The issue here is cows and their digestive system. Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef.
> There are no healthy cheapand safe alternatives to meat.
There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets. I love Meat, it’s tasty and delicious, but it’s very much a luxury.
Eating a Chicken drumstick is more nutritious and healthier than a steak. That connective tissue is good for you.
Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you.
That said their both missing vitamin C [edit: after cooking], so you need a more diverse diet anyway.
On it’s own nothing the body needs quite a lot of it. But it can be a problem if your diet includes excessive quantities.
Edit: Saying a food is healthy or not IMO really a question of how well it fits into the widest selection of current diets and lifestyles. Drinking say 1oz of sea water it generally fine and if people where frequently salt deficient then it could be considered healthy, but as insufficient salt intake is not a common problem and excessive salt intake is occasionally one I don’t think we can really consider sea water as healthy.
Similarly dietary cholesterol has minimal impact on most people, but overall excess is more generally going to be an issue simply due to the small population that is at risk. As such I think we can say lower cholesterol chicken is a net positive overall unless we know more about the specific person involved.
> Chicken breast has more protein, less fat, less cholesterol, less saturated fat. Beef has slightly more iron and zinc but is overall significantly worse for you.
If your nutritional understanding is at the level of “fat and cholesterol are bad” you should not be giving dietary advice.
You appear to be approaching this from a USDA-poster style of nutritional reasoning (please do not do this), so I’ll make two heuristic arguments:
Why do you think, everywhere in the world except where there are social taboos on beef, poor people who eat chicken will preferentially switch to beef consumption when their standard of living improves enough to permit it?
Is the peptide and vitamin distribution of human flesh closer to that of a cow, or that of a chicken?
The human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals.
People may for example need on the order of μg/day of Bromine, Arsenic, Nickel, Fluorine, Boron, Lithium, Strontium, Silicon and Vanadium based on organic compounds containing them, but the need is slow low their plentiful in any reasonable diet. So sure, if you where building a food synthesizer from inorganic compounds then nutrition is quite complex, but in terms of diets people generally self regulate quite well with cravings often occurring should a deficiency develop.
Start looking for what’s not either sufficiently plentiful in most foods or synthesized by the body and you end up with a rather short list. Vitamin C is mainly an issue because it’s destroyed by cooking, and even then people can literally go months without developing systems even with zero vitamin C. Thiamine is another one that became an issue when people started eating a lot of white rice, but again it’s food prep not the plant that’s the issue. Many arguments around optimal diets exist, but the original quote was safety not say Olympic athletes.
So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet, no there isn’t a significant nutritional benefit to beef over chicken.
> switch to beef
Because beef is tasty. It’s the same reason people don’t need to be convinced to eat chocolate.
> The human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals.
I note that your statement is appropriately very strongly hedged.
> So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet,
Dietary “science” has one of the lowest standards of rigor of any field, in the same ballpark as psychology. Until we have accurate computer models of every metabolic pathway in the human body, I’m not going to trust papers that are like “actually you can just eat soy and seitan and be fine” (incidentally, the counterfactual study got funding approval from vegan activists and seventh-day Adventists!). Also, “in the context of a normal diet” is another pretty big hedge - “normal” diets are terrible.
In any case, when we’re talking about nutrition, since the state of research is so bad, we’re basically stuck with a priori reasoning and Bayesian observation, and after applying those two, my observation is that people who eat only ruminants and fish and stuff look really good and are strong and healthy, and the exact opposite is true for people who eat only vegetables, and this doesn’t really impose a big update on my prior derived from what I know about pre-agriculture food sources in these people’s evolutionary environments.
> Because beef is tasty.
As you point out, when your body makes something taste better than something else, it’s probably because it’s doing a better job of meeting your nutritional needs. If two foods were abundant in the evolutionary environment, I expect taste to be reasonably well-calibrated in terms of causing me to eat the nutritionally optimal distribution of foods.
Ruminants and birds were both abundant in my evolutionary environment. So what does it say that ruminants taste so much better?
> Dietary “science” has one of the lowest standards of rigor of any field
Modern dietary science is quite different from it’s starting point. We know enough for soldiers, inmates, etc to eat exactly the food provided and be healthy. That’s the basic benchmark for success.
> it’s probably because it’s doing a better job.
Many birds are quite tasty, chicken however wasn’t part of our evolutionary environment. It also breaks down in the wider context, evolution would be adjusting things based on the overall diet and lifestyle of our ancestors which based on available evidence was quite different from our own.
Having suggested more tasty birds I will recommend a few. Squab/pidgin, Ruffed Grouse, Wild Turkey, Canada Goose. They have a surprisingly wide range of flavors.
Chickens are easy to farm which is why their so common, but they aren’t that representative of other bird species.
It's not a luxury at all in some regions. In higher altitudes for example where warm weather cycles are too short to grow a lot of crops (other than some type of grass) keeping livestock (for meat, eggs, milk) is essential for survival.
It's frustrating to see arguments devolve into this kind of thing. It's almost surely the case we are discussing developed nations like the US (one of the largest consumers of meat), not some remote village in a developing nation. Sure there might be remote places with no access to the world market. Sure there might be some people whose health doesn't allow removal of meat. But on the grand-scale of the US and other developed economies, we can reduce meat consumption by 90% without any negative effects (in fact, we'll improve average health by a lot).
> Chicken is a perfectly reasonable substitute for beef.
This is completely 100% incorrect. Chicken is so nutritionally deficient relative to beef that it might as well be a vegetable.
> There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets
“Cheaply”, yes, “safely” not so much.
Vegetarian populations tend to be have stunted growth, have worse dentition, etc. compared to populations who eat a diet based on ruminants, fish, etc.
Additionally, dietary requirements are not fungible across the human population. People whose ancestors come from different evolutionary environments will be tuned for different food sources. Lactose tolerance is probably the most well known example. A priori, all of my pre-agricultural ancestors must have had a diet completely incompatible with vegetarianism, so it’s not surprising that people of my background who go vegetarian tend to exhibit metabolic problems.
Note that I am not comparing vegetarianism to the standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian already. Switching from SAD to a generic vegetarian diet might simply have the positive effect of reducing the amount of weird slop people consume. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at...
I'm guessing you're basing that statement on the article you shared showing that 70% of calories consumed by Americans come from plant-based sources.
1. I believe your calorie-percentage data points more to the high amount sugar and corn syrup in the standard American diet. Those two plant-based, calorie-dense ingredients skew the data. A McDonald's chicken nugget value meal with a regular Coke has a high number of plant-based calories due to the Coke, but it is pretty far from being a vegetarian meal.
2. Calling 70% vegetarian "practically vegetarian" really stretches the definitions of both words. Most Americans consume meat with > 2 meals per day.
Sweeteners are about 15% of calories for Americans which sort of undercuts your idea that it’s all about corn syrup. Your example of a single hypothetical meal is irrelevant - the data is clear that Americans are practically vegetarian, in aggregate.
70% plants is absolutely “practically vegetarian” compared to, say, a diet consistent with the pre-agricultural evolutionary environment of most Americans. Personally, in excess of 90% of my caloric intake comes from animals (and I am visibly and medically healthier than 95% of Americans, even health-focused herbivores, as are people I know who eat similarly).
Preindustrial diets where mostly plant based in aggregate. Even if you look before agriculture estimates place typical hunter gatherers at about 65% plant based with extreme variation. Which is the same ratio as Americans eat when you exclude those sweeteners.
Longer term surviving examples tended to have a higher meat based ratio largely because they lived on islands or in more marginal areas. However, looking at land area and population density estimates adjusts the ratio significantly.
Some of this needs to be inferred from things like Native American tribal densities and is further confused as diseases decimated native populations throwing off those density estimates. Still the idea of our ancestors eating a primarily meat based diet seems to be a mistake.
Several issues with that statement, we largely didn’t have snow bound ancestors largely because survival was significantly more difficult in cold areas. Historic populations also tended to lose a lot of weight in winters due to lack of food.
On top of this mercator projections seriously distort people perceptions of how much land is near the equator vs the north. Africa is 11.73 million square miles with minimal snowfall outside of a few mountains, Europe is 3.9 million square miles. Combine that with warmer areas providing more food and it’s likely the majority of early modern humans never experienced significant snowfall.
This is complicated by ice ages, but people didn’t spend a lot of time on on near glaciers until very recently. Lack of food and warmth where huge issue before relatively advanced though still Stone Age technology.
Another way of thinking about this is to compare animal biomass per square mile in say Mongolia with Ghana.
Vegetarian populations have different deficiencies than other populations but overall they aren’t worse lifespans than other populations with similar economic backgrounds.
To the extent that’s true, it also demonstrates the false causality in your own claim: poverty, not the absence of meat per se, is the cause of all the things you’re blaming vegetarian diets for.
Obviously the people I’m comparing against each other are in the same social-economic stratum. Even after conditioning for other factors, the costs of bad (vegetable-based) diets are significant.
And, of course, there is a bidirectional causality with poor people getting bad food, which stunts their development, which keeps them poor.
> There are no healthy cheapand safe alternatives to meat.
There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets. I love Meat, it’s tasty and delicious, but it’s very much a luxury.