From what I've heard from carnivore people, it's usually the opposite. It's not that eating meat prevent health issues, it's that eating some vegetables causes them. Carnivore is a form of elimination diet, which can help some people. For example, if you are gluten intolerant, being carnivore will make you feel better. If you are sensitive to nightshades (some people claim to be and I don't want to dismiss their experience), carnivore will work too. Veganism can work the same way for some people (lactose intolerant people for example, people that get allergic to mammal meat due to Lyme's).

I personally think that we tend to underestimate the variations from individual to individual, and that studies don't help with that as nutritional studies are usually self reported and not really solid, and don't take into account confounding factors. For example, vegans and carnivore both have a huge healthy user bias compared to the standard american diet. I think everyone should try different diets and use what's best for them.

One big difference between carnivore (or even keto) and veganism however is that veganism is also a diet based on moral and values. As such, it's hard to see vegans as less biased than keto followers or carnivore followers.

Besides, even if we accept your premise that nutritional data are unhelpful in understanding the effectiveness of any diet, this can said of both plant-based and carnist diets, meaning we can’t say one or the other is better, or worse, or more or less nutritious.

In that case, I think we should then choose the diet which we definitively know causes the least suffering.

I have no reason whatsoever to believe that someone feeling good on a carnist diet but bad on a plant based diet is anything other than not knowing how to have a balanced plant based diet, which is easy to do when armed with the knowledge.

That's where we disagree. I think they are because I think we underestimate the differences between people.

> Besides, even if we accept your premise that nutritional data are unhelpful in understanding the effectiveness of any diet, this can said of both plant-based and carnist diets, meaning we can’t say one or the other is better, or worse, or more or less nutritious.

Again I disagree. My conclusion is that everyone should experiment with different kinds of diet and see what works. We may not know at the humanity level, but we can learn more at the individual level.

> In that case, I think we should then choose the diet which we definitively know causes the least suffering.

I don't agree with your premise (or maybe put individual suffering of humans at a higher level than animals), but I do agree with your conclusions. I don't know if you count climate impact in "suffering" in general but that's a good argument for veganism too.

> I have no reason whatsoever to believe that someone feeling good on a carnist diet but bad on a plant based diet is anything other than not knowing how to have a balanced plant based diet, which is easy to do when armed with the knowledge.

I think that's shortsighted of you for two reasons. First, as I said, I think you underestimate the individual variations between people. Second, considering how many people suffer from obesity in America, I don't agree that having a balanced diet, be it plant based or anything else, is easy.

People on carnivore diet do not have that overarching ethical stance which guides their decisions.

So saying "people don't have to go full blast vegan" is not the same as "people don't have to go full blast carnivore" because people rarely go vegan because of the diet, they do it because of the animals.

Doing it only because of the diet would probably be called "plant based" eating now a days.

Further, many nutrients are far more bio-available than their plant based counterparts. Supplementing for them also isn’t the best substitute.

There’s still a demonization of saturated fats despite the heart claims being largely falsified by the sugar industry, and claims of unprocessed meats causing colon cancer being exaggerated substantially (even for processed meats, there’s an increase, but as I recall it’s minimal. Larger chance of lung cancer from city living than colon cancer from occasional processed meat)

Each person I believe (key word) has ancestral lineage that describes what foods they can handle best. Hence why we see some people thrive on plant based, and others (like myself) was completely miserable despite taking all the necessary steps. Going the opposite (carnivore) was better in blood markers and we’ll-being for me.

"Vegan and vegetarian diets are both very healthy ways of eating. They’ve been linked to multiple health benefits and a lower risk of excess weight, heart disease, and even some types of cancer."

Which was an interesting choice for you, I think. Also there are some seriously misleading facts in the article:

B12 doesn't from from meat, and meat only has B12 today because animals are supplemented with it.

DHA comes from algae, so again, the animals you eat have it as a result of having eaten plants.

Creatine, carnosine, and taurine are considered nonessential, in the very article.

And with regard to iron: "However, iron deficiency is easy to avoid on a well-planned vegan diet", according to the article.

But this is kind of irrelevant, because even if these things _were_ hard to get for vegans and supplements were needed, it still makes veganism a moral imperative, because the small price to pay of taking a pill to save billions of sentient animals every year is a no brainer.

I'm not trying to be glib. If humans did not ever eat meat, we would not have ever domesticated cattle, but we did. So if everyone stops eating meat, what happens to all of cattle?

We can set them free, but we have bred out most of their ability to compete in nature on their own, we would be leaving most for death. Or we can continue to farm historically domesticated animals benevolently.

That way we ween off of livestock, their suffering ends, and we avoid an ecological disaster. Farms will have top adapt, because we don't want all the folks in animal agriculture to be out of a job all of a sudden, so it'd take some time. But we can do it, for sure.

But asking those kinds of questions is really important, so thank you for posing it.