My take on this (an I’m vegan so there’s a possibility of bias) is that most of the mainstream claims such as there being no health downside and a plantbased diet is significantly less harmful for the environment are simply true.

I try to avoid talking BOTH environment and health in the same discussion because I find the risk of it turning into a gishgallop back-and-forth between the triforce of plant (environment, health, ethics). And obviously ethics can become a nuclear bomb dead-end of different fundamental positions. But I do feel of the two sides, the vegan side is definitely the one benefitting most from misinformation. I don't think you'll do the gishgallop thing (you seem to be pretty good-faith), so I'll give my thoughts on both. But if you did decide you wanted to discuss one in detail, I'd ask that we keep it to one of your choosing :)

I'm not sure if I've provided these links (lemmy context issues). This guy is not biased, a lot health focused, and did a LOT of research on the topic of nutrition and veganism.. There's a lot to pack/unpack, but most of it is based around the fact that a supermajority of vegans are suffering from malnutrition in one way or another, compared to a significantly lower number of non-vegans. As for B12, it is 92% of the population. He also did research into the environmental impact of the meat industry (in another video), and it's equally eye-opening. I'm not blindly believing him, and I don't expect you to. My experience has been growing up in non-mega farm areas, so I have seen the things he's saying firsthand. The river in my hometown died from plant farming; it was a fairly big deal, and a friend of mine (from a totally different area) did her Environmental Engineering thesis on it. It wasn't about the plants as much as the overfarming altogether. Which is similarly true with meat, imo.

One thing as a meat-eater I find is that vegans often do one inadvertant disservice (the same types of vegans who throw false shit out). They change the focus from how to improve a healthy balance (less red meat, more white meat and healthy seafood, regulating away processed meats that are confirmed carcinogens, etc) to "veganism is the cure". And instead of focusing on some very real issues with global warming, they focus on the meat industry of countries like the US that are simply an insignificant part of the environmental threat. If every American and European quit meat cold turkey tomorrow, and the most optimistic non-bs numbers were true, it would slow global warming by a tiny fraction of a percent. Look at this map for a second before reading my next line ( full context article here ) . Instead of focusing on meat emissions in ways that probably will never happen and won't do much if it does, we could be focusing on regulating and presssuring India and Africa (and maybe China) to clean up their act.

When we look at the supposed environmental impact of meat, it's pretty important to know that there are African countries that produce more agriculture-related GHGs than all of the US and Europe combined. It's important to note that the second biggest meat producer in the entire world (US) isn't even a blip on the radar. There is a right way to do meat, at scale, that is environmentally friendly. And as bad as the US supposedly is, they're pretty good in aggregate. If there's room for improvement in the US meat industry... well, I don't expect you to believe the next sentence, but I have come to believe that if meat is grown correctly, the symbiotic Meat+veggie+grain farm is simply better for the environment than plant alone. Lots of reasons (fertilizer, the manure->field efficiency, waste products not usable for any other purpose, etc). But suffice to say even if I'm wrong, it approaches zero impact to do meat as long as you do it right.

I'm hating how lemmy.ml is losing my context parent, but I think I posted a video to you prior.

The problem with lab grown meat is that the process is inherently VERY complex and touchy. They like to compare it to making beer or wine, but it's an exacting process. IF we could figure out lab grown meat, that advance would likely involve a far bigger advance in nuclear medicine, changing the world of medication to a "this is YOUR cure for cancer, created for pennies based upon your DNA" type of utopia.

Maybe there's someone close to this who can suggest to me what I'm missing there, but the obstacles for lab grown meat are simply those same golden obstacles we've had to far more important problems, that we've thrown far more money at.

From the video, the biggest pain point for the next 20 years is this. You cannot scale the process. The bigger your bioreactor, the lower the efficiency. "Scale" involves building hundreds or thousands of resource-expensive bioreactors, filling them all with chemicals, and running the bioreaction over a long period of time, in highly a sensitive lab environment. Unfortunately, it feels like this is a "down to go up". While possible, it seems as likely to be a success as some sort of New coal tech wiping Solar out and being the real solution for dirty power. If you put THAT kind of money into the already well-understood meat industries that already have some good best practices (that aren't necessarily followed like they should be), you'll end up with agriculture that's good for the environment AND billions of dollars to spare to use on some other green initiative.

Of course, the real issue is that the countries whose people care the most aren't the problem at all. The US is a great example. Our meat industry is an insignificant part of the problem, at <2% of the GHG emissions. The US meat industry is actually statistically INCREDIBLY effective... but the meat industry in other countries, not so much.

Is that how you respond to a good-faith conversation by someone who has researched this?

Those independent experts corroborate my own experience, the environmental exports I've had the opportunity to befriend, etc. Further, if you look carefully, the environmental numbers that some vegans like to use actually work against them if taken in an unbiased light.

But that's ok, you won because you drew a picture with me having a silly face and you having a chad face :)

EDIT: Flummery to lemmy's recent context BS. I realized that you replied to one of my only comments that didn't include citations, so I backed off on the "how you respond to facts and evidence".

EDIT2: Is anyone else experiencing what I am? When you look at a context, you can't see its parent post anymore. When you reply to something, the link for the original post seems to be overwritten by the link to your reply (with no context of the previous post). I end up having to load the post and ctrl-f search for the damn comment I intended to reply to