> The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided
From my personal sifting through research, it seems there's a lot of correlation with different diets which shows people with more health problems often have an animal based diet and people with less health problems often have a more pesceterian diet.
What is absolutely not clear is any of the cause/effect. It's also unknown of the nuances.
For example, what else correlates with those? It often is true that people with pesceterian diets are from specific isolated genetic lineages. It is also often true that when they're not, they tend to be individuals that pay much more attention to their overall health, making sure they don't eat too much, eat high quality produce (organic, wild caught, etc), exercise more, and often are more financially wealthy.
Personally I agree with you, but I also agree with the opposite:
> The idea that vegetables/fruits/nuts/seafood products are unhealthy seems to be misguided
Historically, we've always consumed all these things. Meat, seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, seeds, human lineage ate all of this for a very long time. Why would any of it be bad for us?
More recently as I've been thinking about this, I'm wondering if it's more related to our modern production of those things, and our changing consumption habits.
Take meat for example, the meat we eat today is very low quality. The animals are themselves unhealthy, fed garbage food, and have a lifestyle unlike their natural one. Can we compare the effect of eating unhealthy meat to healthy meat? We know grass fed beef has way more nutrition than non grass fed beef for example, so there's clearly major differences between eating one or the other.
Now take vegetables, we've not been hard pressing canola into an oil extract and consuming it in high quantity before. This is a modern change.
In fact, I don't even think canola is a plant we would have eaten the seeds off in the past.
So my current thoughts are that low grade produce and processed foods might have a lot more to do with it. And all of the "diets" no matter if you think they are a fad or which affinity you have will emphasize this point: Avoid processed foods and try to get the highest quality ingredients.
In the past, we'd probably eat an animal that had eaten canola itself and processed it for us, and we'd get the canola nutrients through eating the animal.
But also, we wouldn't be eating animal all the time at the quantities we do now. Because winter, and hunting is hard, and lack of preservatives. But also because once we became sedentary, meat was expensive and most people could afford very little of it.
And like I said when we did, it would be this very high quality meat. Very different from what we eat today.
We also wouldn't be consuming all these processed vegetables byproducts, like oils. Appart from those that were very easy to extract, like Olive oils. Everything else that requires modern industrialization to extract it was probably consumed in much less processed forms, such as eating the seeds themselves, or grinding a much smaller amount and getting much smaller amount of oil out of them.
Modernity has brought major changes in that all foods are now of a lower quality, and come in a much more processed form. It made a lot of foods more accessible which mean eating as much as we do is also a modern change. And it allowed us to modify the proportions of what we'd eat, like way more sugar and salt, way less veggies and fruits. In my opinion these are the more consistent factors. So from my readings, I currently conclude the best course of action for your average healthy person is to eat less food overall, eat unprocessed foods of the highest quality (organic, grass fed, wild caught, etc.), In mostly equal quantity of each kind (based on calories), like consume the same calories of meat, fish, veggies, fruits and grains.