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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • I don’t blame you for not knowing any better, there’s a lot of persistent myths and outright lies about veganism, plant-based lifestyles, and nutrition. But you are spreading misinformation again, about protein. Our society’s obsession with protein has little to do with science, and a lot to do with marketing. In the first place the vast majority of people do not need nearly as much protein as they think they do. It’s so easy to get adequate protein even on a plant-based diet, that as long as you’re at least mostly eating real food and getting enough calories, you are getting enough protein without even having to worry about it.

    Even the whole “plants don’t have complete proteins” is a myth. Just about all plants have all essential amino acids. What the protein combining myth points to is that the amino acid ratios in plants are a little bit different than the ratios in our muscle tissues, with some plants being low in a key amino, and other plants being high in that amino but also low in another. Getting what we need is as easy as being sure to eat a variety of plants. A person does not even need to make sure they’re eating rice and beans in the same meal - they could do just as well by either eating a larger helping of one or the other, and/or eating one and then the other at another time or day.

    The big takeaway here is to consider that maybe your perspective on plant-based lifestyles is being informed in the same way as if someone who only ever ran Windows started trying to tell you what it’s like to use Linux. Maybe it’s worth checking out the perspectives of people who actually have experience with the thing and know what they’re talking about.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DMwf_9wqWY0&pp=ygUqZXZlcnl0aGluZyB5b3Uga25vdyBhYm91dCBwcm90ZWluIGlzIHdyb25n

    I understand that everyone has different circumstances that make a plant-based transition easier or harder, or maybe even entirely unfeasible, and that’s okay. We’re okay as long as we’re doing what we can with what we have.

    On the other hand consider trying to shift your perspective on it. I commented in another thread about the remarkable benefits of going plant-based for my depression, and the thing to understand here is that going plant-based can have near-miraculous benefits for a wide range of things like that. So consider the possibility that a lot of what might be making it hard to switch is that the consumption of animal products is keeping everyone in suppressed, unmotivated, lethargic, or even outright depressed states of mind.

    It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but instead of seeing a plant-based transition as a burden, consider that working through the challenges might be just the medicine that a person needs to reach a state of mind where, say, things like home cooking begin to feel possible again.

    Again I want to be clear - I know there are circumstances where it’s not realistically possible for a person to go fully vegan, and not realistically possible for a person to do their own cooking. We should be seeking ways to fix that on a societal level. However what I’m telling you is that what everyone thinks is possible is being perceived through the lens of lifestyles that are making everything that much harder - working through that tough transition to being fully plant-based expands the range of what we think is possible. Life becomes significantly more doable on plants.

    Oh, and for both health and ethics there is no meaningful difference between which particular animals you choose to eat. For example you’re still progressing heart disease regardless of whether you’re consuming 29 grams of saturated fat, or “only” 23 grams. And a chicken is every bit as capable of contemplating their own suffering as a cow is.





  • Even if we ignore the brutal abuse and murder that is done to animals raised for food, or the pandemic inevitability that comes from animal agriculture; or their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of natural habitats for expansions of ranches, or illnesses like asthma that cafos cause to local communities; or the physical and psychological harm that occurs to animal ag and slaughterhouse workers, many of whom are either immigrants or minors - any one of which should be reason alone to seek an end to animal-consumption ways of life - diets that are high in animal products and low in plants are directly harmful to human health.

    That’s essentially what keto, paleo, and carnivore are - high fat, high animal consumption, and low or no carb (and since most plants are high carb, that usually means low-plants as well). In the first case, low-carb diets don’t even meet all nutritional needs without supplementation. In addition these diets are all about increasing the very foods that cause our top causes of death like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc, while reducing or eliminating all the foods that are known to be most protective against these lifestyle diseases.

    https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-try-the-keto-diet

    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.702802/full



  • The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don’t see things the same way. From this post:

    “Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn’t even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny.”

    “The lemmy.world admins’ response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won’t take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation.”

    “The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins’ leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact.”

    Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That’s unfortunate. Glad I’m not on that instance.


  • In western civilization everything is low risk until we’ve come too far to avert calamity. Before the 2008 financial crisis, every institution that played a role would have you believe everything was great, right up until everything was falling apart.

    With global warming we always had, and still struggle against entirely too many people, and lying institutional vested interests, downplaying or disbelieving how serious of a global catastrophe climate change is forming into.

    The only reason h5n1 is “low risk” at the current time is because it’s not yet a human-to-human calamity that is already too far underway to put a stop to. We all saw how badly we all collectively handled covid.

    We are now at mammal to mammal transmission, and humans are also mammals. The only actual difference between low risk, and full on pandemic, at this point, is patient zero.

    You should really go back to the article and read the whole thing, as well as others that are linked to in it. Because in this one the WHO describes it as an enormous concern, because it is.

    https://www.sciencealert.com/who-warns-growing-spread-of-bird-flu-to-humans-is-enormous-concern






  • I’m nearly as far from an expert on infectious diseases as it gets, but - and if anyone who knows about influenza reproduction can chime in - I remember reading that influenza has incredible abilities to mutate wildly and recombine. The analogy was like, if human reproduction is like taking two decks of cards and randomly shuffling half of each deck together, then influenza is like taking any number of decks, randomly chopping up and re-splicing portions of random individual cards together, as well as resorting all of them back together without any regard for whether the results are going to even produce anything that can live or not. But the reproductions and randomizations are so voluminous that it doesn’t matter - at least some of it will stick.

    In other words, in addition to the wildly rapid mutation capabilities these viruses have - if you have animals that are carrying more than one strain of influenza simultaneously, those two or more strains can produce hybrids.

    But again: citation needed.