Thanks David! That's very kind of you :) And TBC: I wouldn't have skipped the whole newsletter -- just weighing on ideal protein consumption, which was a bit of a digression from the main point. (And I had actually considered just saying something like "I don't know how much protein you should eat, but it doesn't matter because we can't influence it much.")

Totally fair feedback. I agree that I should probably have just argued that the general concept of UPFs is nonsense. My sense is that most of the evidence for the harms of UPFs is correlational and based on studies that look at high consumption of fast food and other junk food that we know is based for you based on high sugar, salt, and caloric levels. (I.e. where you don't need to add UPF to explain why they'd be unhealthy.)

My sense is also that the evidence for food additives like emulsifiers, stabilizers, colorings, and artificial sweeteners posing health risks is surprisingly weak given the public uproar. And while I agree that chicken doesn't contain those things, chicken feed typically contains a whole different set of things that would scare people if they had to disclose them, like antibiotics, animal by-products, and lots of artificial ingredients to make up for nutritional deficiencies from a corn/soy-based diet. (Though, to be clear, I think the evidence that those feed additives pose direct health risks is also weak, with the possible exception of antibiotics contributing to antibiotic-resistant Salmonella.)

Thanks David. Yeah I agree that something closer to 1.6 gram per kilogram is probably ideal for gaining muscle mass, per what your ChatGPT answers say. But my guess is that most Americans aren't doing the required weights to actually gain muscle mass. And my guess would be that caloric restriction / GLP-1s are surer ways to loss weight. But I'm also far from an expert on any of this, so on reflection I should have just skipped weighing in on this point at all.

Only a relatively smaller number of breeding hens laying ~275 eggs each per year

Yep that's about right. I think it's roughly 7B new male chicks and 7B new female chicks each year. The population of egg-laying hens (~8B) is a big higher than the number of chicks because they each live for a bit longer than a year on average (though that's partly offset by 5-10% annual mortality on egg farms). 

Thanks Manuel! TED will post this on its YouTube channel in the next few weeks. (They stagger out posting talks across the year, and typically post them for a few weeks just on TED.com before they go on YouTube.)

Thanks for doing and publishing this study! It's so helpful to get a clearer picture on this, even if we don't like the answers. As a validation of your findings, in 2015, Chipotle told Vox that sofritas were 3.5% of sales, very close to your 3.8%. 

Thanks Lizka and Ben! I found this post really thought-provoking. I'm curious to better understand the intuition behind discounting the post-AGI paradigm shift impacts to ~0. 

My sense is that there's still a pretty wide continuum of future possible outcomes, under some of which we should predictably expect current policies to endure. To simplify, consider six broad buckets of possible outcomes by the year 2050, applied to your example of whether the McDonald's cage-free policy remains relevant.

1. No physical humans left. We're all mind uploads or something more dystopian. Clearly the mind uploads won't be needing cage-free McMuffins.
2. Humans remain but food is upended. We all eat cultivated meat, or rats (Terminator), or Taco Bell (Demolition Man). I also agree McDonald's policy is irrelevant ... though Taco Bell is cage-free too ;)
3. Radical change, people eat similar foods but no longer want McDonald's. Maybe they have vast wealth and McDonald's fails to keep up with their new luxurious tastes, or maybe they can't afford even a cheap McMuffin. Either way, the cage-free policy is irrelevant.
4. Radical change, but McDonald's survives. No matter how weird the future is, people still want cheap tasty convenient food, and have long established brand attachments to McDonald's. Even if McDonald's fires all its staff, it's not clear to me why it would drop its cage-free policy.
5. AGI is more like the Internet. The cage-free McMuffins endure, just with some cool LLM-generated images on them.
6. No AGI.

I agree that scenarios 1-3 are possible, but they don't seem obviously more likely to me than 4-6. At the very least, scenarios 4-6 don't feel so unlikely that we should discount them to ~0. What am I missing?

Thank you! I'm not aware of any US certifiers using CCTV, though I know several use unannounced audits to follow up on farms with bad prior audits or allegations of abuse. My sense is that most European certifiers are similar, though I may be wrong.

Sadly both audits and CCTV footage are almost always kept private. My sense is that there's not yet a big enough carrot (i.e. price premium on certified products) or stick (i.e. reputational harm from refusing public CCTV) to push certified farms to agree to this. My guess is it would require a retailer to say "we'll only sell your products if you install CCTV and share the footage." I hope they'll eventually get there. 

Thanks Neil. Good catch, and sorry I'm only replying now -- I hadn't checked the Forum over the break. I assumed that the original article was referring to all cage-free production because:

• The 15% cage-free immediately follows a claim referring to all Brazilian production: “This type of production did not exist in Brazil until 2017. Mantiqueira was the first one. Seven years later, [cage-free] production represents almost 15% of the total."
• The next sentence reads: "We were a driving force." This implies they were a driving force in an industry-wide change, and doesn't really make sense if it refers to their production, i.e. "We were a driving force in getting ourselves to go 15% cage-free." 

But I think this could be a translation issue. And I don't have any other sources, while the sources you found seem more likely to be accurate. So I suspect you're right that sadly Brazil has made less progress thatn we thought.