You're right, it would be silly to suggest everyone who eats meat is going to die of a heart attack.  I'm glad I didn't suggest it.  Since neither you nor I suggested it, it doesn't appear to be relevant to the discussion.

I merely said, and the evidence bears this out, that eating meat makes you more likely to get a heart attack, or suffer a stroke, or get diabetes, or get cancer.  I'd add to that the fact that the evidence suggests people who eat meat/dairy/eggs get more neurological conditions (many cases of "Alzheimers" are being re-diagnosed as cholesterol plaque building up in the brain).  We also have now demonstrated that lots of erectile dysfunction is cholesterol plaque building up in the penile artery.

As for Kevin Smith, he had recently started to take his health more seriously and had lost 85 pounds prior to the heart attack.  But sure, let's set him aside, and look at the Adventist and Adventist II studies.  These compared healthy omnivores, vs. healthy vegetarians, vs. healthy vegans.  The participants in the Adventist studies tend to be healthy and active and tend towards eating whole foods.  In these studies, the healthy vegans had the lowest rates of disease, and the least serious diseases.

Exactly. We do not hunt for cows, pigs, chickens or sheep, we breed them for meat.

The point is - people eat less meat therefore are healthier.

Fuck sake, I read this and now I REALLY want a burger or two... think I know what I'm having for dinner! :P

How do you live? I can only survive on 75% carbs.

I agree with almost everything you say here, with one asterisk:  when it comes to sugar, it's only refined sugar that is a poison.  You can eat fruit salads three meals a day and not get fat, not get diabetes, etc.  If you eat sugar in its natural, absolutely unrefined form, with plenty of fibre to slow the absorption, you'll do just fine.  The human populations that eat the most fruit have some of the lowest rates of diabetes, cancer, obesity, etc.

The research about refined carbohydrates has convinced me that flours and refined sugars are a poison and I avoid them.  However, I also avoid refined fats (olive oil, etc.) as I'm equally convinced those are problematic.  And the World Health Organization has confirmed that all meat probably causes cancer, and that processed meats (any meat that is smoked, cured, grilled, or processed in any way) definitely causes cancer.  So I agree with you that refined carbohydrates are a problem, but the research is that bad fats are the predominant cause of diabetes and that consumption of animal protein is tightly correlated to many cancers, so the preponderance of the best and most independent research suggests that reducing consumption of both animal products and refined carbohydrates is a plus for health.

I don't generally find the combination of unrefined fat and unrefined sugar to be a problem, I see no problem adding nuts or seeds to a fruit salad for example.

Really, eating whole foods is your only choice for optimal health.  Which isn't exactly mind-blowing, since we evolved eating mostly whole foods.  Not a lot of flour or hot dogs on the African savannah, after all.

Ummmm....   got a link for that?  Because I can cite a tonne of sources that say otherwise, including analysis of mummified human hair and rehydration of fossilized human stool that doesn't leave much to the imagination about what people ate in times gone by.  All the evidence I've seen suggests your statement is categorically false.  It is true that meat consumption has dropped in a few countries over the last generation or so, which is positive, but it's nowhere near the 80-90% drop you suggest.  I can't see any way in which your statement could be correct, unless you're talking an incredibly short span of time, and an incredibly tiny geographic area that bucked the global trend.

EDIT:  I see in a follow-up post you said prehistory.  Now we know you're incorrect.  It's a myth that hunter-gatherers mostly hunted.  Most hunter-gatherer populations mostly gathered and had diets rich in plant foods.  This isn't a matter of debate, you can look at mummified hair and analyze it to get a sense of their diet.  Ditto when you find fossilized human stool.  A whole food vegan diet is more paleo than the so-called "paleo diet".

Vegans and vegetarians grew from 2.6% of the population in Israel in 2010, to 13% in 2014 (and appears to have grown even more since then).  (source: https://www.jta.org/2014/10/15/life-religion/israelis-growing-hungry-for-vegan-diet)

I'm not sure where you are, but veganism is estimated to have grown 500% in the U.S. between 2014 and 2017.  (source: https://www.riseofthevegan.com/blog/veganism-has-increased-500-since-2014-in-the-us)

You asked for where the change is coming from, and those are a couple of examples.  :)

We should all strive to be like the true hero of the people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Gorske