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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

I'm not by any means meat-free, but it's really quite easy (and tasty) to cut 80% or more of your weekly meat diet.

We do this at home by making lots of hearty soups, having salad with each meal and having good cheeses, nuts and lots of fruits on hand.

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For me at least, since switching to a complete meat based diet I have had a lot of my digestive issues along with host of other problems (better sleep for example but that could be because I don't have to wake up middle of the night from the esophageal pain) completely gone. I also feel a lot better mental health wise(again could be because I have better sleep). I understand I might be an anecdote.

Often, getting a specialized diet prevents you from eating over-processed foods, which would cut down on potential problems your body may have with them.

It's the same with a low-meat diet since so many restaurants don't offer food without meat - you end up not eating out as much or selecting healthier items.

What were you eating before?

A complete meat diet?

It happens. E.g. the Inuit traditional diet is effectively entirely meat/animal products. Non-animal products make up a tiny sliver of the traditional diet.

Yeah no thanks, the Inuit lifestyle does not seem healthy. The Inuit currently have lifespans that are about 13 years less than the average Canadian lifespan. Even that is an improvement of 29 years from the 1940s. [0]

[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-003-x/2008001/article...

I have no particular take on the health of the Inuit diet; I bring it up mainly to indicate that there are people who do go essentially their whole lives on just a meat diet.

However your statistics there have way too many confounding factors to attribute anything substantial to the native diet. Infant mortality rates historically and remain (comparatively) very high. Alcoholism is rampant among Canadian indigenous people. Even among peoples who have similar diets such as e.g. Metis, Inuit and First Nations peoples, life expectancy is significantly different (this is before even getting into a comparison with other meat-eating cultures in the world).

There is virtually no signal here to determine the healthiness of an Inuit-style diet either way.

Can you tell us more? You went 100% meat and your digestive system for better? What is an average meal for you?

Same here. I never tolerated legumes well, and cutting all plants and especially ones containing fiber cured my IBS and got rid of my chronic inflammation. For anyone curious Paul Mason has a few talks about fiber.

+1 It's also healthier to cut down on meat.

But is it really? We're omnivores. Our bodies are designed to eat meat.

I went hardcore keto and only eat meat + cheese and I've lost a ton of weight and lowered my BP etc. That is way healthier than what I was before so I'm not sure the argument cutting down on meat is healthy.

Yes, support for this is practically unanimous by health research on the topic. Obviously there's orders of 'bad', with processed meats being worse than red meats, and red meats worse than say lean white meats, and the quantity matters too. The whole omnivore argument tends to assume we used to eat tons of meat all the time but it was a rarity until fairly recently in our history.

Yes, I've seen plenty of these studies but all of them have too many variables at play. Actual proof that meat is bad is very foggy at best.

Edit: I'm not arguing either way - I just don't buy into this whole meat is bad for you argument.

The argument about processed foods (meat and otherwise) is pretty solid. Red meat... Open to debate. You need to keep in mind that most of our baselines come from the mid 20th century. Where everyone ate meat, so our definition of "healthy" is based on 70 year old averages. The median for "healthy" is a meat eater.

My spouse is vegan and super healthy. Yet some of her blood-works are borderline. As far as we can tell it's because she's vegan. It's the stats themselves that are biased against veganism. I think that if the studies were corrected meat eating would look MUCH worse than it does now.

But it's not eating meat that's making you lose weight, it's cutting out all the carbs you'd normally eat...

I disagree, we were not designed by anyone. Our ancestors made choices that worked for them in the past, but just because we did things in the past does not mean it is the only way moving forward.

Your issue was probably your weight (causing high BP), more than meat and cheese being an optimal diet. I would be cautious about the longtime harm to your cardiovascular system due to lack of fiber and triglycerides.

I always find it funny when people use the ‘omnivore’ reasoning. Like it sets us in-line with all other animals in the food chain somehow. When was the last time you saw a living animal and thought: “god damn, I’d love to tear into that beast and eat it alive.”

Humans evolved to prepare meat in very specific ways: WE COOK IT (like 95% of the time unless you’re some kind of lunatic) We’re not like ANY other animal and trying to say ‘oh we eat meat AND plants so we’re omnivores and therefore we are intended to consume animals’ is ridiculous.

We originally ate animals because it provided tons of calories in primitive times. It gave us an edge and we got ahead. At this day in age there is absolutely no scientific justification for consuming animals (unless you have some kind of tragic health condition). Can you lose weight and lower your BP in the short term? Sure. But please keep this up for 10+ years and we’ll see how the body sustains itself.

>absolutely no scientific justification for consuming animals

Given the state of nutrition science, I would also say there is no scientific justification for not consuming animals.

Given historical precedent, eating cooked meat seems to have effectively taken fat (a very long digestive track) apes with small brains and turned them into bigger brained highly capable humans.

From what I understand of research, and advisories from Harvard Health and the like, reducing red meat intake in particular can improve CVD risk. Saturated fat raises total cholesterol levels; not just the "bad" small ldl, granted, but that is still thought to raise health risk. It's worse when paired with refined carbs and sugar.

The Mediterranean diet, which is as of yet the most studied in nutrition, advocates for little red meat, moderate poultry and fish, more legumes and vegetables etc.

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