Vegan diets are another story though
It seemed like the sheer volume of food that vegans had to eat in order to avoid losing healthy muscle was very high. Participants really struggled with it.
30 ml of olive oil is about 300 calories. 50 grams of peanut butter is 250 calories. Edamame / tofu (soy) has about 18 g of proteins per 100g. Beans have about 17 g per 100g. Peanut butter has 25 g of proteins.
Protein daily needs is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.
I dunno boss, doesn't seem like a very high volume of food.
Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of health benefits as well but just about everybody lost muscle mass for that reason.
Apparently you can easily get long term brain damage if you don't supplement with certain b vitamins. There were also other deficiencies like iron and zinc that would effect you as well.
Of course this won't effect people who only do it for a year or 2 so most probably don't ever run into issues.
Humans can transform some of the vitamin K1 from plants into K2 (like they can transform beta-carotene from plants into vitamin A), but it seems that the quantity produced thus is not sufficient. The intestinal bacteria can also produce some K2, but it is unpredictable whether that is sufficient. The vitamin K2 is required by humans for purposes in which it cannot be substituted by K1.
Plants do not use iodine and selenium. They may contain some quantities of them, especially of selenium, only when the soil where they have been cultivated happens to be rich in these elements, but it is unpredictable whether they contain enough.
Most humans, especially most males, cannot produce enough DHA and EPA fatty acids from the fatty acids available in plants.
Besides iron, plants do not contain enough calcium and they frequently contain most of their phosphorus in phytic acid that cannot be digested by humans. The vegans who do not take supplements are prone to osteoporosis.
Most humans cannot produce internally enough creatine, choline and taurine to satisfy their needs, so they also need external sources and plants are not among those.
A healthy vegan diet must include about a dozen supplements, which is not really a problem, because they are cheap and easily available, except for the fact that many vegans believe myths like "the only nutrients I know of that vegans tend to lack are B12 and iron", so they eventually tend to have health problems, which make many of them to give up on the vegan diet, instead of taking the right supplements.
The real question if you want to stay healthy is what meat and in what quantities.
300gr of fresh ground beef every other day from the local bio farmer isn't the same as ultra processed bear shaped ham* at every meal.
* https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRkM8VO...
Then if someone is personally addicted to meat and/or cannot enjoy other non-animal products providing the same nutrients then it's another topic. But let's not make incorrect statements, red meat is not key to anything.
Meat provides many vitamins and nutrients in a highly bioavailable form. No one is addicted to meat. It’s a great nutrient delivery vehicle and looking at how many ways we have invented to cook it and increase its digestability it must have been useful. Grains and plants seem to be fillers to a main meal, throw in a bunch of vegetable matter in a pot with stringy meat to make it go further is how many poor people eat and the reason for the beans and rice. Any family that can afford to throw in some chicken legs or entrails or even muscle meat is going to do so into those beans and rice.
In one of the third world countries I lived in they would often tease people who could only afford beans rice and plantains because it was noted they were not as intelligent. Anecdotal sure but a common sense wisdom found in different and less affluent areas.
Furthermore, I can take your argument and use it the same. Eg Many people don’t eat vegetables, they only eat meat, and they are doing fine and many say they are doing better than ever. Let’s not make incorrect statements, vegetables are not key to anything.
You've lost me here. If you want a short active life then mainly meat might be fine, if you want to live in a different situation than our evolutionary past then you are killing yourself early by skipping vegetables, statistically speaking.
You've completely changed the bar in your argument from what is good for preventing early death by today's standards for expected life time to other things.
However, I disagree with this premise frankly. A lot of the studies which led to these classifications are poor quality, backwards looking, and rely upon people remembering what they ate for the last quarter. Nutrition research is poor for a variety of reasons, sadly, and who hasn’t experienced the seasons of change with one article one day claiming eggs/coffee/wine/whatever are bad one season and the next that they are good and then bad and then good and then…
I’ve taken this up as a hobby, in my studies I have found an extremely wide and deep base of people who point out a dramatic improvement in their mental and/or physical health by cutting out plant matter. Many times these people have had chronic, difficult, conditions and had been told it was incurable.
Personally, I don’t believe vegetables are necessary. I am not a zealot however (just made a bluecheese steak salad for the family) and I think nuance is key here. We’ve all been told to eat the rainbow, vegetables are good, meat is bad, etc. However I think that it should be an individual decision, some don’t do well with vegetables high in oxolates, or lechtins, or glycoalkaloids. I LOVE spicy food [and nicotine] as in nightshades, (thanks to adhd?) and while I think I would do better without it I still eat them. I also think if you are eating highly processed meats like charred burgers or smoked salami with beer and bread and condiments that isn’t great and will lead to shortened life span.
I don’t want to drone on, my point is there is a lot of nuance and individual variability. Also, strict diets tend to cut out ultra processed foods (vegan to carnivore). We should not simply assume that all vegetables are good for all people. Some veggies are better than others. Some people process things differently. Healthy meats are healthy.
For anyone interested in further reading look up: https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understand...
More on the “carnivore” diet fringe-y side:
Paul Saladino
Shawn Baker podcast for testimonials
Anthony Chaffee
In summary, there is a lot we don’t know but it appears that people eating an alternative diet are doing great. We shouldn’t just discount that because of “settled science.”
Meanwhile, child development under this diet would be child abuse given how little we know.
We know that people who skip certain vegetables have heightened risk of cancers, those vegetables contain chemicals not in meat.
We can conclude from the study that a vegetarian diet is competitive with an omnivore diet, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse.
From this I would assume that vegetables themselves are an important factor that was a free variable in the studies with vegetarians getting more but not necessarily better quality.
Thus vegetables matter a lot to longevity, and meat is filler that may or may not have aspects directly killing you like all the other non vegetable filler and poorer nutrition portion of vegetables.
You can't get to absolutes with the low quality of nutrional studies or meta studies across them.. But you can get to a Bayesian estimate of how poor a gamble people are making on things like excluding a whole category where some reasonable conclusions occurred within the category.
That's why you would rather bring nuts/peanut butter and crisps to a ultralight hike and not a bag of sugar or candies.
I’m not suggesting avoiding vegetables, they are delicious and healthy. It’s just that meat is the most important thing over all.
The key, as far as our scientific understanding goes, is to have the right micro/macro nutrient in our diet. Where you get them is not as important.
Also, using chickens and cultural norms of other countries (very often shaped by European colonists and their ideals) is not a strong argument as you might think.
In many countries being overweight is a sign of wealth and hence desired but we know that it's not the best in terms of long-term health.
P.S. You say nobody is addicted to meat? Take any random 3 people and ask them not to eat meat for 1 week. Let's see how that goes.