Even if you only eat meat (or whatever else besides grains), bits of food will still get wedged between into your gums and then rot away with your teeth.
It's not the fact that there is food stuck in your teeth that causes cavities, it's what pH results from the bacteria metabolizing that food. Bacteria breaking down carbs produces acidic conditions, but when they break down protein or fat the reaction products from that are much closer to neutral pH.
Yes. But is that a result of not eating meat? Or a result of paying close attention to your diet?
A lot of inexperienced vegetarians/vegans end up with nutrient deficiencies because they don't ensure that they are properly getting all essential vitamins or amino acids in their meatless diets. I'm not a dietician, but it's pretty safe to say that these people are not going to be the ones with reduced mortality rates. You cannot simply remove an entire food group from your diet without putting in effort into paying attention to the rest of your diet.
Some studies[1] show that pescetarian diets offer the lowest mortality rates. This diet still requires paying close attention to what you eat, but you are far less likely to have nutrient deficiencies.
This is one of the huge issues I have with diet-mortality studies. During the gluten-free trend a while back, there were many that suggested gluten-free diets provided health benefits. However, for the vast majority of people, gluten isn't really that special as far as proteins go. It turned out those "health benefits" were just the result of people with gluten intolerances actually paying attention to their diet.
Just to reiterate, I am not a dietician. Everything above is just my cynicism for studies that constantly fail to take into account that most people just don't care what they're eating. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
> A lot of inexperienced vegetarians/vegans end up with nutrient deficiencies because they don't ensure that they are properly getting all essential vitamins or amino acids in their meatless diets
While that certainly happens, its not like you have to maintain constant vigilance. Most popular vegetarian diets are nutrionally complete (major exception being vitamin b12 for vegans is something to be very careful about).
Like yes, if you decide to only eat rice and nothing else it will be bad, but its not like you have to meticulously record what you eat every meal. Getting all essential amino acids is pretty easy if you eat like a sane person.
Where did I imply you need to 'meticulously record every meal'? I explicitly added the "inexperienced" tag to try to avoid this kind of extreme contrarian argument.
> major exception being vitamin b12 for vegans is something to be very careful about
Add to that list iodine, omega-3, zinc, iron, calcium, and vitamin D. All of these are essential nutrients that vegetarians need to include in their diet. Sure, they're easier to get than B12, but they can still be pitfalls if you're careless.
> Getting all essential amino acids is pretty easy if you eat like a sane person.
Yes. That's basically the entire point I'm making. Most vegetarians eat 'like a sane person' because if they don't then they will have issues very quickly. Having a diet with meat means you can eat more carelessly because you're less likely to have immediate issues compared to eating carelessly as a vegetarian.
What I'm asking for are studies that take this into account. Studies that aren't just asking people if their diet includes something. Studies that actually take into account the fact that most people that don't care what they are eating tend to eat meat.
Are vegetarians typically 'inexperienced' long enough to lose lifespan, though?
Fwiw, I've been vegetarian for like twenty years, don't really track much of anything in terms of vitamin intake, and am doing just fine according to the last time I had blood work done. I eat eggs and beans and rice for protein, and cook on a cast iron for iron... And that's the sum of my thought on vitamin intake. My partner takes b12 supplements, though.
I do think there's a certain over estimation of how hard it is to not eat meat. It's really not.
> Are vegetarians typically 'inexperienced' long enough to lose lifespan, though?
No, because they find out really quickly what they're deficient in when symptoms show up (or they revert back to their previous diet). I admit I worded that paragraph poorly though, that wasn't my intention.
> Fwiw, I've been vegetarian for like twenty years, don't really track much of anything in terms of vitamin intake, and am doing just fine according to the last time I had blood work done. I eat eggs and beans and rice for protein, and cook on a cast iron for iron... And that's the sum of my thought on vitamin intake. My partner takes b12 supplements, though.
So you get blood work done regularly, ensure you have certain things in your diet, and you intentionally try to make up for a common nutrient deficiency?
You may not see that as a lot of effort, but for people that don't really care about their health, every one of those things can make a significant difference in terms of lifespan.
> Add to that list iodine, omega-3, zinc, iron, calcium, and vitamin D
Common nutrients that even non-vegetarians do not generally get from meat.
Iodine is usually from salt, Omega-3 is often vegetable oil and nuts, zinc is commonly in beans and grains, calcium and D3 is in milk (you said vegetarian not vegan), and more to the point, most people do not get vit D exclusively from diet.
These are all things that non-vegetarians get in sufficient quantity from non-meat sources. So why would someone becoming a vegetarian suddenly stop eating these things.
> Having a diet with meat means you can eat more carelessly because you're less likely to have immediate issues compared to eating carelessly as a vegetarian.
While i agree in general, your definition of "careless" is so ridiculous that I think meat eaters would rapidly be in trouble if they were this level of careless.
I want to preface this with the fact that I never said you can't have a well-balanced vegetarian or vegan diet, because I feel like that's what you're thinking I'm implying.
> Common nutrients that even non-vegetarians do not generally get from meat.
Other than Vitamin D3, meat is objectively an excellent source of all of those nutrients. Fish is an excellent source of iodine and omega-3, and saying people do not get zinc, iron, or calcium from meat is just incorrect.
> These are all things that non-vegetarians get in sufficient quantity from non-meat sources. So why would someone becoming a vegetarian suddenly stop eating these things.
Maybe because they never started eating those to begin with? I do not know, and I can only speculate on the different reasons. Each person is different, but all we know is that it does happen[1]. Some people just don't have those in their diet.
Anecdotally, I don't think I ever ate beans until I was in my early 20s because my parents just never cooked with them. We also pretty much only had sea salt available, and most of our food was cooked with butter instead of vegetable oil. We weren't unhealthy, but if I immediately dropped meat from my diet at that time without changing anything else, I would have started to have issues.
> While i agree in general, your definition of "careless" is so ridiculous that I think meat eaters would rapidly be in trouble if they were this level of careless.
I'm not going to argue semantics. My argument is about the statistics and how these dietary studies tend to fail to account for extremes in behavior. Vegans, vegetarians, and pescetarians are just less likely to have these extremes.
To reiterate the results from the previous study I linked[2], semi-vegetarians (people who only occasionally had meat) have a fairly worse mortality rate than vegetarians, yet strictly speaking their diet only varies by having meat once or twice a month. The only way this makes sense in my mind is either there's a huge behavior difference in these two groups (less care put into their diet), or that meat is so incredibly unhealthy that just eating it occasionally will knock years off your lifespan. Considering the standard deviation of those results are larger for both non-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians (and that pescetarians have a significantly lower mortality rate than even the vegan group), I would bet on the former.
And if you don't think there's a lot of people that are completely careless about their diets, just remember how much soda the average American drinks in a single day[3], despite half of the population not drinking soda at all. And nearly a quarter of Europeans don't get regular checkups at a doctor[4], despite their access to healthcare. It's safe to say that a lot of people that just flat out don't care if they have a balanced diet (or exercise, regular healthcare, etc), and when you don't care you tend to eat meat.
When we get health studies that don't take this into account, we end up with fad diets because those studies essentially just show that those who pay attention to their diet tend to be healthier. To demonstrate the issues with those studies, this one[5] concludes a meat-only diet has very good health benefits compared to the general population.