The Planetary Health Diet

[Danny Bateman]

A few threads have produced some really good conversation about ethics and morals recently, so I thought this would be a good spinoff topic.

 

Partly this is wanting to discuss the findings of the study itself. I find it really fascinating that a very well-respected health journal like the Lancet got a bunch of really smart people together and this is what they think is best both for humanity and the planet itself. Like, this stuff blows my mind. It's definitely caught some flak from various groups with different bones to pick with its conclusions, but like anything in science, scrutiny is just another part of the review process. People should critique stuff like this - if it holds up, all the more reason to lend credence to the findings.

 

The other part of this thread was to start a discussion about dietary decisions and ethics. My girlfriend of almost 4 years and I have been increasingly trying to decrease the amount of animal products in our diets. She is far more stringent than myself - at this point I'd consider myself a sometimes vegetarian. I still eat eggs and milk pretty regularly, though we've mostly switched to almond milk at home. For most of my adolescence and adult life I've been a gym rat meathead for whom animal protein was an indispensable part of the diet to, you know, bulk up, bruh.

 

But she would like to work with animals, probably at a rescue or a similar setting and potentially be a vet. She feels very strongly about our reliance on animal products as a society and feels it is not ethical to raise animals en masse merely as food. Somehow she's managed to pass these concerns onto me. Today I ate a veggie burger from BK before going grocery shopping and only getting two items with animal meat (Lean Pockets, ew!).

 

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. But this stuff fascinates me. We've been debating the ethics of Roe v. Wade and laying into high school students and how we treat immigrants/POC a lot recently, but the topic about dietary ethics is kicked around much less, particularly in the Heartland. Morality is definitely a spectrum that exists in lots of different shades.

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

I’ve been very interested in nutrition for a long time and have worked in animal production for a lot of my life. 

 

Its an important subject on many levels. I have no problem with people being vegetarian if it’s based on facts. I have eaten vegetarian meals and have no problem with it. 

 

I also have increased the amount of veritable in my diet. I also eat a lot of wild game that isn’t raised in mass production. 

 

The biggest thing for me is that I want to eat something as close as possible to its original form. 

[RedDenver]

It's an interesting take, but the part about 60% of the diet coming from carbohydrates runs counter to all the recent findings that carbohydrates should make up a small portion of our diet.

 

The article didn't address this (and I haven't read the full report), but we can't actually switch to an entirely plant-based diet that's sustainable. Currently, the fertilizer to grow those plants comes from natural gas, which contributes to global warming and is a finite resource. The way we should be doing it ecologically (instead of concentrated feedlot operations) is to put the animals back on the farms and let the manure be the fertilizer. It's more complex than that, but basically we need a closed ecological cycle such that all the inputs and outputs from our agricultural system are put back into the cycle, and animals are necessary to do that. 

[knapplc]

We need fewer people.

[funhusker]

1 hour ago, knapplc said:

We need fewer people.

This is not false....

 

But I can't wrap my head around how this would be introduced without people losing their minds. 

[MLB 51]

1 hour ago, knapplc said:

We need fewer people.

I just had a "Logan's Run" flashback.

[knapplc]

4 minutes ago, funhusker said:

This is not false....

 

But I can't wrap my head around how this would be introduced without people losing their minds. 

 

China did it with the "one family/one child" policy.  It's easier to implement in a dictatorship than a democracy.

[VectorVictor]

1 hour ago, funhusker said:

This is not false....

 

But I can't wrap my head around how this would be introduced without people losing their minds. 

 

You could make people be licensed to be parents. Additional children could be put up for public/private adoption or hosted by childless adults who are friends of the original family.

 

Make contraceptives and Plan B pills readily available to assist couples with family planning. 

 

Problem would be enforcing this in third-world countries where a young labor force is necessary for the country to survive. 

[RedDenver]

2 hours ago, knapplc said:

We need fewer people.

The studies I've seen show that the Earth should be able to support 15-20 billion people, which is also what other studies have estimated as the point we're currently heading towards. Plus, none of the people I talked to about reducing our population want to be the people that get reduced.

 

Keep in mind that half of all the food in the world is disposed of as waste, so it's not an issue of not being able to produce enough food.

[Danny Bateman]

@RedDenver  You bring up some good points. Certainly we now know the low-fat, higher carb diet recommendations of yesterday were a terribly flawed idea and partially pushed by the sugar industry. I think ideally from a weight loss and overall health perspective, a diet that is higher in healthy fats and displaces a lot of the junk carbs we as a society eat far too much of would absolutely be a healthy change for people.

 

This photo from another article on this study by the Guardian shows a typical day's worth of food on the diet:

 

 

Looks radically different from what most of us eat on a daily basis. Most of the carbs there are complex and there is essentially no sugar outside of the fruit and a ton of fiber, so personally the higher carb aspect of the diet doesn't bother me.  One legitimate criticism I've heard is from the perspective of diabetics who may really struggle with blood glucose levels.

 

Also, you're definitely right about our farming habits. Our model now is a huge driver for natural gas emissions and thus scaling it way back but not eliminating it entirely is the way to go.

 

@funhusker You're absolutely right. It seems super incompatible with our western diet and most people would have to undergo some major changes to adjust to this. That said, infeasibility of trying to get everyone to adopt a sustainable mostly plant-based diet aside, it would probably be better for most people's healthy, right?

[Guy Chamberlin]

Food and drink gives me pleasure. It's probably the simplest, most satisfying thing I have in my life. 

 

I understand this argument intellectually and altruistically. It makes every kind of sense. I'm just not sure I would enjoy life itself.

[BigRedBuster]

21 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

Food and drink gives me pleasure. It's probably the simplest, most satisfying thing I have in my life. 

 

I understand this argument intellectually and altruistically. It makes every kind of sense. I'm just not sure I would enjoy life itself.

Food and cooking are a main hobby of mine. 

 

Just because you are eating healthy, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy food. 

 

Its a a lesson I had to learn. I actually eat much healthier when I’m cooking for myself....with better food usually.

[Danny Bateman]

46 minutes ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

Food and drink gives me pleasure. It's probably the simplest, most satisfying thing I have in my life. 

 

I understand this argument intellectually and altruistically. It makes every kind of sense. I'm just not sure I would enjoy life itself.

 

I used to think exactly this. I never thought trending more vegetarian would be an option for me because of my love of lifting weights and the perceived necessity of meat to help build muscle.

 

For Valentine's day a year ago I bought us a food delivery service caught Hello Fresh that has a veggie meal option. 3 meals a week. The way things are prepared and the ingredients they use - which generally aren't anything too absurdly exotic or hard to get yourself - are vastly more flavorful than almost every meat dish I was used to eating. And I felt better after eating it than I would something that was heavy on meat.

 

Now, that's given I wasn't getting really gourmet with my meats the way I know several members of the board do...

[B.B. Hemingway]

4 hours ago, knapplc said:

We need fewer people.

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

Like I said, I’m fine with someone being vegetarian if it’s based if facts. 

 

But, you can eat healthy while eating animal products. For instance, I love steak. What I’ve learned to do is order a filet instead of the giant rib eye. It’s a better cut of meat and then fill up on veggies. 

 

I probably have cut down on bread broducts more than anything.