I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
For the cancer risk, this is the pertinent info:
That’s about half a hot dog. Seeing as the news isn’t exploding, this means that this is relative risk. Meaning your current chances of getting colorectal cancer is X. Eating a hot dog every other day continuously multiples your chance by 1.18. American Cancer Society states that over their lifetime, 1 in 23 men (4.35%) of men will develop colorectal cancer. This means if you ate 1 hot dog every other day continuously, a man’s odds of contracting colorectal cancer changes from 4.35% to 5.13% over their lifetime.
That’s just for colorectal cancer. It also affects other types of cancer (like breast cancer) and increases the chance of dying from heart disease considerably.
But there weren’t any good numbers on those I saw in there. Which is why I ignored the entire “meat” claim as it didn’t list useful metrics. “Might cause cancer” doesn’t really help anyone. There only seemed to be useful data about processed meat and colorectal cancer.