Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

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teo123
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Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

Post by teo123 »

So, what do you guys here think about the Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism?
https://youtu.be/GJ1LImHvdxw
Much of the video is that tired old argument about how cows can turn grass into edible food and are therefore environmentally and economically beneficial. Once you consider that the majority of milk today comes from grain-fed cows, and the vast majority of cow meat today comes from grain-fed cows, it's obvious that this argument doesn't apply. However, there are some statements that I haven't heard before, like that methane emissions probably haven't actually increased over time and that satellite data shows that poorly-made natural gas pumps have a much greater role of methane emissions than do cows. Not that they are too convincing, in fact, they are about as convincing as when the Flat-Earthers claim that the times of sunset and sunrise around the world can't be explained if we assume the Earth is round, those arguments are hard to understand and are obviously against the scientific consensus. However, it would be nice to have a response to them in case somebody uses them.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

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Consensus on contribution of animal agriculture to climate change is pretty clear, it's on the order of the transportation sector, and a large part of that is methane emissions from cows for beef and dairy. Feeding them grass doesn't significantly change that, beyond the fact that grass is also a crop in grass fed farms and it's treated like one; to be productive it requires agricultural inputs, it's not magic. @Dsalles talked about this, she inherited a cattle farm.
The only way we'd be able to manage lower impact agriculture is to massively reduce meat consumption to the point you could have a very low density of cows supporting the habit.

The fossil fuel industry releases a considerable amount of methane, that's true. Volcanoes also release CO2. It doesn't matter that something else is *also* contributing to climate change, what matters is what our habit of consuming animal products is doing and that going vegan goes a long way to help reduce climate change and leads us closer to a comprehensive solution.
His argument is like saying "well earthquakes kill a lot more people than serial killers so serial killing is fine".
teo123
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Re: Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

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I have made a response to that video.
I again brought up that point about calcium causing heart attacks, quite simply because I think it's the mainstream science. I asked a friend who is a pharmacist and he told me it's very likely true.
Another common argument people usually use against milk is that cholesterol in food causes heart disease. I didn't bring that up because my perception is that most nutritionists think that doesn't play a significant effect. That is, that dietary cholesterol raises your blood cholesterol too little to play a significant effect.
I am not sure if most methane in the atmosphere being produced by undersea bacteria, and that those undersea bacteria are concentrated in the Bermuda Triangle and that that's most likely the cause of so many ships and airplanes disappearing there (that they explode and sink because of a sudden rise of concentration of methane in the air), is really the scientific consensus. But I went with that.
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Re: Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

Post by John »

Probably a wise choice Teo regarding the cholesterol. Most people think in terms of HDL and LDL and whole milk brings up HDL.

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2018/ja ... 26725.html
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

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teo123 wrote: Tue Apr 07, 2020 12:40 pm I have made a response to that video.
I again brought up that point about calcium causing heart attacks, quite simply because I think it's the mainstream science. I asked a friend who is a pharmacist and he told me it's very likely true.
First, polling a single anybody, but particularly a single pharmacist (who is not an expert in cardiovascular disease) and in country less than well renowned for its educational system isn't a good way to determine what consensus it.

Second, it depends VERY much how you ask a question like this even to an appropriate expert. Studies have principally assessed supplemental calcium possibly (the evidence is very weak) increasing risk of heart attack -- and indeed, it is only *supplements* that a pharmacist might be aware of anyway.
Even if there's a real causal link, that doesn't mean heart attacks generally are caused by calcium. Smoking also increases risk of heart attacks, but again heart attacks generally are not caused by smoking: you're perfectly capable of having one and dying from it as a non-smoker.

I showed you elsewhere when we discussed this before that even with very low calcium status plaques are perfectly capable of forming. There's no reason to believe it's a limiting factor in the blood: cholesterol is.

Making even a strong claim about calcium supplements is dubious, but trying to extrapolate this to dietary sources too is even more of a problem and not something mainstream doctors are willing to do:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can- ... tack-risk/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-he ... connection
Harvard Health wrote:Those studies don't give the full picture, though. A comprehensive analysis that pooled findings from 31 separate studies of calcium intake and cardiovascular disease, published in October 2016 in Annals of Internal Medicine, found no cause for concern. Moreover, the randomized trials of calcium supplements, with or without vitamin D, did not show a link to heart disease.

"There is no clear association between calcium supplements and the risk of heart attack or stroke," says Dr. JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

The well-known association between bone health and heart health may explain why supplement users appear to have a higher risk of heart disease. Osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease have many shared risk factors, including smoking, lack of physical activity, and an unhealthy diet, Dr. Manson explains. Women who have osteoporosis or its predecessor, osteopenia, are typically advised to take calcium supplements. But these women may also be more likely to have heart disease as well.
teo123 wrote: Tue Apr 07, 2020 12:40 pmAnother common argument people usually use against milk is that cholesterol in food causes heart disease. I didn't bring that up because my perception is that most nutritionists think that doesn't play a significant effect. That is, that dietary cholesterol raises your blood cholesterol too little to play a significant effect.
Except in hyper-responders, that's true. It's endogenous production that people are worried about.
However, what's less clear is whether certain forms of oxidized cholesterol that are absorbed through diet (even in small amounts) may be much worse than endogenously produced cholesterol.

Also, dairy products are pretty rich in saturated fat, so in either case they raise cholesterol unless they are fat free dairy (thus the low fat/fat free dairy recommendation of major nutrition organizations).
teo123 wrote: Tue Apr 07, 2020 12:40 pmI am not sure if most methane in the atmosphere being produced by undersea bacteria, and that those undersea bacteria are concentrated in the Bermuda Triangle and that that's most likely the cause of so many ships and airplanes disappearing there (that they explode and sink because of a sudden rise of concentration of methane in the air), is really the scientific consensus. But I went with that.
This is the problem teo, you just GO with stuff without fact checking. :roll:
If your internet is too slow to fact check, then maybe assume the things you think you know are not credible.
John wrote: Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:12 pm Probably a wise choice Teo regarding the cholesterol. Most people think in terms of HDL and LDL and whole milk brings up HDL.

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2018/ja ... 26725.html
I would not regard diabetes.co.uk as a very good source. There's a lot of context they're missing. They promote a diet agenda where no mainstream medical diabetic organization does, and publish sensationalist books like "Reverse Your Diabetes: The Step-by-Step Plan to Take Control of Type 2 Diabetes" and "Reverse Your Diabetes Diet: The new eating plan to take control of type 2 diabetes, with 60 quick-and-easy recipes"
Big on promises and cherry picking, light on evidence.

Anti-carb diets are about as credible as anti-fat diets like McDougall's starch solution. Again, all about tribe mentality and putting the conclusion before the evidence.

The study they're talking about is real: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29229955
But analyses like this are complicated in the context of an actual diet.

For instance, consider these facts:

1. Meat like beef has more cholesterol in it than milk does, both in terms of protein and fat. And the types of saturated fat in meat may have larger effects than those in milk. If people drink whole milk they may (and likely will) consume fewer calories from other foods -- like meat. Without an intervention that looks at HOW exactly the diet changes, we can't really say *what* the milk is doing, only what happened in these people because of what they added AND what they removed from the diet. There are a lot of reasons to think that milk can be both healthier than other animal products but less healthy than most plant foods. So it depends on what diet it's being added to.

2. The study itself has a caveat, although not nearly strong enough:
These findings suggest that if the higher energy content is taken into account, whole milk might be considered a part of a healthy diet among the normocholesterolemic population.
What most people do not realize is that total cholesterol is still an issue.
It's not that HDL=good and you want as much of it as possible. High HDL levels correlate to heart disease too. It's what we call a U-shaped curve. Very low levels are bad, but so are very high levels:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5863140/

Even in people with "normal" cholesterol it's not necessarily a good thing to have HDL further elevated.
However, considering we have an obesity epidemic and most people have higher than desirable cholesterol in the areas these public health messages are relevant to, avoiding whole milk is probably still a good recommendation.

Mainstream recommendations for low fat dairy exist for a reason: the mechanistic evidence is pretty clear. The saturated fat raises endogenous cholesterol, HDL and LDL. Public health advice is complicated: it's not like you can tell people to stop drinking whole milk and they'll replace those lost calories with broccoli. All we can do right now is give people the most accurate information and hope they'll make good choices. Sometimes that information with backfire and people will forget something else they're supposed to avoid (like sugar) and replace those saturated fat calories with candy (fat free candy!); it's unfortunately in the nature of a consumer driven food industry where ignorance is as big a selling point as knowledge. There aren't any easy solutions.
teo123
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Re: Carbon Coalition video against environmental vegetarianism

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John wrote:Most people think in terms of HDL and LDL and whole milk brings up HDL.
Well, yes, those who advocate milk consumption will generally say that saturated fat isn't dangerous because it raises both your LDL and HDL cholesterol, and the effects of raising your HDL cholesterol somehow offset the effects of rasing your LDL. The problem with that is that, like I've said in the video, we don't know how strongly HDL protects against heart disease, or whether it protects against heart disease at all. In fact, as I said in the video, there is a good reason to think HDL protecting against heart disease is a myth: omega-3-acids convert LDL to HDL, yet studies repeatedly fail to show that they protect against heart disease.
As far as I understand it, saying "avoid cholesterol in food not to get heart disease" is "wrong" for about the same reason saying "avoid glucose in flood not to get diabetes" is "wrong". Cholesterol in food slightly raises your cholesterol levels in blood, but that's not the real issue, saturated fat can raise your cholesterol levels to lethal levels because it "tricks" your liver into "thinking" there is not enough cholesterol in your blood, when there can be too much. Similarly, starch slightly raises your blood glucose levels, but that's not the real issue, the real issue is fructose which makes your liver act as if there is not enough glucose in your blood, even though there can be lot of it.
brimstoneSalad wrote:it is only *supplements* that a pharmacist might be aware
Well, we can only rigorously study the effects of supplements. It's a lot easier to study them than to study the effects of food.
brimstoneSalad wrote:I showed you elsewhere when we discussed this before that even with very low calcium status plaques are perfectly capable of forming.
Well, plaques sometimes form even in people who have very low cholesterol levels: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/H ... c01237a04d
That doesn't suggest high cholesterol doesn't raise the risk of them forming.
brimstoneSalad wrote:This is the problem teo, you just GO with stuff without fact checking.
And doesn't this article telling us most scientists believe that today strongly suggest it's indeed a scientific consensus?
https://net.hr/danas/znanost/rijesen-mi ... g-trokuta/
Sure, it may be wrong, but I don't see any particular reason to think it's wrong.
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