Fake Vegan Statistics: Water, Drought, Cowspiracy, etc.

although I'm vegan myself I'm here to
tell you pure and simple a lot of the statistics that vegans have been promoting our propaganda are exaggerated are misleading are here's a comparison of nuts versus cow milk in terms of the efficient production of fat i morally object to the whole cow exploiting industry this whole business of having a cow live in a metal cell from the day it's born the day it died is pretty terrible but in terms of converting water into fat it's more efficient than not for me if you are watching this video you have probably seen statistics somewhere claiming that meat production requires an enormous amount of water compared to the production of vegan food grains nuts soy beans what have you and you may have seen newspaper articles claiming the exact opposite that the production of some vegan foods such as almonds is actually wasting much more water than the production of meat which one is it this chart that you'll now see on your screen it was posted the internet by Katie Wells hi Katie um I wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't posted it its origin is a website called non human org intentionally or unintentionally this is an example of a fake statistic fake in the sense that it is misleading it's entirely possible that the people who made this chart are themselves mislead and they don't realize the sense in which it's misleading we have this great idiom in the English language apples to oranges and apples to oranges comparison one kilogram of rice is not comparable to one kilogram of beef just as in English we say apples to oranges you can't really compare one kilogram of apples to one kilogram torches but the difference between rice and beef is even more extreme especially because if you're talking about rice being bought as a commodity dried rice would you compare that to dried beef beef that's had the moisture extracted from it or are you gonna compare the weight of rice after it's been boiled after it's been hydrated right that's a lot heavier one kilogram of wet rice is different from one kilogram of dried rice one kilogram of beef jerkey is different from what kilogram of beef but in general we all know if we just pause and think about it a sack of apples one kilogram of apples it's healthier than a sack of beef I'm I'm vegan I'm willing to admit my own bias here if I'm going to the grocery store and someone says hey I'll give you one kilogram for free your choice a kilogram of apples or a kilogram of beef I'm gonna take the kilogram of apples hmm but that's irrelevant right so we all know even if we lose track of the fact when we're looking at a chart of this kind we all know that one kilogram of pork is not really the same thing as one kilogram of hazelnuts or one kilogram of peanuts although they're both high fat foods so then we get into the question of how can we construct a comparison what unit can we or should we select to examine sistex of this kind well when we do it on a meaningful units unit basis of comparison some vegan foods are much more efficient than meat and dairy but some are not and some are close match in this chart we compare nuts to pork okay I'm going to give you the source for this in just a moment it is actually an interesting set of sources published by UNESCO a pair of authors have done a few different reports dealing with these questions of full lifecycle analysis of how much water is used in producing food and then also the side effects of meat production in terms of water pollution alright but looking at this chart this is showing how many liters are can assumed how many liters of water are consumed not to produce one kilogram of pork but how many litres are consumed to produce one gram of fat now one of the main reasons why people become vegan and vegetarian is because they're aware that there is too much fat in a meat-based diet being vegan is a lower fat diet nuts are also extremely dense calorie dense extremely rich and fat but on this comparison which one actually consumes more water in fact pork requires less water to produce one gram of fat than the nut industry the efficiency were measuring is how efficiently different forms of Agriculture produce fat then this shows that the pork industry is producing fat more efficiently than the nut industry deal with it fresh fruit not a good source of fat but a good source of calories rich in calories guess what fruit agriculture fairly water intensive calorie per calorie production of fruit is not that far off of the production of pork and why is pork efficient this way the same things that make modern animal agriculture so despicable the same things that make factory farming look so terrible to the outside world are the same things that make it more efficient when you do comparisons of meat agriculture in third world countries versus first world countries the third world countries consume vastly more water to produce the same amount of meat than westernized countries this whole horrible factory farm system exists for a reason it really is more efficient including greater efficiency in water usage so the first bunch of charts showed that animal agriculture has the advantage in fat so exactly the same thing that makes veganism advantageous in terms of personal health makes it disadvantageous in these water statistics if we're looking at fat as a meaningful unit of measurement starchy roots the category looked at here obviously includes potatoes etc in comparing potatoes to pig meat what do we see okay if we're not measuring fat output if we're measuring calorie output yes it is vastly more efficient to eat potatoes than it is to eat pork as the staple of your diet in terms of getting calories the third and final measure here to look at instead of just using kilograms is to look at grams of protein and while vegans often get angry when meat-eaters claim that beef and pork and so on are a great source of protein guess what if you directly compare nuts to pork in terms of the liters of water required per gram of protein pork is a more efficient source of protein fortunately nuts are not the staple of our diet as vegan for myself at least cereals are the staple in my diet bread rice etc and this obviously is where the efficiency in terms of water use of the vegan diet really starts to come in so even though people do not think of bread as a great source of protein actually it is bread is a major part of the protein of my own diet and guess what yes water usage to produce one gram of protein through cereals way more efficient than pork but again if you compare this to our very first chart it's still not as Extreme a difference as that chart seemed to portray and obviously everyone knows that the reason why cereals have been the staple the human diet throughout most of recorded history rice wheat etc is that it is such an efficient way to get calories in the human diet and it's no surprise vegans win on this one cereals compared to part pork in terms of liters of water per thousand calories okay that's the video the bad news is that yes a lot of vegans are using flawed and misleading statistics in arguing their case the good news is that when you look into all the details and the details are contradictory and interesting and thought provoking and we're thinking about you're gonna find that yeah veganism still not only has a massive moral advantage it also has an ecological advantage this problem and what am I going to call it the the kilogram fallacy the the definition of the unit fallacy it's a very simple but fundamental error how do you compare the the amount of calcium in figs to the amount of calcium in milk cow milk sorry about dried figs or exam a wet figs if it's if it's per kilogram that's a huge difference right that's going to be even an exponential difference likewise how are we going to compare the amount of calcium in broccoli the amount of calcium in milk it's easy if you're doing it per serving if you compare you know one plate of broccoli or the amount of broccoli to eating a meal too the amount of milk you might drink in a meal but to do it on a kilogram by kilogram basis it's apples to oranges it's not a comparison that makes sense you can't really compare a 10 kilogram crate of broccoli to a 10 kilogram plate crate of cheese plate of cheese crative cheese you get my point the only scenario I can think of where you would really be comparing these foods these totally dissimilar foods on a kilogram to kilogram basis would be something like loading a helicopter to go to deliver food to a famine afflicted area and where people say do you look the helicopter can only carry so many hundred kilograms so how many kilograms of beef how many kilograms of rice and how many kilograms of apples are we going to take now precisely because something like beef or pork is nutrient dense it's dense in fat it's dense in protein if you were actually making that decision how can you get the most food value to a bunch of people who are starving if you were looking at one kilogram of apples versus one kilogram of pork that would be a very different sort of decision than the sort of decision we all make beyond that I don't know what to tell you the vast majority of people have a lot of trouble understanding social science statistics and in talking about veganism we're looking at the overlap of social science statistics with politics with claims of a personal nutrition and kind of popular ecology so tempers run red and discussions pretty quickly veer away from the cold hard facts facts are worth knowing about we're thinking about I just want to clear up any rumors about the scarf I'm wearing a scarf because it's cold in here this is in fact vacuuming day in my fabulous bachelor apartment so the windows are all open it's the Canadian winter and I'm vacuuming in fresh air