The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won't improve your health or save the planet

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Lumping the UK in with global figures for countries with vastly different farming practices means that some of the good news gets lost. Beef cattle and sheep in the UK account for just 5.7 per cent of all UK emissions, but this is reduced to 3.7 per cent if carbon sequestration (storing of carbon in the soil) is taken into account. While she says it’s a cliché, “It really is the how, not the cow.” Absolute nonsense, not even worth arguing with in the same way it is pointless to argue with racists or those with extreme political or extreme religious views. This person has gone to unbelievable lengths to convince herself that meat is good for you and vegetables are harmful to us and the planet. Hundreds of ridiculous arguments, processed vegan food is bad for you therefore a meat eating diet is good. Some vegan foods such as avocado have a high carbon footprint therefore meat diets are more environmently friendly. Eating too much meat doesn't cause cancer and actually protects you from diseases. Soya beans are bad, she fails to mention that 95% of the soya crop goes to the feed animals for meat production. She says vegetarians and vegans are more likely to be depressed, self harm and be infertile. Lots of quotes from celebrity vegans, vegetarians and environmental activists that have no relevance. A whole chapter about the dangers of vegetables, they can be dangerous to our health because we could overdose with vitamins. This chapter is called The Bad Guys Lurking in your Plant Based Diet. Talks about the dangers of wholemeal bread....

The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won

We’ve heard time and again that cutting meat and dairy will have the biggest environmental impact but, if you look at the facts, the single biggest change you could make is to forego a flight. Or you can reduce the use of your car. Or you can eliminate all food waste from your home.” A calm, incisive dissection of veganism's salvationist claim to protect human health and the planet - Country LifeA diet expert has come under fire from viewers of ITV's The Morning for claiming vegan diets are 'a con' on the show. However a new report from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health Nutrition Coordinating Center found that most healthy milk alternatives made from plant sources such as oats, soy, or almonds don’t deliver the same nutrition as cow’s milk. I do need to be presented with consistent arguments though, and the author fails to give them. One minute, almonds and avos are the good guys, the next minute, they are the bad guys. Can't have it both ways.

The Great Plant-Based Con by Jayne Buxton | Hachette UK

I may have been able to struggle through the last six hours of a nineteen hour book, despite the problems noted above, but the narrator is

Buxton, a former management consultant with an MBA, is trained to look at data critically. She began researching the topic of food, health and the environment (specifically, the impact of meat and plant-based diets on human and plan­etary health) and she realised the extent of the ­misinformation around both the health and environmental impact of meat-eating, and that the benefits of plant-only diets were being exaggerated. Buxton supports the transition towards farming regeneratively, which aims to restore soil quality and biodiversity while producing sufficient food of high nutritional quality. “British farming is going well compared with the rest of the world.” For someone who drives a car, ditching the car or driving it less often also constitutes an important contribution. Do both of these things and you could wipe 6.9 tonnes of carbon off your total footprint. Many studies have demonstrated how meat and dairy contributes to carbon emissions – accounting for 14.5 per cent of all man-made emissions, according to the UN – but some believe cutting animal foods out and replacing them with plant-based alternatives does not have the effect some would have us believe. Organic goes a long way towards delivering a lot of the things we’ve identified as important to sustainability, but I’d like us to have a labelling system that enables people to know what herd their milk comes from,” he says.

Based Debunking Of The Benefits Of A Plant-Based Diet An Evidence-Based Debunking Of The Benefits Of A Plant-Based Diet

I think this is a very well researched book. I mean go to Argentina. You will see hectares of land burned by soy crops. Nothing grows there for years. That comes at huge cist to biodiversity. Similarly in the book, Buxton mentions rice and how any soil needs blood. A total of 2.6 per cent is not nothing, but it is not even close to the kinds of numbers that are regularly bandied about. Environmental economist Dr Bjorn Lomborg concurs with Hall and White, asserting that “eating carrots instead of steak means you effectively cut your emissions by about two per cent”. Lomborg, a vegetarian for ethical reasons, says: “There are many good reasons to eat less meat. Sadly, making a huge difference to the climate isn’t one of them.” Unlike some reviewers, I have never been a food faddist or a vegetarian or a vegan. I always thought 'how silly'. But at the same time I thought 'fat is bad' and 'cholesterol is bad' and 'carbs are good' – for no better reason than we're always being told to eat '5 a day'. I simply assumed that these were established scientific facts. I also swallowed apparently sound claims that farming for meat had to be curtailed to stop global warming. Medicine and nutrition are making a turn for the better, and this book is a fantastic starting point. Last year the Advertising Standards Authority banned certain adverts by the Swedish company Oatly which it found had misled consumers over the environmental benefits of switching from dairy to plant-based milk.For a very long time the impact has been exaggerated,” says Jayne Buxton, the author of The Great Plant Based Con, “and the nutritional costs of the diet understated or even ignored. As a result we have this overwhelmingly dominant narrative that’s taken hold that most people think the best way to improve the planet and personal health is to go vegan.” That means fruits, vegetables, pulses and nuts that are bought as whole as possible. And there are important scientific reasons why they are better for us. A lot of it comes down to the gut: we know that having a flourishing, diverse microbiome – the community of trillions of gut microbes in your lower intestine – is important for all aspects of health. Unprocessed foods contain two key ingredients that help support this. The more different plants you eat, the greater the variety of beneficial microorganisms in your gut you’ll be supporting Jayne cited how the soil crisis the planet faced - of which there has been a loss of 84 per cent of topsoil - would be catastrophic for food production. If we cannot grow food this will mean a loss of life, she added. Red meat gets lumped in with processed meat, which some studies have proved to be harmful. However, recent studies in the Annals of Internal Medicine [2019], which conducted a meta analysis of the full body of research, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to recommend reduced consumption of red or processed meat,” says Buxton. An ordinary, average British 4oz steak, Buxton worked out from numbers in an FAO report, is about 1.9kg of CO2e. “Estimates of the carbon cost of red meat vary widely. This is not an exact science at all.