Interesting resource here - track down ‘produits bio, équitables et locaux, services écologiques, circuits courts, éco-artisans, mode éthique, écoles alternatives, etc’ in your local area…
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Evidence?
Main paper cited as .pdf here:
Note the erratum mentioned led to under-estimation of benefits of a plant-based diet.
Lots more info here of course:
The last but one paragraph of the Guardian piece (Prof Peter Alexander) is the most important comment -
‘‘My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption.’’
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Yes - this is how I look at it Tim. I’m a fan of vegetarian and vegan cuisine - but it would be awful to lose the great traditions of meat and fish cuisine.
Focusing again on why we need to talk about climate and ecological breakdown!
Made good reading Geof, my comment is the glaring omission of the beneficial nutrient density of meat. To simply say protein and calories is not correct and whilst that may be the the terms of reference for the report.
Some people do very well on a vegetarian diet others do not, plenty of people do very well on a meat diet and cure themselves of mental and other health issues of the gut, bowel and autoimmune diseases so more research is needed to prevent people getting ill on vegetarian diets. When I say vegetarian I also include processed food at which a lot of vegetarian pre prepared stuff is right up in the highly processed food catagory made from things we should not consume. Man made seed oils, emulsifiers, sugars and the like are shoved into pre prepared vegetarian meals under the “healthy vegetarian” label. With this shift the budget for healthcare will need to increase and more hospital facilities built.
If people prepare their own meals from scratch with real ingredients then some can do well. Plenty of discussions when over exited vegetarian and pro meat claim the great victories but in both groups the common ground seems to be that they have moved away from highly processed additive packaged food.
As to the treatment of sewage, who wouldn’t agree that tertiary treatment plants are not required and have been for years. Ok the author could smell animal waste in the rivers, but chemical waste from crop fertiliser may not smell as bad but is also highly prevalent in lakes and rivers, vegetarian has consequences too.
The biggest way to lower the harm of all farming is to eat less and better so feeling satiated fir longer. Eat 2x per day not 3 and in a feeding window 16 hours not feeding 8 hour window for eating. No matter which side of the debate this has proven health benefits.
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I don’t think we really disagree Corona - it’s just that you go naturally for more of a healthy diet perspective, while I put more emphasis on a healthy planet.
I certainly don’t disagree that vegetarian/vegan diets might be damaging to both people and planet if they consist of industrially farmed, chemically-enhanced crops, ultra-processed into plant-based junk food.
My first post in this thread was about how changing our own diets, or our consumer choices in general, is not enough - we have to also act politically, first and foremost against industrial scale agri-business that does not pay for it’s ‘externalities’ (like environmental impacts). In any realistic economic system it would be seen as literally loss-making - but within the rigged system we have now it makes huge profits.
‘All’ we have to do is adopt a genuine ‘polluter pays’ policy for big business - charge the mega-farm corporations largely responsible for chemical growing, meat over-consumption and junk food the actual cost of their operations, and they will quickly withdraw from agriculture, because only small-scale organic farming is actually economically viable.
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Are they not one and the same?
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I think they’re different perspectives Sue - especially in terms of evidence. Corona’s point that vegetarian/vegan diets might not be as healthy for some people as mixed diets might be true - but I’m sure it’s also true that if most people were vegetarian/vegan the planet would improve.
Only if its a whole food additive free diet, 85% of pharmaceuticals pass out of the body I was told, has to go somewhere, usually back into the water courses where it serves as virus and bacterial modifier so we have drug resistant strains. So if we make people healtier then we reduce that pathway to.
The junk, in junk food is there to make profits higher for a few. Yes Geof I agree, make those pay.
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Vegetarians and vegans often themselves have very different perspectives on their choices - for some it’s entirely an ethical matter, to do with animal rights, for others its about their own health, and for still others (like George Monbiot) its entirely about environmental concerns. (George famously killed and ate a deer, persuaded that this was actually the best environmental choice in the circumstances - something that an ‘animal rights’ based vegan would never do.)
For most, of course, it’s a mixture of all motivations.
I do agree with Corona though that big business piling into ‘plant based alternatives’ that are in fact just another form of ultra-processed junk is worrying - and a good example of why political awareness and action is necessary alongside personal food choices.
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I’ve always thought (even before I had much awareness of environmental issues) that the various ‘fruit drinks’ are particularly clear examples of this: take out most of the real fruit, and the goodness with it, replace it with really cheap ingredients - water and chemical flavourings and loads of sugar or more chemical sweeteners - then sell it for big profits as ‘fruit flavoured drink’!
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Sunny Delight anyone? The manufacturer continued the fraud by getting the retailer to sell this totally empty fruit-drink-seeming product by having it offered for sale in fridges in the shop
Wasn’t that the drink that the manufacturer admitted turned skin yellow if you drunk rather alot of it??? God only knows what it did internally 
And the thing is that marketing nowadays is so incredibly powerful, so couple that with the creative food manipulating scientists, and hey presto, you have the cash machine! And even better, folks are totally oblivious they’re paying good money to slowly but surely kill themselves - it’s a crazy world sometimes.
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Often, the fridges in shops are part of merchandising deals - they don’t belong to the retailer at all, but to the big business supplier - the retailer can use them for other lines, as long as they give pride of place to the supplier’s high-profit junk.
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Rather like smoking, I don’t think the comsumers of Sunny Delight are under any illusions about it being either healthy or natural, but rather consume it because they want/need to.
I remember it being launched in the UK, with samples being given away. It looked like orange juice but tasted almost completely synthetic, and wasn’t ever going to find its way into our diet. TBH I can’t imagine why anyone actually drinks the stuff, but some obviously DO like it.
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Sunny D is what you give to visiting kids whose parents you dislike 10 minutes before they go home.
It’s basically crystal meth for kids. Wind them up, dose them up and hand them back.
Then sit down in a comfy chair with a large single malt and hour later and visualise the whirlwind of chaos you’ve created with a satisfied smile on your face.
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Think you’d be surprised - I think it is totally unavoidable to misconstrue smoking being anything but unhealthy and terminal for you, one way or another. On the other hand, ‘innocent looking’ orange juice surely has to be good for you, as everyone’s told, get your daily vitamin C hit. And that’s precisely what they marketing folks prey on. After all, the colour is artificial. Do you think it would have been as popular if it tasted the same but looked like toilet water??? The level of education is getting better as every year passes, but I’m constantly amazed at the ignorance out there, and I say that not in a derogatory way, but in it’s truest form. And that’s precisely why folks gravitate to anything with a ‘healthy’ label - a great example is cereal bars - surely they have to be healthy, right, and that’s what many folks actually think, but then look at the sugar overload in there, not to mentioned the other unrecognizable ingredients - incredible! If I can’t grow it, don’t recognize it or it’s ingredients, and if it incorporates something synthetic, it doesn’t pass my mouth 
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Different people have different levels of knowledge about different products - but nobody has perfect knowledge. This is the central myth of markets and ‘consumer choice’. It’s simply not possible for people to have full knowledge of the environmental impact of every product - including the whole supply chain of every ingredient.
Big business argues that people freely choose its products, while at the same time pouring money into advertising clearly designed to mislead, lobbying clearly designed to prevent people finding out the truth, and business practices clearly designed to limit choice - just as it argues for less market regulation while at the same time aggressively asserting strict regulation when it suits (eg. protecting its intellectual property). Nobody that has thought about it for more than a couple of minutes - least of all decision-makers in big business - really believes in free markets or consumer choice.
Big food and big pharma and big oil and big everything are no different from big tobacco - they know many of their products are damaging to people and planet but are systematically locked in to doing harm. Perhaps the clearest example I’ve come across is ‘filter tip’ cigarettes. They don’t filter anything - indeed, they probably actually make smoking worse for your health - and here’s the killer (literally) - you know those stains that appear on the end of the filter as you smoke - that you thought were evidence of bad things being filtered out? - well no, they are generated by chemical reactions in the filters, put there by the manufacturers, specifically to deceive.
Anyone interested in more details of the ‘filter’ scandal - there’s still available an excellent Radio 4 exposé:
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