I was once on a farm, laughing at something, and a horsefly came up and bit me on the tongue.

I had no idea why it happened, still don’t, but it was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me at that point in my life.

The early story of McDonald’s is one of the great American tragedies. The food used to be excellent fresh-cooked hamburgers, real milkshakes, all this real food and available cheap and fast because they were well-organized. There’s a reason it got popular on a historic scale and started making a basically unlimited amount of money. Then, Ray Kroc pulled an Elon Musk on the (original) founders who had invented it all, hijacked the whole thing and took it over, and ruined the food to save money. Not satisfied with having fucked over the McDonald brothers, he then sued them for using their own name and then successfully drove them out of business from even having the single hamburger stand serving real food – now with a different name – that was all they had wanted to have in the first place.

It’s like everything good and bad about America, all wrapped up in one heart-rending little anecdote. Look up the whole story if you want to get upset.

South pole

They did this in Ukraine right before the shit hit the fan for real, too.

The pro-Russian ruling party at the time was cracking peaceful protestors’ skulls, so they started wearing helmets. And then, the helmets became proof that they were up to something violent somehow, and they tried to make helmets illegal. Within about a month it was street battles, fireworks and small arms and bow and arrows.

Waiting until the US is too dysfunctional to reliably bail them out of whatever wild bullshit they get themselves into. And then, starting a regional war. Great stuff.

Maybe shooting starving families for this long and everything going according to plan has convinced them that they’re indestructible, and nothing can go wrong. It absolutely can. The US has managed to get successful outcomes out of about 0% of wars it has started in the Mideast, and the US is a hell of a lot more capable at these things than modern Israel is.

“It’s common for people across the company to have questions for the CEO, but he doesn’t have time to answer them all,” Jean Yves Couput, senior advisor to footwear company Salomon CEO Guillaume Meyzenq, told The Information.

With the help of San-Francisco-based startup Personal AI, Meyzenq trained an AI chatbot to answer his staffers’ annoying questions about company culture, mission, and strategy, per Couput.

Where are The Yes Men? I feel like they did this.

Wait, what the fuck?

https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/Salomon-names-guillaume-meyzenq-as-ceo,1680479.html

It’s real… I was sure that this was made up to sound out as “John is Kaput” and “Guy Amazing” or something. I cannot believe that there are real life humans who believe that all their underlings are dying to have a bit of their time, to ask them questions about company culture and mission. In all my experience the things I have wanted my boss’s time for are “did you look at that thing I sent you” and “can you make a decision about this and then enforce it afterwards please, any decision, literally any at all.”

I have seen them at protests, and they do seem organized and they definitely can yell. What the fuck, I’ll take it. I feel like it’s probably mostly the central leadership that’s somehow been corrupted into trying to throw elections to the Republicans and getting upset about us sending aid to Ukraine.

I don’t know if the person on the microphone I saw spend most of their speech yelling about Democrats (literally more than 50%) was from the PSL, but I don’t know that they were. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe not, fuck it, come along with us, you can do your thing and I can do mine, sounds good.

You and Five aren’t 100% wrong, I do take the point that the infighting is a waste of energy. I was all set to apologize and acknowledge, and then I looked at the PSL’s web site and it’s all still talking about the election, they don’t give a shit about progress now that it doesn’t involve an election with a Democrat in it, they literally can’t even be bothered to take down the video yelling about the election that happened a lifetime ago in a different type of country. Literally the day the election happened, they stopped caring, I guess.

I mean like I say, I do get it. I just felt embittered. Now that I’ve got it out of my system for a second, yes, we can all rally together and fight this bullshit whether or not the PSL is aware of its role in this catastrophe or interested in self-preservation in future elections going forward.

Take a look at https://pslweb.org/. There’s nothing about the protests on Saturday, it doesn’t seem to have been updated since the election.

Watch the video. “A system that presents two options, but for all intents and purposes, represents a single billionaire agenda.” “I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime. The reality is, over time, it doesn’t matter.”

I turned it off when they got upset about us sending aid to Ukraine. It’s a little wild and incongruous that they found time to fit that in there, in the same breath as aid to Israel.

Now that millions of people are in the streets and there might be some momentum for lasting change (as well as a terrifying outcome if the resistance isn’t strong enough.)… nothing. Now that they fucked up the election, the page hasn’t been updated, they don’t care anymore. They’re not working on building anything non-electoral now that that’s getting wildly popular. All their focus was (and still is, apparently), on the election.

They aren’t leftists. I feel fine attacking them. Honestly? If there are some confused leftists in their ranks, who unlike the leadership are interested in protests and are getting attacked as a result, then absolutely, let’s defend them. That goes without saying. But the PSL doesn’t have any sympathy from me. I’m not happy about the leadership being in any crosshairs because of the predictable disaster they helped to cause, no one deserves to get shot because they advocated for something good. But, that was part of the point about rallying against Trump, was that hopefully no one would have to get shot. If they realize it’s a big deal now and start fighting, then they should update the web site to talk about that, instead of the election.

Party for Socialism and Liberation: “I plan to continue to express absolutely no urgency about the idea of keeping Republicans out of power. The most important party to criticize is and always has been the Democrats. It’s super important not to vote for Democrats. That’s the key thing. It’s the only way to real forward progress.”

The KDP did the exact same thing in Germany in 1932. Most of them were executed in the years following the election.

And what will it do to a person?

In her case, it made her physically weak, she had trouble thinking, and she became irritable and unreasonable. Basically physically, mentally, and emotionally it made her worse.

I mean it does make sense to me. Your body needs energy to function and getting it from complex carbohydrates is a standard way and it’s going to struggle if it doesn’t have that available. As I understand it, the no-carb diets are sort of well known to produce that kind of impact, although I can definitely believe that there could be people who are having a bad reaction to some particular substance that they’re eating so that cutting out all carbs entirely will give them a good result because they’re also not being exposed to that substance, I don’t think that kind of thing is in general a good thing for the average healthy person to do.

No, not largely meat - Exclusively meat - yes. But that is just my opinion and we don’t need to keep talking in circles about it. The problem with Largely is that sugar and carbs will creep in, and all the associated chronic non-communicable diseases they bring.

I mean that’s pretty easy to study. Take a big random sample of people, randomly assign half of them to try that diet, and see what happens.

All I really know is my sample size of 1 person I know who tried that, and she got all fucked up because not eating carbs will do that to a person. But that’s not really all that scientific.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/red-meat-and-colon-cancer-the-evidence-remains-weak

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/red-meat

This articles are very well cited (hover over the numbers for the publications)

I read some of the cites and I’m not convinced. It seems mostly like an exercise in misleading citation, taking studies which indicate a lack of indication of one particular factor of X, and claiming that they find definitively that X does not occur, which isn’t the same thing.

I’m not in the US.

Got it. Some of what I’m saying about the health risks of meat may not apply in a country with better food standards. I think it’s moderately weird that for all the studies and effort that’s been spent on this, this doesn’t seem to be a chief area of investigation when people talk about the health impacts of eating meat.

• Is sustainable antibiotic free range grass fed meat better then farm meat? Yes
• Is farm meat better then processed food? Yes
• Is farm meat better then farm veggies? Yes (but clearly our opinions differ)

None of these are the question. The question is, “Is it a good idea for a first-world society inhabitant to replace their diet with a largely-meat diet?”

I’ve not seen bad health outcome studies based on meat itself, I’ve seen speculative mechanistic appeals, I don’t find that compelling

Here’s a pretty comprehensive attempt to address the issues you’re talking about with epidemiological studies:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6971786/

Meat, by virtue of not being a plant has no toxins, no pesticides - both of which some people react to

This is absolutely false. Cows eat plants, and any pesticides in the plants can bioaccumulate in the cow so that it winds up with more pesticide than you would have gotten from just eating the plant in the first place. It’s one of the problems with eating meat in the modern world.

This has some links to various high-level explanation: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/how-to-shop-for-safer-healthier-meat-a1124955526/

It was actually pretty difficult for me to find a study about this that was (1) from the US and (2) not on some site that was clearly trying to promote one side of the battle or the other. But Consumer Reports is pretty trustworthy, to me.

You have to decide if correlation is important to you or not.

I have explained my thought process, why I think you need to be cautious about assuming correlation is causation when there is a clearly obvious alternative explanation for the correlation, but you can accept epidemiology in general instead of throwing out any study that relies on correlation as any part of its argument.

If not, then there is no smoking gun against meat. If correlation matters then there are opposing epidemiology to consider.

Opposing epidemiology that to me is hilariously weak and implausible, yes. I considered it.

I’m not aware of any problems with low grade meat.

You really should be. It’s not just an issue with “low grade” meat. If you’re in the US, you should know that most of the world won’t even import our meat products because they are so full of hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, and all kinds of other fun stuff that they are illegal to sell in other first world societies. Do you really not know this?

Now consider a modern adult with T2D (which is a billion people right now), carnivore by virtue of having zero carbohydrates is one of the best possible interventions for them to manage or even reverse their T2D

Context matters - Any dietary intervention is better then the sugar heavy, processed food, standard western diet. Even low grade factory farmed meat is better then pop-tarts and cheerios, yes?

Reducing the amount of pure garbage that someone consumes is going to help them, yes. If you’re advocating for replacing the garbage with meat, and then give credit to the meat because of the lack of garbage is helping them, I don’t think that makes a ton of sense.

Great, I 100% agree, to your previous post about all the science being against red meat because of cancer risk, can you point out the non-correlated (non-epidemiology) that demonstrates this risk?

The study actually talks about this. They point out some correlations with BMI where the meat diet is probably not the issue, and then they point out some other health issues where they can’t find an obvious correlation with anything else and so provisionally it is maybe okay to blame the meat.

I’m just pointing out that in all your studies I looked at there was an instant 2-seconds-of-thinking correlation that was more likely the cause than meat consumption, and it didn’t seem like the study was addressing that. It kind of looks like someone is aiming to prove that meat is healthy, and grasping around for anything they can find that will demonstrate that, when most of the science I’m aware of (again, based on consuming the type of meat that’s available in a modern first world society) says the opposite.

If we want to quibble about which diet has optimal health outcomes - then we are already winning! I think most people would benefit from whole food (single ingredient), non processed, sustainably produced food for their diet.

Absolutely agree. I actually personally suspect that almost all the bad health outcomes according to modern science from eating too much meat would evaporate if the people were consuming healthy untainted meat. But, also, I think you have to be aware of that and communicate it if you’re advocating for someone to eat a lot of meat when it’s likely that what they’re going to be eating is tainted.

1. Of course giving protein to Kenyan children is going to improve their performance at everything, that’s not surprising to me. People need protein and if you’re giving some of it to some of them who probably aren’t getting plenty of it already, it’ll help them. That doesn’t directly have a bearing on whether a first-world adult choosing to consume only meat is going to improve anything for them.
2. Correlation is not causation, both meat consumption and overall life expectancy are going to be highly correlated with societal wealth. That’s not surprising to me, it doesn’t directly have a bearing on whether a first-world adult choosing to consume only meat is going to improve anything for them.
3. That’s a social media survey of people self-reporting consuming a carnivore diet and asking them to self-report their health level. It’s not surprising to me that they self-report that the carnivore diet is having good effects for them.
4. Correlation is not causation.

On average, participants who reported consuming meat regularly (three or more times per week) had more adverse health behaviours and characteristics than participants who consumed meat less regularly, and most of the positive associations observed for meat consumption and health risks were substantially attenuated after adjustment for body mass index (BMI). In multi-variable adjusted (including BMI) Cox regression models corrected for multiple testing, higher consumption of unprocessed red and processed meat combined was associated with higher risks of ischaemic heart disease (hazard ratio (HRs) per 70 g/day higher intake 1.15, 95% confidence intervals (CIs) 1.07–1.23), pneumonia (1.31, 1.18–1.44), diverticular disease (1.19, 1.11–1.28), colon polyps (1.10, 1.06–1.15), and diabetes (1.30, 1.20–1.42); results were similar for unprocessed red meat and processed meat intakes separately. Higher consumption of unprocessed red meat alone was associated with a lower risk of iron deficiency anaemia (IDA: HR per 50 g/day higher intake 0.80, 95% CIs 0.72–0.90). Higher poultry meat intake was associated with higher risks of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (HR per 30 g/day higher intake 1.17, 95% CIs 1.09–1.26), gastritis and duodenitis (1.12, 1.05–1.18), diverticular disease (1.10, 1.04–1.17), gallbladder disease (1.11, 1.04–1.19), and diabetes (1.14, 1.07–1.21), and a lower IDA risk (0.83, 0.76–0.90).

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-021-01922-9

That’s just the first random thing I found. Again, I am sure that a lot of that has to do with the low quality of the meat available in modern factory-farm-driven societies. I’m just saying that if you’re advocating for people eating meat, and they live in that type of society, they’re going to be fucking themselves up by eating lots of the type of meat that is available to them in that society.

Any type of person that survives in a harsh environment where death is an ever-present outcome will generally be strong and healthy on an individual basis. It’s natural selection. If they’re not hardy, they don’t survive, so the ones that are left are healthy.

I’m not saying that there’s no way to eat exclusively meat and have it work out. I’m just saying that (a) you’re choosing an example that doesn’t apply all that well to making an argument about how to eat in the modern world (b) the industrially farmed meat that’s available in the modern world, definitely in the US at least, is pure poison compared to what any ancient society you’re studying was eating.

Every study in the modern world that I’m aware of has drawn conclusions of severe negative health consequences from eating too much of the type of meat that’s available to us now.

The Inuit didn’t exist for thousands of years in the arctic circle eating only animals to spite vegans.

Their population is sparse and they had absolutely no energy to spare to expand or rise up in the world, they were too busy with the incredible energy expenditure that is hunting. They didn’t choose to do this as a success option, they just have no other option because nothing will grow in their environment, so it’s hunt or starve.

LOL what a joke, my ancestors lived on a diet of almost all bison

I highly doubt this. Meat in prehistoric societies was pretty hard to come by. When you exist on the same plane as the animals, you’re subject to all the stuff they plan to do to make sure they’re not going to get eaten. It’s a hell of a lot easier and safer just to grow some plants or do some fishing or something.

I won’t say it never happened that someone’s ancestor’s society was just killing it and eating bison burgers all the time but the diet where you can eat large animal meat is almost entirely a modern invention caused by our overflow of wealth and productivity.

Eating a lot of meat is not good for you, science has proven this time and time again.

Eating a lot of meat in the modern day will straight-up kill you in the long run (literally), because the meat is full of hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, disease from the conditions they were kept in, and God knows what else. Societies in the ancient world that sorted out how to eat meat consistently (one prime example being domesticating cattle successfully) started exploding across the landscape and overtaking all their neighbors, it’s a pretty good formula as long as the meat is healthy for you.

I am pretty sure the carnivore community is just a big troll. Maybe it is some confused people, but it seems on Lemmy more likely to just be people taking the piss out of vegans.