Mercola says:
"As a general rule, I believe man-made foods are vastly inferior to natural, whole foods and always will be. Outperforming nature is a tall order, and no one has succeeded yet. As such, I believe extreme caution is warranted. Apparently, so does the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as reported by the New York Times."
While it's true that millions of carnivores, especially in the U.S. are supersizing and poisoning themselves with two or three times as much CAFO meat, dairy and poultry as a natural health expert would recommend, a moderate amount of grass-fed or pastured meat and dairy (especially raw milk dairy products) are actually very good for your health. So if you want a healthy meal, skip the "Impossible Burger" and other fake meat and go for a 100% grass-fed beef, lamb or buffalo burger instead.
If you prefer to get your protein boost from seafood, skip the farmed fish and go for Wild Alaskan Salmon. If you're determined to eat a veggie burger, skip the GMO yeast and fake blood and flavors and choose a healthy meat alternative such as an organic tempeh burger, made from fermented soybeans, or a bean burger, made from all natural, organic ingredients.
Even more bizarre, elitist and uninformed is the recent trendy chorus calling for the elimination of the planet's 70 billion livestock as a major solution to the climate crisis. These "no livestock" fundamentalists ignore the fact that over a billion people, especially in the developing world, rely on raising livestock for their food and survival. They do this on the billions of acres of pasture and rangeland that are simply not suitable for raising crops, but which can and do support properly grazed livestock.
Besides providing 37 percent of the world's protein, animal husbandry and livestock today provide 33 percent -- 55 percent of the household income for the world's 640 million small farmers, 190 million pastoralists and one billion urban peasants, more than 50 percent of whom are low-income women.
Should we just tell these billion "backward" peasants to go into town and line up for their genetically engineered "Impossible Burgers" and forget about raising their cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, ducks and chickens like their ancestors have done for thousands of years?
The animals can save us
Perhaps the most fundamental reason we need to preserve and promote a regenerative system of animal husbandry across the planet on millions of farms and ranches is the little-known fact that properly grazing animals (as opposed to imprisoning animals in factory farms) is the key to sequestering excess carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and storing this carbon in the world's 4 billion acres of rangelands and pasturelands.
As world-renowned climate scientist Dr. James Hansen says:
"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current levels to at most 350 ppm . . . "
A growing corps of climate experts have warned us repeatedly that we must stop burning fossil fuels, eliminate destructive food, farming and land use practices, and drawdown enough carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Earth's atmosphere through regenerative farming/ranching and enhanced natural photosynthesis to return us to 350 parts-per-million (ppm), or better yet to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm.
About half of the total human greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming today come from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) for transportation, heating, cooling, electricity and manufacturing. The other half, unbeknown to most people, comes from degenerative food, farming and land-use practices.
These greenhouse gas-polluting, climate-destabilizing food, farming and land-use practices include the massive use of fossil fuels and synthetic, climate-destabilizing chemicals on the farm, including diesel fuel, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers.
They also include energy-intensive food processing, packaging, long-distance transportation of foods, the confinement of billions of methane-belching animals in factory farms, the dumping of rotting waste food and organic garbage into landfills instead of composting it, and the wasting of 30 percent -- 50 percent of all the food we grow.
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