> The human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals. I note that your statement is appropriately very stro

> The human body can produce almost everything it needs internally from most editable plants and animals. I note that your statement is appropriately very strongly hedged. > So, based on all existing research and in the context of a normal diet, Dietary “science” has one of the lowest standards of rigor of any field, in the same ballpark as psychology. Until we have accurate computer models of every metabolic pathway in the human body, I’m not going to trust papers that are like “actually you can just eat soy and seitan and be fine” (incidentally, the counterfactual study got funding approval from vegan activists and seventh-day Adventists!). Also, “in the context of a normal diet” is another pretty big hedge - “normal” diets are terrible. In any case, when we’re talking about nutrition, since the state of research is so bad, we’re basically stuck with a priori reasoning and Bayesian observation, and after applying those two, my observation is that people who eat only ruminants and fish and stuff look really good and are strong and healthy, and the exact opposite is true for people who eat only vegetables, and this doesn’t really impose a big update on my prior derived from what I know about pre-agriculture food sources in these people’s evolutionary environments. > Because beef is tasty. As you point out, when your body makes something taste better than something else, it’s probably because it’s doing a better job of meeting your nutritional needs. If two foods were abundant in the evolutionary environment, I expect taste to be reasonably well-calibrated in terms of causing me to eat the nutritionally optimal distribution of foods. Ruminants and birds were both abundant in my evolutionary environment. So what does it say that ruminants taste so much better?