| I would really appreciate if people would stop referencing this book as evidence for anything. If it was written as a literature review paper and subjected to peer review, it would have been torn to shreds, not published and endorsed by a scientific journal. (Even by the infamous standards of an industry neck-deep in replication crisis) https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review https://thehealthsciencesacademy.org/book-reviews/how-not-to... Meanwhile, what do actually peer-reviewed studies say: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/ https://www.adelaide.edu.au/newsroom/news/list/2022/02/22/me... There seem to be people out there who managed to make plant-based diets work for them, but it took more than reading a single book, and it takes a lot of maintenance and monitoring to sustain. That gets more and more difficult in advanced age, as nutritional needs naturally change, including changes to the the absorption, metabolism, and even transport of the raw nutrients we do eat. Even steelmanning the cardiovascular case: The population base rates of depression, anxiety, and obesity are far greater than cardiovascular disease. It is ignorant at best and irresponsible at worst to encourage people to optimize for reducing their already slim chances of cardiovascular issues while increasing their already high chances of several other issues. Even that doesn't hold, of course, because obesity also increases the risk of cardiovascular issues anyway. I'm going to stop short of accusing plant-based diets of being a scam or a conspiracy, but I do believe they are somewhere in the space of bad science and poor reasoning, even in the most well-trodden easily-avoidable ones like the base rate fallacy. |
Studies of feces appear to indicate plant consumption was high. There’s also one I came across on Neanderthal diet 50k years ago that suggests they ate more plant stuff than previously thought. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329486931_Dietary_f... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2481-2_...
This one says meat was an important component, but that fiber (only from plants) consumption was much higher than it is now. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Bi...