I will not eat animal sourced food, it will cause global warming! Fact or Fad?

Global temperatures have been going up particularly since the 1980's but should we blame a particular industry only? When we say inclusive, holistic review, we must look at all possible effects, whole system especially when you accuse something. First of all, we need to know for normal human omnivore eater, how much they eat food from non animal and animal. We don't know right? But my guess for normal people is around 30% from animal and 70% from non animal sources. So whatever they claim negative towards animal sourced food is based towards the remaining percentage of consumption. Preaching on plant based sourced food over animal sourced food is like telling no need salt we need sugar only whereby we need both of it.

It raise eyebrow why certain group or people blame livestock industry that caused climate change while the big elephant in the room is fossil fuel. For industry per say, we know that the airline industry operating 24 hour Vs livestock industry. Electric vehicle is not the solution for environment as most electricity is generated through coal powered, which produce the most CO2.

By not taking animal sourced food is that a quick win? I will provide some facts of both animal and plant based food and the solution for both. The facts gathered from my observation, asking industry practitioner and some citation from professional.

Distance and frequency of transportation

Plant based diet has brought more of non localized dietary to people such as plant-based milk to non tropical countries. The most wanted or high valued vegetables and fruits can only plant in certain climate while most consumed animal can be breed anywhere but the only difference is the type. Taking in Malaysia context, the high valued and nutrients plant food like Quinoa, Sweet Potato, Peanuts is coming from South America, and that is approximately 15,933.32 km. Couscous coming from North Africa is approximately 18,953.59 km. All these calculation is based on calculation here. This is just some assessment, more details of impact can be calculated if we were to use 'cradle to grave' impact assessment.

Stacking limitation of fruits and vegetables also should be considered which could lead to frequent transportation.

-Non climatic fruit

Non climatic fruit cannot ripen after harvested says Mr. Mizan, Agriculture Officer (Bachelor of Agricultural Science, Crops and Pasture, Adelaide University). These means like blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes etc from 18,000 km to asian countries have potential of using some preservatives.

A must use pesticide for plant based food

Without crop protection including pesticides, half of the World's Crops would be lost to insects, diseases and weeds. All farmers use pesticides, including organic farmers. Whether from synthetic or natural sources, pesticides are used by all farmers. The difference is organic farmers can only use pesticides from natural sources. But both synthetic and natural pesticides have various levels of toxicity. Choosing organic vegetables and fruits should be the way but it's not cheap. Not only the crop, soil and ground water is affected too on pesticides usage.

Choosing your product from a reliable company with sustainable certification is important, like in Malaysia myGAP(Good Agrcultural Practice)and Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) .

Absorption efficiency

Plant food especially vegetables is digested slowly thus not easily absorbed. During my endoscopy preparation due to my gastric problem (since childhood), Dr Syed Anees, Pusrawi Hospital Kuala Lumpur told me not to eat porridge with vegetables because it will stick into my intestine even after 24 hour. He won't be able to see my digestive system clearly if there is something sticking on my digestive system. I quickly remember if you look at your feces (come on u might have accidentally), if your feces has stripe, it is from plant, no way it is undigested animal food.

To illustrate this further, human intestine are about 5 times of their body while Horses and rhinos, small rodents and rabbits are hindgut fermenters. They tend to have large, complex intestines about 10-13 times the length of their bodies, (Rosane, 2016. University of California, Why You’re Not a Cow or a Gorilla)

"Look at cow, they don't eat other animal but they produce protein!" First of all, cow is ruminant, they have unique digestive system with four (4) separate compartments to better use energy from fibrous plant material than other herbivores. Claiming ruminant eating plant based food can produce protein is also akin of saying like "look at the Chicken or Nene Bird, they eat grain and can fly!" whereby you obviously don't have wing, and claiming on ruminant, you don't have that kind of stomach.

The World 7th Cause of Death

When one get a diabetes, despite genetics, we can sure that it is coming from your non animal source diet. Diabetes causes various microvascular and macrovascular changes often culminating in major clinical complications, 1 of which, is stroke. Risk for stroke is actually higher in the young population with diabetes.

This is why high protein diet can help diabetes to cure or at least treat them overtime. If you face type 2 Diabetes, it is way more crucial to treat it, you need to be extra careful on your sugar intake including sugar in fruits.

However, plant based diet is good for those who do not have related disease

Unethical Production

As vegetarian and vegan diets increase in the UK – whether for health, environmental or animal rights reasons – shoppers are said to be hoovering up nuts, eating 17,000 tonnes in 2016, a huge 35 per cent increase compared to 2012. Women who shell cashew nuts for as little as £2 a day are regularly left with agonising acid burns while trying to meet British demands for the snack, a new report has found

With the almond bloom in California’s orchards , beekeepers across the country were fretting over their hives. A lot of their bees were dead or sick.They are fed substitutes for their natural foods of pollen and nectar so they will quickly repopulate the hive to be ready for almonds. Beekeepers reported losing as much as half their hives over the winter.The results of this year’s annual Bee Informed Partnership survey, a collaboration by leading research labs released Wednesday, found that winter colony losses were nearly 38%, the highest rate since the survey began 13 years ago and almost 9% higher than the average loss.

Solving problem, blaming or Conflict of Interest?

Frederic Leroy, Professor of Food Science and Biotechnology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, said meat had effectively become a scapegoat for commercial and environmental advocates, much of which was based on bad science. The anti-meat lobby has gained traction in Europe and elsewhere over the past few years, leading to calls for banning or instituting a sin tax on meat. High-level UN policy makers have even suggested that we could eventually see meat-eaters being banned from restaurants.''

This has been promoted by organisations such as the Open Philanthropy Project (OPP) which in 2017 paid the United Kingdom-based Guardian newspaper more than $NZ1million to publish a series titled ''Animals farmed'', which painted animal agriculture as unhealthy and dangerous to the environment. OPP is funded by Dustin Moskowitz, one of the founders of Facebook and an advocate of farm-animal welfare. OPP is also a major investor in Impossible Foods, the maker of the Impossible Burger(Brent Mellville, 2019, Otago Daily Times).

Livestock Industry produce CO2 and Methane

I'm sure they all are aware of that. But as per previous topic, if you want to solve you will suggest instead of ban. According to Department of Primary Industries Regional Develoment's Agriculture and Food, Western Australia, feeding one type of seaweed at 3% of the diet has resulted in up to 80% reduction in methane emissions from cattle. They also use some tannin, fats and oils to reduce methane from the cow. There are also several studies by Md Najmul Haque US National Library of Medicine and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Performance of athlete

As for the performance wise of herbivore athlete Vs omnivore athlete, I'm looking at Olympic Game Record or Guinness World Of Record. They are few stars like Lewis Hamilton and Novac Djokovic whom eat plant based food only, but they are relatively very few and not specific to human performance; record breaking.

I'm not sure what is the main factor that contribute less of them in the ranking but plant based diet surely lack of an important few nutrients associated with animals . Those include Calcium, vitamin A, vitamin D, B12, arachidonic, eicosapentaenoic, and docosahexaenoic fatty acids.

However, high performance athlete consume 10,000 calories perday, that is about 4 times more than normal people. If you are not an athelete but you consume around athlete then you need to relook on your diet.

Choice of diet that may affect others

Last but not least, what you choose or convince to choose may affect other people what more your loved ones. If you are a parent, you must be shocked to stumble across this article on vegan parents facing jail after their baby found severely malnourished, malnourished toddler that turns out had no teeth .

A note to woman, researchers found that a higher intake of two nutrients, Vitamin B6 and Zinc appeared to delay menopause by 0.6 and 0.3 years respectively. In addition, vegetarians in the study reached menopause at an earlier stage that meat eaters. Would you take a risk towards this? I don't, because I love my family and those surround me.

The above picture is just a joke if you know that female praying mantis eat the female after mating and several others like some spider species and Octopus. However, I would like to point out that even an animal know what's best for them, in this case by eating male, it will boast her egg numbers. I'm not supporting cannabalism but you have to know what's the best for you.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION / THE WAY FORWARD

Eating local food which is around 100-200 miles radius will help overall effect to the environment. It could reduce the average consumer’s greenhouse gas emissions by 4-5%

Country like Whales plan to plant 1 trillion new trees across the world to soak up the carbon dioxide produced since the Industrial Revolution began. However, when the scientists were assessing the suitability of areas for tree planting they excluded all fields used to grow crops and urban areas.However they did include grazing land because they say some trees are a benefit to grazing animals. Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

Dr. Allan Savory came out on the idea to fight desertification and climate change through planned animal grazing. At 10:00 video, he said the seasonal grass become long and if not eaten, the grass and soil will die. By leaving like that, it will switch to oxidation and woody vegetation and bare soil release carbon. To prevent this, traditionally they use fire but doing that burning 1 hectare of land is more damaging than 6,000 cars pollution. This We are burning in Africa more than 1 billion hectares of grass land and nobody talk about it. This effort is simple and doesn't cost much compared to like giant carbon sucking machine In Switzerland.

There are also several companies looking at the use of insect meal in poultry diets, particularly fly larvae. These are grown on organic matter, before harvesting and grinding into meal. Insect meal has a high (37-49%) protein value and is highly digestible.

Besides carbon footprint, using plastic bag in our daily life also contribute to climate change. I've been doing this for my weekly groceries, to put all free weight vegetables / fruits into one plastic bag. This effort is an extension towards using woven plastic bag to carry your groceries to your home. You could also cook your own food and do meal planning like my post. With that you can use your non-plastic container including when you are on the go.

Choosing livestock, vegetables and fruits from certified MyGAP (Malaysia Good Agricultural Practices should be the criteria for buying as the farmers follow strict rules from sowing, harvest to packaging.The certification follow Malaysia Standard MS 1784: 2005

If you have thought on eating animal sourced food is cruel by slaughtering, perhaps following Islam slaughtering will help. The windpipe (throat), food-tract (oesophagus) and the two jugular veins must be cut. By using sharp knife, the method is to eliminate pain as the impulse of the body did not reach the brain.

If you still don't believe on the above method, why not inject a Lidocaine, a local anesthetic numbing medication. There's always a way to solve rather than simply ban.

Conclusion

Everybody should contribute in making less negative effect to the the mother earth right from individual, industry and policy makers. Choosing substitute resources won't help much as eventually the land area will be swap to the desired usage. We can't stop but we can delay. If you don't agree for all of the above solution you might want to be like Thanos destroy half of the population to cope with the 'over population' that he believed it disrupt the system and resources.

As Gus Speth, [an American environmental lawyer and advocate] say, he thought environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change, but the top problems are selfishness, greed and apathy.

References:

https://www.sustainableag.co.uk/whats-really-behind-the-plant-based-diet-agenda/

https://www.sustainableag.co.uk/the-pinnacle-of-human-nutrition-red-meat-dairy-products/

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/toddler-fed-vegan-diet-so-malnourished-she-had-no-teeth-court-told-20190509-p51lrp.html

https://ucdintegrativemedicine.com/2016/03/youre-not-cow-gorilla-dont-eat-like-one-either/#gs.uyeie4

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5298897/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/79c2aa16-35f1-11e9-bb0c-42459962a812

https://i.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/112610509/australian-toddler-fed-vegan-diet-was-malnourished

https://elemental.medium.com/how-do-vegans-survive-f6617ba678e4

https://7news.com.au/news/court-justice/vegan-parents-facing-jail-after-their-baby-daughter-was-found-severely-malnourished-c-102974?utm_source=l.facebook.com&utm_medium=referral

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48043134

https://www.health.harvard.edu/womens-health/diet-might-delay-or-hasten-the-onset-of-menopause

https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/04/women-india-pay-price-cashew-nut-demand-vegan-diets-rise-9110415/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/honey-bee-census-almonds_n_5d0a8726e4b0f7b7442b3aaa

https://www.odt.co.nz/rural-life/red-meat/beef-blame-game-unscientific-professor-says

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/beyond-meat-health-vegan-burger-plant-based

Sustainability of livestock, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

http://www.fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf

Alternatives to soya for sustanable poultry beed

https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/livestock-feed-nutrition/alternatives-to-soya-for-sustainable-poultry-feed

https://qz.com/1131428/if-the-entire-us-went-vegan-itd-be-a-public-health-disaster/

#fruits #sustainable