BS. Vegan -- if you supplement with B-12 -- can be a very healthy diet. There are many elite athletes who are vegan. I eat mostly vegan, and I (humbly) can hold my own in my age group.

Here's a rational thought: In the Adventist 2 Study of 25,105 men, those who ate vegan had fewer deaths than omnivores:

• 19% fewer deaths from cancer,
• 42% fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease,
• 55% fewer deaths from ischemic heart disease.

But it's still based on beliefs. I've been on both sides of the fence. I was meatless for 20 or 30 years. I think extremist of any kind is the biggest vice.

B12 comes from meat as I'm sure you know, so purism is useless.

B12 is made by bacteria in the soil, and in the gut of some ruminants, and in supplements. So you don’t have to kill a cow to get your B12.

It is not really about the food per se in an ancestral diet that is good or bad. It is is about the fact that the ancestral food items, largely consisting of items that were in continuous abundance and constituted prey for humans, megafauna, pressured our bodies to optimize for those items.

This is why today all, as in every single one of the essential nutrients can be found in high bio-availability in animal items.

There is no reason whatsoever, expect for one's own desire, to be a on diet consisting solely of meat. What is possible does not make it necessary.

I share the same concerns about meat, in fact I never feel great on supermarket meat and I find that I'm very sensitive to histamine. For protein and fat I mostly stick to eggs and cheese that I can find from farms, and a lot of small fish. However, whenever I see interesting cuts of meat at the farmers' market, I go for them.

I think that a good practice, which many traditional Greek families do to this day, is to buy a couple of animals from a farm, usually a sheep and a goat, have them slaughtered fresh on site, portioned, and then they put them in the freezer for the year. Some more meat will arrive in the form of game meat from relatives, some other meat like minced meat for some moussaka will come from the butcher.

For those who don't want to eat meat because of personal beliefs, you can easily get B12 from fermented dairy and eggs.

B12 is just one of the concerns, there are other essential nutrients that are almost absent or barely bio-available in plants, like Vitamin D3, ω3s (DHA/EPA), Iron, Zinc, and Calcium.

Basically, a great recipe for fatigue and muscle weakness, which is exactly what the Great Lent diet that I described earlier (no meat, fish, dairy, or eggs) aims for (you are supposed to pray and meditate, not win races).

While I do not doubt that at all, and have not read this study, I am wondering about a little survivor bias here. To overly generalize, I would think that vegans have a more healthy lifestyle in general. If you think that much about what you eat, you probably also think about exercise, sleep and general safety. But maybe they controlled for those factors.

At what age were the folks in this study?

OK, thank you for telling me B12 can come from non-meat sources. Perhaps my knowledge was way out of date.

The bias you mention is real!

There are a lot of problems with nutritional studies and I'm very skeptical of many of them, which have later been proven wrong. I'm headed out the door now, but this video is great at pointing out many of the problems with nutritional studies.

You do recognize that, by themselves, those percentages are next to meaningless?

Adjustments:

"Adjusted by age (ie, attained age as time variable), race (black, nonblack), smoking (current smoker, quit <1 year, quit 1–4 years, quit 5–9 years, quit 10–19 years, quit 20–29 years, quit ≥30 years, and never smoked), exercise (none, ≤20 min/week, 21–60 min/week, 61–150 min/week, and ≥151 min/week), personal income (≤$20 000/y, >$20 000–$50 000/y, >$50 000–$100 000/y, and >$100 000/y), educational level (up to high school graduate, trade school/some college/associate degree, bachelor degree, and graduate degree), marital status (married/common-law and single/widowed/divorced/separated), alcohol (nondrinker, rare drinker [<1.5 servings/mo], monthly drinker [1.5 to <4 servings/mo], weekly drinker [4 to <28 servings/mo], and daily drinker [≥28 servings/mo]), region (West, Northwest, Mountain, Midwest, East, and South), and sleep."



Age of participants:

In case anyone was wondering why the new food pyramid saved its most prominent real estate (top left corner) for meat and dairy.

Wonder. No. More.

"(I)t looks very much like these guidelines
were purchased by the beef and dairy industries.
The committee is filled with people
like J. Thomas Brenna,
who has been funded by the National Cattlemen's Beef
and the Texas Beef Council,
among many other conflicts,
or Don Layman, who complains that, in his career,
he was never able to obtain funding from the NIH.
So he took it from the Beef Board,
the National Dairy Council,
Kraft, Nestle, and many others.
And so they put beef and dairy
at the top of the pyramid."

I don't think that the new food pyramid is going to influence and change eating habits of millions of people, just like the old food pyramid didn't. Majority of people will continue to eat whatever they feel like eating. Highly processed junk foods aren't going away anytime soon. Fast food and junk food is engineered to be addictive and people will continue get most of their daily calories from it.

That was a very good watch, thanks!

Eating a McDo hamburger would be considered eating meat, however, 1 McDo hamburger has 12 grams of protein, 9 grams of fat, and 30 grams of carbs (of which 5 grams are added sugar). Small fries would get you another 31 grams of carbs, and a small Coke another 53.

So, within a small meal like that, protein is about 10% of the carb content. Even if you had the hamburger alone, protein would be 1/3 of the carb content.

Yeah, that's true, but I gained more from the video on his analysis of various scientific research and real world facts.




.

Fiber, magnesium, potassium, vitamin C and a list of other micro-nutrients. Constipation is likely at some point in the short term. And maybe frequently or chronic. And scurvy a possibility long term.

I did just google that and pretty much just gave you the AI response. But it is pretty much what I was thinking.

Of course all that is if you truly only ever eat eggs, fish and meat. Even you seem to have claimed in the past to eat vegetables and fruits IIRC. So maybe you are discounting how much they contribute to your health.

Nutrition is a complicated thing, there are so many things your body needs at some level or another. A good example of this is Lycopene. Lycopene is a nutrient, but it's not considered an essential nutrient, despite the fact that the body can NOT synthesize it, it must be obtained via diet of foods with red pigmentation. Examples are: Tomatoes, Carrots, Papayas, Watermelon...

However, while not categorized as an essential nutrient, it has been identified as significant promoter of health.

Come on... Eggs alone already have all essential nutrients except Vitamin C, and together with dairy, meat, and fish/shellfish you can make a pretty balanced diet; fiber is not an essential nutrient.

I still eat some whole grains, vegetables, and fruit, and plenty of nuts too, and I plan to continue to do so, that doesn't change the fact that eggs, meat, and fish already cover everything. You can also get Vitamin C by just eating lemons, but there so many other options too.

So you you are changing up your criteria from the original statement of eggs, fish and meat providing all.

And eggs do not bring all the nutrients you might need. And depending on what your total diet actually is, then eggs and meat can definitely bring you too much of all the bad stuff even if it does have most all the good stuff. So simply saying they alone are all that is needed is silly to me.

I eat eggs, fish and meat. However I also eat a heck of a lot of vegetables and fruits. I'd never attribute a good heathy diet to only a few items as you do.

Fiber may not be officially classified as " essential" but there is enough research and evidence which proves that fiber is extremely beneficial for health and should be included as part of a healthy diet.

No it's not complicated . It's simple, get your daily calories from real whole foods.

Well, that's one way to look at it. Just like riding a bike isn't complicated, until you look at the science of counter-steering and wonder how you're going to learn how to counter-steer. But you just do it and the body learns, easy peasy. Personally, I never heard of counter-steering when I first got on a bike, but I was blown away by how crucial it is when I finally learned about it.

I guess the same can be said for nutrition, just eat real, whole, natural foods and of course all in moderation. But don't look at them nutritional studies, because they'll drive you nuts


BTW, speaking about fiber, does anyone know why cats and dogs eat grass

A diet consisting solely of eggs, fish, and meat (with the organs) would actually cover all essential nutrients, that cannot be that difficult to understand.

Because they're smarter than humans .....and they don't need scientific studies to tell them which foods are most optimal for their bodies and that fiber is good for them, they know that intuitively.