“the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which suggest four ounces per day of meat, poultry, and eggs combined for those consuming 2,200 calories per day.”
The “12%” figure comes from analyzing food logs recording food eaten over a 24 hour period – a single day.
We analyzed 24-h dietary recall data from adults (n = 10,248) in the 2015–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Disproportionate beef consumption was defined as an intake greater than four ounce-equivalents per 2200 kcal. Associations of this indicator variable with gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, family income, diet knowledge, and away-from-home meals were assessed using logistic regression, incorporating survey design and weighting. Disproportionate beef diets were consumed by 12% of individuals, but accounted for half of all beef consumed.
4 ounces of beef is roughly equivalent to a single set of 52 playing cards – aka a card deck.
The above “study” became this headline: Just 12% of People in the U.S. Consume Over 50% of the Country’s Beef, Study Finds – EcoWatch – without adding “on a single day”.
The recommendation, based on this 24 hour log, is: “Efforts to address climate change through diet modification could benefit from targeting campaigns to the highest consumers of beef, as their consumption accounts for half of all beef consumed.”
Ruminant animals, including sheep, goats, cattle, buffalo camels, giraffes and others, all produce methane gas during digestion. Also antelope, pronghorns and similar animals, deer, moose and other animals. We need to eliminate all of these animals.
Academics are prepping use for future bans on beef, if not most meat sources. Their dietary recommendations are driven by presumed greenhouse emissions described by study co-author Donald (Diego) Rose: Q&A: What Tulane professor Diego Rose has learned about climate change and the American diet | WBUR News
We need to ban meat consumption:
“All animal products are more impactful than plant products because you have to grow the feed, and include all the impacts of those crops to feed the animals. But on top of that, with ruminant animals, there’s methane from burping. They’re able to digest grasses, which is a great thing if you think about it, but on the other hand, that bacterial fermentation in the gut is producing methane, which is like 30 times more impactful than carbon dioxide. So, it just really puts beef in a different ballpark.”
There is no impact on climate emissions from growing fruits and vegetables, using mechanized planting systems, massive state-sized water delivery systems (think California), irrigation, and then harvesting them using highly mechanized equipment, and then shipping them an average of 1,500 miles for fresh consumption, or transporting them to food manufacturing plants where they are cleaned, cut, chopped, steam, frozen, freeze dried by high energy intensive equipment – after which they are packaged, stored in freezers, and transported by trucks (mostly) across the country, and sometimes internationally.
These alternatives to meat have zero impact on the climate. Of course.
