The Protein Predicament: Livestock’s Impact on Human and Environmental Health (and What to Do About It)

Report says red meat OK for human health

By now you have likely heard of a report recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that concludes “there’s no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health,” as summarized in the Washington Post.

Kaboom! Went the plunge of this report into the midst of what had been a gathering consensus about the many ill effects of a meat-heavy diet.

RECOMMENDATION: before you read the full Washington Post piece, first read its last two paragraphs (beginning with “Willettt says the panel’s conclusions and recommendations do not reflect the study’s findings . . .”  – emphasis mine).  They indicate that the editorial board of the Annals etc. have spun the data in favor of the red and processed meat industry. In the editorial itself, the writers bury concerns about the environmental impacts of meat consumption in the final paragraph.

If you read the complete piece in the Post, you will see that the conventional nutritional wisdom, that it’s healthier to eat less meat, still has solid  support among almost all nutritionists. Walter Willett pointed out that the study itself associates moderate reduction in meat production with a 13 percent lower mortality, and said,  “if a drug brought down the number of deaths to that degree . . .  it would be heralded as a success.” Certainly such a drug would be heralded as a success by a multi-billion dollar drug company.  There is no multi-billion dollar profit-making enterprise to curb the consumption of red meat.

Once the media, always on the hunt for controversy, had taken up the  report it went mainstream (as in the Washington Post, the New York Times etc.) accompanied by a glut of social media chatter. And then came a firestorm of backlash such as you can read of in a litany of objections from nutritionists, doctors, and researchers found on this page of WebMd.

The study is tainted by past ties of one of the research’s co-leaders to an industry trade group, the “International Life Sciences Institute” (ILSI)—a connection he did not disclose because technically the connection did not fall within the past-3-year reporting requirement for publication. While the earlier study—which incidentally was an attempt to allay health concerns about sugar additives—was published in December 2016 (less than 3 years ago), researcher Bradley Johnston said he was paid for the research in 2015 (more than 3 years ago).  Ergo he was not obliged to disclose the connection because the payment fell outside the 3-year window. . . .  Did he really think this was not going to come out? Did he really think that no one would suspect he might be eyeing future funding by the ILSI, having insinuated himself further into their good graces with the red meat study?  Maybe in the context of runaway mendacity and moral obtuseness in the twenty-teens he saw no reason to observe the spirit of disclosure rules.

Still, the past connection of a researcher with an industry front group does not necessarily invalidate a study.  Johnston claims he has no more to do with the ILSI—perhaps he really is a seeker of truth. Certain kinds of truth anyway—the kinds of truths that are embraced by organizations such as the ILSI.

So, there may be a case that red meat consumption is not all that unhealthy . . . unless . . .
unless you believe that humans reside on a planet where greenhouse gases are turning up the heat to full broil, which could be unhealthy for some seven billion people who would rather cook than be cooked.

For a short snappy summary of the effects of animal agriculture on climate, habitat destruction and fragmentation, and biodiversity, check out this page on the Climate Nexus website, that addresses the salient issues, replete with links to authoritative sources such as the UN’s Food and  Agriculture Organization (FAO).

If you’re short on time and have digested the Climate Nexus summary, you can now skip down ten paragraphs to the section, “The protein predicament: meat keeps it simple.”

The intervening material (next two sections) fills in a lot of detail about greenhouse gases, deforestation, and animal agriculture. You don’t need to read all that to get to the real meat of the meat problem.

Environmental havoc of red meat production, Exhibit A: deforestation and beef production in the Amazon

In terms of combining habitat destruction with greenhouse gas emissions, there’s no agricultural practice more deadly than red meat production, beef production in particular. The most ghastly example is the ravaging of Amazonian forests by fire, chainsaw, and bulldozer, documented in dozens of sources.  (Rather than try your patience with listing a bunch of URLs here, I recommend just doing a web search on “clearing for beef production in Amazon” and take your saddening pick.*) Burning forests immediately releases oodles of carbon dioxide that would be otherwise be slowly released by rotting of vegetation at a rate that growing trees could match in carbon uptake. (For the same reason, don’t get misled by the claim that the burning  in Europe of wood pellets derived from trees cut in North America is “renewable.” It’s only renewable on the time scale it takes for trees to grow back, i.e. decades—and in case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have decades to  cut carbon emissions drastically before all climate hell breaks loose.)

(Take note, in video above, The Telegraph takes celebrities to task for distorting the story of the 2019 Amazonian fires as instances of “virtue signaling.” The problem with this is that climate change deniers may pounce on these inaccuracies as examples of “fake news”—and they’d be right. Celebrities should know better than to give the deniers ammunition; in the long run, it hurts a just cause.) 

Once the forests are cleared, you then have cattle grazing on the cleared land, and worldwide cattle literally belch enough methane into the atmosphere to account for about 40 percent of the “annual methane budget,” according to an especially dispiriting article in The National Geographic in January 2019, entitled Methane, Explained.

There’s a further knock-on effect of tropical forest destruction to make way for cattle grazing: since so much of the biomass of a tropical forest is tied up in fast-growing trees rather than in soil, removal of the trees removes nutrients, driving further penetration of cattle ranchers into the remaining forest in the manner of marauding barbarians on the march, plundering resources in their path and leaving death and destruction in their wake.

Cattle farming becomes especially noxious when you throw in cattle’s consumption of huge amounts of water, and contamination of water by their waste—especially if they have direct access to waterways. For an analysis of water pollution by livestock in the U.S., check out this on the website OneGreenPlanet.  (BTW I cannot vouch for the credibility of OneGreenPlanet; I just hurriedly grabbed this off the Internet as starter material, and it looks well-researched and plausible, but you might want to look around at other sources if you have doubts.) Water pollution by livestock is still worse in much of the developing world for lack of regulations.**

Is meat really so bad?

There’s no lack of doomsaying about the impact of rising meat consumption on the environment, as exemplified in a July 2018 article in The Guardian. (The Guardian article is based largely on a paper in Science that addresses several environmental, health, and social factors involved in meat production and consumption.)

Way back in 2006, the FAO sounded the alarm with “Livestock a major threat to environment,” citing dangerous land, biodiversity, and water impacts in addition to the global warming threat. Among the more eye-opening stats in this report are (1) “meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all terrestrial animal biomass [this was in 2006, undoubtedly higher now];” and (2) the livestock sector “generates 64 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And here you thought methane was bad—and, oh yeah, livestock also contributes 37 percent of all human-induced methane. For a deeper look at how land use conversion affects nitrous oxide and methane emissions, not only in meat production but also in soy and palm oil plantations,  see this in Climate Change News online.

A paper in Animal Frontiers, July 2019, is more narrowly focused on the climate impacts of the livestock sector.*** This paper describes some mitigation strategies—all very scientific, but it’s tiptoeing around the Elephant in the Meat Production Room (sorry, elephants, this is just a metaphor!), that the mitigation strategy with the most bang for the buck is simply to consume less meat—a lot less. 

Hoping to put the climate impacts of meat production and consumption in a less dire perspective, I went to one of my favorite sources on climate issues, Skeptical Science.****  Here, Skeptical Science draws from several sources to undercut the frequently heard claim that “animal agriculture and eating meat are the biggest causes of global warming.” Agriculture as a whole accounts for 13-18% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), behind deforestation at 18% and fossil fuel-based energy at 64%

A breakdown is graphically illustrated by the first chart, above. (Unfortunately, although the text in Skeptical Science pegs deforestation at 18%, that is not reflected in the chart from the World Resources Institute (WRI).  I plead ignorance.†) The third  chart, illustrating CO2 emissions by food source (which may persuade you to consume a lot more lentils) is instructive, although it omits methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which is why you find milk down at the tail end of the continuum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a more complete catalog of GHG emissions from livestock, check out pages 15-21 in  a 2013 FAO report, Tackling Climate Change through Livestock.

The whole meat-packed enchilada: according to Chapter 5 of the draft IPCC report of 2019, 25-30 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from the “food system.” This adds together land use conversion, delivery, processing,  transportation, storage, and sales, as well as agriculture itself. (See Table 5.4 on p. 61 of the draft report.)

The protein predicament: meat makes it simple

You the environmentally savvy reader may be asking, what exactly IS the problem? Don’t we already know how to rein in the disproportionate reliance on animal agriculture for protein in the developed economies? In Diet for a Small Planet, 48 years ago, far-seeing  Frances Moore Lappé prophesied how meat production would increasingly threaten both the environment and the food supply. She proposed practical measures to counter that threat—mainly in the form of a vegetarian diet, with foods scientifically chosen to complement each other in providing essential proteins.

Nevertheless, the extravagantly wasteful Western diet, now being emulated by wealthier classes in the developing economies, does one thing extremely well: it delivers concentrated, high quality protein in the form of meat, without the research, forethought, and self-education required to obtain necessary protein from a strictly plant-based diet.  For a quick pro-beef primer in the shape of soft-sell industry propaganda, watch the following three-minute video:

The beef industry has found an ideal spokesman in Dan Hale, PhD, with his gentle baritone voice, friendly, calm, sincere, logical manner, and firmness of conviction that beef is the protein source without parallel.  After listening to this very likable guy for a few minutes, you might begin to think that well-meaning vegans are out of touch with your average, busy shopper.

And you’d be right.

Dan Hale may have persuaded you that, protein-wise, giving up meat is a risky proposition for your health.  You open your old, little-used copy of Diet for a Small Planet, and notice just how complicated it is to put together the various complementary protein sources to ensure you’re getting all the essential amino acids which Dan says you need “EVERY SINGLE DAY!“  What if you’re not getting enough cystine? Valine? Leucine? You could be heading for collapse, muscles starved to the point when, in extreme leucine debt, you head desperately out to the supermarket to get your red meat fix . . . but get there too late, unable even to open the car door, and are found sitting in your car in  the parking lot, motionless, staring vacantly, hopelessly into the distance—a distance into which the essential amino acids are receding out of reach.

On the other hand, a snapshot of protein needs and protein sources provided by the Harvard School of Public Health paints a slightly different picture, starting with the recommended daily amount.  According to the Harvard SPH  it’s 7 grams per every 20 pounds of body weight.  Meaning for a 150-lb adult = 7 x 150/20 = 52.5 grams, quite a far cry from Dan Hale’s 100 grams recommendation.

There’s more! Have you heard about all the elite athletes gone vegan? It’s true!  For an entertaining gallery of top-notch vegan athletes, from tennis superstar Venus Williams to “Mr. Universe” of 2014,  Barny du Plessis, check out this from Business Insider, November 2017. (Fun fact: Cory Booker has been vegan since 2014.)

You may be put off by Barny du Plessis’s extreme (some might say grotesque) physique, but his food philosophy is sound. Pointing out that the world’s strongest land mammals—gorillas, buffaloes, elephants and the like— are plant-eaters, Barny declares a vegan manifesto:

We [Barny and his partner] have a point to prove. . . .  We are representing the vegans of the world, all the animals and the environment. My crusade is to show the world that we can live a healthy, happy, and prosperous life without exploitation of innocent creatures.

Kicking the meat habit: challenging a deeply embedded norm

Obviously, if the muscular requirements of elite athletes can be met with a vegan diet, the rest of us should be able to get along without meat—especially, red meat—and be all the healthier for it. We know for sure the planet will be all the healthier for it. We should . . .

But we don’t.  We don’t, most of us, even try.  Many of us might have had a fling with vegetarianism in our youth, but have found, amid all the demands and distractions of contemporary life, that, year-in, year-out, it just ain’t worth the effort. Even when we add in the cruelties of factory farming—where most meat comes from—we still resist change. We reduce, but not to zero.

Besides, everybody else is eating meat. Right? Cutting back some, but definitely not to zero. How many vegetarians, much less vegans, do you know?  Less than a fifth of your friends and family, I’d wager. As a society, we in the West are on A Diet for a Much Larger Planet than the One We  Actually Live On. That’s not even accounting for the meat consumption by 89 million dogs in the U.S. alone.

Everybody else does it, crudely stated,  is the moral underpinning of social norms. Even ALMOST everybody else does it, is enough to make a norm.

Some norms of questionable value in a world creaking under social and environmental stresses are nonetheless so ancient and deep-rooted that they seem impregnable. Such appears the norm of meat eating in most modern societies—especially where folks are wealthy enough to eat a lot of it.

We have norms for  good reasons.  Following norms is to follow the path of least social resistance—no swimming against the tide, and no expending time and energy to evaluate your habits . . .  since they’re pretty much everybody else’s habits,  they must be good. It saves energy. Our ability as social animals to combine our individual strengths with those of others in the group—along with big brains, abstract language, and opposable thumbs—is what makes us the dominant species in our world. “Normalcy” is socially adaptive.  Normative behavior is the glue that holds societies together, and makes cooperation itself a norm.†† 

Not all norms are equal: corporal punishment of children in schools was once the norm†††; smoking in public buildings and workplaces was once the norm; exclusion of women from physically demanding sports was once the norm.

We’ve largely shed norms, such as the three just mentioned, that were so distinctly and recognizably bad that a strong consensus formed; in many places laws were passed and rules imposed that are steadily squeezing those behaviors out of the normative space.

Meat consumption, however, is viewed as far from recognizably bad by the great majority of Westerners.

Meat consumption is so pervasive in Western culture, that it has become about as normal as having furniture.  The problem is the scale of meat consumption in the developed economies. A piece of furniture is forever (sort of), but a hunk of meat is here today, gone tomorrow, to be replaced by more meat.  If furniture were consumed at a  pace similar to that of meat, every city block would have a huge incinerator into which families would regularly deposit a piece or two of furniture, replacing it with another chair, couch, lounge, table, bed, bookcase, bar stool, divan, hassock, settee, etc.

Starving the meat norm

This meat thing is a big, fat, enormous bull of a norm.  Just about as big as, say, fossil fuel consumption, and far tastier. 

If we could change norms we could change behavior. And vice-versa. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing: changing norms changes behavior, and changing behavior changes norms. Where to begin? 

Psychologists are onto this problem, and their approach works on the changing norms side of the feedback loop, with the “Social Norms Approach” (SNA).  Moreover, research strongly indicates that SNA works best when employing “dynamic” rather than “static” messages.

Huh? Here’s an example of the difference between static and dynamic found on a page in the website for the Association for Psychological Science. “Focusing on Changing Norms Can Spur Eco-Friendly Behavior.”  This was studied in an experiment involving faculty members, staff, and graduate students at Stanford University, given materials encouraging them to limit their consumption of meat.  Materials stating “30% of Americans  have started to make an effort to limit their meat consumption” (dynamic) were more effective than “30% of Americans make an effort to limit their meat consumption” (static). In fact, while the reductions were small,”those in the dynamic-norm group were twice as likely to order a meatless option as those in the static norm condition.” Unfortunately, twice a very small number is still a small number.

Ergo, it appears that norms may shift in response to carefully crafted messaging.   The same Stanford researchers, under the lead of PhD candidate Gregg Sparkman, tried a more scalable intervention, by adding “Our Meatless Burgers Are on the Rise” to a menu at a burger restaurant. Another message was tacked onto the card machine: “We’ve noticed customers are starting to choose more meatless dishes.” The intervention was a success—to the tune of increasing the proportion of meatless dishes sold by 1.7 percent.

You read that correctly: one-point-seven percent. (1.7%—about 1 in 58.) Success may be overstating it. Nevertheless, Sparkman, noting that it was a burger restaurant to begin with and there was no guarantee the signs would be read, counted this as a minor triumph, and enthused:

“Even if the effects are small, we’ve come up with a way to make something highly scalable. Any restaurant could do this with relative ease. If it became something that the industry took on as a standard, then you could have a huge amount of change.”

Now THAT’S optimism! How “scalable” is open to question—even ten  times as strong an effect would be a paltry 17 percent. In view of the colossal impact of meat consumption and livestock farming on the environment, the remaining 83 percent would keep pushing us hard toward the climate catastrophe brink.

Implicit in Gregg Sparkman’s optimism is an assumption that a good enough norm—even one at odds with a long-prevailing one—can ripple out through a community. Eating habits are malleable on a “huge” scale, per Gregg Sparkman. Yes, but . . .

What’s the expiration date on massive animal agriculture?

Shifting norms in a positive direction via psychologically sophisticated nudging holds promise for pushing agricultural practices toward sustainability.  Say the ripple effect caused a doubling of the fraction of meatless meals every five years—starting with Sparkman’s 1.7%, you’d be up to 50% in 25 years, and 100% in 30 years. But 100% won’t happen—the question is how far from 100% will the ripple die away?

Not close enough to make the crucial difference.  Given how little progress we’re making in the mitigation of global warming, draconian laws to stem the tide of greenhouse gases are inevitable. Some of those laws could put an end to livestock farming as we know it.

 Cultured meat could tip the scales

Biotechnology may save the day for a society rife with unrepentant carnivores: meat grown without animals, without cruelty, without eructative methane, and without vast tracts of land used for grazing (plus other vast tracts used to grow feed)—and with the tastiness and protein completeness we associate with butchered animal tissue. Instead, we can have meat grown in vats—”cultured” on a scale umpteen times larger than culturing bacteria in a petri dish.

If it’s good enough, we could see the scaling up of a new norm in short order. The best part of this development is its compatibility with capitalism—which seems necessary for rapid change without a radical shift in the economic structure.

The protein predicament might turn out to be one of the most tractable of climate change problems. 

Your own web search can turn up plenty on cultured meat, but for an appetizer try this from the BBC’s Science Focus.

THERE’S MORE – “AIR PROTEIN!”

 Conversion to an all-plant diet may seem radical, but “air-based foods” sounds like pie-in-the-sky.  Except that Air Protein CEO Lisa Dyson says,

“We are already seeing a shift from animal-based to plant-based protein. The next evolution — from land-based to air-based protein — will allow us to [feed] a growing population without needing to remove rainforests or natural habitats.”

Dyson is both an entrepeneur and a pioneer who wants “to usher in a new era of sustainability.” Blue sky thinking, with some pie as a byproduct.

At MIT, Dyson earned her PhD in theoretical high-energy physics —only the fourth black woman to do so, anywhere.  When you think about it, being black and  a woman means she knows how to overcome big obstacles. Why else would she have a PhD thesis entitled “Three lessons in causality : what string theory has to say about naked singularities, time travel and horizon complementarity”?

See this by Tom Idle in Sustainable Brands “Clean Tech” section.

Keep your hopes up. For some encouragement, check out this short video featuring Lisa Dyson talking revolutionary food production:

 

===================== footnotes ====================

* While you’re at it, note that the current spate of fires in the Amazon is nothing unusual; it has been business as usual, with occasional lulls, for decades. But the 2019 (historically not the largest) uptick in fires has provided a convenient target at which countries in the developed world can aim their outrage, distracting the world’s attention away from the abject failure of developed countries to come close to meeting their emissions-reductions goals.

** Not that regulation is all that effective in the U.S., with industrial animal agriculture seeking immunity from citizen lawsuits, borne out notoriously in the case of hog farming in North Carolina. 

*** Among the more startling revelations of the Animal Frontiers paper is: “Almost 60% of the global biomass harvested worldwide enters the livestock subsystem as feed or bedding material.”

**** FYI, Skeptical Science is devoted to debunking global warming denial—“getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.”

†  I have seen estimates of global deforestation’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions as high as 24 percent. What muddles the calculations is the overlap between deforestation, other forms of land use conversion, and agriculture.  Grasslands, for example, may be converted into cropland; deforestation may make way for roads, settlements, airports, pipelines, mines and wells, etc., as well as agriculture.

†† Thus why, in our current political climate, the outcry “this is not normal!” has so much emotional weight.  The extremely abnormal can be just as destructive as the outright criminal. Of course, too often the two go hand in glove, as in the Trump administration..

††† Corporal punishment in schools has been outlawed in 31 U.S. States, and throughout Europe.

†††† Back in  January,  I  touched on  bits of the why and how of geoengineering.