Anyone seen Cowspiracy? Thoughts?

some frogs are gender fluid. they can actually change gender depending on mating season

Haha that would be easy game

I didn't watch it the whole way through, but I've heard the argument before of how energy intensive it is to produce beef. I watched Forks over Knives and being a little bit of a health nut, that was much more influential to my intake preference. There was also a documentary I do not remember the title of, but it was a girl who's goal was to convert some meat eaters that had volunteered to be in the film into vegans more so through showing them the suffering the animals go through. I think I'm a great example of lazy- I believe in all three angles- its resource intensive, yet doesn't necessarily yield the healthiest intake option, all while being very cruel (factory farms), but the availability and convenience of those products are so high, its been difficult to take the additional time and effort to eat healthier. Its easy to get complacent when the issue is 'out of sight, out of mind' for me. When I worked in the health care sector, I was in much better shape as I saw daily reminders of what comes from years and years of neglecting simple common knowledge of a healthy lifestyle.

Having been vegan for a few months while also doing some awesome physical training with a buddy years back, IMO people that have cravings when eating "healthy" may not just be getting over some addictive properties of some of our food, but may be "doing it wrong" as well. I didn't have cravings when I was one, and I was training a lot at the time. I've met vegans that look and are sickly, and they ate a lot of processed vegan food, and not a broad range. I followed some advice of the Doctor's son in Forks over Knives who is a vegan triathlete as to what vegan foods to eat to get comprehensive nutrition even for an active lifestyle. I found myself not even taking the cheat days I had allocated myself to eat meat. It was a trip to go out of my way to get coconut products as it can become a challenge to a vegan to get enough saturated fat.

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I've only met one vegan in my life but I've been hearing a lot about the sick vegans. Being vegan does not equate to good health. You actually have to eat unprocessed plant foods to reap the benefits. Also, a lot of vegans end up eating lots of green salads which is also the wrong way to go as their meals end up lacking in calories so they don't have much energy to get through the day. I disagree with vegans not getting enough saturated fats. Saturated fat, whether it's from animal source or plant source, will result in an increase in serum cholesterol levels and a decrease in flow mediated dilation. It's best to keep saturated fat consumption as low as possible. If you want more information on nutrition, I find that nutritionfacts.org is the best source as it is literally a gold mine for nutrition.

Huh, so a near 0 gram saturated fat intake would be most optimal vs some specific minimum requirement for healthy body function? For Trans fat thats a no-brainer, but I had been under the impression our bodies make some use of saturated fat. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised one way or the other, the research is always leading to various conclusions, one year anti-oxidants prevent cancer, the next year they promote cancer growth or whatever. Gotta take all the studies with a large grain of salt, bake in some common sense and personal experience and do one's best I guess.

I just watched. It's awesome

Saturated fat is indeed an integral part of our cell walls. It prevents our cell walls from hardening under lower temperatures. But we make all the saturated fat we need with a few genetic exceptions. I took a nutrition class(sadly the only nutrition class) at the university I'm going to right now and I was told that although saturated fat is associated with increased disease and death, it's not as bad as trams fat. Taking that with a grain of salt because I don't know when my professors teach us incorrect info. This is why I hate bio classes. They just tell you to memorize a bunch of facts and mechanisms but they don't tell you how they came to that conclusion. Like it's ok to consume a bit of saturated fat as long as you keep your total cholesterol levels below 150. 150 is the cutoff for being immune to heart disease risk (maybe a little wiggle room).

Yeah there seems to be a lot of conflicting research going on but it's mostly due to corporate influence from food industries. I've looked into some of the studies that show that things like butter and eggs are healthy and discovered that the evidence is either weak or full of bullsh**. Of course, you'd need a bit of experience to be able to catch the bs in research papers but really...corporate greed is killing millions and making our lives miserable.

corporate greed is killing millions and making our lives miserable

I don't need to read a bunch of research to believe that one.

Good and bad are both interpretations of relevancy within the mind. I don't have priorities rather they be animal or human, but more so the logic to understand that we all bleed the same.

I eat meat because it's what we can afford, and it adds deviation to meals... Not because I hate the animal in question. Who's to say a more intelligible organism wouldn't eat humans? Look at it that way.

I do however think the way in which we exploit livestock is gruesome and inhumane... But at the same time we do have to eat, don't we?

In the health point of view, the use of factory farming has created a situation where the animals have suppressed immune systems, creating the perfect environment for bacteria to mutate and grow rapidly. One of the reasons why we have so many multi-drug resistant bacteria is due to the feeding of antibiotics to these animals, allowing bacteria to grow resistant to the antibiotics and even to antibiotics they haven't been exposed to. This creates a really dangerous situation for us as we may head into a future where even a tiny scrape could become lethal. It has been getting better these days with organics but I'm pretty sure most meat out there isn't organic.

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I seen it just now. I was really shocked how nearly all the environmental groups refused to talk about the animal agriculture. And yes Methane (CH4) being about 23 times more powerful at creating green house effect than CO2 is not news. But people dont talk about it because nobody takes cows seriously.

I don't think I can become full vegan but i will definitely try to cut down on eating meat.

Basically what the movie says is that in order to keep our planet sustainable everyone will have to stop eating meat or the global population will have to drop. Yep neither of those things will happen. Not impossible but extremely unlikely.

I don't think we have to stop eating meat completely but should make it only 10 to 15% of our diet.

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Any reduction in meat intake will help. You should try watching Forks Over Knives when you have time if you haven't already. You'd probably knock that percentage down a bit further.

I don't think it is outright wrong to eat meat. Animals also kill other animals to survive. It is part of the food-chain. However there is just too many of us. And we are no longer at the stage where we struggle to survive as a species. We went beyond thriving and are now overpopulated. The only way for every single person to eat meat all day every day is to resort to cannibalism or lab grown meat.

What i do think is wrong is corporations breeding animals in horrible conditions, making them suffer. Feeding them some processed waste with anti-biotics. Killing them and selling them as healthy food to people while destroying the habitat of non-domestic animals all in the name of profit.

Furthermore 40% of all produced food gets thrown out before it reaches the customer.

Obnoxious vegan propaganda, extremely selective information.. Monocrop agriculture and industrial farming is the problem regardless of what you eat. Topsoil depletion and desertification is a pretty damned problem.

Ideally cows can turn food we don't want into food we want and they can do that on land we can't use for anything. Just put them there, keep an eye out for competing predators and move the herd frequently as to mimic the wandering pattern of their ancestry. This method can, and currently does, help restore desert to useful crop land.

The animals are not the problem. In the US alone there were millions of bison before we came over there and ate them. There was also a vast grass land. We destroyed a very old symbiosis because we did not know any better. Take a look at grasslands ability to use and trap greenhouse gasses btw. But the good news is that we can restore it by imitating what nature was doing before we derped all over it. We can hit two bird with a single stone without resorting to eating sticks and leaves or test tube burgers.

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Do you have an article about the method of moving herd around to restore desert to useful crop land? I feel like it's not feasible a feasible method to satisfy current demands for meat consumption. A lot of land has already been cleared for meat production so if we were to use the wandering method, wouldn't the land consumption be even greater? I don't know how that would help the topsoil depletion much.

Letting them roam free like that seems like a good way to spread multi-drug resistant bacteria as farm animals are currently breeding grounds for these bacteria. Their feces, filled with these dangerous bacteria, would contaminate our soils and waters which would cause serious infections in wildlife as well as in humans. So I think the only way to re-establish the old symbiosis would be to decrease the population of farm animals(which means reducing meat intake significantly), fix the drug resistance problem, and then apply your wandering method of meat production. For now, your method seems to be wishful thinking.

Well said, you just described the biological function of the cow, and I for one can not see how another could blame the cow for fulfilling it's biological function, which like everything else on this planet is to adapt to serve us, or die.

There is no shortage of land, most land is either unused or highly unproductive, furthermore everyone doesn't need to eat like a westerner, survival of the fittest, darwinism and everything, so there is no need to produce enough meat for everyone. Even now many poor people subside on little to no meat, what difference does it make if that number is somewhat larger or smaller than it is, I think it would make very little to the personal lifes of most people who frequent this forum.

I'll watch it if it's free streamed somewhere. But just watching the title and people in there it's very Sea Shepard heavy documentary? I mean you're talking about a group that doesn't really respect international waters and policing the international waters like some sort of pirate turf. They would so violate UN/American sanction water boundaries of Korea if they would be there or any other countries where UN/America have drawn bountries for.

BTW do you endorse milk for kids? or you into soy milk for kids?

Look up guys like Alan Savory, and the whole planned grassing movement.

" A lot of land has already been cleared for meat production so if we were to use the wandering method, wouldn't the land consumption be even greater?"

We are moving them on the wrong kind of land, out of tradition.

Also lets not forget that there are a lot of people who wont eat meat from large animals due to religious or etchical concerns, and bless those good folks too.

What guy slike Alan Savory realized was the we in our understanding of how the ecosystems worked had reversed the cause and effect. We thought it was the amount of animals in a spot that did the damage, but in reality it is not the size of the herd, but how long you leave them in a single place. So he spend a lot of time culling herds with a riffle for environmental protection. He then later realized that it was wrong and only made matters worse. That the ground they were trying to protect needed more animals, not less. They then eat the shrub, poop and massage that poop in to the ground. Poop full of seeds.

With a great bit of bitterness in his voice he said in an interview that it took the life of 50.000 elephants before they realized they were wrong. And handling the whole problem in the wrong way.

Do anyone where know why so many anti biotics are used in the US (there are less used in EU and in Denmark only vets can administer them and only in so far that the cow is actually sick from something. The key is that the more time the animals spend eating fresh grass on the field and ensilage in the winter, the less sicksness you have. Cows do very poorly on cereal grains. they get gassy, get infections etc. Also from being cramped togther in a small
confine.