The main argument of the article appears to be that some farm land won't be used (perennial cropland) when people are on a vegan diet. Well, then use that space to build some aeroponic or hydroponic farms [1]. You'll get produce all year around.
Other studies have shown that it's not sustainable if we'd have to rely on meat to feed the world. The only reason why we keep eating meat is because it's cultural, traditional and pleasurable. Our society doesn't need meat anymore to survive, plenty of other protein sources available that doesn't involve killing other sentient beings en masse. Even some high performance athletes are relying on a plant-based diet only - making the argument 'you need animal protein to be strong' moot [2]
The future of food is going to be plant based [3].
[1] http://aerofarms.com/ [2] http://thediscerningbrute.com/more-vegan-athletes-rise-to-th... [3] http://beyondmeat.com/
Not only that, flax and chia seeds are very high in Omega 6, thus promote dangerous levels of inflammation.
So, can a vegan please explain to me how your community has managed to solve this?
Also, vegans are healthier than the average population with lower rates of death in major categories like heart disease[1]. In other words, from the standard american diet to veganism, it's generally much healthier which I think is the better comparison to make.
"Dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids does not appear to affect the risk of death, cancer or heart disease. Furthermore, fish oil supplement studies have failed to support claims of preventing heart attacks or strokes."
OK, so even if we assume we need more Omega-3 than a normal vegan diet contains, most meat also does not contain a good balance of Omega-3 to Omega-6. Eggs are only a good source if they have been supplemented with flax or other good sources of Omega-3. Fish is often a mixed bag, when it comes to health; it may be better to get our nutrients from the same place they get it. Seaweed and other edible ocean plants are a pretty good source of Omega-3 and are healthy on other fronts, too.
Finally, there are many normal foods that have a good Omega-3 to Omega-6 balance. Walnuts and other nuts, most seeds, several kinds of fruit and vegetables (while it's a smallish amount, the balance is good and you really don't need mega-doses).
In short, if you're eating a diverse vegan or vegetarian diet, you almost certainly don't need to think about any specific nutrient (except B12 for vegans, which does need to be supplemented, or obtained via nutritional yeast that has B12). You're just as likely to have specific nutritional deficiencies on a meat-based diet; folic acid deficiency is a common problem of a meat-heavy diet that would not trouble a vegan or vegetarian, for example.
A balanced and diverse diet is the right answer to questions about food and nutrition. Laser-focus on any one particular nutrient is probably counter-productive, unless there's a specific reason to focus on it (some people have difficulty processing some nutrients, for example, but Omega-3 isn't one of them, to my knowledge).
In short: Omega-3 is the new fad nutrient. There will be another in a year or two, and the entire health nutrition industry will figure out ways to sell you books, and pills, and diet plans, and the food industry will figure out how to cram more of it into foods, and we'll find that, like most of the other supplements over the years, it doesn't really do anything. You need some to be healthy; you don't need gallons of it to be healthy.
See:
https://sentientist.org/2013/05/20/the-ethical-case-for-eati...
The article approves of oysters too, but note that oysters may contain oyster crabs:
One particular supplement I like is Green Foods True Vitality, which I think is the least expensive for vegan DHA supplementation: http://www.greenfoods.com/store/p/44-True-Vitality-Vanilla.a...
It isn't bad on its own, but I mix it with my usual soy drink which is NOW Foods soy milk powder (which is just powdered soybeans; sadly the only equivalent with rice is rediculously expensive), (vegan) cane sugar (because it is much less expensive than maple syrup :( ), a dash of ground whole stevia herb (to reduce the amount of sugar needed), and a little vanilla powder. Quite delicious :).
Edit: After reading SwellJoe's excellent reply again I would also like to emphasise that many fruits and vegetables have really excellent nutritional profiles and just eating more of them can solve most nutritional issues. Even with vegan diets it is quite easy to not do that, but it is almost certianly the healthiest option.
From the study: "Despite having significantly lower intakes of EPA and DHA (from fish or fish oil), blood levels of EPA and DHA in vegans and vegetarians were approximately the same as regular fish eaters.
The results indicate that the bodies of vegetarians and other non-fish-eaters can respond to a lack of dietary omega-3 EPA and DHA by increasing their ability to make them from omega-3 ALA.
And as they said, "The implications of this study are that, if conversion of plant-based sources of n-3 PUFAs were ... sufficient to maintain health, it could have significant consequences for public health ..."
To be safe, I occasionally take an omega-3 supplement from algae.
While this doesn't get you into the recommend blood levels of omega-3 oils (it's mostly suprising because it's been found at all, and consistently), I have not seen a non-drastic method for meeting the amounts of omega three that the science reccomends, vegan or not.
Omega fat science is quite out of whack with the dietary recomendations commonly made. If you do the math, in order to acheive the ratios that are described in most papers I've read, one would need to forgo all omega 6 sources (olive oil, tofu, many other things), or consume unrealistic amounts of omega-3 oil each day to offset them. (I once calculated it to be in the region of a pint of omega-3 rich oil a day)
I'm equally mystified, but about the whole thing.
Or simply get some supplements like this one here: http://www.nothingfishy.co/
Also don't forget your B12 and D3 vitamins.
http://www.foodprocessing.com/articles/2012/algae-dha-health...
GMO could easily solve the problem of omega-3 and B12. [2]
[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947
[2]: http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/database/plants/63.rapeseed.h...
And even with 100% veganism, assuming no miracle crop is invented to use that additional land, it was still a pretty slim gap between the vegan diet and the "optimal" ones.
Really, the article kind of buries the lede when it puts veganism under the microscope considering that its numbers show how moving away from the modern meat-heavy diet would like triple the food supply.
Vegan diet: food from land -> truck -> grocery store -> my mouth.
Meat/dairy/what have you: food from land -> truck -> animal's mouth -> truck -> grocery store -> my mouth.
And when it comes to meat it means years feeding and water etc. until the product can actually be sent to the store. That's the idea behind it being "good for humanity". A lot of energy/pollution/water use is going into something we simply do not need in such large portions. If we ate less meat (like humans have been doing for most of our history) things would be a lot better for the environment and therefore humanity.
Years? No. Chickens are normally slaughtered at around 40 days. Pigs, 4-10 months. Beef cattle around 14 months.
Rather than breaking things down by meat or plant, we should just be looking at cost per calorie.
There are classes of plants which use much less resources than meat to produce a single calorie. These are generally grains, potatoes, and anything which produces edible oils (olive oil, canola oil, etc.)
There are also classes of plants which require much more resources than meat to produce a single calorie. Generally speaking, all fruits and vegetables, especially leafy greens (which are an order of magnitude more expensive per calorie than meat).
So, veganism or vegetarianism are not necessarily good for the environment. If you switch to being a vegan/vegetarian, but your grocery bill stays the same, then you environmental impact is probably about the same.
The bottom line is that your food bill in no way accurately reflects the cost required to produce your food.
In case you are, the energy problem comes from having to ship the cows, lighting, heating, water pumping and fodder shipping to house and feed them. Then further energy requirements for processing the meat, freezing or refrigerating it during shipping, packaging etc. Some of these costs (refrigeration, mostly) are shared with plant-based foods, but most others are extra.
> Cropland in perennial forages included hay crops and grazing on land which could be cropped but is used for pasture.
A: Perennial cropland is used as pasture for animal agriculture.
> Perennial cropland requirements were zero in the vegan diet.
B: Vegans don't require pastures for animal agriculture.
> The ovolacto- and lacto-vegetarian diets used about half of the cropland restricted to perennial forages, while the vegan diet used none of the restricted cropland.
C: Therefore the vegan diet wouldn't have any use for perennial cropland.
This would be true if perennial crops for humans didn't exist, but that's just not true. For example, we can grow perennial sunflower (!), grain (!!) and rice (!!!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_crop#Example_crops
Tom et al. (2015) [1] also show that in the US the switch to a vegan diet would be less efficient. But it's natural, from an economic perspective, that existing processes are optimized for efficiency and low costs and given the high demand for vegetables and fruits there would obviously be a huge incentive to optimize the production processes and lower the prices.
Vanham et al. (2013) [2,3] show that EU would benefit from a vegan diet when it comes to water usage.
Overall, it's quite obvious that the medical costs of today are extremely large mostly due to overconsumption of animal products. It is unfortunate that they can be easily overconsumed and thus cause health issues. Diet that includes animals is much more destructive when it comes to dead ocean zones, rainforest destruction, species extinction and water pollution, being the biggest factor in mentioned issues.
[1]: Energy use, blue water footprint, and greenhouse gas emissions for current food consumption patterns and dietary recommendations in the US http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-015-9577-y
[2]: The water footprint of the EU for different diets http://temp.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Vanham-Bidoglio-2014....
[3]: Potential water saving through changes in European diets http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013...
Whoa there, you have no evidence for that claim. The medical impacts of sugar and corn syrup for example have been a disaster. Probably more so than excessive meat. You can't single-out meat, Americans overconsume everything.
well, I'll leave then :(
The vegan curve never flattens out, because it is entirely dependent on cultivated cropland, unlike the other diets:
https://images.elementascience.org/611000.elementa.f005.PNG_...
I'm more sympathetic to the idea of maintaining a population level within which people can live with some amount of dignity e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...
Grazing animals can co-exist with other life, and some cases like forest grazing [1] (which used to be the standard way of grazing animals in europe and is slowly gaining traction again), has been shown to actually increase biodiversity.
So paradoxically enough, if what you care about is biodiversity and the livelihood of animals, you might consider reducing your consumption of cropland produced products like vegetables and grains in favor of meats from grazing animals.
Limiting meat consumption by ~50% would have a similar sustainability impact to a vegan diet.
W.K. Kellogg funded the research. Their grant: http://www.wkkf.org/grants/grant/2009/02/foodprints-and-food...
100% of humans being cops is bad for humanity. Does that imply being a cop is not good for humanity?
