The United Nations has urged people to stop eating meat in order to save the planet
Experts urged westerners to become "demi-tarians" by halving the amount of meat they eat.
A report for the UN Environment Programme said that pollution from fertilisers is threatening human health and the environment by causing phenomena such as toxic algal blooms.
It said that 80 per cent of the nitrogen and phosphorus used in fertilisers is consumed by livestock because it is used to grow the crops they eat.
The scientists, led by Professor Mark Sutton of the UK's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said eating smaller portions or having meat every other day would help slash pollution.
Europeans eat 35 per cent more protein than recommended by the World Health Organisation while Americans overeat it by 58 per cent - and most of it comes from meat.
Meanwhile regions such as Asia, and particularly, China, are increasingly eating meat as their economies develop.
Professor Mark Sutton, chairman of the International Nitrogen Initiative, said the West needs to set an example to help slow the world's growing reliance on meat.
He said: “To aim towards eating half of the amount of meat we are currently eating is a good starting point.
"We should aim to be demi-tarians - eating half the meat we have typically been eating."
We need to realise that over-eating is not healthy - not for the environment and not for ourselves.”
He added that this switch could reduce the risk of a repeat of the horsemeat scandal which has been triggered by long trans-continental supply chains.
He advocated a more local supply chain which would make it easier to trace where meat came from as well as reducing pollution.
He said: "If we eat meat less often, we might go for a higher quality product when we do."
Co-author Dr Bruna Grazzetti of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, said: "We need to reduce consumption of meat in countries were consumption is excessive compared to recommendations for a healthy diet.
"It does not mean becoming vegetarians but, say, reducing the size of the portions of meat we eat or not eating meat every day."
The report says that humans have "massively altered" the natural flows of nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients.
It adds: "While this has had huge benefits for world food and energy production, it has caused a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health, causing toxic algal blooms, killing fish, threatening sensitive eco-systems and contributing to climate change."
It set out a 10-point plan to reduce the pollution, including using nutrients more efficiently as well as cutting meat consumption.
With 60% of our daily intake of nutrients coming from animal products, experts have warned that pollution will continue to rise unless we stop our over consumption of meat.
The report was backed by Achim Steiner, United Nations Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, who said: “Whether we live in a part of the world with too much or too little nutrients, our daily decisions can make a difference.”
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Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
Vegetarian, vegan and raw diets can be healthful, probably far more healthful than the typical American diet. But to call these diets “natural” for humans is a bit of a stretch in terms of evolution, according to two recent studies.
Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a few million years.
Although this isn’t the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and thatmeat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least a million years before the dawn of humankind.
Calories to grow our brains
At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.
One study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain size of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times as massive as humans — have smaller brains with one-third the neurons. Why?
The answer, it seems, is the gorillas’ raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating to provide enough calories to support their mass.
Researchers from Brazil, led by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, calculated that adding neurons to the primate brain comes at a fixed cost of approximately six calories per billion neurons.
For gorillas to evolve a humanlike brain, they would need an additional 733 calories a day, which would require two more hours of feeding, the authors wrote. A gorilla already spends as much as 80 percent of the tropics’ 12 hours of daylight eating.
Similarly, early humans eating only raw vegetation would have needed to munch for more than nine hours a day to consume enough calories, the researchers calculated. Thus, a raw, vegan diet would have been unlikely, given the danger and other difficulties of gathering so much food.
Cooking makes more foods edible year-round and releases more nutrients and calories from both vegetables and meat, Herculano-Houzel said.
“The bottom line is, it is certainly possible to survive on an exclusively raw diet in our modern day, but it was most likely impossible to survive on an exclusively raw diet when our species appeared,” Herculano-Houzel told LiveScience.
The study puts an upper limit on how big a brain is able to grow while on a premodern raw, vegan diet. But the researchers could not determine when daily cooking began. Was it about 250,000 years ago, when humans were nearly fully evolved with big brains, which is supported by archaeological findings? Or was it about 800,000 years ago, when prehumans began their most dramatic brain-growth spurt, an era for which there is little archaeological evidence of controlled fires for cooking?
Meet the meat-eater
If cooking wasn’t routine before the dawn of modern humans, eating meat certainly was.
The second study, published in October the journal PLoS ONE, examined the remains of a prehuman toddler who died from malnutrition about 1.5 million years ago. Shards of a skull found in modern-day Tanzania reveal that the child had porotic hyperostosis, a type of spongy bone growth associated with low levels of dietary iron and vitamins B9 and B12, the result of a diet lacking animal products in a species that requires them.
The child was around the weaning age. So either the child’s mother’s breast milk lacked key nutrients or the child himself did not consume enough nutrients directly from meat or eggs.
Either way, the finding implies that meat must have been an integral, and not sporadic, element of the prehuman diet more than 1 million years ago, said the study’s lead author, Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.
This supports the theory that meat fueled human brain evolution because meat — from arachnids to zebras — was plentiful on the African savanna, where humans evolved, and is the best package of calories, proteins, fats and Vitamin B12 needed for brain growth and maintenance.
“Carnivore animals, whether terrestrial or aquatic, are bigger-brained than herbivores,” Dominguez-Rodrigo told LiveScience. He added that “there is no [traditional] society that live as vegans,” essentially because it wouldn’t be possible to get Vitamin B12, which is only available in animal products.
Hi, Ive found another video regarding animals being killed. I saw this on Facebook. Although Im posting this here but I didn't actually dare to watch the video yet so yeah..... Here it is :D
Hhahahhaa this is a really catchy song I found on Youtube and its really relevant! Do take a look! the lyrics make a lot of sense and the video is very entertaining HAHHA (':
By Manlin
Should humans stop eating animals and become vegetarian?
Should humans stop eating animals and become vegetarian?
I've found this website where people debate on whether we should become vegetarians or not. Here are some views they had: "Animals are kept in awful conditions and treated appallingly just so the meat eaters can eat them. The animals go through a painful short life which isn't fair. All animals have feelings, and most of them are quite intelligent, but we humans portray them as dumb, worthless, things. Pigs are more intelligent as dogs, and cows get excited and jumps around when they figure out a problem. Chickens are probably the most abused animals in the whole world, even though they are clever, and they even worry about the future. It's disgusting that all animals are precious, yet they know no freedom, and some never even see the sunlight. I saw a cow getting killed for meat, it's head was hanging off, but it was still alive and in pain. I don't understand how anyone could eat any part of any animal after seeing that."
"Why should people eat animals, if animals don't eat people? I detest how people mistreat animals like this. I mean, isn't it just cruel to take away an animals precious little life just to be eaten? Isn't it cruel? I mean, if animals don't eat us, we shouldn't eat animals. It is just cruel! Why should we eat animals? It isn't fair, and everything should be fair. Animals aren't just playthings of humans, you know. They are breathing and living things just like us."
"Just be non-veg and support the plants to help them because they give us oxygen. And make the earth more green. SO its upon you what you choose for your mother earth. I know it is cruel to kill animals and eat'em, but do we have choice? May be it could happen in the future that human beings can develop new type of energy source to consume -- of course it has to be as delicious as meat and contain more or equal nutrition to what we are eating right now. until then, there is no way we can change. My conclusion is: we have no choice but to eat them because we are not evolved to that degree of advancement. if we don't consume animals, then there will be cause global food crisis."
"Vegetarians don't get enough protein and this can cause many issues. People need to eat meat to get strong. Meat has many vitamins. People who don't eat meat do not have as much energy. Some symptoms of not enough protein are edema, pale skin, skin rashes, weakness, slow healing, difficulty sleeping, and thinning of hair. PEOPLE NEED TO EAT MEAT."
1. Think about how animals are being killed brutally, how would you feel? 2. Did you know that these animals are harmless? 3. Would you stop your friends if you see them eating? 4. Dishes such as shark fins soup is a tradition during festivals, however, sharks are endangered what dishes do you think they can be replaced by? 5. What if one day there are no animals on earth, would you rather die or turn vegetarian? Why? 6. Do you know that some species of sharks and stingrays are endangered animals? If yes why do you still at them? If no, would you stop eating them now that you know they are endangered? 7. Have you seen videos of how farm animals are being killed brutally? 8. How would you feel if you were an animal being killed? -Lau Tin Ying & Dewi
The website above states some of the commonly heard statements that make people believe that eating shark is okay. They then rebutt all this statements with some facts not known to many people.
Some interesting facts found in this website are:
-"You are sixteen times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be bitten by a shark." (To show that sharks rarely harm humans.
-"Top predators act as the caretakers of their environment, picking off the weak and sick of smaller species, helping to ensure strong and healthy populations and a balanced ecosystem." (To show that Sharks is important to ensure a balanced ecosystem. Killing sharks would disrupt the food chain.)
-"Firstly, finning means that the main part of the shark is wasted, only the fins are used. On top of this the act of finning a shark while the creature is still alive is barbaric and cruel and is a practice that would be illegal in most countries' slaughterhouses were it to be practised on a farm animal (for example if a lamb's legs were cut off and it were left to bleed to death in a crate)." (To reinstate the fact that killing sharks is cruel and needs to be banned.)
-"According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 143 shark species (where there is sufficient data to determine conservation status) are at high risk of extinction either now or in the near future. That's over 55% of shark species." (To show the severity of this issue.)
-"shark has a very high level of mercury and the United States Environmental protection agency advises women and young children to avoid it" (To prove that sharks are bad for your health and should be avoided)
-"shark fins are often treated with hydrogen peroxide in order to make their color more appealing to consumers" (To reinstate the fact that sharks are bad for your health) By Dewi Asyura
This website here list 15 animals that are endangered yet still eaten in some parts of the country. Though most of the animals are not being consumed in Singapore, I still think that its important to know about the different kinds of endangered animals consumed all over the world.
If you look at photo 11 of 17, you could find some really interesting yet terrifying facts about the consumption of sharks. One example is that "a third of all shark species are threatened and over 100 million sharks are killed by fishermen every year". By Dewi Asyura
Snake meat contains protein like any other type of meat. Protein is necessary for many body systems, including the development of muscles. Protein provides amino acids the body cannot obtain any other way, which do everything from building cell walls, to regulating hormones. Snake meat contains roughly 93 calories per 100g (3.5 oz) of raw meat, depending on the type of snake. This is roughly half the calories and one third the amount of fat of a similar amount of sirloin beef steak. Fewer calories and less fat content for the same weight of meat can aid dieters in controlling their weight.
Cautions About Snake Meat
As snake meat is not often sold commercially in the United States, it does not have particular, rigid health standards that other meats do. Rattlesnake meat is often sold from "Rattlesnake Roundups," which are similar in atmosphere to rodeos and have been accused of low standards of food preparation. This is of particular concern as rattlesnake meat in South America has been linked several times with severe strains of salmonella, which grows in the snake's gut. This bacteria is neutralized by proper handling and by cooking. Snakes, like other animals, may also contain parasites and other infections that can be transmitted to humans, which can also be neutralized by proper handling, freezing, and thorough cooking. Snake venom must enter the blood stream to pose any danger to people, so there are no concerns about poisoning from eating most snakes.
xin hui
Snake meat is relatively low in fat and calories, high in protein and some consider it a rising star in the food industry. However, like any type of meat, it should be prepared and cooked carefully to ensure it does not result in infection or food poisoning.
Our research for stopping cruelty for endangered animals
My first time eating snake dishes.
Over here you can clearly see the snake's head
But now it's gone, what really happened in between......
First the lady put the snake in a pail, then she proceeded to pour hot water from a flask into the pail. Surprisingly the snake did not make any sounds! then she took it out after a while and cut out the head! ahhhh bloody! look the the next picture, you see the difference? that's why we should stop cruelty and protect the animals.
I ate a "chicken skin dish". it was actually snake skin! it's not exactly the same as this picture form google. sorry i did not take the picture of the dish as i thought there was nothing special other than being chicken skin. The actual dish was black snake skin, like totally black and it was cut into really tiny pieces so i could not really tell the difference. it was really chewy and thicker than chicken's skin.
Then, we had a fied "chicken" dish. it tasted just like chicken or fish other than having more bones and more salty. apparently, according to my dad, village people like to add lot of salt in their dished so as to hydrate themselves. So that could be one reason. but no matter how i think it is still pretty cruel. moreover i was tricked into eating "chicken"
Then there was the soup which i was not impressed at all. it tasted bitter and bland. despite the constant reminders that this was just chicken soup from friends from china, i just did not like it.
People in China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, some parts of US etc. eat snakes. In China I have seen it quite common to eat snakes.
Well these people are adventurous to eat snake!
There is a chinese myth that says eating snake is good to stop constant nose bleed.
To answer the first question: It's ideally the non-venomous snakes that a survivor would want to procure. This is best done with what I call the Grady Gaston Method. Grady was a member of a B-24 bomber in WWII that crashed in Australia after returning from a bombing run against the Japanese in New Guinea. He survived over 130 days, most of it solo, while living on snake meat that he obtained by hurtling large rocks on the creatures. By the way, he didn't have the means to make fire so he consumed these raw! In the end, it was his sheer willpower, sense of optimism, and serpentine diet that enabled him to endure one of the most epic tales of survival in recent times.
Beware of rattlesnakes, as they can still bite you after they are dead due to a reflexive action of the nervous system. Lopping the head off, burying it, and then skinning and cleaning the snake are the recommended methods established by the military and used by survivors. Once skinned and cleaned, the meat can be boiled up in a stew with any other tasty tidbits or edible plants or placed on sticks and cooked shish-kebab style over the coals.
