[jm2721]

I feel like you're omitting some key points here. You say they ate meat and dairy every day. Practically everybody eats meat and dairy every day, but not everybody has high cholesterol or an increased risk of heart disease (note that those are separate concerns, as CVD happens in people with low cholesterol as well). If I have a glass of milk with cereal in the morning, and a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch on white bread, I've already had two servings of dairy and a serving of meat. But I've also had one or two servings of a sugary breakfast cereal and two slices of white bread (both of which are about as nutritionally void as candy). Those are the really harmful factors here.

I believe you when you say they lost weight on an all plant diet. But I think you're probably attributing their success to the wrong thing. Correlation != causation. People on a diet would never dream of having refined carbohydrates or too much sugar, because those are universally understood to be bad for you (even if it's just the 'empty calories' argument). They just so happened to also stop eating any animal products. So I don't think you can target the meat and dairy and just claim that removing them is "probably the healthiest option for the majority of the population". Rotten thinking like this is what got us into this catastrophic obesity epidemic in the first place.