[brain-tree]

> 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.

[salad-tycoon]

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.

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.”

[brain-tree]

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.