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A thought as a reaction to a discussion on veganism of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast:
It does not seem right that being healthy as a typical omnivore is costless wheras being healthy as a vegetarian is very costly at least in terms of doing your research. If you want spend no thoughts on your food and have maximum convenience, that is not the same as taking health into account.
What I find confusing is that people talk about things like "balanced diet" and "eating a little of everything" as a solution to designing your diet. No, it is not enough to say that you need to draw randomly from a set, if you do not describe what the set looks like and what metric you use to choose randomly.
Imagine an alien species that can consume green circles, green squares, or red triangles. Does "balanced diet" refer to 1/3 green circles, 1/3 green squares, and 1/3 red triangles? Or does it refer to 1/2 green meals and 1/2 red meals, with green meals being 1/4 green circles and 1/4 red squares? Or maybe we should classify the triangles as acute, right, and obtuse, and then the balanced diet is 1/5 green circles, 1/5 green squares, 1/5 red acute triangles...?
Exactly the same thing applies to human diet. How much of everything is one supposed to eat? If you say something like the same amount from each category, then it depends on whether you have e.g. "vegetables" and "grains" and "berries" as separate categories, or one "plant-based" category. Etc.
A) our diets evolved together with our bodies over a very long time.
B) eating whatever you like from the things that are offered in a modern supermarket is healthy (or at least healthier than a standard vegetariqn diet).
Yet B does not follow from A.
It could also be true that
Eating meat was fitness-maximizing under conditions of hunter-gatherer food scarcity, but it is unnecessary today. (Similar to bacalao or pemmican, which may both be useful under certain conditions, but no necessary part of a modern diet. )