> As you said, eating loads of soybeans or oil may not be great for you,
but replacing the worst oils with better ones will help a lot.
Yes, though so far the franchises like KFC are not really replacing
soybean oil, they are just replacing one type of soybean oil with another
(replacing soybean oil that contains lots of trans fats with one that
doesn't). Apparently, only the method of processing the oil has changed.
But I would guess that it is at least a small improvement. It would be
better, according to Cordain, if they used canola or light (cooking) olive
oil, but that would of course cost them more. So the economic incentive is
not there until and unless people demand it. I could see that happening
some day.
> I remember when suddenly oats were the 'heart healthy' fad. Suddenly, in
just one year the price of oats shot up and oat products appeared
everywhere, lots of new oat breakfast cereals. The next year farmers
planted
a lot more oats, and also the fad tapered off and oats were no longer
expensive. So these changes can happen very quickly if the media gets
behind
them.
Yes, but as has been discussed, Cordain apparently believes that the
production of Paleo foods can only be increased to feed up to 9% of the
current world population. It makes sense that the limits to Paleo food
production are much lower than for the modern foods. Especially meats and
seafood. For example, already scientists are saying the seafood stock is
in danger of exhaustion in the next few decades--and this is without large
scale adoption of Paleo diets.
> But with the pressure easing off, we will have an easier time adapting to
the population.
Even the most rosy estimates don't see world population peaking until at
least 2030-2040. With these rosy estimates the population will still be
above 4 billion in 2150. If the goal were to just stop world population
from growing, that would be achievable in our lifetime. The evidence is
accumulating that the goal should be very different.
After reading the works of Ben Wattenberg, Julian Simon, and others, I
used to think that the a global population of 6.5 billion is not a problem
and that the "birth dearth" was the real problem, rather than
overpopulation. One of the birth dearth argument advocates, Steven W.
Mosher, predicted that population will peak at 7 billion in 2030. But
after reading NeanderThin, The Paleo Diet and Ishmael, it became quite
apparent that the world population target needs to be much lower than 7
billion. Based on Cordain's estimate, it looks like we should aim for a
world population below 600 million and probably significantly lower than
that if we want humanity to be able to live and eat the way it was
designed/evolved (Paleo-like foods), and to return to a fairly harmonious
balance with nature. At 600 million there would still be people who want
to eat modern foods, but at least everyone would have the choice to eat
Paleo if they wanted to without causing exhaustions or extinctions of
Paleo-like animals and plants.
If we want to set an easier target than the ideal, perhaps we could say
about half the people eating relatively modern diets would be acceptable
and therefore say that around one or so billion would be a reasonable
target. And perhaps with serious dedication to developing greener
technologies and preserving biodiversity hotspots like rainforests we
might find a way to live sustainably and harmoniously around the 1 billion
mark. Of course, for those that think that the modern foods are fine and
that we don't need a lot of biodiversity, my points are moot.
> Not sure about this. China is developing rapidly, leapfrogging ahead, and
>
> they are reportedly experiencing a massive increase in pollution.
> I am still hoping that China and India can make the jump faster than we
did, using our tech to skip some of the intermediate stages.
They are making the economic and technological jump much faster than we
did, with massive new factories sprouting up and whole new industries
developing in less than a decade that took a century to develop in Europe
and the US. Unfortunately, China is making that jump in a dirty fashion,
though at least the government there has publicly stated recognition of
the problem. I'm thinking you mean that you hope they learn to make their
industries less-polluting in less time than we did. My guess is that would
require China to switch from using coal energy to using mostly nuclear.
It's possible. Nuclear fusion is a hope for the future, though miracle
technologies often turn out to be less miraculous than they had been
predicted by their boosters.
> That initial stage is when most of the species loss occurs. It makes me
sad to think of all the species we must have lost when the plains states
were all pretty much completely plowed under, marshes drained etc. Of
course they have a lot more population pressure now than the US or Europe
ever did, so it won't be easy.
Now the rainforests are being plowed under, which causes a much higher
rate of species extinction than when the plains were plowed under and
converted to monoculture, because the species in the tropics tend to have
smaller ranges than North American species.
> In another post, someone mentioned the idea that it takes ten calories of
energy to produce one calorie of food energy. I have to say I don't
understand the comparison.
Lynnet may be able to answer that one. It is a new concept for me.
> When the cities get cold, the eco-fantics who live there will be the
first
to proclaim the wonderous benefits if nuclear power, I have no doubt at
all!
I'm not concerned about cities getting cold. I think humans will find ways
to produce energy, there's too much incentive behind it for them not to.
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