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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

No one's disputing the footprint, they're disputing how feasible it is for all or even most people. Vegetarianism requires much more understanding and planning to ensure you ingest sufficient proper macro and micronutrients.

Edit: and you need look no further than Harvard's explanation of how to become a vegetarian and choose your foods to ensure a healthy diet: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/becoming-a-ve...

How many ordinary people do you think have sufficient understanding of these factors to become healthy vegetarians?

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Eating a healthy diet takes work no matter what diet plan you follow. You're assuming a meat-based diet is automatically healthy when in fact the typical meat based, western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases. You're going to be a lot better off on an even non-ideal plant based diet than you are going to be eating hamburgers and pizza.

I'll admit it's currently not that easy to follow a strictly plant based diet if you mostly eat in restaurants and don't live in a first tier Western city.

If you're willing to do your own shopping and mostly eat at home it's actually not only easy but really enjoyable to take back control of your health and what you eat.

> You're assuming a meat-based diet is automatically healthy

I'm asserting that it's harder to be nutrient deficient given a meat/fish-based diet. The only "work" in this diet is not eating too much.

> western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases

Mostly due to overconsumption, not due to the composition of the diet. Controlling for caloric intake eliminates most differences in health outcomes between the various diets, assuming no nutrient deficiencies are present.

> the typical meat based, western diet is strongly linked to all of our most deadly diseases

The standard American diet is composed of 70% plant-based foods, which is the same ratio found in the Mediterranean diet which is lauded as one of the most healthful.

It's not the meat that's causing the issues, it's the processed plant foods and plant-derived oils that destroy one's health on a western diet. Or in other words, the horrible food quality. Any diet that doesn't include processed plant foods and oils will be an improvement from one that does, regardless of whether it includes meat.

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