Ask HN: Plant-Based Diet?

> significant amount of scientific consensus

This is a very weird expression. Is there consensus or not? Always ask for evidence, not appeal to authority.

Read: The China Study. The book is based on the China–Cornell–Oxford Project, a 20-year study—described by The New York Times as "the Grand Prix of epidemiology"—conducted by the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, Cornell University, and the University of Oxford.

I don't know that movie, but there is no such consensus.

What I take from people who know this stuff better than I do: There's reasonably good evidence that a diet should have a large amount of vegetables and fruit. There's controversial evidence that red meat is particularly bad.

However the big issue with meat in the diet is not health, it's climate. It's pretty clear that on average meat has a much higher carbon footprint than plant-based food, while some forms (particularly beef) stand out as particularly bad.

After looking at it for a while, I came to the conclusion that most (emphasis on 'most'. The problem is to know which one is) dietetic science is junk and that we're more in religious territory than anything else.

So if I was you, I would do whatever feels reasonable (maybe meat 2 times a week, drastically reduced amount of processed foods, particularly sugar etc).

IMHO in diets like in politics the danger is always in the extremes. I wouldn't go full vegan but I wouldn't eat meat 3 times a day either.

There's lots of research based evidence that the Mediterranean diet can result in a healthy, long life. https://neurosciencenews.com/aging-blood-cognition-nutrients... https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/t...

I am a vegetarian and I don’t have much idea about how much meat one should have, health wise.

What is very clear is that eating meat has a massive bad influence on the environment.

Majority of crops grown are for animals not humans. These animals then become hamburgers and such. The amount of energy it takes to kill, process, transport, refrigerate etc is mind boggling. Not to mention pollution.

For this reason alone, it would make sense to eat less meat, if not quit.

I'm following a Keto diet where I eat meat 2 times a day.

I'm dissatisfied with the state of the science behind the impact of meat on both health and climate. If you search papers/studies on this, you'll find diverging answers.

Pros plant-based people have the movie "The game changers", Pros meat-based people have the movie "The magic pill". You can find a lot of articles that praise/criticize both movies.

If there's no strong evidence of a large effect one way or the other and everyone has their own anecdotes pointing in different directions, is it really worth worrying about? If you can say anything, it's that humans are highly adaptable to many different diets like no meat, high meat, low carb, high carb etc.

Reducing meat is one of the biggest ways to reduce your own personal carbon footprint and reduce animal suffering. Those two reasons are good enough.

About the "carbon foot-print" of meat, that is far from conclusive. Most of the crops are NOT raised to feed cattle. What goes to cattle is the waste after these crops are processed, mainly to remove the vegetable oil, starch and some proteins from soy and corn for human consumption, mainly for: fast-foods, candies, fake food (milk, burgers, etc), tofu, soy sauce.

What is meant by meat?

Eggs? Milk? Fish?

Mostly it comes down to essential vitamins like B-12 that are all up in the meat biz.

There are cultures that have been vegetarian for millennia. Ref parts of India.