this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
-6 points (28.6% liked)
Friendly Carnivore
109 readers
18 users here now
Carnivore
The ultimate, zero carb, elimination diet
Meat Heals.
We are focused on health and lifestyle while trying to eat zero carb bioavailable foods.
Keep being AWESOME
We welcome engaged, polite, and logical debates and questions of any type
Purpose
- lifestyle
- food
- Science
- problems
- Recipes
- Sustainability
- Regenerative lifestyle
Rules
- Be nice
- Stay on topic
- Don't farm rage
- Be respectful of other diets, choices, lifestyles!!!!
- No Blanket down voting - If you only come to this community to downvote its the wrong community for you
- No LLM generated posts . Don't represent machine output as your own, and don't use machines to burn human response time.
Other terms: LCHF Carnivore, Keto Carnivore, Ketogenic Carnivore, Low Carb Carnivore, Zero Carb Carnivore, Animal Based Diet, Animal Sourced Foods
Meta
If you need to block this community and the UI won't let you, go to settings -> blocks you can add it.
[Meta] Moderation Policy for Niche Communities
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We can, though. By isolating contributing variables and comparing them to other options, we can isolate the ecological footprint of an animal per unit of body mass or useful produce.
We know how much methane cows vs other animals produce per unit of body mass, and we know cows are very high methane producers, even by ruminant standards - and cows are the most extensively farmed ruminants, too.
The carbon that enters the animal ends up either carbon dioxide, methane, or more complex carbon structures that can eventually become one or the other (and, over a very long term, it all eventually becomes carbon dioxide). Humans, for example, lean more on the carbon dioxide side, while cows emit a lot of methane. Advanced farms even use cow manure as a fuel source, though most of methane enters the atmosphere anyway. Natural decomposition of plants in the soil by soil bacteria is, in turn, less methane-emitting than either the processes happening in the rumen, or even in the human digestive system. Add to that all the maintanence overhead of cattle feed and farm management, and the differences will exacerbate even further.
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, even when corrected for it's atmospheric lifespan, and hurts environment more than carbon dioxide.
All animals have more of such footprint compared to plant-soil bacteria cycle, but cows are exceptionally bad. This is why, from an ecological standpoint, beef and dairy consumption should be reduced, of not eliminated entirely.
Sure, and if you look at unit of bioavailable protein, ruminants win. https://www.aleph2020.org/
except in high water environments (swamps and bogs). You need to also account for wild ruminants who eat the grass even if cattle are not around.
You also need to account for the bioavailability disparity between a whole food plant based diet and a whole food animal based diet. 3kg vs 0.5kg in daily food. That is about a 6x food volume difference, lots of people get focused looking on calories, but if we seriously are trying to remove all ruminants from the food supply then we need to look at all essential nutrition, factor in the cost of medical care for people who have issues with plant based nutrition (such as type 2 diabetics who suffer under carbohydrate load, of which there are a billion).
No, they don't. According to this paper:
At the same time, the CO2 equivalent per 1kg of product (source):
Chicken eggs are slightly more bioavailable than beef, while being responsible for 7-21 times less emissions. Peas can be a hundred times less polluting, while being a relatively good protein source.
Which agricultural lands typically are not.
Total population of wild ruminants sits at around 75 million. The farm count is 3,6 billion, which is 48 times that. Wild rumimants, thereby, constitute around 2% of total ruminant population, the other 98% are domesticated. (source)
Maintaining a vegan diet is more complex than simply removing meat and leaving the rest the same. One of the several points healthy vegan diets focus on is, exactly, gaining enough protein. For that, there are various protein-rich plants and processed products, protein isolates, yeast products. Moreover, vegan diet typically requires adding vitamin B12, as it is the most limiting factor of plant-based diets. Luckily, industrial bacteria can produce it very efficiently.
That said, eliminating animal food is not necessary. Poultry, pork, eggs, fish are all much better ecologically than beef. Beef is exceptionally bad from an ecological standpoint, and there are other, much better sources of same nutrients.
Vegan diet is not a contraindication for people with Type II diabetes, although basic meal planning, as always, is advised. In fact, vegan diet can improve cardiovascular health of such patients (source)
Going forward, I would like to ask you to provide academic/authoritative sources instead of linking to advocacy groups, which are highly biased.
does anyone else want to explain the problems with poore-nemecek 2018 or....
I'm afraid there's only two of us left, so you'll have to.
In any case, if you have a particular gripe with Poore and Nemecek, there's no shortage of papers coming to similar conclusions, like this one, this other one, and a myriad more. Same can't be said of the opposite.
As things stand, arguing that beef is eco-friendly is as scientifically fringe as saying the Earth is flat. Certain attempts (nutritional, organizational, technological etc.) are made to reduce the ecological footprint of cows, but it remains huge nonetheless. You can't make cows less cows.
one of them relies directly on poore-nemecek, and the other commits the same blunder as them: combining disparately methodized LCA studies
Only in one part, while sourcing the rest on other works, of which there's plenty, the other is a review article, and of course methods will have to differ somewhat.
I specifically go through review articles to show the studies are actually more than plentiful. You can look them up more thoroughly before dismissing. They all speak of the same picture, and it's about as clear as "the water is wet".
I provided you with a vast pool of studies to confirm what should be obvious to anyone who had at least school-grade biology. I would be much pleased if you could gather scientifically-backed points to the opposite. Show me research that demonstrates cows are actually not ecological disaster and are at least on par with pigs and chicken, or better yet, plant foods on ecological footprint, since that's the basis of your original claim.
the conclusion might be correct, but these "studies" are junk science.