thejdizzler
1yr ago
Default is not killing sentient creatures for your taste pleasure?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
What's your philosophical/scientific basis for this? This clearly contradicts my own intuitions/ the scientific consensus.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Dude, I have a life too. I honestly don't think about this crap 99% of the time, except when eating out a restaurant or arguing on an internet form. I only tracked my intake for this post. If I wanted to bulk I would use protein powder like 99% of meat eaters, or make a serious effort to include more protein rich foods like soy.
I agree with some of your points. I'm not sure why the line is at animals when it's pretty clear that things like oysters are basically plants. There's a difference between those edge cases, and something that's clearly as smart as a human baby like an octopus or a pig.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
I respect this attitude, and I think it is directionally the same as me, although I am much more uncomfortable killing animals.
On the exercise point I think the real important factor is just the specific stimulus. My mile (running) and triathlon PRs are from when I was meat eater and honestly eating crap (sleeves of Goya cookies for lunch), but my training stimulus was almost perfect.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
How can you categorically say that animals have no moral worth? Is this axiomatic, or do you have justification?
I think simple sugars certainly have a role in metabolic syndrome, but saturated fat is also clearly a huge problem (i.e atherosclerosis and obesity). Pretty much the only source of saturated fat is animal products (dairy and meat).
Factory farming exists because it is cost efficient. Growing grain and soy for animal feed is more efficient in terms of calories per acre than grass fed (because wheat and soy are more efficient plants at converting sunlight to calories and protein than grass is). However, our current monoculturing is clearly not sustainable from a disease or resource use perspective. So we'll have to go back to more traditional animal agriculture methods. Which means less meat.
I'm not sure that your ethical point is really a satisfying argument to me. What is the difference between that statement and me saying "I'm really not concerned about the suffering of black people, I'm a white-centrist?" I also don't believe this is true for most humans ala pets: most humans surely care way more about their dog than someone halfway across the globe.
As far your last point: I think you underestimate how much that we can adjust to changing hedonic stimuli. I used to love beef and pork and salmon before I was vegan, but 4 years of vegetables has made me like... vegetables.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Almost every time I get into a discussion about veganism, nutrition is brought up. People claim that it’s hard to be healthy, get enough protein, or not be deficient in key minerals on a vegan diet. As an accomplished runner, and 4- year vegan, this always baffles me. In my time as a vegan, I’ve set PRs in the 10k (30:49), 5k (14:56), Marathon (2:36), mile swim (19:00), bench, and squat (they’re embarrassing, I’m a runner). I spend about $50 less on groceries a week than I used to (non-processed meat is expensive yo),my acne has cleared up, and I generally feel better. An my success is one story among the millions of vegans and hundreds of millions of vegetarians that lead healthy lives. But that’s all anecdotal. What I want to show in this post is that it's not actually that hard to get all the nutrients one needs on a vegan diet.
Protein
Let’s start with protein. I’m 150 pounds, and with the recommended RDA of 0.8 g/kg body weight for protein intake a day, I only need 55g of protein. If I ate nothing but white flour (3g protein per 100 calories), I would exceed this amount (60g). There is the issue of grains (i.e. bread) having low protein bioavailability (closer to 40-50%), but this can be partially remedied by eating something like sourdough, or just not something absurdly stupid like getting all your calories from bread. Protein deficiency is so absurdly rare that it’s almost impossible to have it without calorie restricting, even on a shitty Western diet. However, the average American is either some kind of athlete or has aspirations to be one. RDA for athletes is up to double this amount: 1.6 g/ kg body weight, or 110 G protein for me. I can hit this if I try, but my daily consumption is usually around 100g protein, at least during the times I’ve tracked intake. While protein intake has not been demonized like the other two macronutrient groups, research suggests that high-protein intake is actually negatively associated with longevity. People also bring up complete proteins, but I also think this is a non-issue on a balanced diet. Soy beans contain all nine essential amino acids, and rice and beans together also make up a complete protein. There's also the issue of Methionine/BCAA consumption: they seem to be associated with decreased lifespan, but they also are necessary for muscular anabolism so it's sort of a win some you lose some situation. Animal proteins are richer in BCAAs, but I'm not sure if this a good or bad thing.
Vitamin D
Ideally you should be getting this from UV exposure. However that isn’t possible for 3–6 months during the year in locales above 30 N or below 30 S. I supplement during the winter. Animal products like milk and meat have appreciable amounts of vitamin D, but these are either added later (milk) or supplemented in the animal feed. If you insist on a vegan dietary source, mushrooms with UV exposure or sunlight exposure before cooking have enough vitamin D to meet the RDA.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
There are three types of Omega-3 fatty acids: ALA, DHA and EPA. DHA and EPA can pretty much only be found in marine sources (algae or fish). ALA is common in plant foods such as flax and chia. I personally take an algae DHA supplement daily, but this may not be necessary because I consume about 7g of ALA from plant sources, including Chia and Flax. The RDA for DHA+EPA combined is between 250–500 mg. Assuming middle of the range 5% conversion between ALA and DHA (source), I still get enough omega-3s without the supplement. Flax and chia are super cheap and super easy to add as a garnish to salads, overnight oats, baked goods (although this destroys the omega-3s), and the famous chia pudding.
B12
This is fortified in soy milk and nutritional yeast. This is supplemented in most animal products as well, either in animal feed or post production. If you really want a natural source of b12, duckweed has 750% of the RDA per 100g. I've also started homebrewing Kombucha, which by my own TLC (thin-layer chromatography) analysis has plenty of b12. I'm sure this is true for other fermented foods as well.
Iron
Anecdotally my serum ferritin and hemoglobin levels increased when I became vegan, probably because of dropping dairy. My tracking app says I get plenty more than the RDA of 18 mg of iron (which is already 2x what is needed for males). Main sources are dark chocolate, sea-weed and dark, leafy vegetables. Yes, plant iron is less bioavailable, but heme iron (animal iron) is a carcinogen, and you can increase iron availability by eating iron rich foods together with vitamin C. Oftentimes these two nutrients are in the same food.
Calcium
Again this is supplemented in soy milk, but even without that I get more than enough calcium to exceed the RDA of 1g from a variety of sources including and not limited to nuts, leafy greens, flax, chia, oranges, kiwi fruit, and sea weed. There is a range of bioavailability from these foods, but the main non-vegan source of calcium (milk) is around 30% of bioavailability, which is the upper middle range of plant foods. Dairy is not a health food for a variety of other reasons, so I don’t think this is an entirely fair comparison.
Iodine
I cook with iodized salt, but also eat seaweed. Iodine is also available from plant sources, but the yield varies wildly depending on the iodine content of the soil.
Other Nutrients
Some people also claim vegans suffer from vitamin A, vitamin K and zinc deficiencies. Vitamin A can easily be found in spinach and carrots. Vitamin K in kale, kiwi and chia, and zinc in beans, flax and small amounts in pretty much every other food. Zinc is in nuts and seeds, but I also eat oysters (not sentient and are sustainable), which are almost too rich in Zinc and other essential metals. Plant K2 can only be found in natto, but again the conversion rate isn't that low, and is probably upregulated if you don't intake enough vitamin K2 from your diet.
I’m not claiming that a vegan diet is optimal, but it seems pretty clear from both research and my anecdotal experience that is possible to be successful athletically on a vegan diet. Considering that American levels of meat consumption are unsustainable environmentally (we would need 8 earths if everyone ate as much meat as Americans), and generally seem to result in poor health outcomes, it seems that moving closer to a vegan diet would be better for all of us. While regenerative grazing can generate meat in a sustainable manner, it cannot do so on the scale of factory farming, and thus cannot satisfy the insane American demand for meat. There’s also the issue of ethics to consider: cognitive research has shown that many farm animals (cows, sheep, chickens come to mind) show many signs of intelligence similar to young children and pet animals. I've become much more open to the idea of small-scale animal farming, where animals are treated humanely, but still ultimately killed and eaten, but this still entails eating far less meat. Nutrition isn’t a serious barrier, so what’s your excuse?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Not my article but: https://www.rintrah.nl/the-end-of-the-internet-revisited/
I'm not sure the machine learning/AI revolution will end up being all it's hyped up to be. For local applications like identifying cavities, sure. For text generation however, it seems much more likely to make the internet paradoxically much more addictive and completely unusable. There's so much incentive (and ability) to produce convincing scams, and chatGPT has proved to be both easy to jailbreak and/or clone, that any teenager in his basement can create convincing emails/phone calls/websites to scam people out of their money. Even without widespread AI adoption, this is already happening to some extent. I've had to make a second email account because the daily spam (that gets through all the filters) has made using it impossible, and Google search results have noticeably decayed throughout the course of my lifetime. On the other side of the coin, effectively infinite content generation, that could be tailored specifically to you, seems likely to exacerbate the crazy amount of time people already spend online.
Another thing I'm worried about with the adoption of these tools is a loss of expertise. Again this is already happening with Google, I just expect it to accelerate. One of the flaws of argument that knowledge-base on the internet allows us to offload our memorization and focus on the big picture, is that you need to have the specifics in your mind to be able to think about them and understand the big picture. The best example of this in my own life is python: I would say I don't know python, I know how to google how to do things in python. This doesn't seems like the kind of knowledge that programmers in the past, or even the best programmers today have. ChatGPT is only going to make this worse: you need to know even less python to actually get your code to do what you want it to, which seems good on the surface, but increasingly it means that you are offloading more and more of your thinking onto the machine and thus becoming further and further divorced from what you are actually supposed to be an expert in. Taken to the extreme, in a future where no one knows how to code or do electrical engineering, asking GPT how to do these things is going to be more akin to asking the Oracle to grant your ships a favorable wind than to talking to a very smart human about how to solve a problem.
I'm not sure I really like what I see to be honest. AI has the potential to be mildly to very useful, but the way I see it being used now is primarily to reduce the agency of the user. For example, my roommate asked us for prompts to feed to stable diffusion to generate some cool images. He didn't like any of our suggestions, so instead of coming up with something himself, he asked ChatGPT to give him cool prompts.
The best days of the internet are behind us. I think it's time to start logging off.
What's unsustainable about any of these foods? I can and have grown almost all of them including mushrooms?
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