Not by any reasonable definition. Americans consume more meat per capita than any nation on earth. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...)
I'm guessing you're basing that statement on the article you shared showing that 70% of calories consumed by Americans come from plant-based sources.
1. I believe your calorie-percentage data points more to the high amount sugar and corn syrup in the standard American diet. Those two plant-based, calorie-dense ingredients skew the data. A McDonald's chicken nugget value meal with a regular Coke has a high number of plant-based calories due to the Coke, but it is pretty far from being a vegetarian meal.
2. Calling 70% vegetarian "practically vegetarian" really stretches the definitions of both words. Most Americans consume meat with > 2 meals per day.
70% plants is absolutely “practically vegetarian” compared to, say, a diet consistent with the pre-agricultural evolutionary environment of most Americans. Personally, in excess of 90% of my caloric intake comes from animals (and I am visibly and medically healthier than 95% of Americans, even health-focused herbivores, as are people I know who eat similarly).
Longer term surviving examples tended to have a higher meat based ratio largely because they lived on islands or in more marginal areas. However, looking at land area and population density estimates adjusts the ratio significantly.
Some of this needs to be inferred from things like Native American tribal densities and is further confused as diseases decimated native populations throwing off those density estimates. Still the idea of our ancestors eating a primarily meat based diet seems to be a mistake.
You’re telling me my snow-bound ancestors were eating vegetables in the dead of winter, prior to the advent of agriculture?
On top of this mercator projections seriously distort people perceptions of how much land is near the equator vs the north. Africa is 11.73 million square miles with minimal snowfall outside of a few mountains, Europe is 3.9 million square miles. Combine that with warmer areas providing more food and it’s likely the majority of early modern humans never experienced significant snowfall.
This is complicated by ice ages, but people didn’t spend a lot of time on on near glaciers until very recently. Lack of food and warmth where huge issue before relatively advanced though still Stone Age technology.
Another way of thinking about this is to compare animal biomass per square mile in say Mongolia with Ghana.
Even if this is true, it’s tremendously misleading because (globally) vegetarian populations tend to be quite poor.
And, of course, there is a bidirectional causality with poor people getting bad food, which stunts their development, which keeps them poor.
This is completely 100% incorrect. Chicken is so nutritionally deficient relative to beef that it might as well be a vegetable.
> There are over a 600 million people are living cheaply and safely on vegetarian diets
“Cheaply”, yes, “safely” not so much.
Vegetarian populations tend to be have stunted growth, have worse dentition, etc. compared to populations who eat a diet based on ruminants, fish, etc.
Additionally, dietary requirements are not fungible across the human population. People whose ancestors come from different evolutionary environments will be tuned for different food sources. Lactose tolerance is probably the most well known example. A priori, all of my pre-agricultural ancestors must have had a diet completely incompatible with vegetarianism, so it’s not surprising that people of my background who go vegetarian tend to exhibit metabolic problems.
Note that I am not comparing vegetarianism to the standard American diet, which is practically vegetarian already. Switching from SAD to a generic vegetarian diet might simply have the positive effect of reducing the amount of weird slop people consume. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/december/a-look-at...