Animals Attack

[Nailest]

So you're just lazy?

It's been a while since I studied any metabolism (thank god), but how efficient are our guts at extracting energy from plants compared to a similar amount of meat? I do recall we're pretty hopeless at digesting cellulose, but what else do we get? I'm not trying to be facetious, merely curious.

[Jene]

im veggie purely on the 'feeling sorry for animal' front....

like when your driving down the moterway , move out to overtake some lorry....glance left anf just see all these big, sad cow eyes staring at you through the gap in the lorry side.

if all farming was free range / culling was done on site / close to the farm then maybe i'd eat it but not sure....

and bacon makes me jus wanna throw up

[PorkyFatBoy]

Whilst I do eat animals (domestic and wild), I have to say that it is far more difficult if you rear your own livestock, to then eat it, even if you can have it slaughtered locally. Meat in sanitised packaging in Tesco's is far removed from the concept of animals they come from.

Oh, and all my chickens are definitely free range having 12m2 each - but then they are skinny layers rather than plump table birds. My bees are free range too.

[badger]

i make a point of not eating honey from battery bees.

[Mrs H.]

Porky would you like a stall at the Jk? I remember the French 5 days at fontainbleau (fab event) they gave local honey for prizes each day - Nev won a couple of jars - it was delicious

[PorkyFatBoy]

Sorry, 2004 harvest was all sold out, even before Croeso. I don't think I'll be able to get any off of the hives and bottled before the JK event with all the surrounding fields full of spring flowering oil seed rape. Easter is early this year, and the winter is supposed to be hard - the blackberries were very good this year and the leaves are still on the oak in November.....

[Neil Crickmore]

I am a vegeterian, simply because a little knowledge of energy transfer says it is grossly inefficient and therefore more sensible to eat the plant than feed the plants to animals and eat the animal. Plus animal rearing in the intensive way it is done nowadays is damaging to the environment in soooo many other ways, pollution, overgrazing, tree felling. Feelings for animals never really came into it

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" - discuss.

I might even try this out on some of our students - the biochemists and ecologists would have a field day (metaphorically speaking). Even some of the physicists would have to admit that Einstein should have stuck with astrophysics

[ic]

good, i heard someone mention the biochemistry of metabolism....

perhaps one of you experts can answer the following: once upon a time, i was at a carbohydrate conference, and (presumably to keep the myth alive) as a special guest star one of the speakers was a nutritionist of some description. (of a particularly biological description actually, but the point is that he was talking about carbohydrates in nutrition, unlike everyone else there.) anyway, one thing he said was that while possible in foetuses, the conversion of carbohydrate into fat cannot happen in humans due to the relevant pathway being disabled. i only mention this cos it goes against popular dogma and i don't know whether i misunderstood his gist or if it's just irrelevant in the grand scheme.

Of course i ought to go and look up some reference or other, but i haven't done that in the last 5 years and just wondered if you knew the answer. (that was my discussion.)

[fell]

competely random note- it takes more energy to digest celery that you actually get out of it.

so I assume the more you eat, the skinnier you get.
wow dieting wonder.

[Mr. Furness]

i am an astrophysicist, and although i generally agree with albert on various cosmological principles, i have to say he'd obviously lost his marbles with the above statemant. (maybe his second mistake!!?)

(thats because astrophysics is cool. honest.)

[Klebe]

I am a vegeterian, simply because a little knowledge of energy transfer says it is grossly inefficient and therefore more sensible to eat the plant than feed the plants to animals and eat the animal.

Yawn !!!

Plus animal rearing in the intensive way it is done nowadays is damaging to the environment in soooo many other ways, pollution, overgrazing, tree felling.

And pouring tonnes of nitrates into the fields and watercourses along with hundreds of tonnes of pesticides onto those lovely vegetable crops is so environmentally friendly.


Off for a burger !!!

[gg]

yeah but bacon tastes good

pork chops taste good...

[Toni]

It's been a while since I studied any metabolism (thank god), but how efficient are our guts at extracting energy from plants compared to a similar amount of meat? I do recall we're pretty hopeless at digesting cellulose, but what else do we get? I'm not trying to be facetious, merely curious.

I share an office with four others and three of the five have chronic digestive illnesses. Interestingly we were all told not to eat red meat when we weren't feeling well, red meat in particular because it is so difficult to digest. You use 30% of the calories you get from a steak just to digest it! I turned veggie just because my body finds it sooooo difficult to digest meat and I doubt I am alone in that! I am veggie because I don't need meat in my diet - in fact it makes me ill! That said I think that equally some people need meat and can't cope without it!

Nothing to do with Bacon Baps not being good (although I don't miss them really)

[cj]

He he, thought I'd get that response, I also went veggie when it was trendy age 8 and was too stuborn to give up, so yeah laziness really. Regards carbs into fat ic I thought you could, all ends up / built from acetyl-CoA and all that. Mind you I'm not such a fan of metabolism, too many names and structures, same for genetics

[ic]

I am a vegeterian, simply because a little knowledge of energy transfer says it is grossly inefficient and therefore more sensible to eat the plant than feed the plants to animals and eat the animal.

i don't know anything about energy transfer in this context.

but... while the argument that eating the animal after the animal has expended a lot of energy making something that is similar in structure to what you (the eater) want to make probably doesn't hold water (due to your having to break down and rebuild whatever structure it was (depending on how big a structure you are talking about - eg yes for a muscle, no for glucosamine)), the fact that you're eating something similar to what you want to do with it must have some value from the standpoint that at least the building blocks are assembled, pre-ordered in a ready-to-eat package. right?