• streetfestival@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    5 months ago

    If I learned 1 thing from the COVID pandemic, it’s that science doesn’t matter when it’s at odds with established big money continuing to make big money.

    Per the WHO, processed meat is in the same category of carcinogen as cigarette smoking. That’s the science. In my locale of Toronto, they sell dollar hotdogs weekly at the ballpark of the professional men’s baseball team. They dump tons of money into advertising and fetishizing binge meat-eating. They try to increase the stadium’s consumption that day well past 40,000 ‘dogs’. Last I checked, colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men and second in women. These dollar hotdogs certainly keep colonoscopists in business.

    More money talk. 2/3rds of animal biomass on this planet is ‘livestock’, which is given three-quarters of the antibiotics we produce. A healthy vegan is very unlikely to need diabetes, cholesterol-lowering, or heart disease meds. Most people on North American-ish omnivore diets will be on multiple prescription meds of these classes for decades of their life. They will need colonoscopies every year or two, starting around age 50. They will need hospitalization and maybe surgery after their first angina attack, heart attack, or stroke. They’re essentially a different kind of livestock.

    It’s amazing how much taxpayer money goes into preserving this extremely-dettached-from-reality status quo that benefits pharmaceutical companies, the medical industry, and Big Meat. It’s not serving the people who eat North American-ish omnivore diets, the healthcare system, the tortured non-human animals, or the low-paid humans that are probably stuck in those barbaric industries for lack of access to better work

      • streetfestival@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        5 months ago

        Keto BS.

        A high-meat low-carb diet is a pseudo-self-starvation method to lose weight if that works for you. But no one needs that amount of cholesterol and saturated fat, and where are you getting your fibre and micronutrients from? Getting that many calories from protein could be problematic too, and would certainly be off the table for anyone with kidney issues.

        Not to mention all the other reasons why meat isn’t great: inefficient use of land/food resources (1:10 conversion of calories), environmental pollution, non-human animal suffering.

        Advocating for a high meat diet is absurd and exemplifying all of the confusion peddled by the animal agriculture industry to disguise the obvious solution to eating for health: reduce animal products, and eat a whole food plant-based diet.