[dnissley]

Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only country with more than 15% of it's population being vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.

[tmotwu]

There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.

[dnissley]

It would be interesting to see the stats of a country like India though, where you don't have confounders like vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the developed world. Although the more I look into it, the more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label there.

What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty big hit in the early agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.

[tmotwu]

Buddhist societies and the sects formed around them immediately come to mind.

[numpad0]

It’ll be accurate enough to say Buddha argued it unethical to kill until he died from eating generously offered but spoiled pork so...

[Spare_account]

Does this cover off any of the areas you're interested in?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02615...

>Health outcomes associated with vegetarian diets: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses

>Conclusions: Vegetarian diets are associated with beneficial effects on the blood lipid profile and a reduced risk of negative health outcomes, including diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and cancer risk. Among vegetarians, SDA vegetarians could represent a subgroup with a further reduced risk of negative health outcomes. Vegetarian diets have adverse outcomes on one-carbon metabolism. The effect of vegetarian diets among pregnant and lactating women requires specific attention. Well-designed prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the consequences of the prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency during pregnancy and infancy on later life and of trace element deficits on cancer risks.