Comments on: So You Think You Can Be a Meat-Eating Environmentalist?

By: Niki

Niki — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 04:10:46 +0000

To Zoey,
Humans don’t eat cellulose-based plants (grasses, trees, shrubs), dear – we’re not grazers. This is why we don’t chew a cud! (we’re not ruminants, either) Our bodies are VERY efficient at breaking down and utilizing plant material – much better than meat. Out digestive tract is fairly long – to accommodate this digestive process – as opposed to the fairly short intestinal tract of carnivores. I’ll only briefly mention how human teeth are designed to grind and chew plant material – not tear flesh (although we CAN do it).

Your argument doesn’t hold ANY water! I won’t even get into your discussion about poop. It’s really FOS.

By: Zoey

Zoey — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:38:14 +0000

What it doesn’t say is that we humans are very inneficient in digesting plant material as we don’t have the enzymes in our gut to reak down cellulose, the most widespread polysaccharide in the nature and to access the nutrients trapped inside plant cells. So, a MAJOR PART OF VEGETARIAN DIET ENDS UP IN POOP and is wasted. Animals however,(such as sheep and cattle) are super efficent to digest plants as have helper microbes in their gut. Apart from cellulose, these guys also convert nitrogen to protein, something that we can’t do. So all that lovely nitrogen present in your green veggies ends up – yes you guessed right – in your poop, then in sewage then in water/soil where it rots and turns into another greenhouse gas – nitrous oxide

By: Peter Bracher

Peter Bracher — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:39:51 +0000

What an eye-opener! Presents a very strong case for not eating meat. Concise, main issues covered and the graphs convey a lot of info. in a highly accessible format.

By: Tracey @ Planet Ark

Tracey @ Planet Ark — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:10:55 +0000

Great article! I’m going to show this to my meat-eating family. The statistics are quite shocking. That pie graph about meat and the greenhouse effect is just scary.