I’ve recently reconciled my behavior with my ethical intuition regarding eating animals, by way of deciding to alter my behavior and do some variation of “don’t eat meat”. I decided on this question long ago but did not act upon it.
I notice that there is very confusing information out there about what one should eat in order to avoid negative health impacts, and would like to read correct and useful articles on the subject, because I strongly desire to not be unhealthy. Do you have suggestions?
I am pragmatic. My intuition says that bone ash used to color certain food products has a relatively low cost (in sin-ons), and that there definitely are places I will make trades against sin-ons.
I also recognize that I would like a reasonably fast process to estimate sin-ons, and suggestions about highly impactful considerations (metabolic efficiency, things that might put various horrors on understandable scales) would be appreciated. Also, I am not sure that sin-ons is the word I am looking for as a measure of this sort of badness.
I have checked with my brain, and my brain has decided that cuteness does not particularly matter to it as a factor. Horse sashimi is delicious.
If you have things to say in favor of eating meat, please share them, and explain it to me as if I am a precocious 8 year old.
Frozen salmon is good for you, keeps a long time in the freezer, is sustainable (at least in the US), and easy to cook. It is excellent in various kinds of soup and you don’t even need to pre-cook it for that purpose—throw in a chunk and bring the soup to boiling. Poke the fish until it falls apart. Eat.
I think salmon is meat, but it might be one of the less bad things (don’t know), and this is something I’ll deliberately examine if it solves some health stuff.
I am considering adding oysters and mussels to my vegetarian diet as a result of these two blogposts. I don’t have Good Information about the nutritional problems that come from avoiding meat or the nutritional benefits of adding oysters and mussels, but it seems like a good way to hedge against deficiencies without spending too much research time, especially since I’m cutting down on eggs (Warning: unpleasant image of chicken having its beak clipped appears relatively high on that page).
That being said, I do consider this kind of thing to be “reconciling daily behaviours with abstract ethical beliefs” more than I consider it an effective form of altruism; it looks to me like poverty and the long-term future are much better places to invest Actual Altruistic Effort.
Very much agree. The altruistic version of being a vegetarian warrior maybe looks like developing some fiendish scheme to make meat unpalatable to humans on a large scale. My reason for change is basically just that I recognized this conflict between my thinking and my behavior and it looked fairly, like, hypocritical to me.
I’ve known a couple of people who became vegetarians for a while and then changed to eating meat occasionally, saying that it was for health reasons. Apparently, they got weak or sick when they went a while without eating meat. And a lack of iron was part of it IIRC. Maybe you could try being a full vegetarian until you notice side effects. The side effects might be really subtle, but if you do have them and detect them then you can get a measure of how much meat you need to eat.
Yeah, I see a lot of complications involving iron, b12, and a few other things.
I don’t have some sort of moral absolute thing going on; I ought to be able to make a low-effort glance into the things I eat and pick a diet that closely matches my intuitions without sacrificing health, happiness, or undue money. Like if it turns out that beef is the most ethical meat, and that eggs are really horrible, then I might eat beef but not eggs, if they are just vastly better ways of getting things that are otherwise a complete PITA to acquire.
Most likely, though, I can get by with very minimal tradeoffs, or at least it looks that way.
I ought to be able to make a low-effort glance into the things I eat and pick a diet that closely matches my intuitions without sacrificing health, happiness, or undue money
I’m not sure what sense of “ought” you’re using there, but that seems like you’re expecting an implausibly cooperative universe. Your ethical intuitions might be in line with what you need for health, but they are only loosely affected by health considerations.
There’s some pull towards ethics leading towards diets which are livable for a high proportion of people who follow them, but that’s hardly a guarantee.
Warning: I eat meat, so this might be motivated reasoning. On the other hand, the health claims for vegetarianism also seem to me like motivated reasoning.
“Ought” meaning that I think it’s highly unlikely that these calculations come out in such a close race that I don’t have clear choices despite using low powered analysis. It might, but like, if the mussels thing looks very likely true, that for example would be a big differentiator over certain other products. Also, there is some variation between brain size and food value. If something IS a close call, there are lots of things that almost certainly are not. That’s what I mean by “ought”
One person does not have a large effect on market; I suspect that most vegetarians are being unreal with themselves about the impact of their choices. You can point out a lot of these sorts of quirks about deliberate vegetarians (health claims you mentioned), which may be a sign that there is lots of motivated reasoning going on in that group.
I pretty much just want to make choices more consistent with my ethics or morals or whatever, and desire to do that with minimum effort.
Yes, but if you’ve never tried to be vegetarian before, then your fears of the downsides (bad health and not enjoying food, right?) might be out of proportion. Going fully vegetarian for a bit gives you a chance to get feedback from your body about it, and so help you determine your limit.
If you cut down your meat intake but stay high above the limit then you’re causing some animal suffering for no significant gain. (I assume reducing animal suffering is the goal of your plan.)
I planned to this myself but I’m not doing it, because of issues with my SO.
Mind elaborating a bit for the curious? What is a “sin-on”? What led to your conclusions with regards to the ethics of eating meat? Seeing as I’m new here, I imagine it likely that there’s been a discussion I’ve missed out on at some point.
Yeah. A bit tongue in cheek, utility is to utilon as sin is to sin-on.
It’s like a very immature concept in my head and I’m still trying to map out what’s hiding in there, but it seems useful to me at the moment to figure out what a sin-on is made of and figure out order-of-magnitude type detail about things, as a way of trying to make reasonably consistent choices.
Well, not defining on my own. I’m deliberately asking a community of people who try to think about these sorts of things in clearer terms than normal about what sorts of considerations might be worth examining. Making a perfect objective suffering function doesn’t seem hugely worthwhile for me; I just want to be able to make orders of magnitude comparisons because that’s likely enough. [ed: on my necessarily messed up strange subjective human scale]
My core assumption is basically that some animals with brains have some degree of conscious experience, and can experience pain, discomfort, etc. I don’t think these things necessarily are perfect 1:1 matches with what the human experience analogues look like (both in how they are experienced and how relatively important they are to me or to the animal) - but visual evidence looks compelling enough to me that this claim looks likely true. I would need to dig into the mechanics of pain or something to get a clearer picture around that assumption, which may be a useful thing to do.
I’m sure the conversation where two people argue about this already exists on LW, just have faith that I will in fact look for it and read it, I am not particularly interested in engaging on a discussion about qualia at the moment.
I think there are probably better versions of farming that could exist, that would both sit better with me on the silly levels that do not get a vote and on other levels that matter more (e.g. optimizing slaughtering to reduce pain or something). Inflicted pain is an example of a cost that is being applied to animals that can be improved upon. There are other things like that that make farming meat objectionable to me.
On some gut level this actually matters to me. I have some amount of empathy for at least a lot of non-human animals, and whether a human has been involved in some transaction seems to make it matter more to me.
It might be possible that there’s a version of meat farming that doesn’t suck from my perspective. Like, if cows just dropped dead on their own accord after living reasonably good lives, and were immediately harvested, and that was somehow still excellent meat, that would probably have a large impact on how I looked at things. Is that substantially different than eating engineered vat meat? I’m on the fence.
I’m undecided on what you do with a bunch of useless animals you cannot release into the wild if you have engineered vat meat and other artificial animal products of sufficient quality at a sufficiently low cost. Maintaining far smaller populations doesn’t seem horrible to me.
Anyway, I recognize that I would probably kill a cow to get lots of dollars (which I could do useful things with), but probably not do it for 25 cents. Some animal products are useful. Eating a frustrating diet has a cost. If I must eat an egg a week to maintain normal brain function, then I guess I’ll eat an egg a week unless there are alternatives that aren’t too expensive, even if that comes at the cost of some chicken suffering. I just want to navigate those sorts of considerations and figure out what trades I am comfortable with.
Peccaton (from the Latin for “sin”). Hamarton or hamartion (from the Greek). Culpon (from the Latin for “blame”). Aition (from the Greek). Aliton (from another Greek word for sin). There are a bunch of other Greek words that denote wickedness, evil, badness, etc.
I meant more along the lines of I don’t have some coherent framework to slam this stuff into, but I want to be able to locally do some very ballpark comparison on things that I currently know too little about. Sin-on is the wrong word (it doesn’t reflect very well what it’s trying to represent), but it seemed amusing, so for the moment sin-on it is.
I don’t think dismissing something based solely on who funds it is a good choice. Look at the science and the facts. The fact that someone you don’t like funds an organization doesn’t mean that that organization is spouting lies, and it doesn’t mean the science behind the health advice is wrong. There’s a pretty simple reasons for why all of those companies would fund a health organization: it’s good PR.
I don’t think dismissing something based solely on who funds it is a good choice. Look at the science and the facts.
It’s quite easy in nutrition to argue for a lot of different positions by cherry picking studies.
It also easy to find them lying in favor of the commercial interest of mosanto:
The FDA uses the Total Diet Study to determine pesticide residues in foods. The study limits pesticide residues to five to ten times lower than is found to be safe. In short, these residues are regulated to levels that are considered safe based on the average daily food intake of both adults and children
Studies don’t determine what’s safe but test for evidence of specific kind of harms. It’s takes clear reading to spot the lie but it’s still a lie. You could argue that the author simply missed epistemology 101 but that’s still a problem.
There’s a pretty simple reasons for why all of those companies would fund a health organization: it’s good PR.
The website is deliberately constructed in a way that makes it hard to see who funds the organisation. If a company does something for PR they usually want their logo displayed.
Also as far as science goes, the effect of funding on scientific studies is well established. It creates a bias in the results.
Your latter reasons about the author and organization hiding information are great. I’m not trying to imply you don’t have any basis upon which to be cautious. I was trying to say, though, that who funded a study or an organization does not make that organization’s or study’s findings wrong: often times, organizations like IFIC are not in a good position to turn any money down, as long as the money doesn’t dictate their message. If you have good reason to think that the money is indeed dictating the message, then by all means, be skeptical.
I would note that there’s very good reason for why the website might choose to keep the logos from being openly displayed: having the logos in a prominent position on the site would be very counter productive to the message of the site. If you are advocating healthy choices—and from reading the articles on the website, it does indeed seem like IFIC is advocating healthy food choices—pretty much the last thing you want to do is put the McDonalds or Pepsi logos on your front page, because it creates a confusing message. Companies like Pepsi and McDonalds still gain something from the exchange: they get to say in press releases and on their own websites that they fund health organizations, which is great PR for them, and it provides a foundation for those companies to claim that they do not encourage people to make unhealthy choices.
Unfortunately, with regards to scientific studies, the problem of funding is pretty widespread. I’ve had a pretty long term interest in ecology, and it’s pretty well known that there’s just about no way to do agricultural research without having some influence from Monsanto—and it’s sometimes dangerous, career-wise, to publish results counter to Monsanto’s party line.
I was trying to say, though, that who funded a study or an organization does not make that organization’s or study’s findings wrong
It doesn’t make them wrong but it makes them more likely to be wrong. The effect is well established by scientific papers. There are many ways to bias a study that you can’t trace by reading a paper.
It doesn’t make sense to say look at the science, and ignore the science that clearly establishes that funding sources bias scientific papers.
IFIC are not in a good position to turn any money down, as long as the money doesn’t dictate their message
You don’t need to dictate a message to encourage an organisation to argue position that are in line with your interests if you are clear about your interest and give them money. Corruption works quite well without direct dictates.
pretty much the last thing you want to do is put the McDonalds or Pepsi logos on your front page, because it creates a confusing message
If you look at the website it’s interesting to see the hoops they put up to get people to see the funding sources. The first step is to find an click the about button. There you get the paragraph:
OUR STAKEHOLDERS We bring together, work with, and provide information to consumers, health and nutrition professionals, educators, government officials, and food, beverage, and agricultural industry professionals. We have established partnerships with a wide range of credible professional organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions to advance the public understanding of key issues. For example, we have a long-standing relationship with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion as part of the Dietary Guidelines Alliance, a public-private partnership focused on the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the MyPlate Food Guidance System.
It misleading. It speaks about relationship with professional, when in fact the organisation has relationships with companies that pay the majority of it’s budget.
If you want to know more, you can click “Partner and sponsors”. That brings you to a black and white PDF page. There no reason avoid having normal html page that list the “Partner and sponsors” and uses the logos unless you want to design the website in a way that makes it harder for the user to find out the funding sources.
Another interesting part of the website is an article about beef. It reads like a beef commercial:
Every parent wants to feed their family safe, nutritious, and healthful foods. If you’ve seen recent news articles on grass-fed versus grain-fed meat, you’re probably left wondering how to choose what’s right to purchase for your house. The short (and pretty low stress!) answer is that whatever choice you make, either conventional or grass-fed beef or milk, is a great option for you and your family.
Of course McDonalds wants people to eat beef. In the mainstream nutrition community there a general belief that the average American eats too much red meat. Given that background saying “don’t stress about the choices you make about beef consumption” is problematic.
Of course there are paleo people who think that eating red meat is quite alright, but it’s still highly suspicious for the authors of the website manage to argue the position that it’s funders would want it to argue. The paleo people wouldn’t advocate milk as a good choice.
I’ve recently reconciled my behavior with my ethical intuition regarding eating animals, by way of deciding to alter my behavior and do some variation of “don’t eat meat”. I decided on this question long ago but did not act upon it.
I notice that there is very confusing information out there about what one should eat in order to avoid negative health impacts, and would like to read correct and useful articles on the subject, because I strongly desire to not be unhealthy. Do you have suggestions?
I am pragmatic. My intuition says that bone ash used to color certain food products has a relatively low cost (in sin-ons), and that there definitely are places I will make trades against sin-ons.
I also recognize that I would like a reasonably fast process to estimate sin-ons, and suggestions about highly impactful considerations (metabolic efficiency, things that might put various horrors on understandable scales) would be appreciated. Also, I am not sure that sin-ons is the word I am looking for as a measure of this sort of badness.
I have checked with my brain, and my brain has decided that cuteness does not particularly matter to it as a factor. Horse sashimi is delicious.
If you have things to say in favor of eating meat, please share them, and explain it to me as if I am a precocious 8 year old.
Frozen salmon is good for you, keeps a long time in the freezer, is sustainable (at least in the US), and easy to cook. It is excellent in various kinds of soup and you don’t even need to pre-cook it for that purpose—throw in a chunk and bring the soup to boiling. Poke the fish until it falls apart. Eat.
I think salmon is meat, but it might be one of the less bad things (don’t know), and this is something I’ll deliberately examine if it solves some health stuff.
http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-per-kg.html
I am considering adding oysters and mussels to my vegetarian diet as a result of these two blog posts. I don’t have Good Information about the nutritional problems that come from avoiding meat or the nutritional benefits of adding oysters and mussels, but it seems like a good way to hedge against deficiencies without spending too much research time, especially since I’m cutting down on eggs (Warning: unpleasant image of chicken having its beak clipped appears relatively high on that page).
That being said, I do consider this kind of thing to be “reconciling daily behaviours with abstract ethical beliefs” more than I consider it an effective form of altruism; it looks to me like poverty and the long-term future are much better places to invest Actual Altruistic Effort.
Very much agree. The altruistic version of being a vegetarian warrior maybe looks like developing some fiendish scheme to make meat unpalatable to humans on a large scale. My reason for change is basically just that I recognized this conflict between my thinking and my behavior and it looked fairly, like, hypocritical to me.
Thanks for the helpful links!
I’ve known a couple of people who became vegetarians for a while and then changed to eating meat occasionally, saying that it was for health reasons. Apparently, they got weak or sick when they went a while without eating meat. And a lack of iron was part of it IIRC. Maybe you could try being a full vegetarian until you notice side effects. The side effects might be really subtle, but if you do have them and detect them then you can get a measure of how much meat you need to eat.
Yeah, I see a lot of complications involving iron, b12, and a few other things.
I don’t have some sort of moral absolute thing going on; I ought to be able to make a low-effort glance into the things I eat and pick a diet that closely matches my intuitions without sacrificing health, happiness, or undue money. Like if it turns out that beef is the most ethical meat, and that eggs are really horrible, then I might eat beef but not eggs, if they are just vastly better ways of getting things that are otherwise a complete PITA to acquire.
Most likely, though, I can get by with very minimal tradeoffs, or at least it looks that way.
I’m not sure what sense of “ought” you’re using there, but that seems like you’re expecting an implausibly cooperative universe. Your ethical intuitions might be in line with what you need for health, but they are only loosely affected by health considerations.
There’s some pull towards ethics leading towards diets which are livable for a high proportion of people who follow them, but that’s hardly a guarantee.
Warning: I eat meat, so this might be motivated reasoning. On the other hand, the health claims for vegetarianism also seem to me like motivated reasoning.
“Ought” meaning that I think it’s highly unlikely that these calculations come out in such a close race that I don’t have clear choices despite using low powered analysis. It might, but like, if the mussels thing looks very likely true, that for example would be a big differentiator over certain other products. Also, there is some variation between brain size and food value. If something IS a close call, there are lots of things that almost certainly are not. That’s what I mean by “ought”
One person does not have a large effect on market; I suspect that most vegetarians are being unreal with themselves about the impact of their choices. You can point out a lot of these sorts of quirks about deliberate vegetarians (health claims you mentioned), which may be a sign that there is lots of motivated reasoning going on in that group.
I pretty much just want to make choices more consistent with my ethics or morals or whatever, and desire to do that with minimum effort.
Yes, but if you’ve never tried to be vegetarian before, then your fears of the downsides (bad health and not enjoying food, right?) might be out of proportion. Going fully vegetarian for a bit gives you a chance to get feedback from your body about it, and so help you determine your limit.
If you cut down your meat intake but stay high above the limit then you’re causing some animal suffering for no significant gain. (I assume reducing animal suffering is the goal of your plan.)
I planned to this myself but I’m not doing it, because of issues with my SO.
Mind elaborating a bit for the curious? What is a “sin-on”? What led to your conclusions with regards to the ethics of eating meat? Seeing as I’m new here, I imagine it likely that there’s been a discussion I’ve missed out on at some point.
I think it’s supposed to be a unit of sin.
Yeah. A bit tongue in cheek, utility is to utilon as sin is to sin-on.
It’s like a very immature concept in my head and I’m still trying to map out what’s hiding in there, but it seems useful to me at the moment to figure out what a sin-on is made of and figure out order-of-magnitude type detail about things, as a way of trying to make reasonably consistent choices.
Hah. Makes sense, if a bit of a heavy endeavor to try to define on your own.
Mind elaborating on your reasoning for not eating meat? I’m not critical of the choice—yet :P—but I am curious!
Well, not defining on my own. I’m deliberately asking a community of people who try to think about these sorts of things in clearer terms than normal about what sorts of considerations might be worth examining. Making a perfect objective suffering function doesn’t seem hugely worthwhile for me; I just want to be able to make orders of magnitude comparisons because that’s likely enough. [ed: on my necessarily messed up strange subjective human scale]
My core assumption is basically that some animals with brains have some degree of conscious experience, and can experience pain, discomfort, etc. I don’t think these things necessarily are perfect 1:1 matches with what the human experience analogues look like (both in how they are experienced and how relatively important they are to me or to the animal) - but visual evidence looks compelling enough to me that this claim looks likely true. I would need to dig into the mechanics of pain or something to get a clearer picture around that assumption, which may be a useful thing to do.
I’m sure the conversation where two people argue about this already exists on LW, just have faith that I will in fact look for it and read it, I am not particularly interested in engaging on a discussion about qualia at the moment.
I think there are probably better versions of farming that could exist, that would both sit better with me on the silly levels that do not get a vote and on other levels that matter more (e.g. optimizing slaughtering to reduce pain or something). Inflicted pain is an example of a cost that is being applied to animals that can be improved upon. There are other things like that that make farming meat objectionable to me.
On some gut level this actually matters to me. I have some amount of empathy for at least a lot of non-human animals, and whether a human has been involved in some transaction seems to make it matter more to me.
It might be possible that there’s a version of meat farming that doesn’t suck from my perspective. Like, if cows just dropped dead on their own accord after living reasonably good lives, and were immediately harvested, and that was somehow still excellent meat, that would probably have a large impact on how I looked at things. Is that substantially different than eating engineered vat meat? I’m on the fence.
I’m undecided on what you do with a bunch of useless animals you cannot release into the wild if you have engineered vat meat and other artificial animal products of sufficient quality at a sufficiently low cost. Maintaining far smaller populations doesn’t seem horrible to me.
Anyway, I recognize that I would probably kill a cow to get lots of dollars (which I could do useful things with), but probably not do it for 25 cents. Some animal products are useful. Eating a frustrating diet has a cost. If I must eat an egg a week to maintain normal brain function, then I guess I’ll eat an egg a week unless there are alternatives that aren’t too expensive, even if that comes at the cost of some chicken suffering. I just want to navigate those sorts of considerations and figure out what trades I am comfortable with.
Yes, by analogy with “hedons” and “utilons”, hypothetical units of pleasure and utility respectively.
Peccaton (from the Latin for “sin”). Hamarton or hamartion (from the Greek). Culpon (from the Latin for “blame”). Aition (from the Greek). Aliton (from another Greek word for sin). There are a bunch of other Greek words that denote wickedness, evil, badness, etc.
Haha. Nice.
I meant more along the lines of I don’t have some coherent framework to slam this stuff into, but I want to be able to locally do some very ballpark comparison on things that I currently know too little about. Sin-on is the wrong word (it doesn’t reflect very well what it’s trying to represent), but it seemed amusing, so for the moment sin-on it is.
www.ific.org
I don’t think taking health advice by a foundation funded among others by Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Monsanto is a good choice.
I don’t think dismissing something based solely on who funds it is a good choice. Look at the science and the facts. The fact that someone you don’t like funds an organization doesn’t mean that that organization is spouting lies, and it doesn’t mean the science behind the health advice is wrong. There’s a pretty simple reasons for why all of those companies would fund a health organization: it’s good PR.
It’s quite easy in nutrition to argue for a lot of different positions by cherry picking studies.
It also easy to find them lying in favor of the commercial interest of mosanto:
Studies don’t determine what’s safe but test for evidence of specific kind of harms. It’s takes clear reading to spot the lie but it’s still a lie. You could argue that the author simply missed epistemology 101 but that’s still a problem.
The website is deliberately constructed in a way that makes it hard to see who funds the organisation. If a company does something for PR they usually want their logo displayed.
Also as far as science goes, the effect of funding on scientific studies is well established. It creates a bias in the results.
Your latter reasons about the author and organization hiding information are great. I’m not trying to imply you don’t have any basis upon which to be cautious. I was trying to say, though, that who funded a study or an organization does not make that organization’s or study’s findings wrong: often times, organizations like IFIC are not in a good position to turn any money down, as long as the money doesn’t dictate their message. If you have good reason to think that the money is indeed dictating the message, then by all means, be skeptical.
I would note that there’s very good reason for why the website might choose to keep the logos from being openly displayed: having the logos in a prominent position on the site would be very counter productive to the message of the site. If you are advocating healthy choices—and from reading the articles on the website, it does indeed seem like IFIC is advocating healthy food choices—pretty much the last thing you want to do is put the McDonalds or Pepsi logos on your front page, because it creates a confusing message. Companies like Pepsi and McDonalds still gain something from the exchange: they get to say in press releases and on their own websites that they fund health organizations, which is great PR for them, and it provides a foundation for those companies to claim that they do not encourage people to make unhealthy choices.
Unfortunately, with regards to scientific studies, the problem of funding is pretty widespread. I’ve had a pretty long term interest in ecology, and it’s pretty well known that there’s just about no way to do agricultural research without having some influence from Monsanto—and it’s sometimes dangerous, career-wise, to publish results counter to Monsanto’s party line.
It doesn’t make them wrong but it makes them more likely to be wrong. The effect is well established by scientific papers. There are many ways to bias a study that you can’t trace by reading a paper.
It doesn’t make sense to say look at the science, and ignore the science that clearly establishes that funding sources bias scientific papers.
You don’t need to dictate a message to encourage an organisation to argue position that are in line with your interests if you are clear about your interest and give them money. Corruption works quite well without direct dictates.
If you look at the website it’s interesting to see the hoops they put up to get people to see the funding sources. The first step is to find an click the about button. There you get the paragraph:
It misleading. It speaks about relationship with professional, when in fact the organisation has relationships with companies that pay the majority of it’s budget.
If you want to know more, you can click “Partner and sponsors”. That brings you to a black and white PDF page. There no reason avoid having normal html page that list the “Partner and sponsors” and uses the logos unless you want to design the website in a way that makes it harder for the user to find out the funding sources.
Another interesting part of the website is an article about beef. It reads like a beef commercial:
Of course McDonalds wants people to eat beef. In the mainstream nutrition community there a general belief that the average American eats too much red meat. Given that background saying “don’t stress about the choices you make about beef consumption” is problematic.
Of course there are paleo people who think that eating red meat is quite alright, but it’s still highly suspicious for the authors of the website manage to argue the position that it’s funders would want it to argue. The paleo people wouldn’t advocate milk as a good choice.