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(I might be putting up a strawman here:) Seems to me that many of the people who're arguing for meat and against fruit/carbs/grains are oversimplifying things by just saying: meat is healthy food and lots of carbohydrates and thus most/sweet fruit is bad/unhealthy.

IMO anyone who seriously tries to argue that any of meat/fruit/carb/fat/.. is inherently healthy or unhealthy is arguing a lost cause.

Yet, people arguing that meat is healthy (while the world population is AFAIK hitting record numbers in obesity and dietary health issues) might well be getting at least *something* right, even though their oversimplified message isn't correct.

Many people who're struggling with obesity might be better off exchanging some carbs in their diets for meat (or other foods high in protein and low in carbs). Not because meat is somehow better food than fruit. But because the average person today doesn't burn enough calories to live on a diet that contains lots of calories but only little protein *without* ingesting more calories than they need.

I've come across a few slightly or not so slightly overweight people who seemed to think that they could lose weight by adding some more "healthy food" to their diet, meaning by that things like fruit. To a certain degree this misunderstanding is understandable, as fruit is (according to my perception) quite often being marketed as specifically healthy, while I cannot recall having seen an ad for some meat being marketed as specifically healthy.

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Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

On the first order, or to the first degree, what you eat doesn't matter. Being a healthy weight matters, which means eating only enough to maintain that healthy weight and not more. If you are a healthy weight, you can eat anything you damn well please and achieve this first-order level of success. And if a pure-meat diet gets you to a healthy weight wereas no other system worked for you, then an all-meat diet is a reasonable way for you to lose weight. Other than keto's effect on hunger, food choices are mostly irrelevant to weight loss. If you eat extra protein your body turns it into fat... it doesn't go onto your muscles. If you eat extra sugar your body turns that into fat too (but you already knew that).

But on the second order, or to the second degree, people at a healthy weight who chose to eat a significant amount of meat throughout their lives don't live as long as people at a healthy weight who eat little to no meat. The healthy-weight people who live the longest are the pescatarians who are lacto-ovo-vegetarians except that they eat fish. They eat no red meat, no pork, no chicken, only sea-meats and generally only the fishes.

The difference occurs due to atherosclerosis. Meat (not just the saturated fat) and saturated fats (like coocnut oil) accelerate the development of atherosclerotic plaques. This is why you will see very healthy weight body-builders on the carnavore diet kick the bucket at 57 from massive heart attacks, and why people like Ancel Keys and nutritionists that worked with him (Jeremiah Stamler, Henry Blackburn) live to 100.

to be decided 1y ago

I'd agree on everything you wrote here.

Only after writing my replies did I scroll further down in your posts to find out that you're coming from the opposite corner as you formerly had lots of meat in your diet.

My perspective was more from the vegetarian/vegan side of things. I know a few people who're eating vegan/vegetarian diets and are struggling with a bit too much weight. My reasoning is that vegans (and vegetarians who don't eat much cheese or other protein rich dairy) are adding another challenge on top for themselves through their diet (in combination with the typical low exercise lifestyle) by skipping on meat. Because they'd basically have to have legumes like beans or lentils as a component of *every* meal in order to get enough protein *without* too many calories, but most people don't do that. Then they end up eating more of the pervasive carb rich foods, because their body basically commands them to ingest enough protein until they have eaten enough of that.

Mike Dilger ☑️ 1y ago

This reminds me of my childhood. I was raised a vegetarian and didn't eat meat until I was 18 years old. But I ate a lot of white bread and drank a lot of root beer and I started developing a stomach at only 11 years old. Vegetarianism is not a weight-loss diet.