"The annual all-cause death rate of vegetarian men is slightly more than that of non-vegetarian men (.93% vs .89%); the annual death rate of vegetarian women is significantly more than that of non-vegetarian women (.86% vs .54%) (Am J Clin Nutr 1982 36:873)"
Take that FWIW....I take it as the differences between vegetarian longevity and non-vegetarian longevity are pretty minuet...no matter how you define vegetarian...
That type of statistics is very often completely irrelevant, the reason is that it's not a test, it's a correlation about coincidences. If you look at large groups of people, maybe vegetarians are more likely to be killed in anti-war hippie demonstrations or somesuch, just because the two tend to be associated for some reason. Plus we are talking about very different types of vegetarianism.
If you could show that feeding any animal a diet consisting of exactly the same amount of protein, vitamins, carbs and fat but differing only in meat caused the meat-free animals to drop dead faster, then you would have my attention. But we both know that would not be the case, because all coincidences would be out of the picture.
It's a simple matter of math. There is absolutely nothing you get from meat that you can't get from eating eggs/dairy/vegetables and creatine powder.
You're right. Matter of math. Small handful of world champions are vegetarian/vegan. The majority are not. Just math...
Again, totally irrelevant matter of coincidence rather than cause-effect. It does not mean that sport makes people morally ambiguous. It doesn't. And if you gave that same winning athlete exactly the same amount of nutrients he normally uses, replacing all meat, he will not perform any worse than he did before. Again, simple math/logic. The example you gave however is not math or logic because it's coincidental, not causal and therefore does not logically follow.
You can't say your statement with any sense of certainty. If everyone followed your line of thought, vitamins would never have been discovered - neither would have simulin - neither would have the importance of minerals....
This is an argument by ignorance, saying because we can't possibly know future discoveries, there must be something special, unique and irreplaceable in just meat.
But if anything it's been the opposite with scientific discoveries in nutrition. People clearly knew that something unique existed in some foods, as you had serious diseases if you deprived yourself from vitamin C etc even before we knew it was vitamin C.
But now that we know about vitamins, minerals, proteins, essential fats etc, we actually know they are not so unique to just one food group.
And meat is the least likely to have new magical essential components in the future.
Meat is already so similar to our bodies that it doesn't produce anything we could produce ourselves, only accumulates it from plant sources. Plant sources, on the other hand, produce an incredible amount of very complex and unusual organic molecules, some which are essential and unique or useful (and some poisonous too of course), so yes, you can discover new ones of those all the time in plants, although they will probably have less and less essential roles. You can already live full healthy lives with just the nutrients and chemicals we discovered so far, new ones might have some extra health benefits but you can definitely live without them.
