> I didn’t mean to come off condescending but I did mean to attack. Recommending a high meat diet in this world is like recommending people drive gas guzzlers. It is irresponsible and selfish. The time for that behaviour has gone and we all need to be willing to give up a few things for the future of the planet.
This sort of rhetoric does nothing except taking the guilt from producer and regulator to the consumer. If we think there is a problem with meat production, there certainly is, then we need to regulate meat industry instead of harshly judging meat-eaters with hope of making them feel enough guilt to turn vegan. This is childish. The reality is we don't have enough power to regulate meat industry so we just turn into shaming our peers, something we do have power to. But this is an ineffective method.
> On a more individual vegan diets absolutely are more healthy. The longest lived people in the world (subtracting genetics) are vegetarian or vegan. I cannot fathom how you could think otherwise; I mean just look at stomach and colorectal cancers. Figures are very clear.
No they are not clear, vegan diet is absolutely not the healthiest period. The research on this matter is very vague and pretty much no one knows, pretending otherwise is intellectual dishonesty. Up to last 20 years we thought fats are evil and cause heart disease, which is wrong and now we know fats and cholesterol do not correlate with heart disease. We thought fibers are important to prevent constipation, which recent research shows otherwise. We learn more and more every day how important Omega 3 is.
The only countries in the world with a significant vegan and vegetarian population are India and Mexico [1] and the rest only has vegans as a single digit percent minority. Also, pretending "Mediterranean diet" is meatless is horseshit. I was grown up with Mediterranean diet, and people do eat fish or meat quite regularly, except proportionally much much less. Pretty much everyone I know from my childhood ate Mediterranean diet, and I know absolutely no vegans except the ones I met in US. I do not necessarily advocate eating meat every day, but there is simply no evidence suggesting taking it completely out of your diet is a good idea. Hell, there is substantial evidence suggesting taking fatty fish out of diet is a bad idea.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country