In what way is this diet not superior to animal diets: high legume (mainly lentils=low methionine) and vegetable intake, moderate fruit intake, moderate nut and olive oil intake.
You talk about ''all the good stuff that come with limited amounts of animal protein'' - what are these?
Well, maybe that was a bit of an overstatement. Or wasn't it? All the vegan propaganda and all the real evidence for the adverse effects of animal products notwithstanding, there is plenty of good stuff in them, too. For example: carnitine (no,
carnitine won't cause atherosclerosis - forget that shabby paper by Koeth et al.), carnosine, anserine, taurine, creatine, cysteine, CoQ10, lipoic acid, polyamines, immunoglobulins, albumin,
bioactive peptides, BCAA, CLA and, of course, long chain omega 3s and vitamins D and K2 and B12. They are also important sources of B2, choline, zinc and calcium, selenium and iodine - and last but not least the double-edged sword of iron.
While is possible to supplement many of those substances while being on a vegan diet - or to seek out those plant foods which contain meaningful amounts of them - and hypothetically do even better than the flexitarians. That would be the obvious explanation for the statistical longevity advantage of flexitarians: many vegans are not even prudent enough to supplement B12, let alone the other nutrients. And even if they do, they may be deficient in nutrients which are not exclusive to animal food but may be hard to come by on a vegan diet nontheless (like iodine and selenium, for which animal foods are the main source wherever the soil is low in them, because at least the animal feed is supplemented).
However, some of them, like the complex mixture of antioxidant, immune boosting proteins found in dairy (especially in dairy from healthy grass fed cattle, sheep or goats) or beneficial peptides from muscle meat can't be substituted even with the most ambitious vegan supplement stack - and of course there is always the possibility that there may be other compounds with beneficial health effects which haven't even been researched by now or some synergism from the whole food (beware of epistemic arrogance and misplaced reductionism).
I think it is interesting in this regard, that the
most recent large-scale epidemiological study on meat consumption found no significant association between mortality from any cause and the consumption of
unprocessed meat (yes, even red meat!). That is
despite the known adverse effects of high heme iron intake, the fact that virtually all of the meat poeple from the study ate was from industrial mass production, and the decidedly unhealthy way meat is often prepared/charred. If anything, one could come to the conclusion that there have to be some remarkably
healthy substances in meat to make up for all of these downsides. Just think about it...
Edited by timar, 03 December 2013 - 09:36 PM.