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Originally Posted by Iliftrocks
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Um, obesity and a lack of food variety are risk factors of malnutrition as well. And a balanced vegetarian diet
is a "regular" diet. So is balanced omnivorous diet. So is a balanced vegan diet. So is....a
balanced diet.
Eating fortified foods isn't more work; people do it every day. I'm assuming you do to, since you live in the U.S. Some of it is government mandated.
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Face it, it's easier to get nutrients with meat in your diet.
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I don't deny that meat is a quick way to get things like lots of protein, in addition to b vitamins, iron, zinc, and a few other minerals.
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In my anthropology class the statistic for hunter/gatherers was meat was 10% of the mass of food eaten and 90% of the nutrients. Plant were 90% of the bulk and only 10% of the total nutrients.
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The points I've made in above posts indicate that we're not a hunter/gatherer society; we're a grocery-store-customer society. And I sincerely doubt that the average American has 10% of the food mass consumption as meat. The other thing, too, is that many hunter/gatherers were eating only certain plant foods limited to their region, mainly fruits and vegetables (berries, tubers, etc.). We have access to a far greater variety of food now, plus we have a greater amount of knowledge regarding food and nutrition. The proportion of food source/nutrients are more easily rearranged and have been for years.
But I like your point. If only the average American reduced their meat intake to 10% of food mass.
Cancer researchers say that only 27% of Americans eat a healthy proportion of meat to plants.
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Meat is much more nutrient dense and we are not made to eat so much vegetation. Luckily we can cook and process vegetation and if we cross our t's and dot our i's we can survive, and maybe thrive on a vegan diet these days.
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We weren't made to eat so much meat either. I would say that we're far better made for eating too much vegetation than we are too much meat. If we look at what is possible and what one can thrive on, then we look towards
reducing our meat intake, not increasing it or even keeping it as it is with the average intake. The bottom line is that Americans should reduce their meat intake, even if you look at it as a health issue. The environmental benefit would be a pleasant side effect.
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[...] Agriculture in general is killing off our planet's resources, not just meat production. If we are to switch to vegan, we will have to raise a whole lot more vegetation than is currently used for our food.
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Umm....what are the animals eating? What if....
we ate it instead?
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Some foods that ruminants eat, we cannot, so farms will somehow have to be retooled to provide vegetation that we can eat. Most of which won't grow in the areas we grow the grass that animals can eat.
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Much of the meat industry is fuelled by corn and oats, and a few other grains I think. I don't think it would take much to "retool" these farms to produce grains and other products for human consumption.
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In the end, we need to thin out our herd to sustain, whether or not we eat vegan or a more natural omnivore diet.
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We produce enough food to feed at least 10 times our current global population. We'd just have to stop eating meat. That's just an off-the-cuff guess, but I would't be surprised if it were true. Okay maybe 5 times our current population is a safer guess, but still, that's incredible.
You know what, though? I don't care if anybody becomes vegan. If everyone simply reduced their meat intake to 10% of their diet and instead filled those calories with natural plant foods, it would solve a whole slew of environmental and health problems.
I think the
traditional Okinawans can teach us a lot, not just in terms of diet, but in lifestyle as well. Sure, they eat some fish and pork (but no other meat, and very little in the way of eggs and dairy), but 6% of their caloric intake is soy and other legumes. Americans tend to eat too much protein and not enough of the good stuff.