The bias absolutely applies. Vegans care about their health, so they’re likely to do a lot of behaviors that are unambiguously healthy. If someone believes that meat is bad for them and continues to eat it, then they are obviously valuing something else over their health, and are more likely to do other unhealthy things like smoke, drink too much, etc.

I’d be far more interested in comparing vegans to people who believe that meat is good for them and are very health aware. Paleo or Keto individuals would be a good cohort to pick. That would measure technique and not intention, because both paleos and vegans are intending to be healthy.

I’m curious what your results were on low carb. I work out with a cohort of low carb eaters, and we lost an avg of 30lbs when we switched. I personally lost 40, most of it fat (thanks Dexa scan!). I’d also be curious about what your brother cut out from his food supply that helped. Obviously we’re deep into anecdote land at this point though.

I’m dubious about lab grown meat. As previously mentioned in an edit, 84% of the worlds calories are just straight up plants, and it doesn’t seem to be helping much. But if it provides cheaper meat to the masses, I might be persuaded.

I am however very conservative when it comes to introducing new ingredients into the human food supply. I think we’ve done a lot of harm in the past 30 years by adding a lot of seed (sorry, “vegetable”) oils into our food supply. Just because something isn’t acutely toxic doesn’t mean you should be eating it all the time, and I will personally take the exact same approach to lab grown meat. I’ll probably be the last person to switch over, if I ever do.

Edit: it turns out the original study claiming that meat was producing half of the greenhouse gasses was flawed, and the authors had to revise it. The actual number is 3.9% of US emissions, with the rest of agriculture representing 5.1% of US emissions.

Source: https://www.eco-business.com/opinion/yes-eating-meat-affects...