Its interesting to hear anecdotal stories like these because they contradict the conventional wisdom nowadays that says you have to eat meat as protein every day - clearly that wasn't the case in prior centuries.

what was the life expectancy? what was the standard of living? trying to call back to 1930s belarus as an example to live from is crazy. It doesn't even logically follow that we should avoid meat because poor farmers in belarus didn't each much.

Where's the logical argument?

Is this just being down voted because of tone?

The premise seems valid: just because you can "survive" off of a low-to-no protein diet doesn't mean it should be espoused.

This post demonstrates the success of marketing "protein is meat". Such that when someone mentions reducing meat consumption, someone else thinks they are referring to a low-to-no protein diet.

Protein in terms of protein / calorie ratio of food tilts protein sources to meat and dairy. Easy way to compare foods and meals is to compare grams protein per 100cal of a given item. Things like meat, cottage cheese, yogurt, etc., top the charts.

So if you want to maximize for protein consumption without putting on fat mass, you tend to look for meat, dairy, and things derived from them (whey protein isolate).

I think you may be missing the point.

The controversy is about whether humans need gargantuan amounts of protein.

Your post is assuming protein is very important, and thus it’s important to maximize protein per calorie.

The post you’re responding to is discussing the fact that any time vegetarian or vegan diets come up, people launch into criticisms that are based on the assumption that humans needs lots more protein than occurs in vegetables.

One issue I've seen when assessing some of the vegetarian or other plant-based diets proposed has been neglecting to account for protein. Most men at least don't enjoy the muscle loss associated with eating a low-protein diet, which is what the implementations I've seen often look like.

That said, Americans are predominantly overweight and obese. A diet high in protein but low enough in total overall energetic content is an excellent recipe, when paired with weightlifting and a few days of cardiovascular activity, for improving musculature and eliminating fat.

A scientific example demonstrating this point, entitled "Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial": https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609

That is true. But people rarely develop allergies to meat based protein. The same cannot be said for plant based proteins.

I find posts about vegan/vegetarian lifestyles to heavily vote in lockstep. People don't like it when someone points out that something that seems to confirm their bias actually contains no logical argument.

Tone is something you read into things, as much as is written into them. If someone is responding because of a perceived tone, it would be wise of them to consider if they're being as aggressive as they accuse the other side of being.

Also, I dont mind being downvoted, I just wish someone would provide a logical argument in response.

> Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you.

As far as I can tell, this is completely false. Vegan diets do a lot of things well: reduce salt, saturated fat, and cholesterol intake, for example. Vegetarian / vegan diets improve cholesterol, blood sugar levels, and other things.

Here's some citations of studies and papers that demonstrate vegan diets are better for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/

Several more listed at https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies#sect...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26508743 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25684089 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23695207 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16164885

The consensus of scientific evidence seems pretty clearly in favor of plant-based diets. The evidence is as clear as the world being round or climate change being real.

Truth is that there's very little consensus on this, it's all politics at the moment. You have pro-vegans and pro-meat/keto tribes, and they all have their claims and proofs. My own purely anecdotal experience is that actually both approaches work just fine, if done in a sensible way.

The only politics is when you look at dozens of studies on NIH and say "it's all politics" and counter with your anecdotal experience. This is like denial of climate science. Stop doing it. I'm not part of any tribe but the science tribe. Eating meat is unambiguously worse for the environment and worse for your health than non-meat diets. The scientific theory and studies on the subject are clear.

And I eat meat. Chowing on a burrito al pastor as we speak.

There are no studies that show that a diet where one consumes animal products occasionally like 2-3 times per months is worse for health then pure plant diet. This is even when one does eat meat, one eats it a lot. Apparently body is able to recover from any negative effects of animal products within 10-14 days. And one avoids a potential for deficiencies like B12, iron, K2 that one may run on a pure plant diet unless one is careful. And even for environment it can be better if the animal products on those days come from slaughtered caws that are grass-feed on land where growing grains etc. is impractical.

So the problem is really not the meat, but it’s amount.

> You know that lifestyle where everyone was poor, sickly and died at a younger age, that's a totally better lifestyle!

That’s not because of lack of meat.

> In that lifestyle you may eat the clean meats on special occasions, but you eat the less desirable parts on a regular basis. Mostly in soups and stews because it stretches the food for longer. You save the bones and make soups out of them. Oh and you ate a lot of fat. Like smearing pig fat on bread. Technically pork was the cheapest meat. Only one purpose animal. Hens give eggs and fertilizer. Cows give milk, fertilizer and pull carts/plows. Kill them only when they're useless. Plus you may get meat from a butcher on special occasions.

This sounds like eating less meat?

> Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you.

Citations needed.

You went and did a whole thing there, eh?

When my grandmother was dying in the hospital we sat and talked. I aske what their meals had been like back in the 20s. Every part of every dish has animal protein or fat in it. The turnips were seared un lard, the turnip greens had bacon in them. The biscuit was made with lard too, and yes there was always some pork chicken or beef on the plate. Roots and leaves are healthy and should be most of the volume of our food, but grass fed animal fat is great for getting the remaining calories and animal protein absorbs so much better than pea or rice.

In this traditional rural diet "extra protein" (in addition from what protein you get from potatoes and grains and legumes) is mainly supplied by dairy and eggs.

However, slaughtering a pig or two once a year in the autumn also doesn't imply eating pork once a year, for a single family a single pig provides a quite large amount of various cured/smoked/dried meat products that are consumed over the winter, so you still have some meat products (not in large quantities though) on most days.

Not for poor people, those better situated would eat it more often. More importantly, people were not eating just steaks, but all parts of animals, so (in case of my grandparents in Yugoslavia) they'd eat a chicken or pork on Sundays and holidays, but on other days they'd perhaps have a cooked meat and bone marrow from a soup, or fried liver, or stew made from Sunday's leftovers. Also eggs, milk, cheese and other dairy products, that were affordable to everyone.

I think we should be pointing to science - which to date it hasn't been adequately done relating to diet, to see what diet is optimal, and how that varies per group whether that's by blood type, DNA/ancestral data, or other - while taking in the particular sensitivities of each individual as part of the research vs. making the reference points based on a structure of scarcity of what was available based on what people could afford; also having an idea of a person's current health state, how healthy their GI tract is and overall system needs to be taken into account as to how they may or may not respond to different diets - including not limited to how we're only just beginning to understand how gut bacteria and within the whole GI tract can strongly impact outcome.

what do you think the standard of living in balarus before the second world war was, and do you think people would accept it now in belarus let alone the the US?

Its odd to call back to 1930s eastern europe for an example of how to live. There are many arguments to make against meat etc but 1930s belarus is not one that logically follows.