• 0 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 4 个月前
cake
Cake day: 2026年1月4日

help-circle









  • It’s way more sustainable and ethical (and possibly healthier too) to take b12 supplements (even if they’re not sustainably produced) than any amount of animal flesh (other than roadkill I guess).

    • b12 deficiency is widespread even among meat eaters
    • b12 is generally supplemented in animal feed or the animals themselves are supplemented. Skipping the middle man is clearly more sustainable.
    • If the animals are not supplemented, you can’t know if you’re avoiding deficiency. Furthermore a tiny amount of a vitamin (milligram or microgram order of magnitude) takes way fewer resources to produce than 500g of meat/fish.
    • no matter how “humanely” they treat the animals they still get killed, unlike with the supplement. For dairy and eggs the slaughter is more indirect but it is still a fact that animals in the industry end up getting killed.
    • In terms of sustainability, it doesn’t matter that much if a product is local, the most impactful thing is the mode of production or the product itself (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-chain)

    I agree with your overall point that from a population perspective it’s way more practical and impactful to change as many diets as possible instead of focusing on changing diets to 100% plant-based. And I think we should focus on that, broader society interventions instead of advocating for individuals to change their diets.

    But if someone who reads this is facing the choice of taking a supplement versus some animal flesh, there is no ethical or sustainability grounds for choosing the flesh. Also probably no health grounds unless there are compounding issues (eg deficiency + allergies, interacting conditions, etc). I focused on B12 but this applies to many nutrients.

    It’s just not true that a tiny amount of animal flesh will spare you deficiency. It’s also not true that deficiencies are “tough to avoid” on a plant-based diet, especially protein deficiency.








  • Yes the dairy cycle is more complex I simplified it because I wanted to focus the impregnation part.

    Milk production decreases greatly after the first 9-12 months. To make it profitable they do get impregnated repeatedly. The life of a dairy cow typically goes like this:

    • 15 months old: First pregnancy
    • 24 months old: First calf is born
    • For around 12 months: milking
    • 60 days “dry off”

    The cycle is then repeated. Since pregnancy and milk production is taxing on the body and milk production declines, most cows get slaughtered at 5 years old with an average of 2.5 pregancies (average lifespan is 20 years). This also makes sense because to maintain the herd you need to keep the number of females stable, which have a 50% chance of being born (male claves get slaughtered ofc).

    Maybe some homesteads or subsistence farms keep milking them for years after one pregnancy, but otherwise even for free range grass fed whatever, if they sell milk to make a profit this is how it goes.

    You can get all this info from industry sources.