Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

[palou]

scrapking said:

The longest-living and most vibrant human populations are the eat the most plant-based diet

A bit of nitpicking, but I do believe that that has much more to do with the efficiency of a plant-based diet than the overall effect on a person's health. 

 

Meat just cannot be produced in the same density. If you want alot of people on little land, it needs to be grains/tubers.

 

It's difficult comparing meat-based and plant-based societies, since their overall way of life is so different that main detterminants are outside factors for anything you want to compare.

 

If you look at a pure average age, for any given period of time, the former will have the advantage - plant-based societies lived in larger numbers, closer together, which makes the population more prone to diseases and outbreaks (which killed off 90% of the population in th old days.), while hunters and herders lived in smaller groups that travelled around.

Because of the beforementionned reasons, the shift to an agricultural lifestlye (which massively reduced meat intake) actually reduced global life expectancy quite significantly. (I know, wikipedia. But he article is well-sourced.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy