I'm partway through a series recounting the physical evidence we actually have about the evolution of our ancestors' diet...the index is here. 

Meanwhile, note that there is a major difference between "how much meat we require to stay alive in a modern world with free access to highly processed grain products" and "how much meat we require to stay alive in the Paleolithic world in which we evolved, in which we had access only to living foods, and in which we had only minimal and portable technology to process them."  Paleolithic people didn't have access to highly concentrated sources of refined carbohydrates (note: even "whole grain bread" is a highly refined food), and calories must come from somewhere.

JS

I imagine our ancestors ate an animal when they could catch it.  Also, I think it depends on how much of that steak someone is eating and how lean that steak is (a tenderloin is much leaner than a ribeye).  Most steaks/animal meat aren't all protein, they come with a certain amount of naturally occurring fat.

Who knew butter could be an act of civil disobedience?

Alex M:

That's a great article.  When so much money is at stake (especially sunk costs), it's quite profitable to cheat.

JS

Funnily enough everyone just went over the border to buy their fat foods cheaper and the small business lost out, of course.

The more I read about it, the madder I get, so I better stop now and go eat some bacon.

Any excuse to raise taxes is generally met with support by certain elements of the government. Hopefully the repeal of the saturated fat tax denotes the high water mark of the diet-heart hypothesis, and we can actually start making forward progress.

JS

Yippeee

Raw Food SOS is brilliant, and it's where I direct anyone who tells me to read The China Study or Forks Over Knives.

There's also some good information at Beyond Vegetarianism, and Let Them Eat Meat explores the ethical dimensions of veg*anism vs. omnivorism.

JS

These articles seem to come out every year or two: yet another mining of the same known-bad data sets to produce another spurious association between reported meat consumption and something negative.

I think the latest one purports to show that meat-eaters beat their wives more often (not kidding).  Of course, the Third Factor in play is that vegetarians are many times more likely to be college-educated and of higher socioeconomic strata, and therefore much less likely to engage in domestic violence.

JS