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Comment by bboylen | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the info.

It is apparent to me from living life that meat is a big part of a healthy diet. But it can be frustrating seeing studies such as this one come out and not knowing what to believe.

I recently started dating a vegetarian and am really realizing how much harder it is to eat a healthy vegetarian diet. Since no one actually wants to eat nothing but greens / veggies all day, many of her meals are carb heavy to fill up, with little protein. I'm not saying you can't be a healthy vegetarian - but it's harder. There are no good meal analogues for something like grilled chicken with a sweet potato/veggies on the side.

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Vegetarianism has been a (mandatory!) prestige marker in India for at least several hundred years; a traditional diet of that type will be adequately healthy[1]. What's hard is cutting meat out of a meat-based diet. You can't expect to just intuit how to fill the holes it leaves.

[1] As with all traditional practices, partial adoption may result in loss of any amount of the benefit, including amounts greater than 100%.

Also applying diets from one genetic cluster in a different one from another climate is asking for trouble. I can process lactose fine, but many can't. Chickpeas and lentils I do not absorb well.

It is a risk, but it's still true that the Indian vegetarian diet will cover all major dietary needs. And while that's not the most ringing endorsement, it's more than you can say for cutting meat out of a diet that features a lot of meat.

How much dairy protein is in such a diet? A lot of the curries I enjoy have yogurt and I love the cheese and cream in palak and saag paneer. But those may not be normal dishes?

I don't know, though my first guess would have been that the major source of protein would be lentils or other pulses. Yogurt is certainly plausible as well.

In England eating beef has been a prestige marker for at least several hundred years[1]. A traditional diet of that type will be more than adequately healthy. What’s hard is getting over ancient superstitions about animals being reincarnated people and then rationalizing that it’s actually healthy for an omnivorous species to abandon eating meat.

Or maybe there’s no reason to believe that a diet that’s healthy for Indians is necessarily healthy for Europeans or vice versa.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6043908-beef-and-liberty

Just look to biology for the answers, its there if you pay attention.

The leader of a wolf pack gets first pickins at a kill, and it always eats the liver first.

Large carnivores elsewhere eat organs first as well.

There's a growing body of research for something that's being called the "carnivore" diet, and there's a sub-movement called "eating nose-to-tail" that seems to be, as best as I can tell, led by a physician named Dr. Paul Saladino, M.D., although the usual suspects are always on his podcast, or he's on theirs and/or associated with him: Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, Dr. Shawn Baker, M.D., etc.

Its basically exactly what you would expect... eating a lot of heart, liver, kidneys, along with skeletal muscle, etc.. I tried to do it, but I love things like french fries, roasted potatoes, roasted Brussel sprouts, etc. way too much. The biomarkers on this diet look amazing, but its always the same "problem". The people who are evangelical about eating this way are also huge into fitness, oftentimes spending an hour or more a day exercising.

I'd like to see 100 total lazy fatasses on a nose-to-tail carnivore diet and 100 total lazy fatasses on a vegetarian diet for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years, and do weekly workups on them... blood pressure, fasting glucose, post-prandial glucose, and so on.

If you would like organ meats but don't like the texture there are meat pills that contain an equal portion of each organ type that are desiccated. These [1] are the ones I use.

[1] - https://shop.ancestralsupplements.com/collections/frontpage/...

Fantastic. Thank you very much. Any idea how many you should take daily? I didn't really see anything on that page, although judging by the amount of capsules per bottle, I would assume 6 per day? 180 caps / 30 days = 6?

I think that should be based on your dietary requirements and what amino acid and vitamin gaps you are trying to fill. There are breakdowns of the vitamin content somewhere on their site and I think I also found it in the Amazon questions section. I use 6 when I only have protein shakes but I use less when I eat a complete meal. That is just my personal preference.

Another leader in the diet realm is Sean baker, a surgeon, who runs meatrx.com. That website contains a large repository of video testimony from people who have done the carnivore diet. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, each one making eyebrow raising claims. They include remission of asthma, arthritis, MS, anxiety, depression, chronic skin rash, brain fog and many many more things. That repository will convert literally anyone to a carnivore believer. There is even one guy who measured his CAC before and after, and his CAC was significantly lower after. This not only goes against the prediction of mainstream medicine, it is something that is thought to be impossible under any circumstances whatsoever. Carnivore is insanely OP. People get ripped, shredded without ever going to the gym. They become slim and metabolically healthy. Men’s testosterone go up. Couples that have been trying to get pregnant for years are able to get pregnant. I’ve watched hundreds of those videos and it’s case closed in my mind. It’s the healthiest diet we know of.

That being said, it sucks. I tried it and I couldn’t do it. Not eating any of the foods you like fucking sucks. And the adjustment period is brutal, with nausea and watery stools. Electrolytes are a constant problem. Once you get past the one month mark it’s supposed to level out, but I’ve never been tough enough to last a month.

> That being said, it sucks. I tried it and I couldn’t do it. Not eating any of the foods you like fucking sucks. And the adjustment period is brutal, with nausea and watery stools. Electrolytes are a constant problem. Once you get past the one month mark it’s supposed to level out, but I’ve never been tough enough to last a month.

Yeap, everything you just said here was exactly my experience too.

There are plenty of good substitutes for chicken that are rich in protein, some even complete proteins. Flavor them however you like. Tofu, tempeh, seitan, chickpeas, portabella mushroom, quinoa, lentils, just to name a few. And then there's the actual chicken analogues like Morningstar and Beyond Chicken, which are pretty good and realistic. I am completely satisfied with any of these and some veggies on the side, even without added carbs, although I do love me some carbs too. (Background: have been vegetarian for 15 years.)

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