What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty big hit in the early agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02615...
>Health outcomes associated with vegetarian diets: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses
>Conclusions: Vegetarian diets are associated with beneficial effects on the blood lipid profile and a reduced risk of negative health outcomes, including diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and cancer risk. Among vegetarians, SDA vegetarians could represent a subgroup with a further reduced risk of negative health outcomes. Vegetarian diets have adverse outcomes on one-carbon metabolism. The effect of vegetarian diets among pregnant and lactating women requires specific attention. Well-designed prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the consequences of the prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency during pregnancy and infancy on later life and of trace element deficits on cancer risks.
Doesn't that mean there is a quality (and quantity) to nutrition and not just subsisting, that we need to examine? And the claim about meat is that it has a quality that is beneficial.
It's impossible to do this really rigorously, as there are too many unknowns in nutrition still. So this leaves holed you can drive all sorts of sized trucks through, which means a lot of argument but not a lot of resolution.
(I eat meat all the time, but we know a lot more than barely anything about nutrition. Figure out vitamin RDAs in milligrams if you want an example)
Is this why GMOs became such a pariah?
You are right we have some pretty good information on deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12 (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how even dietary source actually work even with some key nutrients outside of lab conditions, and beyond that dietary nutrition is absolutely full of handwaving. We are nowhere near a clear picture; lot's of people will tell you we are but they still contradict each other regularly. This is not a mature science.
I'm not saying your not correct that vegetarian diets are fine from a health perspective but this isn't evidence of it.
I'd genuinely be very interested for those sources to be shared, please...
edit: I also have some doubts on the care taken in this study and it's peer-review. As there is an easy to spot mistake in table 2 (the dietary fat section).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2019.0034...
Millions of vegetarians doesn't mean meat is suddenly less nutritious.
I enjoy meat myself, but I use it more sparingly in combination with other central meal components.
The truth is that every living being is low on B12 due to soil erosion / over farming. So in a way a meat eater is supplementing B12 by proxy of an animal, where as a vegan is buying a pot off amazon (and in turn able to get a much more specific dose).
If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.
I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please?
So the parent’s claim is an argument against unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of vegetarianism doesn’t address that. Massive difference between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement or not.
You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S., Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans, while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage, though those two are disputed.
The organisms that provide us vitamin B12 tend to host said bacteria and archaea within their GI.
Alternatively supplements are provided (as I mentioned). Nutritional yeast, dairy, and vitamin pills are some of the ways in which vegetarians survive. Apparently certain beans are high in B12 as well!
It's the same supplements but with extra steps.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11464234/
(Of course, this study is from Czech Republic where average beer consumption is something like 0.7l per capita)
I looked it up and it seems to be suggested that it does but I didn’t look long enough to find a study.
That's not quite right. B12 is mostly produced by bacteria on the surface of plants. We can't synthesize it an neither can the animals we eat. So if you eat products of animals that have been eating such plants (or these days, maybe supplements), there is a source, and especially in developed countries is often the easiest one.
It's an important vitamin, deficiency wise, and for humans there are 3 practical approaches: eat products from animals that consume B12 on plants, eat those plants, or fortify another food more directly.
The 2nd one sounds like an easy win, but is made harder by the fact that most processing (e.g. even vigorous washing ) will remove all the B12 as it is superficial and water soluble.
It's also worth noting we don't need much B12, and we don't need it every day, so managing this isn't very difficult.
You can get all the B12 you need and even more from this while still being balanced in macro and micro-nutrients. Also B12 deficiency will usually make you psychotic or very very tired and to die from it you have to be completely depleted, if you live in the modern world and eat products made with fortifried grains, like white bread, pasta or some breakfast cereals, you will probably never go below the threshold were you cause damage.
There's also multiple protein shakes or meal replacement shakes that sell for like 2 dollars that have enough B12 for the daily recommended intake which is far far more than what you actually need as it's based on the old 2000 calorie diet thing.
> "Yeast cannot produce B12, which is naturally produced only by some bacteria.[8] Some brands of nutritional yeast, though not all, are fortified with vitamin B12. When it is fortified, the vitamin B12 (commonly cyanocobalamin) is produced separately and then added to the yeast."
Furthermore, fortified all purpose flour is not the same as fortified nutritional yeast. In fact, what you are referring to is likely _enriched_ all purpose flour. This has vitamin B1, B2, B3, B9 and iron added to it. There is no addition of vitamin B12.