Whole swats of populations go without touching any red meat (or any meat whatsoever) and be absolutely fine, some say faring even better.
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.
If I throw a bowl of scraps to my chickens or dog or cats they go for the highest value things first which is meat and fat. Only after everything has been pecked and licked do any of them consider carrots and lettuce.
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.
Not "helthy", he said "highest value" and you are right! Candy does have pretty much the most bioavaliable energy, thats why we love it, so you make a very good point and further prove what Salad-Tycoon is saying.
The only nutrient that candy has is added sugar, which is of decidedly low value ( one of the few commonly-consumed ‘nutrients’ of which the ideal amount is probably zero)
You might be confused, the highest value is generally what we call fats. Sugars (aka carbohydrates) have the same calorie density than proteins (broadly speaking, it seems to heavily depend on the metabolism of each individual, the type of food, etc.)
That's why you would rather bring nuts/peanut butter and crisps to a ultralight hike and not a bag of sugar or candies.
> 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.
I appreciate your reply and argument. I concede that conventional wisdom and knowledge is that vegetables, across the board, are healthy and that meat is classified as carnciogenic by renowned national and international institutions.
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.
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.”
Sure, people are happy at the moment with a diet they've been on for up to 2 decades..
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.
If the nutritional density of the food you are eating is the limiting factor, then prioritizing meat makes sense. But in the USA it's a lot more common to have the opposite problem, people are eating too much. In which case focusing on less dense foods can make a lot of sense from a health perspective. Variety also is important to avoid various micronutrient deficiencies. That's one thing that makes Vegan diets more difficult (but if you're overweight it'll probably still help just by reducing your calorie intake, much like most big diet changes).
The difference here is that I never stated they were, unlike OP.
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.
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.