That puts us at 0.006% of the global population. How did I arrive at 500k? I kinda made it up based on carnivore study populations, but its super duper tiny. I looked everywhere, I can't really find a solid estimate. But we are totally in the dozens of us category.
I NEVER meet another zero carb carnivore anywhere organically. Plus there is huge stigma for being a carnivore. EVERYONE thinks I'm crazy.
- Omnivore - 73% - 6,000M
- Flexitarian - 14% - 1,100M
- Vegetarian - 5% - 400M
- Pescatarian - 3% - 250M
- Vegan - 3% - 250M
- Zero Carb Carnivore - 0.006% - 0.5M
Using ipsos (broad strokes good enough) for the other eating pattern data
It's fine to be a minority group. Live and let live.
There are some people who simply cannot suffer us in our little corner of the internet at all. My poor little community script runs every day and bans many accounts for just downvoting all the posts in the community. https://discuss.online/modlog/696952
I've dug into the many of the non-obvious-sockpuppet accounts, and it seems most of the hate directed at us comes from our nearest neighbor at 3% total population. A group 500x more popular.
I really wish we could just be friends, let's agree that whole foods, totally unprocessed is good, and leave each other alone as allies in improving everyone's health. I'd like that. This childish animosity doesn't help anyone.
Perhaps this is just the cost of being a small fringe eating pattern, easy target for other less small groups to hate.
Eyeballing daily active users on the fediverse it looks like we have about 7,000 unique users every day. There are about 3 carnivores - which puts us at 0.04% of the lemmy population.
This is the main thing that doesn't add up for me, this almost 10fold less food usage doesn't weigh up against the 50fold (very back of the envelope averages of things you can't average, but rough numbers) decrease of land usage of lamb/beef vs eggs/grains/fish/nuts/peas.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore
Afaik reducing meat consumption is the single biggest (positive) impact one can have on their ecological footprint.
I wonder how correct that is, because I also know that we're one of the rare few organisms with broken genes for vitamin c, because our ancestors sat in trees munching fruits rich in vitamin c and it didn't put evolutionary pressure on the ones missing that gene.
Both can be true of course, in different distances of ancestry, but it would surprise me, given the length of our intestines compared to true carnivores, that our ideal ancestral eating pattern is pure meat. (On a side note, ancestral anything is not a strong argument imo, as neither the meat nor the fruit/veg/... we eat today resembles much of what our ancestors ate, nor does our daily pattern)
That said, I believe most of the other facts you stated, like bioavailability (which goes both ways though, prions and other diseases are way easier to catch from meat) etc, so I definitely can believe the diet works, I just don't think it should be advertised as a one size fits all, nor as a first step (not that I think you're doing that). I'll definitely accept it as a step after you've tried reducing meat and processed foods etc etc.
Same here though, I wish you and anyone else here all the best, and thanks for so honestly and openly having this discussion!
This graph is misleading because it looks at amount of land, but not type of land used. We have arable land and pastoral land. I.e. there are areas we can't grow crops but can feed ruminates. That breakdown is like 30/70 of agricultural land FAO Source
Meaning even if every cow was dead we don't get more arable land... which brings us to soil health - there is a bit of a top soil crisis happening, we are losing it, we are not regenerating it and our ability to produce fertilizer from fossil fuels is not infinite. We need to start taking regenerative farming seriously, soil health is importing for plants and animals and humans.
I disagree, I'd say people need to eat local whole foods without external inputs as much as possible. Animal sources make this possible, that is how we lived historically - we couldn't import exotic plants around the globe to cover a nutrient deficiency
Another complicating factor you need to add to your calculations is that about 800M people have T2D globally right now, and we spend something like 9% of global emissions in the treatment of T2D and it's complications. A sick population eating food that drives metabolic disease is expensive on the environment even if the food is "free"... T2D is completely avoided on a low carb / keto / zero carb eating pattern, and can even be reversed in many cases with strict keto.
Turns out one of the historic cures for scurvy is fresh meat! Basically zero carb meat eaters get their vitamin c from meat. two interesting mechanisms - carbohydrates elevate blood glucose, which cells use the GLUT4 transporter to move into the cell... but vitamin C also gets into cells via the same GLUT4 transporter. A high carb diet means vitamin c is competing for a highly contested transporter and this is why sailors eating mostly hard tack (clack-clack) often got scurvy. Now consider zero-carb carnivore, no extra glucose to compete for the glut4 transporter, so the smaller dose of vitamin c in meat doesn't compete and gets in... plus some of the products vitamin c is converted into is abundant in meat.... double efficiency win.
Well, you also need to consider the length of our cecum (place to ferment vegetable matter) - its almost totally gone. As far as I can tell from the literature, we started as frugivores in trees, we scavenged high fat left overs from carnivores / ate seafood, developed our brains, and over about 2.5 million years our gut adapted to high fat, low carb... but how we got here isn't really material, its how our bodies react to the inputs we give it, that is what matters to us today.
It might be a unpopular opinion, but i think it makes logical sense as a strong first step in anybody's health journey, do a clean elimination diet with a highly bioavailable food for 30 days - see if whatever is bothering you got better, if it did then you can add things back in and figure out what your trigger was. It's a huge efficiency - it reduces so many variables .
Agreed on processed foods as a easy first step, I've seen no data that eliminating meat has a measurable health benefit - especially not in a short term testable fashion
Absolutely! Always happy to chit chat! I like the push back, its productive!