It helps that we’re right. That it can’t be bad to eat what humans have eaten for 2 million years.
But 2 recent things I’ve looked at were studies done a few decades ago and shelved because they didn’t get the “right” answer, but were recovered recently and published showing the lipid hypothesis was wrong and the cause of metabolic disorder was carbohydrates
They were suppressed in the 70s and 80s, now they are published. Dietary guidelines in Australia (one of the biggest wheat exporters) now allow low carb for treating type 2 diabetes.
I do believe we’re watching a change in consensus (which as always is progressing one death at a time - perhaps it’s good that the other side is committed to a metabolically dangerous path)
Beef seems to need much more land and water usage than almost any other food. Since you need land to grow the food for the cattle and land for the cattle. Take the extra methane output which is a potent greenhouse gas. By almost any metric that will be worse for the environment than just growing a food source directly.
Perhaps a chocolate or something takes more water per kg. But many less kg’s will be consumed of chocolate than meat.
https://redtablemeats.com/fresh-meat/beef/how-much-water-is-needed-to-produce-1kg-of-beef/
(I eat beef and other meats periodically).
Ruminants, which include beef cows, are part of the normal carbon, and water cycles. The water ruminants drink is mostly peed out onto the land. Ruminants when eating their natural pastoral diet do NOT want grains, and do not need grain grown inputs.
Regardless of where you sit on the Arable / Pastoral debate, one unifying thing that is critically important is top soil health and depletion. Ruminants are a critical part of maintaining and growing top soil! Most industrial grain production is monocroping using exogenous fertilizers. Sustainable agriculture requires we incorporate ruminants to replenish topsoil (crop rotation, etc). Those exogenous fertilizers will run out eventually (some reports say we have between 30-60 “traditional” crop cycles left in the current system).
In the industrial system grain waste is used to feed ruminants, but that isn’t super healthy for the ruminants
Permaculture cows in their fields are a negative carbon dioxide equivalent source.
Cows turn incomplete and hard to absorb proteins in wheat into 1. More protein, and 2. Complete and highly absorbable protein. It is more efficient to get your vital amino acids by feeding your crops to cows and then eating the cows
Beef is mostly grown on land that isn’t fit for growing crops
Beef returns practically all the water it consumes to the water cycle
How much land is dedicated to feeding pet dogs and cats?
Did you know America has more horses than dairy cows? Horses have the same digestive system as cows, they release as much methane
There are promising projects to make cows digest methane rather than expel it
Specifically mentioning dairy cows when it’s about meat seems like a false equivalence.
According to the USDA there are 88 million head of cattle. https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/h702q636h/6108x003v/kk91h696g/catl0124.pdf
While there are only around 9 million horses
https://www.ridewithequo.com/blog/the-horse-industry-by-the-numbers
That’s a 10 fold difference.
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In the end all water returns to the water cycle, but that can take such a long time that in human spans a shortage on clean drinkable water can definitely occur. Now meat consumption there isn’t the only factor of course.
I mentioned dairy cows because they happen to have a similar count to horses. We talk here about animal sourced food, which includes dairy. Dairy has all the fat soluble vitamins, if you have your cornflakes with dairy milk you increase the vitamin content enormously
Noting that beef cattle typically live in places where nothing people can eat will grow, so if we stopped eating them the land would be abandoned and would instead support the same biomass of just as thirsty, just as methane producing (but with no one invested in fixing the methane problem) grass eating animals, be they wild horses or deer or bison.
Meanwhile how much water do pet dogs and cats consume? How much extra is wasted by being in open containers in airconditioned spaces?
I like that you only found fault in the fun fact that dairy and horses have similar numbers, which you didn’t deny, and the fact that the water they drink isn’t wasted which you reckon takes too long but it has been going on for a very long time, it has to be in a steady state in natural grasslands. Before beef it was bison in America