You make a lot of good points in your statement. However I do have to disagree with a couple of them. First, the vegetarian diet is not necessarily lower in calories. It depends on what kind of vegetables you are consuming. If you are eating primarily leaves and greens then yes you are correct. However if you are consuming beans, potatoes, and corn, it can be just as high as the average American's diet and it is still considered to be vegetarian. Oils from plant sources can also raise your total in a hurry. You have to be consuming something with some calories or you would soon wither away to nothing but a toothpick.

Next, to be on a low-carb diet you don't have to be consuming a wheelbarrow load of animal fat on a daily basis. You don't have to focus your diet on red meat or any other type of large production farm-raised animals. Have you ever heard of fish? I mean the ocean-caught type, not the trout raised in fish farms. I don't believe that fishermen are out there shoveling fish food and fish growth hormone into the ocean to increase the rate of tuna production.

Sure you have to worry about consuming a little mercury, but look at all of the herbicides and insecticides that are added to vegetables in order to produce more and more of them. I'm still worried about what long-term effects that these may have on my body. You can buy veggies that are supposedly organically grown, and pay three times the price for them but how do you know that they are truly organic? Is there some veggie police out there on all of these farms making sure that the "organic" farmers are not adding a little something in the middle of the night? This has always been in the back of my mind ever since they came out with these. You just have to "pick your poison". If you are raising your own vegetables, you can control this but very few people do anymore. You can also use olive oil, peanut oil, and canola oil as your primary fat sources, it doesn't have to be beef tallow and lard. Just a few points for you to consider.