I routinely encounter people who believe it is not possible to live healthily as vegetarians. I hired a developer who was a Hindu a couple of years back and half my team could not believe that he had never eaten meat, in part because he was very active and healthy.

Yeah, I can also confirm this. I live in the midwest, so I've encountered these people more than a few times. Even on HN you'll see a lot of people arguing that vegetarianism is actively unhealthy if not downright unsurvivable without supplements.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, is it not? I am in the camp that we've over indexed on meat products in the weest(we eat too much of it) but I also believe that knife cuts both ways.

Humans evolved eating meat - just a whole lot less of it than we do today. It was a luxury, something you got once in a while, when an animal could be caught. I believe if we all went back to this intake level (90% vegetarian) we, and the planet, would be better off.

On average ancient hunter-gatherers got about 30% of their calories from meat. But it varied widely by location. People living in colder areas ate more meat because there often weren't any edible plants to be found.

>Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians

So how do you explain that many people become vegetarians even though they checked all the boxes of "knowing it is possible but yet not willing to change"?

I was in that category until I was not. Why?

I knew it was possible (like almost everyone) and I didn't want to stop eating meat. But it isn't just an information, it's a belief (how the knowledge affects you, exactly).

What makes people believe they can't or don't want is mostly a product of culture/habits. It's really easy to change that, especially as it's become a hot topic. Not everyone changes at once, but it's quite viral (when people stop eating meat around you, the possibility of change doesn't seem abstract anymore). Idem when restaurant start offering good options in their menus (not a mere salad).

The issue is not of "knowing" but of "realizing". You can't distinguish people who are in one camp or the other as if those who change their eating habits become whole different persons, all the sudden.

>Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetarians?

Yes! I actually do think that! Anecdotally, almost every time someone, especially the 50+ crowd, finds out I eat a vegan diet they ask "are you getting enough protein?!". My answer is usually "do you think about how much protein you're eating right now?" and the answer is always no, people don't think about their diets period, even the easy tracking stuff like macronutrient intake. Given the obesity epidemic going on in the US right now, many people don't know how to live healthily as omnivores.

I think most of us think it is possible to live healthily as vegetarians, but much more difficult. Meat from other mammals contains almost all the nutrients we need in a convenient and properly balanced format. In particular the protein quality and digestibility is higher than in most plant sources.

For those of us who are active athletes, there are a lot of anecdotes about people who tried vegetarian or vegan diets and found they had trouble recovering from workouts or healing from injuries. I suspect many vegetarians suffer from subtle, sub-clinical nutritional deficiencies and that makes me hesitant to give up meat.

There are around 300 million vegetarians in India. That is close to the population of the United States. Whatever health problems you think they may suffer from it isn't the ability to procreate.

I gave up meat 6 years ago. All of my non subtle clinically diagnosed health problems went away.

I did it because I couldn't think of killing animals anymore and the wonderful side effects of obesity, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure all went away.

I'm never touching meat again.

Most of the benefits you mention come from weight loss, and almost any intervention that can cut weight during the first years would report similar improvements.

Plenty of people lose weight, drop blood sugar and drop blood pressure by going keto. And some with a more extreme carnivore diet.

The real comparison here would be to have "2 people like you" 6 years ago and have two interventions. One going vegetarian and another going keto or carnivore, and see where there are now.

There's more to life than procreation. How many of those 300 million vegetarians are still able to perform at a high level in strength and endurance into their 50s and 60s?

Assuming equal caloric intake there is no reliable evidence that eating meat increases obesity, blood sugar, or blood pressure. Rather the opposite.

The fun thing about restrictive diets is that you have to watch what you eat to stay on them.

I post this hesitantly because it's probably some subtle bias (possibly selection/observation bias), but: the vegetarians and vegans I know personally, they all look borderline unhealthy and seem to lack energy in a subtle ways. Also, my wife sometimes watches cooking vloggers, and I can usually tell at a glance whether the particular tuber is a vegan/vegetarian blogger or not: the ones who are also give this impression of health problems and lethargy. This observation makes both of us hesitant to go vegetarian (though we try to reduce the amount of meat we consume).

> heathly as vegetarians

Worth noting that being vegetarian does not necessarily equal healthy. There are plenty of vegetarians who are just eating mac and cheese. My sister, when in high school, became iron anemic due to poor food choices while being vegetarian.

This is common. Vegetarian diets are much harder for sexually mature aged women than men, because of monthly blood and therefore iron loss.

Cholesterol is also linked directly with testosterone production in men, If I remember correctly

If you're consisting of a diet of mac & cheese, or other poor food choices... Being a vegetarian isn't the problem. Poor food choices are the problem.

That is quite obvious, you can be unhealthy with any kind of diet if you are nutrient poor...