Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

[palou]

scrapking said:

palou said:[...]

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.

[...]

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

 It *was* difficult to compare omnivorous vs. plant-based societies (there are few, if any, true meat-based societies, scurvy being what it is).  It isn't so much now, thanks to the Adventist study (and, now the Adventist 2 study).  These people belief as an article of their faith that it's important for them to take care of their body, so as to honour the fact that they believe they're made in God's image.  This study is looking at 96K participants last I checked, and they're mostly healthy and active and eating whole foods.  So it's mostly healthy omnivores vs. healthy vegetarians vs. healthy vegans.  Because all of these people live in Canada and the U.S., that removes a lot of the cultural differences.  Because the studies are so large, it's possible to filter out for different ethnic backgrounds.  It's also to look just at sub-sets (such as the thousands of California adventists) to reduce the chance of environmental differences playing a role.  Adventists are a particularly interesting group to study because they tend to live healthy overall lifestyles no matter what they eat, but that many of them are vegetarian, and many of them are vegan (whereas in most other groups the vegetarians and vegans would be much smaller sub-sets).

The Adventist studies suggest that healthy vegetarians have slight advantages over healthy omnivores, and that healthy vegans have significant advantages over both omnivores and vegetarians.  The vegans suffer less heart disease, less diabetes, less cancer, and less all-cause mortality than the other groups.  Here's a link:  https://publichealth.llu.edu/adventist-health-studies  Off-hand, I'm not aware of any health metric in the Adventists studies where the vegans didn't come out on top.

As to your second point, rehydrating of fossilized human stool is now suggesting that many (most?) pre-agrarian societies were mostly plant-based.  That seems to be true in the cradle of civilization in Africa where so much of our evolution occurred, for example.  There's new evidence that we've been cooking grains for far longer than previously believed, too.  (source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgc-6zZj034)

If I remember correctly, we actually agreed that a significantly plant-based diet wa healthier for a modern human. The argument, and my comments, in context, relied more on if a significantly plant-based diet was necessarily "natural". The differences you can find between vegans/non-vegans, as stated by your studies, are mostly lower rates of heart diseases, cancer. That's however quite irrelevant whne analyzing the advent of civilization, as people generally died much too early to be affected by *any* of that. My argument was that a vegan diet can help us stay healthy for longer, but that that is relevant but in a modern context.

Also, that guy in the second video does NOT know how to source his stuff properly. His sources are good; they just don't say what he claims that they do. For the "mostly grains" thing, his articles either only claim specific cases, only claim existence of grains in the diet, not predominance, or both.