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How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eat

How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.

tmotwu 6y ago
Those arguments always drive me nuts because they're all so bro sciencey, and I'm not even vegan or vegetarian. Sure, meat offers a different set of nutritional value than vegetables - you can most definitely replace it entirely with other sources and remain very healthy. Billions of people have done it for centuries and continue to do so, as you've said.
- dnissley 6y ago
  Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only country with more than 15% of it's population being vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.
  - tmotwu 6y ago
    There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.
    - dnissley 6y ago
      It would be interesting to see the stats of a country like India though, where you don't have confounders like vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the developed world. Although the more I look into it, the more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label there. What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty big hit in the early agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.
      - tmotwu 6y ago
        Buddhist societies and the sects formed around them immediately come to mind.
        numpad0 6y ago
        It’ll be accurate enough to say Buddha argued it unethical to kill until he died from eating generously offered but spoiled pork so...
  - Spare_account 6y ago
    Does this cover off any of the areas you're interested in? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261561420301011 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02615... >Health outcomes associated with vegetarian diets: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses >Conclusions: Vegetarian diets are associated with beneficial effects on the blood lipid profile and a reduced risk of negative health outcomes, including diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and cancer risk. Among vegetarians, SDA vegetarians could represent a subgroup with a further reduced risk of negative health outcomes. Vegetarian diets have adverse outcomes on one-carbon metabolism. The effect of vegetarian diets among pregnant and lactating women requires specific attention. Well-designed prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the consequences of the prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency during pregnancy and infancy on later life and of trace element deficits on cancer risks.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  A counter argument - billions of people subsisted on ok food for centuries, but somehow in the 20th and 21st centuries people got taller, smarter and had earlier puberties because of better nutrition. Doesn't that mean there is a quality (and quantity) to nutrition and not just subsisting, that we need to examine? And the claim about meat is that it has a quality that is beneficial.
  - tmotwu 6y ago
    Certainly you have to look at causations for that holistically. People have cooked and eaten meat in the past as well. It needs to be further studied on the qualities that has driven our growth in the industrial age. I think we now have a better understanding of our bodies and how to gamify our growth, through a myriad of ways whether or not eating certain amounts of meat and balancing it with other foods.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- novok 6y ago
  It's not brosciency, it's called bioavailablity. Ex: Carrots have a lot of a vitamin A precursor in the form of beta carotene, but the rate it's absorbed compared to the form commonly in the liver (retinol), is significantly lower and is reduced even further if you have certain health problems, including common ones like diabetes or insulin resistance.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
elktea 6y ago
I'm comparing it by ... comparing the nutrients in each. There are lots of examples of nutrients in meat that aren't found in plants (carnitine, b12 etc) and even more where the type found in plants must be consumed in far greater quantities and converted to a form we can use (retinol vs beta-carotene, DHA vs EPA/ALA etc) Millions of vegetarians doesn't mean meat is suddenly less nutritious.
- munk-a 6y ago
  But hundreds of millions of vegetarians does mean that eliminating that meat from our diet is extremely realistic and much more widely affordable.
  - mythrwy 6y ago
    By all means, feel free to eliminate meat from _your_ diet. But "Our" diet is a different issue.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      We all live on this planet together, what we do affects others and while I think meat should remain part of our diets I think it needs to become a much less central part of it. I enjoy meat myself, but I use it more sparingly in combination with other central meal components.
- giantandroids 6y ago
  The B12 in off the shelf beef , chicken is from it being injected by farmers (along with all manner of other stuff such as antibiotics). The truth is that every living being is low on B12 due to soil erosion / over farming. So in a way a meat eater is supplementing B12 by proxy of an animal, where as a vegan is buying a pot off amazon (and in turn able to get a much more specific dose).
cphajduk 6y ago
I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs. If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives, and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the age of two. I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country
  - graeme 6y ago
    Meat and eggs. So you need eggs. It’s also present in dairy. So the parent’s claim is an argument against unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of vegetarianism doesn’t address that. Massive difference between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement or not.
    - pwinnski 6y ago
      Oh, you didn't click through, maybe. Or missed that the linked page included millions of vegans, too, in the same chart. You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S., Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans, while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage, though those two are disputed.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - novok 6y ago
    Strict vegans are the only ones that typically have the B12 issue. Most vegetarians still eat a lot of dairy and eggs so still get B12 in their diet. Also a lot of foods are 'fortified' by government regulation to avoid common nutritional deficiencies that would arise with their standard diets, so it's hard to take certain things at face value.
Spivak 6y ago
Look, this isn't the whole picture and it super misleading. Just because humans survived with a particular diet doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been healthier had they eaten meat. You can't just point to historical populations who didn't have widespread access to animal products and be like "see they lived." I'm not saying your not correct that vegetarian diets are fine from a health perspective but this isn't evidence of it.
- arrrg 6y ago
  Don’t you have the burden of proof exactly reversed?
- mft_ 6y ago
  It's not just that vegetarian diets are "fine" - there's actually a wealth of evidence that a meat-free diet is far healthier - in terms of risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, and various forms of cancer, for example. https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/ https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    Thhere's also evidence for the contrary. If you care about any dieting at all and watch your micros and macros, you will invariably be above average in health.
    - mft_ 6y ago
      Really? There's a body of evidence that a meat-containing diet is protective against heart disease, type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, versus a plant-based diet? I'd genuinely be very interested for those sources to be shared, please...
      - buckthundaz 6y ago
        https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/734/4690022?login=true https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/734/4690022?login... https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/carnivore-diet-for-diabetes#The-carnivore-diets-effects-on-health https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/carnivore-diet-fo...
nicoburns 6y ago
I'm a vegetarian, I think this is true when comparing meat with whole plant foods. But to be fair the the GP comment, meat substitute products are almost certainly considerably less nutritious (micronutrient wise) than actual meat.
- Bang2Bay 6y ago
  for generations we have been vegetarians and many of my carnivorous friends have told me the opposite. That is they feel better nourished with plant based meals.
- tomstoms 6y ago
  Exactly how certain is it?
ska 6y ago
> How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? It's impossible to do this really rigorously, as there are too many unknowns in nutrition still. So this leaves holed you can drive all sorts of sized trucks through, which means a lot of argument but not a lot of resolution.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  There's not magic shit in meat, it's mostly water and amino acids and the remaining fraction is mostly bad for you. (I eat meat all the time, but we know a lot more than barely anything about nutrition. Figure out vitamin RDAs in milligrams if you want an example)
  - ska 6y ago
    I didn't say we know "barely anything", just that the unknowns are significant enough to allow a lot of wiggle room and arguments. Including, for example, the accuracy of many vitamin RDAs.
  - DetroitThrow 6y ago
    I'm shocked that people seriously believe that the fundamentals of nutritional science are a virtual mystery or has enough "wiggle room" to make ridiculously broad claims about diet necessities. We know almost exact micrograms of iodine we need per day to be healthy. We have a pretty great idea of what the body needs to function optimally and are getting a clearer picture every day. Is this why GMOs became such a pariah?
    - ska 6y ago
      If what you were saying were true, we wouldn't have wildly divergent (macro) diet and nutrition claims being made in cycles without clear resolution. Most of them are wrong, it seems, but the science is hard. You are right we have some pretty good information on deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12 (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how even dietary source actually work even with some key nutrients outside of lab conditions, and beyond that dietary nutrition is absolutely full of handwaving. We are nowhere near a clear picture; lot's of people will tell you we are but they still contradict each other regularly. This is not a mature science.

tmotwu 6y ago

Those arguments always drive me nuts because they're all so bro sciencey, and I'm not even vegan or vegetarian. Sure, meat offers a different set of nutritional value than vegetables - you can most definitely replace it entirely with other sources and remain very healthy. Billions of people have done it for centuries and continue to do so, as you've said.

dnissley 6y ago
Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only country with more than 15% of it's population being vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.
- tmotwu 6y ago
  There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.
  - dnissley 6y ago
    It would be interesting to see the stats of a country like India though, where you don't have confounders like vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the developed world. Although the more I look into it, the more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label there. What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty big hit in the early agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.
    - tmotwu 6y ago
      Buddhist societies and the sects formed around them immediately come to mind.
      - numpad0 6y ago
        It’ll be accurate enough to say Buddha argued it unethical to kill until he died from eating generously offered but spoiled pork so...
- Spare_account 6y ago
  Does this cover off any of the areas you're interested in? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261561420301011 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02615... >Health outcomes associated with vegetarian diets: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses >Conclusions: Vegetarian diets are associated with beneficial effects on the blood lipid profile and a reduced risk of negative health outcomes, including diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and cancer risk. Among vegetarians, SDA vegetarians could represent a subgroup with a further reduced risk of negative health outcomes. Vegetarian diets have adverse outcomes on one-carbon metabolism. The effect of vegetarian diets among pregnant and lactating women requires specific attention. Well-designed prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the consequences of the prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency during pregnancy and infancy on later life and of trace element deficits on cancer risks.
kzrdude 6y ago
A counter argument - billions of people subsisted on ok food for centuries, but somehow in the 20th and 21st centuries people got taller, smarter and had earlier puberties because of better nutrition. Doesn't that mean there is a quality (and quantity) to nutrition and not just subsisting, that we need to examine? And the claim about meat is that it has a quality that is beneficial.
- tmotwu 6y ago
  Certainly you have to look at causations for that holistically. People have cooked and eaten meat in the past as well. It needs to be further studied on the qualities that has driven our growth in the industrial age. I think we now have a better understanding of our bodies and how to gamify our growth, through a myriad of ways whether or not eating certain amounts of meat and balancing it with other foods.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
novok 6y ago
It's not brosciency, it's called bioavailablity. Ex: Carrots have a lot of a vitamin A precursor in the form of beta carotene, but the rate it's absorbed compared to the form commonly in the liver (retinol), is significantly lower and is reduced even further if you have certain health problems, including common ones like diabetes or insulin resistance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

elktea 6y ago

I'm comparing it by ... comparing the nutrients in each. There are lots of examples of nutrients in meat that aren't found in plants (carnitine, b12 etc) and even more where the type found in plants must be consumed in far greater quantities and converted to a form we can use (retinol vs beta-carotene, DHA vs EPA/ALA etc) Millions of vegetarians doesn't mean meat is suddenly less nutritious.

munk-a 6y ago
But hundreds of millions of vegetarians does mean that eliminating that meat from our diet is extremely realistic and much more widely affordable.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  By all means, feel free to eliminate meat from _your_ diet. But "Our" diet is a different issue.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    We all live on this planet together, what we do affects others and while I think meat should remain part of our diets I think it needs to become a much less central part of it. I enjoy meat myself, but I use it more sparingly in combination with other central meal components.
giantandroids 6y ago
The B12 in off the shelf beef , chicken is from it being injected by farmers (along with all manner of other stuff such as antibiotics). The truth is that every living being is low on B12 due to soil erosion / over farming. So in a way a meat eater is supplementing B12 by proxy of an animal, where as a vegan is buying a pot off amazon (and in turn able to get a much more specific dose).

cphajduk 6y ago

I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs. If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.

pwinnski 6y ago
I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives, and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the age of two. I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country
- graeme 6y ago
  Meat and eggs. So you need eggs. It’s also present in dairy. So the parent’s claim is an argument against unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of vegetarianism doesn’t address that. Massive difference between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement or not.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Oh, you didn't click through, maybe. Or missed that the linked page included millions of vegans, too, in the same chart. You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S., Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans, while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage, though those two are disputed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- novok 6y ago
  Strict vegans are the only ones that typically have the B12 issue. Most vegetarians still eat a lot of dairy and eggs so still get B12 in their diet. Also a lot of foods are 'fortified' by government regulation to avoid common nutritional deficiencies that would arise with their standard diets, so it's hard to take certain things at face value.

Spivak 6y ago

Look, this isn't the whole picture and it super misleading. Just because humans survived with a particular diet doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been healthier had they eaten meat. You can't just point to historical populations who didn't have widespread access to animal products and be like "see they lived." I'm not saying your not correct that vegetarian diets are fine from a health perspective but this isn't evidence of it.

arrrg 6y ago
Don’t you have the burden of proof exactly reversed?
mft_ 6y ago
It's not just that vegetarian diets are "fine" - there's actually a wealth of evidence that a meat-free diet is far healthier - in terms of risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, and various forms of cancer, for example. https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/ https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/
- Bancakes 6y ago
  Thhere's also evidence for the contrary. If you care about any dieting at all and watch your micros and macros, you will invariably be above average in health.
  - mft_ 6y ago
    Really? There's a body of evidence that a meat-containing diet is protective against heart disease, type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, versus a plant-based diet? I'd genuinely be very interested for those sources to be shared, please...
    - buckthundaz 6y ago
      https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/734/4690022?login=true https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/734/4690022?login... https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/carnivore-diet-for-diabetes#The-carnivore-diets-effects-on-health https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/carnivore-diet-fo...

nicoburns 6y ago

I'm a vegetarian, I think this is true when comparing meat with whole plant foods. But to be fair the the GP comment, meat substitute products are almost certainly considerably less nutritious (micronutrient wise) than actual meat.

Bang2Bay 6y ago
for generations we have been vegetarians and many of my carnivorous friends have told me the opposite. That is they feel better nourished with plant based meals.
tomstoms 6y ago
Exactly how certain is it?

ska 6y ago

> How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? It's impossible to do this really rigorously, as there are too many unknowns in nutrition still. So this leaves holed you can drive all sorts of sized trucks through, which means a lot of argument but not a lot of resolution.

maxerickson 6y ago
There's not magic shit in meat, it's mostly water and amino acids and the remaining fraction is mostly bad for you. (I eat meat all the time, but we know a lot more than barely anything about nutrition. Figure out vitamin RDAs in milligrams if you want an example)
- ska 6y ago
  I didn't say we know "barely anything", just that the unknowns are significant enough to allow a lot of wiggle room and arguments. Including, for example, the accuracy of many vitamin RDAs.
- DetroitThrow 6y ago
  I'm shocked that people seriously believe that the fundamentals of nutritional science are a virtual mystery or has enough "wiggle room" to make ridiculously broad claims about diet necessities. We know almost exact micrograms of iodine we need per day to be healthy. We have a pretty great idea of what the body needs to function optimally and are getting a clearer picture every day. Is this why GMOs became such a pariah?
  - ska 6y ago
    If what you were saying were true, we wouldn't have wildly divergent (macro) diet and nutrition claims being made in cycles without clear resolution. Most of them are wrong, it seems, but the science is hard. You are right we have some pretty good information on deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12 (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how even dietary source actually work even with some key nutrients outside of lab conditions, and beyond that dietary nutrition is absolutely full of handwaving. We are nowhere near a clear picture; lot's of people will tell you we are but they still contradict each other regularly. This is not a mature science.