Four billion years is a lot of time for that randomness (via selective pressure of the environment or of life itself) to produce tons of crazy results.
I do both, old stuff and new stuff depending on the mood. Lately I've been exploring some genres I didn't even know existed like medieval speed folk (Perkelt is a group I like) and Dungeon Synth (Fief is my favorite so far).
In a recent thread somebody mentioned the My Analog Journal YouTube channel called and I've found so many great things through there. I had no idea that Japanese funk was a thing until listening to:
Veganism is mostly about reducing animal suffering. It also has a health angle but it's mostly about the ethics of killing animals when we can have a complete and healthy diet eating plant-based (plus fungi).
I know what veganism is but it's promoted by its followers as healthy when in reality it's based on dogma.
Anyone can choose what diet they want. Vegetarianism is just as good but it seems to be too tame for some people. It strikes me that many follow veganism merely as one-up-manship, posturing, or due to intimidation.
2 years of psychoanalysis, tons of books. But for real, everyone can benefit from psychoterapy, just be aware that there are a ton of different schools of thought.
There are tons of easy alternatives for vegetable protein, including good old lentils, beans, chickpeas, etc. You don't have to go out of your way to buy tempeh or gourmet vegetarian food.
Hitting high protein or low carb macros is difficult without some kind of protein supplement. I'm currently targeting 50% fat, 25% protein, 25% carbs for endurance reasons. Of course this isn't applicable to everyone. But it is applicable to anyone who needs to keep carbs low for health reasons, or anyone with some kind of athletic hobby.
Also bear in mind that not all protein is created equal. If wheat gluten wasn't low in lysine, I'd eat a lot more of it.
1. "healthy" doesn't mean living a long life free of ailments. It means achieving your standard of athletic performance as a hobby.
2. "challenging" doesn't mean difficult. It means doing some research, buying more tempeh at once and maybe freezing it, or just buying a protein supplement.
> "challenging" doesn't mean difficult. It means doing some research, buying
That's already too much. I can do that, and you can do that. Our jobs are to research things and then implement them. Most people will not or can not do this. Expecting them to is a waste of time.
The way to solve this would be to de-incentivize meat production on the supply side, and encourage food distributors to fortify food with micronutrients that are commonly missing in vegetarian diets (vitamin B12, calcium, etc). Anything short of this is not going to do much except turn people off from being vegetarian.
I'm curious what else you think is missing in a vegan/vegetarian diet, because calcium is not one of them, and even "omnivores" are recommended to supplement B12 - it's produced by soil bacteria that we would in the past get from fresh vegetables, and that's how animals should get it, too, but even now meat animals are given B12 supplements.
Calcium is most certainly an issue. A lot of vegan dairy substitutes are already fortified with calcium for this specific reason.
I'm still learning this stuff myself. But from the things I've read so far, vegans (especially the WFPB variety) can have difficulty getting: Vitamin B12, calcium[0], iron, and possibly a balanced amino acid profile if they have elevated protein requirements. A diet too high in carbs and too low in fat and protein can also cause long term problems like candida overgrowth and hormonal imbalances.
I just want to make sure I am clear on the argument you are making. Are you saying the average person can't easily be healthy without meat? That it would require them to do research? That it is easier for them to be healthy on meat-including diet without doing any research?
I agree that none of this matters as long as people can eat meat. They will if they can.
> I just want to make sure I am clear on the argument you are making
Yes, that's a decent summery. Populations would be less healthy if meat just suddenly disappeared with no other changes. Although, in the United States at least, we massively over-consume meat to the detriment of our health. But we rely on it as a source of many micronutrients that we otherwise wouldn't get by default.
Additionally, these changes will never happen without regulatory changes on the supply side to artificially drive up the cost of meat production.
Beans, lentils, and chickpeas are not a substitute for meat, in terms of either nutrition or flavor. Vegetable protein does not equal meat protein in terms of amino acids. Plant proteins are typically low in methionene, tryptophan, lycine, and isoleucine [0]. My point is not that vegetarianism is completely impossible, but that it is hard to get everything necessary. This is especially true for anyone who is trying to build muscle or get in shape. It certainly doesn't taste as good, especially if you don't want to take tons of time cooking.
It still takes "gourmet" vegetarian food to compare to regular meat.
> There’s no official RDA for lysine, but according to research, you typically want to aim for about 12 mg per kg of bodyweight.
> For example, a 170 lb person needs 924 mg per day, or more.
So a cup of soybeans providers 1.33 grams, oats, lentils and any bean at least a gram per serving.
Oatmeal for breakfast, nuts for a snack and a mix of vegetables with some beans or tofu for dinner and you exceed the RDA for every one of those amino acids you've listed. All healthy things you should be incorporating into your diet anyway (fiber rich). So while a single food may not meet the RDA alone, it seems very easy to meet with a combination of common foods in a plant based diet.
Not to mention nutrients that are supplemented in vegan diets often are also supplemented in omni diets (B12 in meat and Vitamin D in milk, for example, are only because of supplementation and fortification).
> It certainly doesn't taste as good, especially if you don't want to take tons of time cooking.
> It still takes "gourmet" vegetarian food to compare to regular meat.
I had plenty of terrible meat meals and many amazing vegan dishes. I would say the standard American diet lacks a lot of knowledge about tasty ways to cook plants, but they do exist and they aren't hard. Ethiopian and Indian cooking, for example, have a strong tradition of plant based dishes that are easy to make. Many other cuisines can easily be adapted.
Well said. I generally also like to point out that many meats are eaten with some kind of flavouring/ sauce to make them taste better. These flavourings and sauces are nearly entirely made of vegetables and fruits...
I'd say that's pretty subjective. I haven't missed meat from a taste perspective. The smell actually starts to get a little bit repulsive when I go for months without it.
The rest of your point is very relevant though. I supplement with whey protein. But if it wasn't for that, I'd really be struggling to hit amino acid targets. Being an athletic vegan is borderline impossible in my opinion.
> Being an athletic vegan is borderline impossible in my opinion.
There are a great number of vegan athletes that disagree. E.g. Patrik Baboumian, one of the strongest people alive, is vegan. America's best Olympic weight lifter (maybe not currently but has been), Kendrick Ferris, is vegan. Keep an eye out for the release of the moving "The Game Changers" [1] for more.
Just copying and pasting this link from a sibling comment to yours to point out that oatmeal, nuts, and beans are generally good enough to cover the amino acids that are otherwise hard to get from a vegan diet https://vegfaqs.com/important-vegan-amino-acids/
Agreed that it's really hard to be an athletic vegan, but seems doable if you hit these amino targets and still supplement with pea protein or something.
You're right that taste is subjective, and that what tastes good for one may not for another. That is a large part of the reason that I take issue when people self-righteously say I should be eating a vegan diet, eating insects, etc.
Selective breeding isn't genetic engineering though. GMO is used when genes from a species are inserted into another, not for strains that are produced through artificial selection of organisms with desirable traits.
A traditional method of breeding new plants is to expose them to mutagens and see what happens. The results of these experiments are in the food supply and not labeled as GMOs.
Yes, selective breeding is far less controlled and predictable as to unintended changes; people think of it as safer because of the way it used to be done which operates over longer time scales, which, aside from not actually providing any kind of safety, neglects the fact that modern methods allow selective breeding to operate over much shorter time scales.
I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods. That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled; one of the side effects is that it disrupts a random selection of completely unrelated genes.
> I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods.
So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.
> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled
That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.
Selective breeding performed slowly over longer time scales did at least give the breeders time to notice some kinds of severe problems. If you're breeding wheat and accidentally introduce a toxic mutation, you might notice the resulting pile of dead horses. There won't be a warning like this in every case, but it's not right to say that there's zero benefit to going slow.
That said, I don't really have an opinion on GMOs. I'm fine with you partaking first, though. :-)
Selective breeding doesn't create fundamentally new organisms like transgenic GMOs, however -- organisms for which there is no method to predict their interactions with our one and only environment (Earth, if that wasn't clear :p).
What you are describing is transgenics, GMO just means that the genetics were modified using gene editing tools rather than breeding techniques the vast majority of GMO food products are not transgenic.
If I did it someday I wouldn't be thinking about making money, just being self-sufficient and growing enough food for me and my family. If I could sell some that's great but that's not the objective.
