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I like the taste of meat, it's enjoyable. We could cut down a lot of environmentally unsound practices if we wanted to reduce the standard of living. Air travel for instance is not essential - teleconference or do a VR tour of a foreign city. VR headsets themselves are fairly expensive and non-essential, as is the 4070 TI in my PC. We could rezone everyone into Burj Khalifa-style pod megastructures and save a lot of transport energy and free up plenty of land. We could ration food instead of wasting huge amounts of it because it's ugly. But people don't want to live in the pod or eat the bugs, no matter how healthy or non-sapient they might be.
Furthermore, dairy is apparently good for you and tastes good - for example ice cream has some ameliorating anti-diabetes properties: https://archive.is/38Wqi
In addition, nutrition science is not very well developed, they keep changing their stance on things like salt, fat and sugar. Or ice cream for that matter. The field as a whole has not had great success. We should be sceptical of the whole field of academic counter-insurgency after Afghanistan and Iraq turned into complete disasters, we should be similarly sceptical of nutrition science. Health has been declining for decades now.
We should stick with tried and tested food products from times when the general population was fairly fit and healthy. Milk from cows, not oats or soy. Fruit and vegetables, fish, grain and meat, olive oil as opposed to palm oil. Or we could copy diets from healthy, long-lived countries like Japan, France or Italy.
There's a reason for that. You can find it on the USDA website
Yeah. 'human health' and 'helping farmers sell things' are not aligned goals. The United States Department of Agriculture funds studies and propaganda to prop up middle America. State legislatures do the same of course. And corporations are happy to chip in.
Milk from cows is a conspiracy. No really, the entire Got Milk campaign was welfare for middle America farmers. See, in the 1900s after the drop in demand at the end of WW1, The US government bought so much surplus that they had cheese rotting in caves. Predictably, this caused the market to produce even more milk. At this point, there was a lot of political will to make people drink more milk. And we got the Got Milk campaign. And when people stopped drinking milk, they started shoving it into every product as powder and cheese.
Of course, only northern Europeans even evolved to drink milk. By drinking so much of it, even though they couldn't properly digest it, that they eventually evolved to do so. Something like 15% of the population is lactose intolerant.
All that said- milk is probably fine in moderation. But this is America. We don't do moderation, we do regulatory capture and making the bottom line go foom.
Not true, there are alternative mutations inducing lactase persistence in other pastoralist groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
It's a bona fide superpower and a very neat example of convergent evolution under cultural pressures.
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Yeah, there was a similar thing with corn and HFCS around the same time everyone started getting fatter - governments should not be interfering with agriculture nearly as much as they do. Ensuring that there's some basic level of caloric self-sufficiency is enough, just in case there's a supply-chain issue or war.
I read some P. J. O'Rourke and he had a great chapter on just how much the government was messing around with agriculture in Parliament of Whores, this was from the 1990s and I doubt it's improved since then.
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Absolutely. I think it's a little ironic that said Europeans now want to stop being based and stick with their ancestral diet but-
It's perfectly reasonable. Who wants to spend another thousand years evolving capabilities we'll probably be able to add by hand with gene-tech within hundreds?
Also putting milk in everything is... well.
I'm sure plenty of people here are willing to bite the bullet and say they're fine with poisoning the non-Europeans on purpose.
Can't argue with based people.
Just gotta steal their mutations and express yourself even harder.
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