Kialo is a site, where people discuss in comments and can add arguements and counter-arguements to each topic. Both arguements and counter-arguements can be further supported with pro claims and other counter-arguements to endless depth. You vote them up or down depending on the relevance and your subjective opinion. One of the biggest latest discussion is about meat, especially its consumption. Let me share my viewpoint on this topic.
Currently, counter-evidence slightly outweighs the idea. Humans should carry on eating meat according to the participants. I understand this as we have been eating animal products for some thousands of years now, or even longer. Trends like veganism or vegetarianism appeared in the recent decades. I am sorry vegans, people of Ancient India used to eat very different diet to our new-age vegan diet. And it included meat.
I can fearlessly say that there has never been a civilisation, which survived without eating meat etc. Some false evidence speaks of great philosophers and physics being vegans, but if we stick to truth and logic, they weren't. They could restrict meat and dairy. But they could not afford to be B12 defficient. And consuming Chlorella, which is an only plant proven to give humans bioavailable (useful, active) B12 to the best of my knowledge, was so rare.
On the other hand, since we have supplements and chlorella, some good and accurate evidence speaks of Whole Food Plant Based Diet being the healthies option for us. The China Study discovered that if people take over 10% of our energy (calories intake) from proteins, rapid exponential growth of cancer occurence for each another 1% of protein can be observed. They have also found various biomechanisms how exactly it works.
Increase of toxicity of some cancer causing substances, or increase of cells division to a level, where cells can not fix themselves before they are divided, therefore dividing themselves in a broken state are just examples.
What is the relation of these findings to the topic? I mean plants also contain protein. Well, they do but they contain much less of it on average. And most importantly, these findings were true only for animal proteins. Nothing really bad was observed if extra plant-derived protein was give to people.
Another fact to bear in mind when thinking about meat is a portion. Seventy years ago, before the invention of fastfoods or supermarkets, the portions of meat were far smaller. Nobody could afford to fill their whole plate with meat. At least not the ordinary folk. Seven thousand years ago, meat was even less available. If hunt failed, humans had to stick to plants. If the hunt succeeded, they are bigger portions. But for a limited time!
My very own opinion is that meat can be removed from the ones diet. It is not necessary though. If you agree to restrict it to the amount, our ancestors were able to farm and eat. Commercial meat is worse due to the content of antibiotics, growing hormones and other stuff you don't want to even hear.
I usually eat meat just once a week for lunch. When it comes to protein only, I use leucine supplement, which is a rare amino-acid (a building stone for proteins). This specific amino-acid exerts huge influence on muscle growth and sustainment. It can not hurt me as my total protein intake is close to recommended 8% (rec. according to The China Study).
As you can see, I don't even mention moral reasons. In nature, it is very common to eat other species...
Let me know what do you think in the comments!