienced in my life for about 3 hours as I waited for the place to open. That sucked.
Later, my kid had low iron levels. I imagine I probably did too.
Sure people are able to live a life without meat, but the nutrition from having meat is something I'm finding difficult to replace. We eat meat probably 2 or 3 times per week. Seems like a decent compromise, but I still feel like this is going to age poorly when people become more aware of animal consciousness.
I'd love to know what you were eating. I've been vegan for over 13 years and I eat a lot of processed foods. My most recent blood test showed everything in the middle of the healthy range, and I had too much iron.
I wonder if it's genetic, but my parents don't go to the doctor so I don't know anything about their health.
I don't supplement, but eat the vegan equivalent of the standard American diet.
2-3 times a week is exactly what is recommended [1]. There are several heath issues with high red meat intake, the biggest and not so fun is Colon Cancer. I know two people that lost the battle with colcon cancer. It is a bugger to diagnose, treat, and recurrence.
I've been a highly athletic veg/vegan for a decade and not had any major issues, sans maybe B12 or vitamin d occasionally. plenty of veg friends experienced the same. vitamin supplements are easy to take.
80% of antibiotics in the US are used in animal husbandry, often because antibiotics cause animals to grow bigger. Until very recently, farmers could buy 55-gallon drums of antibiotics from Alibaba.com.
Those antibiotics persist in the environment, where their exposure to scores of different species of bacteria causes resistance to develop across gene pools, which is bad because of horizontal gene transfer.
The majority of communicable diseases in humans have zoonotic origins.
It's insane that still wasn't enough, and the industry is now using antibacterial peptides that mirror innate immune systems.
I’ve been hearing about this issue in some form for what seems like the last several decades. It seems like there have been some impacts, regulations followed, and then things turn out okay. I’m not aware of any significant human health impact from agricultural antibiotic resistance (unlike human antibiotics).
Is there a reason to get so invested in this issue beyond making sure regulators stay on top of it the way they have been?
What infuriates me is the big companies selling them to farmers, probably already know this and have done for years. But they continue to get away with it.
> ...the prevalence of these strains of E coli have dropped steeply since China banned the use of colistin as a growth promoter, suggesting that these genes carry other “fitness disadvantages” for the pathogens.
That sentence seems pretty important but is hardly given any attention. It seems like if we simply stop using the antibiotics then the dangerous strains will die out on their own?
No. The numbers expressing it drop, but there are often enough advantages in competition situations that the trait stays around and can rapidly recolonize the population. Carrying the genetic material is a slight cost. Expressing it costs more, but that could be made conditional.
Furthermore, note that in this case, the point is that the trait also confers resistance to the same type of molecule occurring naturally as part of the innate immune system of animals, meaning that for bacterial species with a large pathogenic component to their lifestyle the resistance retains a fitness advantage in their niche.
I love the optimism, and the ideas in all of the rethinkX papers. They are great reads. Their predictions for food and agriculture might indeed happen, but not by 2030. The dairy predictions in that paper seem the most likely to occur.
Never have humans in the history of their entire existence consumed so much meat in their daily diet. To imagine that this comes with no consequences is just naive.
People usually use the opposite argument: if we've been eating meat for so long, how could it be bad?
A food we've evolved with can have a negative impact on us because the evolutionary trade-off is to optimize for reproductive age. Something like high cholesterol, for example, didn't stop our ancestors from siring children in their teens and 20s.
On the other hand, foods we started eating recently including novel foods don't have this antagonist pleiotropic effect.
Fish, eggs and some meat. Mostly hunted. They didn’t use antibiotics in their meat or use undocumented immigrant labour at slave wages. Context, please.
Right. So they hunted seasonally. They consume fish and also bird eggs. Most importantly, they didn’t eat factory farm meats. It seems to me that you are purposely omitting the context for a ‘gotcha’.
[..]Hunted meats:
Sea mammals such as walrus, seal, and whale. Whale meat generally comes from the narwhal, beluga whale and the bowhead whale. The latter is able to feed an entire community for nearly a year from its meat, blubber, and skin.
Inuit hunters most often hunt juvenile whales which, compared to adults, are safer to hunt and have tastier skin.
Ringed seal and bearded seal are the most important aspect of an Inuit diet and is often the largest part of an Inuit hunter's diet.
Land mammals such as reindeer (caribou), polar bear, and muskox
Birds and their eggs
Saltwater and freshwater fish including sculpin, Arctic cod, Arctic char, capelin and lake trout.
While it is not possible to cultivate native plants for food in the Arctic, Inuit have traditionally gathered those that are naturally available, including:
Berries including crowberry and cloudberry
Herbaceous plants such as grasses and fireweed
Tubers and stems including mousefood, roots of various tundra plants which are cached by voles in burrows.
Roots such as tuberous spring beauty and sweet vetch
Seaweed[..]
Yikes! You can't post like that to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do.
I'm not going to ban you right now because it doesn't look like we've warned you before. But you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and quite badly for quite a while - here are some examples:
People are kinda stupid when it comes to eating meat. The current scale of meat consumption [1] is just mind boggling. Yet even this comment has to be a throwaway because people can't handle someone telling them they shouldn't eat meat 2x a day.
It's bad for the environment, it's bad for individual health, it's bad for collective health (breeding drug resistance and causing pandemics), and all that is before we even talk about the mass scale of needless suffering inflicted on other sentient beings.
I don't know what the solution is, because as soon as you mention eating less meat people laugh at you or get super defensive. "What, do you care about the animals?" is something I've had people say to me in all seriousness.
When I gave it up it felt similar to giving up cigarettes, you get depressed and feel exiled from a joy you used to share with others. But that's what addiction does to you and once you get to the other side you wonder how you even participated in such negative behavior in the first place.
My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years. If you can't do it, then you have no business participating in consuming it. Bonus points if you're a regular hunter.
Overuse of antibiotics in livestock is certainly a problem, but this is also true for many of the pesticides we use for plant farming and our lack of standardized irrigation water testing (in the US) which has lead to issues like the recent E. Coli outbreak in lettuce. In general modern farming of all kinds has issues that need to be addressed, I don't see any exclusivity in the meat category.
I will continue eating meat, I believe it is *good* for both individual health and collective health. In fact the amount of vegans I've met in life who didn't look like they were suffering from some illness has been very rare, only solidifying my position on this.
I'm comfortable with meat prices going up if it resolves the antibiotics issue, but I'm unconvinced by the moral arguments you disguise as health arguments.
> In fact the amount of vegans I've met in life who didn't look like they were suffering from some illness has been very rare, only solidifying my position on this.
I would push against this sort of anecdotal view. The circle of people we eat with (and therefore know the dietary restrictions of) tend to be quite low compared to all the people we meet with on a day to day. Additionally, "looking sick" is a vague enough assessment that simply knowing someone is a vegan may very easily cause you to be much more critical of their appearance, and vice versa you may see someone who looks sick to you and then pay more attention to their dietary habits than you ordinarily would. Another thing to note is that all dietary restriction lifestyles is subject to a noticeably higher rate of disordered eating or intestinal issue that leads to the person participating in the dietary change and therefore it may be important to first determine if the disordered eating or gut issue caused veganism vs the other way around.
That is to say: even though I am neutral towards veganism itself, your logic as to why meat is good reads to me as quite flawed and poorly reasoned around.
What do you want me to say here? The science is pretty much settled that we are omnivores, you can't just ditch meat without consequences. Yes there are substitutes, but in practice do vegans consistently eat these at the right amount to compensate for the lack of meat in their diet? Well my first hand experience tells me this is a big fat NO.
Let's put it another way, imagine some guy likes to pester you about your eating habits, says they are unhealthy, and that their diet is healthy. Well the burden of proof is on them and as someone who cares about staying fit, if the guy trying to convince me either looks like skin & bones, or is overweight, then they are already on shakey ground. This has been my first hand experience multiple times.
Ultimately my ancedote is not meant to be a counter-argument, but instead a reminder to those reading to touch grass. Because why wouldn't your personal experiences matter more than the anecdotes and misinformation spread by strangers online? (This applies to my own anecdote as well)
I'm just saying that "well everyone I met who is vegan looks sick" is shoddy reasoning to proclaim eating meat is the healthy behavior. That's it. I already clearly said I have no opinion on veganism itself, nor am I pestering you with a claim that any one diet is healthy.
I agree with you here. I'm not advocating everyone be vegan -- I'm not even personally vegan! I don't even think most people should be vegetarian, as much as I'd love to live in that future. I don't even think I made any arguments one way or the other, just that it's generally pretty bad and maybe we should do less of it!
I just find that most people when confronted with a fairly straightforward way to mitigate massive environmental and global health problems (eat less meat), people will get up in arms and defensive and shut the conversation down immediately. They'll make all sorts of assumptions about what you're implying about them, which I feel like points to the fact that people in their deepest self know that it's somewhat wrong.
It's kinda funny is all, it's the same behavior I engaged in when people told me I should consider smoking less or not at all.
Most people on this forum are flabby omnivores but nobody is going to use that observation to condemn plants or meat because it doesn't make sense. Same with someone's carnivore hot dog diet. Or someone's vegan Skittles diet.
Every Vegan I know either looks like an underwear model or an athlete. Doesn't mean that all of them are like that though. Although being Vegan definitely stops you from eating at most horrible fast food places. Whenever someone asks me if I feel healthier since cutting out meat I just say "Beer is Vegan."
The moral arguments are pretty solid though. The amount of rainforest currently being clear cut to make way for cattle is insane. Ecosystem destruction is being fueled heavily by the demand for meat products. The US used to be covered in huge forests that were clear cut for cattle, way before any of us were born. Use of antibiotics is just one more aspect of why we should probably cut back heavily on beef.
The pricing does a good job of this, but I would encourage meat eaters to reduce consumption of beef products as much as possible. Maybe make it an occasional treat instead of the main course of every meal.
Veganism can act as cover for disordered eating; perhaps that is what you have observed.
Related, I know many “vegetarians” who are what I call effective vegans, meaning they eat vegan ~90% of the time, recognizing purity as a pointless pursuit.
Anecdotally, vegetarian seem to eat a lot of eggs, fish, etc. Yes I know fish is technically not vegetarian, but.. they call themselves vegetarian and certainly avoid other meats.
Just saying, my experience with vegans is very limited. For all you know, the vegans you know are, in fact, cancer patients. Cancer patients are much less rare than vegans after all. Not everyone tells the people around them.
> My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years.
I have heard this repeated from so many vegans / animal activists at this point, including my own sister. Where did you get it from? Who is the original author? I am seriously asking.
An argument involving only my individual health (I am into fitness stuff) plus effect on the environment - repeated enough times - would sway me.
To be completely honest: I do not appreciate being told that I am an immoral human being for X (X = eating meat).
Been told that too many times already during my lifetime. It is a cultural constant. That formula is just too tiresome to hear yet again at this point.
> I do not appreciate being told that I am an immoral human being for X (X = eating meat).
While I don’t think it’s useful to oversimplify this into a binary moral issue, I also think it’s necessary to be reminded about the realities of the choices we make.
Why do you not appreciate this sentiment? Inconvenient truths tend to not feel very good, but that doesn’t make them incorrect.
> Been told that too many times already during my lifetime. It is a cultural constant. That formula is just too tiresome to hear yet again at this point.
I mean this with all respect, but this really sounds like “well, the world hasn’t stopped abusing animals yet, so I really don’t have a choice but to participate, and it’s really tiresome when people point that out”.
Change starts from within. I’d argue that the reason these argument feel tiresome is because the current solutions are not easy ones. They require each of us to alter our habits and demand broader change.
This is legitimately hard. But neither is there some magic bullet that will solve this.
I fully appreciate that we’re all stuck in a system that we can’t do much individually to change. But the one thing we can change is ourselves, and this is an option that is always available.
I wouldn’t be so quick to call someone who eats meat immoral, and as a meat eater I’d be a hypocrite for doing so. I’ve also gone to lengths to acquire meat that is as ethical/humane as possible, and over time I’ve reduced consumption significantly.
There are historically plenty of culturally acceptable practices that are also deeply immoral upon further reflection. If you’re finding the arguments tiresome, that may be a good signal to listen more closely.
> Why do you not appreciate this sentiment? Inconvenient truths tend to not feel very good, but that doesn’t make them incorrect.
Is this a genuine question?
We're social animals and calling someone immoral is going to be perceived as a social attack by non-neurodivergent people.
> I mean this with all respect, but this really sounds like “well, the world hasn’t stopped abusing animals yet, so I really don’t have a choice but to participate, and it’s really tiresome when people point that out”.
If you think this is just about animals you're missing most of the picture. In the modern day people are told they are immoral for many many reasons: driving cars, not turning off lights when they leave the room, not going to that BLM protest, not signing the anti-abortion petition, not going to church, using shampoo, not donating to ukraine/save the children/deworm the world, etc etc
It's an extremely common tactic used by every activist on every topic.
I agree. We should be able to acknowledge that we do harmful things without turning it into judgement on our overall character. It's not hypocrisy to admit that you do bad things sometimes.
> Why do you not appreciate this sentiment? Inconvenient truths tend to not feel very good, but that doesn’t make them incorrect.
"You're immoral for X" is very often used by someone who wants to take a very grey issue and make it black and white, with their side obviously being the "right" one (and, just in case it's not clear, they label the other side as immoral). It's often a cheap rhetorical trick of someone who wants to win the argument by default, rather than having to go through the hard work of actually persuading people (which means having to deal with all the grey parts of the question). "I'm morally right, you're morally wrong, you should feel ashamed of your position, and therefore you should shut up" is almost never a good-faith argument.
That doesn't make them "inconvenient truths". That makes them rhetorical ammunition for someone who is interested in winning, not in truth or good-faith discussion.
Note well: This does not apply to all instances of the phrase "inconvenient truth". But it seems to me that it is used that way more often than it's used in good faith.
If one accepts they are an omnivore, and there is ample evidence to support this, then they do not feel it is immoral to kill animals for food. That would make one’s very existence immoral. You may disagree, but that doesn’t mean you’re right or that your point of view is the truth, convenient or otherwise and few people appreciate moral judgments from others.
I don't get it. In most circumstances, if one doesn't want to be called immoral for performing an objectively cruel act, the standard course of action would be to stop doing it.
Why would one who inflicts or remunerates mistreatment, slavery, and death upon animals expect to be shielded from criticism on the count of it potentially hurting their feelings?
There’s a huge difference between killing animals and eating their meat. Likewise there’s a world of difference between industrial scale livestock and smaller, organic, free-range farming - on many levels. Yes, animal slaughter is require for meat production, and by eating meat we contribute to said slaughter. But there’s a ton of nuance in between, and people know this.
It’s a really disingenuous argument to pretend these are exactly the same thing from an ethical standpoint. In Buddhist ethics, for example, intention is key: monks cannot kill an animal but they may eat meat if offered. People who cry about the moral or ethical basis of some decision often make uninformed arguments believing an issue is black and white. Ethics is gray all the way down.
Until technology advances thee is only one way to make meat: by killing a living creature. You do not get to just remove that step from the conversation because you don’t like it. There is no “huge difference” when the action is a required part of producing meat.
But… if the animal is treated well during its lifetime, and slaughtered humanely (as painlessly as possible), almost everybody isn’t going to have a problem with it. You are then getting into religious beliefs which most are not going to agree with.
Admittedly a lot of current practices are pretty horrible.
I agree that killing is inseparable from consumption.
But there is absolutely a huge degree of difference in how the killing occurs, and how the animal is treated during its life leading up to it.
These differences materialize as an array of options when deciding what to purchase, and are factors that can be weighed by an individual.
The difference is there and quite meaningful once you examine the spectrum of realities involved in modern meat production.
One might still believe that no form of animal killing is ever acceptable regardless of circumstances, but that places the argument in a different category.
The topic here is about animals who are fed excessive quantities of antibiotics while healthy, fattening them up to the point that their skeletons frequently fracture because they can't bear the weight. These are not well-treated "happy hens". They are chickens crammed by the tens of thousands into barns with about as much square footage as it has birds. Sometimes less. The unroofed "free range" they get access to may amortize out to a couple square inches per bird, in a portion of the facility they'll never reach due to bird traffic.
It is of no solace to any of the 40 billion individual chickens presently in factory farms that some others may be raised in a coup in a backyard of someone's hypothetical uncle's house. And the hypothetical existence of said uncle has no relevance to the act of paying others to abuse birds in farms, which is where every single person reading this is getting either the vast majority or all of their bird flesh.
To be clear, I find the conditions you're describing to be abhorrent and an unacceptable norm, and I've argued elsewhere in this thread to that end.
But real free-range farms actually exist, and are not someone's "hypothetical uncle's house". The products of these farms are available in stores, and purchasing them does not contribute to the abuse of animals in factory farms.
To claim otherwise cannot be justified by an examination of facts/reality, and is to claim that I didn't eat dinner last Thursday. This is not to say that sourcing food this way is easy, and it's certainly not cheap.
> the act of paying others to abuse birds in farms, which is where every single person reading this is getting either the vast majority or all of their bird flesh.
The point with all of this is that there is a nuanced conversation to be had. Oversimplified binary reductions do not represent reality nor are they a useful point from which to have a conversation about how to improve the status quo. Issuing blanket statements like the one quoted above can only create a wedge between your position and those who you'd arguably like to reach with it. I happen to agree with you re: the horrors of unhappy hens, but you're also directly contradicting my lived experience.
GP's point is that eating isn't killing, you can eat meat without (personally) killing any animals, and that can be (and for very many is) emotionally different for people.
And the general counterpoint to this is that the emotional distance gained by not doing the killing has zero relevance to the moral acceptability of mass abuse in factory farms.
Furthermore, that emotional distance leads to even more grotesque behavior because people are so far removed from the process that they can remain completely unaware.
Over time, more people have become aware of child labor and otherwise horrible working conditions in the production of clothing and shoes. Not being directly exposed to those conditions does not in any way excuse those conditions or make them acceptable.
I think it's important, as people who eat meat, to fully acknowledge the deep and societal harms that meat causes. It is well-studied that slaughterhouses are uniquely bad for a community and uniquely bad for the people who work there. Meat as a food can sometimes be bad for people, but meat as an industry is definitely bad for people. Knowing this can allow us to make more responsible choices even if we still end up eating meat, such as selecting for small, ethical farmers that also limit the trauma of themselves/those who do the slaughtering of their stock.
if you read the comment you're replying to carefully, you'll see they never said you or anyone else was immoral for eating meat, yet that's your takeaway.
I think it is a valid point. We can only indulge in such a guilt free way because we don't see how the sausage is made.
My friend will eat burgers and chicken nuggets all day, but a chicken drumstick with it's tendons and cartilage he is unable to eat, it is a necessary disconnect for him.
My tolerance is way higher but if part of ordering dinner was choosing a living animal for them to kill and prepare I would definitely just get tofu.
IDK, I don't see any food-guilt issues from any of the countryside people I know who see "how the sausage is made" because they have done it, and have slaughtered some of the animals they have grown themselves.
And IMHO the discussions about "kill your own dinner" are quite impractical because that simply doesn't work in most conditions from the perspective of hygiene and food safety, and slaughtering is a job that does require quite some skill to do it properly, having it done by amateurs can easily be needless cruelty if you do it wrong. Like, I can butcher a chicken or a rabbit, but I would not be qualified to handle a pig or a cow properly.
"We can only indulge in such a guilt free way because we don't see how the sausage is made."
That might be for some people. There are many that would have no guilt. As you point out, some people know what is in a chicken nugget (chicken) but eat it anyways. This path might slightly reduce the number of omnivores, but I doubt it would have a serious impact overall. Like any reduction in consumption from them would just lead to a lower price and increased demand either domestically or internationally.
I 100% agree with you in most regards (including being able to kill what you eat), but I don't think meat is bad for individual health. I recently did just 3 weeks of a carnivore diet as an experiment and it was boggling how much it affected my strength and recovery. Vegan and vegetarian both have had immediate negative impacts on recovery, even when supplementing protein and other vitamins.
From an altruistic perspective yeah, do not touch meat, but it does have health benefits that I have not been able to replicate with vegetarian alternatives.
Also a throwaway to say "eating meat is bad?" that isn't a crazy controversial stance haha.
Seeing this response so high up makes me a bit sad.
There's a lot of ways to eat vegetarian, and all the ones that I can think of that require supplementing protein and vitamins are unhealthy.
It should be obvious that eating a way that "had immediate negative impacts on recovery" indicates that what you're eating is not healthy.
You see this with a lot of omnivores, they try cutting meat out of their diet and complain. But, the thing is, an omnivore diet without meat is a deficient diet. It sounds a bit intimidating but you really have to rebuild the way you eat if you've been eating meat.
Cultures that have a vegetarian tradition (even if not described as such) provide a rich tapestry of foods to make a healthy diet rich in protein and vitamins. Ethiopian, Persian, Indian, Sri Lankian; these are just some of the cultures a successful and healthy vegetarian will take inspiration from. Eat like a world traveler and you can forgo meat without being unhealthy.
Quick list of good protein-rich ingredients across cultures:
Mushroom
Quinoa
Eggs
Halloumi
Chickpeas
Green/brown/red lentils
Peas
Paneer
Yoghurt
Walnuts/almonds/sunflower seeds/pistachios
And forget stews. Roast, broil, saute, crisp, brown! There are flavors unlocked by the family of Maillard reactions - the technical name for the chemical reactions that give rise to browning - that we associate with meat but are common to the process of roasting. Savory vegetarian food is a thing.
protein !== protein. Besides eggs those are all terrible sources of protein from an amino acid perspective.
I never said it was unhealthy to forego meat, just that I have never found a non-meat source that can compete. I was vegetarian for 6 months, have done tons of 3-6 week vegan stints, keto, carnivore and others all while doing rock climbing training and tracking my performance. I am noticeably weaker and more injury prone on a vegan/vegetarian diet. I do 3-6 weeks of veganism to intentionally lose muscle mass and lower my overall weight.
People and the internet can say whatever they want about nutrition but it will be hard to convince me when I can accurately predict how much strength I will lose when removing meat from my diet.
no, they are not "terrible", they're not complex proteins - excepting eggs. you have to mix two sources of simple protein to equal complex. good, bad; whatever your characterization of them may be, that's the foundation.
you again seem to be conflating your ability to measure something with the method itself being good. I think it's impossible for us to say your vegetarian diet is healthy when you say it makes you weaker, yet you point to being predictably weaker as a sign of knowing what you're doing? I'm not following.
Forget stew? I understand the motivations for being anti-meat, even if I don't agree with them, but anti-stew? Stew is great, even vegetables stews. How can you be anti-stew?
Hah, I'm not anti-stew. It's a conception you run into a lot, that healthy vegetarian food is a brown stew of chickpeas. I threw that in there for the skeptical.
> ... I don't think meat is bad for individual health
I agree with you here too, meat eating isn't in and of itself unhealthy, but the quantity and scale that most people engage with it at is not doing their body any favors. You sound like a very conscious person when it comes to their body, which is unfortunately atypical.
As someone that is extremely active as well (training 5x per week muay thai and ashtanga yoga, with lots of kettlebell work mixed in), I also agree that recovery can be much harder on a vegetarian diet. You really have to think about your nutrition more, but personally I've decided it's fine for me to make that recovery sacrifice for the benefit of animals and the Earth. I don't expect others to do the same though and I'm fine with that.
> People are kinda stupid when it comes to eating meat. The current scale of meat consumption [1] is just mind boggling. Yet even this comment has to be a throwaway because people can't handle someone telling them they shouldn't eat meat 2x a day.
I'm sensing a lack of empathy in this comment.
Calling people stupid or attaching any label to them will only hinder your attempt to sway their minds.
Portraying black and white thinking (splitting), when we know the world is shades of grey, also hinders your ability to change minds.
It's great that you found benefits to moving to a non-meat diet. This helps others see what they could benefit from. Continue from here.
This is the same issue as an abolitionist speaking to a slaveholder. The moral problem is so overwhelming for the abolitionist that it is exceedingly frustrating, difficult and ineffective trying to persuade the slaveholder.
> I'm sensing a lack of empathy in this comment
That is what is frustrating- to have to show more empathy for the feelings of the slaveholder than the slaveholder has for their slaves.
Have you been to commercial meat operations? I am not talking about millions of non human lives held in captivity, raped and slaughtered..but the condition of the labour in meat processing and meat packing industry.
It’s not a cowboy who brings your steak to the table, but probably some undocumented immigrant paid slave wages and living in a shed.
> comparing meat eating to slavery makes you seen even more unreasonable
I think that is an attitude that our culture will be ashamed of in the near future, just like we are ashamed of slavery now. The agricultural practices are almost identical (different mammal). The major difference is that we consume the flesh of one, and the produce of another.
The only reason for saying that the enslavement of other animals is ok, while the enslavement of humans is not, is if we can come up with a reason that makes us special and those other animals not. There is only shaky ground for any of those possible reasons, and believing them puts blinders on what we can know. I.e., we will not recognize things that do not fit our conceptions, which has big implications for our biological science, psychology and philosophy.
The fact is that meat eating, like slavery, is not reasonable. It is just something we grew up doing (individually and as a species). Any argument advocating it is as superficial and misleading as antebellum racial theorists. That is an uncomfortable truth.
Nonsense. Try telling the lion it is being cruel to the Antelope, or the wolf it is being cruel to the deer. All life (minus plants and Cyanobacteria) get their energy from eating other living things. That’s just the way it works.
Sometimes we compare dissimilar things and in the process discover new truths. We don't compare them to see which is worse, we don't compare to rank them, but to discern similarities and differences and, in doing so, gain a better understanding of both our subjects; even, why not, of ourselves.
It's only unreasonable to compare factory farming to human slavery if one believes that the rights of animals compared to humans is similar or worse than slaveholders believed the rights of their slaves to be compared to thme.
For the record I eat meat, but I'm under no illusions regarding the cruelty of the process. I support all laws that would increase farm animal welfare, even if it means my steak gets more expensive, it's simple enough to make good veggie dishes once in a while.
If — and I recognise that it is an "if" given the current lack of any sufficient testable definition of subjective consciousness awareness of self — if farm animals are self-aware, then slavery would be several steps up from their current existence.
We only stopped feeding cows to other cows because of a fear humans might get prion diseases.
Coming at it from the other direction, "what if humans were food?" is a horror trope, be it vampires, zombies, werewolves, or psychopath cannibals.
"Empathy" is not "sympathy" ("in-" vs "with-"). You try to understand the position of the other (it's a projection), not necessarily sharing the feelings.
The poster clearly expressed that "if they do not see it, insulting will probably create a counterproductive reaction of closure - it's not helping them to see it".
Its an arbitrary line, holding slaves at least follows from the golden principle. What principle says don't raise animals in poor conditions or eat them? Are you extending the golden principle to apply to all animals? Why? Do you think these principles come from anything but a higher-order self-serving? Rather naive to make up a principle for no other reason than a poorly identified (non)-symmetry. I could see applying the golden principle to a dolphin but its probably some back of the mind idea that maybe one day my grandchilds grandchilds grandchild will be half dolphin and I should hedge for that eventuality.
I'm not trying to sway any minds, the majority of people aren't going to change their meat consumption habits at all and honestly I'm fine with that. I never said in my comment that everyone should be vegetarian. Being vegetarian requires a lot of thoughtfulness, especially if you're at all athletic (I train muay thai and ashtanga yoga), and most people don't have the time for it (or think they don't).
People become exceedingly defensive when they're asked to confront the reality of their habits, and honestly I think it's probably too much for people to even begin to consider. I have deep empathy for that as a fellow human as I've been through it too and have experienced both sides of it multiple times (meat eating -> veg -> meat eating -> and now back to veg for good).
Hi, I'm seeing a lot of people misunderstanding and/or disagreeing with your points so I just wanted to say that I agree with you. I've always liked the taste of meat, but the older I've gotten, the more the idea of killing something, and then consuming it, has increasingly bothered me. It has led me to try stretches of vegetarianism over the past couple years.
I definitely wouldn't be able to kill an animal with a knife, unless I was starving.
I do agree that part of the problem is that the eating of animals has become so abstracted away (i.e. chicken tenders) that most people aren't even truly aware of what it is they're doing. I like the knife + license idea.
I like meat. Vegetables just don't cut it. Eating meat is one of the few pleasures in my life, and I'm not willing to give it up for some vague ideal.
I'd assume a lot of people think the same way. It could be considered somewhat arrogant to demand everyone to give up their personal pleasures for something you believe in.
We could solve all world's problems by collectively killing ourselves, but obviously we don't want to do that. Giving up things is somewhere on the spectrum between giving up our life and not giving up anything. Who gets to decide where the line is for everyone?
I'll just keep saying it in this thread, but not once did I say everyone should give up meat. In fact I said go at it, go hunt and kill and eat it!
But the fact that people feel defensive whenever the thought of vegetarianism comes up to me points to the fact that deep down people on an individual level know that it is, to some degree, wrong.
You called for introducing meat eating license, which would introduce friction and make people eat less meat. The end game is the same, the mechanism is different.
> But the fact that people feel defensive whenever the thought of vegetarianism comes up to me points to the fact that deep down people on an individual level know that it is, to some degree, wrong.
Maybe. Or maybe people just feel discomfort because of all the people who are trying to dictate to them what they can and cannot eat.
No one is forcing you to give up meat, and no one is forcing you to engage in this thread. The status quo of meat consumption is firmly entrenched in our society and if anything getting stronger (see the rise of the carnivore diet for example) and yet when someone on the internet seriously believes in the opposite and laments the hopelessness of the situation, they get bombarded by dozens of meat eaters with comments about how vegans look sick, meat is essential, etc...
Can you not see where the OP is coming from? Do you have any sympathy towards them? They seriously believe that meat eating is wrong, and yet when the mention that on the internet in a thread about antibiotic overuse, they got bombarded by pro-meat commenters.
For context, I eat meat too. And what I am saying (and to some extent the OP is saying) is that on balance, vegetarianism is more ethical and sustainable than meat eating. There is of course some nuance to it, i.e eating factory farmed meat is a lot worse than eating meat that you hunted or raised humanely. But for the most part, vegetarianism wins.
I am man enough to admit that, and I own up to the fact that my meat consumption is the less ethical choice. But a lot of posters on this thread seem to have fragile egos and instead of owning it, make up a bunch of half baked excuses why eating meat is the better choice.
> I am man enough to admit that, and I own up to the fact that my meat consumption is the less ethical choice. But a lot of posters on this thread seem to have fragile egos and instead of owning it, make up a bunch of half baked excuses why eating meat is the better choice.
So, you hold a belief, you consider it "the right belief" (ethically speaking) and then you even pat yourself on the back for being "man enough" to hold your belief, implying that anyone who doesn't agree with you couldn't possibly have any other reason to, but is simply "not enough of a man" to agree with you, and has a small peni... ahem, I meam, fragile ego?
I'm sorry man, but that only makes me think of you as a narcissistic virtue signaller. I don't care if you think I'm "not man enough", "ethically evil", or whatever evaluation of me as a person you come up with, I like meat and no amount of shaming will make me pretend I don't. If you wonder why people hate vegetarians, this holier-than-thou attitude might be one of the reasons.
If you want to convince people of ethical superiority of your beliefs, it might help to just stick to the cold facts. E.g. what framework of ethics you're starting from, and how does it make vegetarianism more ethical.
The definition of fragile ego right here. Name calling, circular arguments, and even a reference to reproductive organs. Just admit you were wrong. It is okay to be wrong sometimes.
> My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years
That's not a solution.
My grandmother's generation (, Chinese) has extensive experience with slaughtering animals. That generation still likes and craves meat.
You might have people who chicken out in the short term, but in a couple of years getting a butcher license will become normalized and you're back at square 1.
That's great! People should be in touch with the foods that they eat, preferably ones that they raise and aren't kept in nightmarish conditions on factory farms.
If people in my completely made up fantasy world eat tons of meat then that's fine too, but I do have a suspicion that many people wouldn't be so fine with doing it. I personally could not, so I don't eat animals.
I wouldn't be surprised if we get a sufficiently human-transmissible avian flu pandemic within the decade, given how many non-avians the current strain has been killing in addition to birds.
Literally the current one? I mean yes there's the lab leak theory, but still the common explanation is that it first jumped the species gap at a meat market.
The graph you posted seems very reasonable compared to the world population. That's around 10 chickens a person per year, and chickens are one of the most efficient farmed animals per gram of protein.
The USDA recommends 65g of protein for me per day per https://www.nal.usda.gov/human-nutrition-and-food-safety/dri... . That's around 200g of cooked chicken, which I'd obviously split into multiple meals and mix with other foods. And other foods don't come close in amount of protein, I'd have to replace vegetables or other things with eggs/yogurt which is not obviously a good move.
Edit: A 1.4kg chicken yields 600g cooked meat, so that's a chicken every 3 days. That's around 100 chickens a year for me, personally.
Downvoting because you insult people without providing the required citations, even though I somewhat agree.
Also, this really doesn't work at all: My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years.
Humans used to do that for hundreds of thousands of years.
If you are worried about carbon emissions, just tax them directly and use that money to offset them. If meat then becomes uneconomical, then I guess that's that and people will reduce their consumption accordingly. Though honestly I suspect that if we did that we'll magically find new ways to farm meat that will be less carbon intensive (which is just another reason to do it).
> it's bad for individual health
Eating more meat has actually been great for my individual health, since it has a low glycemic index and high satiation per calorie. Thanks to all the weight I've lost my blood pressure and cholesterol have both really improved. It would've been almost impossible for me without meat.
> it's bad for collective health (breeding drug resistance and causing pandemics)
That sounds like a case for banning antibiotics in agriculture, not for not eating meat.
> and all that is before we even talk about the mass scale of needless suffering inflicted on other sentient beings.
I don't mean to sound offensive here, but I suspect that this is the only reason people that care about this actually care about, since every other reason brought out just ends up feeling like an excuse brought forth to strengthen this position even though the solution doesn't actually require forgoing meat.
> My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years. If you can't do it, then you have no business participating in consuming it. Bonus points if you're a regular hunter.
At the very least you'd have to make an exception for people who are too old/weak/disabled to do it themselves. Also a problem for Kashrut since an animal killed that way would not be Kosher. I believe it would not be Halal either.
Unfortunately, there are people like my friends who specifically have dietary restrictions forcing them onto Keto (meat) diets. So the "it's bad for individual health" falls apart in the face of a diverse human population. The fantasy solution would probably end in them starving to death, or make them victims of Chronic Unscheduled Intestinal Liquidation.
Also, just from an animal cruelty standpoint. Making an amateur kill a live animal, with a knife? That is just incredibly cruel and unethical. I don't think that idea is compatible with the philosophy you espoused earlier.
I've been to a camp that made us do that for dinner. It was messy and prolonged the animal's suffering. Some of our more religious fellows also refused to eat it, since the culling wasn't done properly in accordance to their beliefs.
The specific choice of a knife would definitely increase suffering compared to the more humane standard methods used in small and large scale agriculture. What’s the point here, to make someone inflict pain and suffering as punishment for the transgression of eating meat?
If the point is to gross someone out, have them field dress or gut for a few hours.
> My fantasy solution is everyone needs to go get a meat consumption license by going to a farm and killing an animal with a knife in their hands every, say, 10 years. If you can't do it, then you have no business participating in consuming it. Bonus points if you're a regular hunter.
I'd do it if I could use a gun or a captive bolt pistol, but I've been knocked over by large animals before and I assume they would get more aggressive if they think you are trying to kill them. A farm animal can't pull the trigger of a gun, but they could push a knife back on you. I have body armor and a helmet so I would be wearing them.
It isn’t, in fact it’s more nutrient dense per calories than vegetables and legumes and rich in amino-acids necessary to maintain muscle mass which is increasingly important as you age.
It’s just something the anti-meat crowd parade, while omitting that:
- These beliefs come from epidemiological studies without regards for other life habits such as smoking or dietary choices such as sugar intake.
- Often when saying meat is bad, what is actually referred to is processed meat packed with salt and nitrites.
Eating chicken, pork or beef that you buy raw and cook yourself is healthy.
How much you eat of anything matters too. Don’t eat anything in excess and move.
> more nutrient dense per calories than vegetables
I'm not sure how this meme started, but it's not actually true. You can plug foods into Cronometer.com and see for yourself. e.g. carrots (vitamin A) or kale (vitamin K1) give you the RDA with few calories. I mean, the cocoa powder I added to my smoothie this morning had 100% RDA copper and 45% RDA iron in 57 calories.
Similarly, plants and plant-based foods have full amino profiles. Once again, plug anything from soy beans or even broccoli into Cronometer.com and look at the amino acid breakdown.
These are some really ancient wives tales about vegetables.
> These beliefs come from epidemiological studies without regards for other life habits such as smoking or dietary choices such as sugar intake.
This isn't true. Tracking and multivariate adjustment are standard fare for epi studies.
It's not a meme. If you look at research that look at foods rich in micronutrients, you'll see that meat covers most of them.
For example, yes Kale is rich in calcium and vitamin K than meat in general, but beef, pork or chicken covers a higher ratio of micronutrients than Kale. Obviously, one should not only eat meat. But the point was that meat itself does not make you sick (unless in excess, like anything).
> Similarly, plants and plant-based foods have full amino profiles. Once again, plug anything from soy beans or even broccoli into Cronometer.com and look at the amino acid breakdown.
Full amino acid profile doesn't mean that it contains the same amount, it just means that it's present. Moreover, nutrient absorption is often lower with vegetables than with meat.
Again, not saying one should not eat vegetables. One definitely should eat fruits and vegetables. But it's clear that lacking meat in one diet has long term consequences that reveals itself later in life.
Be specific about the micronutrients because aside from a few things like protein and b12, I think you will be let down by your expectations when you plug meat into Cronometer.
What are all these micronutrients that you think 100g (184cal) of chicken has? Now compare the mineral and folate contents of 100g (121cal) edamame (first vegetable I saw in my freezer). Or compare it to 530g of cooked broccoli which has the same calories as 100g chicken (if isocaloric comparison is easier) and tell me that chicken is more nutrient dense per calorie.
I don't want to sound like I'm a Cronometer affiliate, but most people can't even estimate which foods have which nutrients until they plot a few days of their diet into Cronometer. I was certainly surprised, myself.
I highly recommend you log a whole day of eating into Cronometer to get an idea of where nutrients come from.
I'm assuming here that we're talking about "nutrient density"—the ratio of nutrients per calorie. Is that what you means? Or are you using something like "per gram"?
I'm not sure. We don't really have a specific term for it as far as I know.
I think it's mostly confusing because we're talking about how healthy food is, and because you talked about a ratio. Since we're in a situation too many calories is more of an issue than too few, nutrition-per-calorie is used as a rough proxy for how "healthy" a food is. Pure lard has a higher nutrition-per-gram ratio than beef. (So long as you consider calories to be part of the "nutrition".)
I'll get hate for my comment too, but the answer is less people.
Resource consumption (for multiple resources) and freedom are competing interests. You have to trade freedom to restrict resource consumption. But even if you do that for this topic (meat). You have to look at the secondary effects and still need to do that for other topics to make any impact.
For example, if you do away with meat, you would also have to do away with egg, milk, etc products. In some cases these products are used in things like formula, vaccines, etc. Every alternative has some trade-off too. Some may be better, some may be worse. If you're still producing eggs or milk for these other purposes, then you still have meat as a byproduct. You'll also end up with people raising their own, which is less efficient and possibly worse for the environment if done on a mass scale. Certainly worse for health impacts is done illicitly in high density areas.
I do agree that there are many people who are disconnected from their meat source, among other things (eg people who think hunting is cruel but happily eat mass produced meat, or want their almonds/almond milk). I'm not sure licensing will really fix that. Either it had to come with a wide restriction to local only production to remove many environmental issues and force people to see production issues more visibly, or we slowly reduce population so we can maintain our desired lifestyles.
My estimate is that we will see restrictions in historical freedoms and economic pressures on everyday activities. This will led to some natural reduction in population. But it will be precarious because there will be people who don't agree with the restrictions or nations willing to fight for resources.
Edit: If you're going to disagree, please say why. Specifically, why is it not true that reducing resource consumption to truly sustainable levels won't require lifestyle restriction or a population decline? And not just that some unknown future tech will save us from out current situation.
Burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. A cow eating grass and dying is not.
The part of meat production that's bad for the environment is the machinery used to transport and process the meat. Grain, legumes, and vegetable farming also use machinery for transportation and processing. Outside of that, animals and plants are all part of a carbon-neutral cycle, so long as the plants aren't fertilized with Haber-Bosch excrement.
>it's bad for individual health
This is nearly 100% certainly wrong.
We can say with nearly 100% certainty that a human being cannot thrive without regularly eating meat, or at least dairy or eggs. This is evidenced by human beings having eaten meat for millions of years. Eating meat is Lindy. Million-year-old Lindy things, especially biological things like diet, are robust, resilient, antifragile.
Diet is a solved problem. It was solved over millions of years of humans, their predecessors, and their extinct offshoots trying and testing various foods/diets. The ones who survived ate and continue to eat meat. Guess what happened to the other ones.
>I don't know what the solution is, because as soon as you mention eating less meat people laugh at you or get super defensive
Less is pretty relative, and there is no solution, because there is no problem. It's understandable people are going to get defensive when you attack their means to life.
Just eat how your ancestors ate. For a Northern European, that means a lot of milk and meat. If you're Mediterranean, follow the Greek Orthodox tradition - periodic meat and vegetable eating. If you're an Eskimo, eat a bunch of fish.
> We can say with nearly 100% certainty that a human being cannot thrive without regularly eating meat, or at least dairy or eggs. This is evidenced by human beings having eaten meat for millions of years.
Uh...your second sentence is evidence that you can thrive while regularly eating meat, but not evidence that you can't thrive without it.
Meanwhile, your first sentence entails that there's no such thing as a thriving vegan.
Maybe eating meat is natural, and healthy, and moral, but you might want to limit your arguments to those that don't deny basic observable facts.
Look up "antimicrobial resistance" (AMR) and see where the deaths attributed to this are occurring. South Asia (e.g. India, etc) and Africa. Regions with inadequate healthcare for humans, where front-line antibiotics get spammed, where people don't complete the full course of treatment for lack of resources or understanding. It's not coming from the 'factory farms' of developed nations.
I.e. this isn't just about the use of antibiotics -- this is about the use of antibiotics which are _similar to parts of our own immune systems_. Using antibiotics which are more dissimilar to our own immune responses would create _drug resistant_ bacteria but not _immune resistant_ bacteria.