6 ms·

The idea of "mostly plants" was arrived at using the same methods you don't seem to trust. Why are you ok with that one?

• CamTin 8y ago
  It at least has the definite benefit of being less resource-intensive. If you accept the premise that we're just guessing what the right diet is, we may as well guess the "cheapest" option.
  • nonbel 8y ago
    This has nothing to do with resource consumption, it has to do with health/longevity.
  • hirundo 8y ago
    The paleo diet is based on a different guess: "As long as we're guessing we may as well guess the options most likely to be compatible with our evolutionary adaptations." This seems completely incompatible with picking the cheapest food, but healthier.
    • CamTin 8y ago
      I'm not saying I agree with the premise (that we really have no idea what a healthy diet looks like), but given the situation where are all diets are equally likely to be healthy, picking a cheap one makes sense.
      • hirundo 8y ago
        Yes, if we know nothing about food except for its price, it's reasonable to chose based on price. But do you really think that's true? There's no credible basis for selecting one food over another based on its nutrition? I wonder if this is the point of much of the smoke blown into nutrition research by Big Food. People get so confused they think wtf, if the big brains can't figure it out, how am I supposed to. I'll just buy that, it's cheap and tasty.
        • CamTin 8y ago
          Do I really think that the rational thing to do is always only eat the cheapest food? No, I don't. I was reacting to the premise, which is that all diet advice is as likely to be correct as any other. This is clearly a false premise.
• dbingham 8y ago
  A couple of reasons, it's the only thing that does seem to consistently match across all the studies. Though, there are plenty of counter examples of cultures that have an almost all meat diet and are perfectly healthy, there are other factors involved in those cultures that don't apply to your average first world eater -- the meat is mostly wild caught for instance. The other one is environmental efficiency. While I don't buy that a vegan diet is the most sustainable diet -- there are sustainable agro-ecology systems that include meat by necessity to make them work, and the vegan diet relies heavily on certain monocrops that massively damage the planet in their own right -- it does seem pretty clear that we cannot continue to consume meat at the rate it is consumed in the western diet and stay sustainable. The other thing is that it's a really broad guideline, not a specific prescription. As a broad guideline for health and sustainability for those living in western culture, it seems pretty reasonable.
  • nonbel 8y ago
    >"Two reasons, it's the only thing that does seem to consistently match across all the studies." Not saying I agree (I haven't looked, but surely "all" is an exaggeration...), but if you don't trust the researchers to know what they are doing this could easily be due to bias or including mcdonalds/etc as "meat". Ie, eating less fast food is correlated with not eating meat. >"The other one is environmental efficiency. While I don't buy that a vegan diet is the most sustainable" This has nothing to do with health.
    • zzzeek 8y ago
      > This has nothing to do with health Are you an agricultural scientist? How do you know that? How do you know the quality and purity of the soil from which the food grows and the aquifiers which hydrate it didn't affect the nutritional quality of the food itself? I think such impacts have already been observed.
      • nonbel 8y ago
        >"Are you an agricultural scientist? How do you know that?" Ok, I should have spoken more carefully. First, I believe that literally every single thing we can observe is correlated with every other thing (although this correlation may be weak/negligible). So there is nothing that has nothing to do with any other thing. >"How do you know the quality and purity of the soil from which the food grows and the aquifiers which hydrate it didn't affect the nutritional quality of the food itself? I think such impacts have already been observed." Definitely, there seems to have been a great amount of vitamin/mineral depletion. Usually this is chalked up to intensively farming (high-carb) grains (rice, wheat, corn) that really no animal should be eating much of: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221451411500121X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221451411... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
• everdev 8y ago
  Look at our teeth, mostly plant chewing teeth.
  • throwawaymath 8y ago
    Is that true? How do we determine that our teeth are primarily intended for eating plants?
  • pakitan 8y ago
    Yet our gut is optimized for a meat based diet. Our digestive system resembles more the one of lion than the one of our closest cousin - the chimpanzee. In his book "Sapiens", Yuval Harari talks about how we literally drove into extinction something like 90% of the biggest animals on Earth. And that wasn't because we competed with them for the juiciest grass fields.
  • nonbel 8y ago
    My teeth chew meat just fine. They wouldn't work so well as weapons, but humans devised tools for that purpose long ago.
• deleted 8y ago
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