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Comment by iofj | Hacker News Reader

I do hope people realize that fake meat is plant food and thus requires nutritional supplements (or an -extremely- varied diet) or it will cause serious health issues.

Meat has no such requirement. While it may not be good for you in the long term, you can survive purely on meat for decades.

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People can survive on a vegan diet too, as long as they get the nutrients they need. It doesn't necessarily need to come from meat. It's much easier to add those requirements into fake meat as beyondmeat is doing already.

> you can survive purely on meat for decades.

You can, if you have genetic variation that allows you to process the food.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/inuit-study-add...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239256

Someone please tell India's ~40% of their population of 1.25 billion that they have serious health issues and need to change their diet or they might die.

And no, this is not a poverty issue. I work with some very successful expat Indian developers who are strict vegetarians.

Iron deficiency is prevalent in India

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/255701994_Prevalence...

B12 deficiency is prevalent in India

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19676146

Malnutrition is incredibly common in India.

http://wfp.org/content/malnutrition-widespread-indian-childr...

> Roughly 42 percent of all Indian children under age 5 suffer from malnutrition, a sobering reminder of the persistence of poverty and hunger in the world’s largest democracy,

Vegetarianism in India is partly driven by religious and cultural values. That article does not link vegetarianism with malnutrition.

My city has a flourishing expat Sikh community who are largely (though not exclusively) vegetarian, they are for the most part robust and successful individuals.

To categorize vegetarians as intrinsically at risk of health issues needs evidence before I'll buy it. And I say this as a meat eater.

Great point! According to research done on "Blue Zones," the healthiest community in the U.S. is a group of Seventh Day Adventists who are vegetarian. It would be so interesting to see what their diet has in common with vegetarians in Indian and Sikh communities.

The only supplement required on a vegan diet is B12. Vegetarians don't even need that. The key is to eat a variety of plant-based foods, like our ancestors often did, rather than a lot of junk food. Doing that, studies show that plant-based diets are much more healthy. Protein is not an issue, since most Americans get way too much protein anyway, and there is tons of protein in veg, grains, and beans.

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