I've been vegan/vegetarian in the past, and can only say that sustained veganism, done by the book, gave me serious deficiencies and mental issues; if you're looking for a diet to label 'unnatural', veganism is it. It's essentially an eating disorder. Vegetarianism that includes eggs and/or dairy can be perfectly healthy, though.
I would question the health benefits of any diet based primarily on vegetables. In terms of nutrients available elsewhere to milk, someone mentioned
[
]spinach, broccoli. kale, various seaweeds, all excellent sources of calcium. almonds as well. loads of others.
Something that most people don't consider is that the nutrients in plant foods, particularly vegetables - greens, beans etc. - are outweighed by the array of toxins the plant has produced to prevent itself being eaten. Fruits are generally low in toxins since they are designed to be eaten. Hence unseasoned raw vegetables are disgusting and truly ripe fruit is delicious. Oxalic acid is one of these toxins, present in spinach, broccoli and kale - it binds to calcium (and magnesium, and iron) and prevents its absorption; the ostensible calcium content of these vegetables is not the actual bioavailability. But oxalic acid is only one of a huge number of plant toxins in most vegetables. Goitrogens are particularly nasty, suppressing the thyroid. When I was vegan, influenced by trendy raw food veganism, I thought that since cooking destroys nutrients, it would be better to eat most of my vegetables raw. Result: hypothyroidism. Cooking vegetables thoroughly enough to eliminate these toxins (and break down the fibre) then destroys many of the nutrients they are advertised as containing. Soy is relevant here - the soy consumed historically in Asia was always fermented (as in proper tofu, miso etc.), so as to destroy the estrogenic toxins that are increasingly problematic today. Unfermented soy, as in soy milk, soy oil, soy protein etc. is the problem. Essentially, with non-fruit plant foods, significant processing is crucial, rather than something to be avoided. It's worth noting that almost all rice consumed in Asia is white rather than brown. Processed plants are a source of bulk calories, not nutrients. These come primarily from animal foods.
This article (by an usually erudite and rewarding writer in this field) is particularly incisive on these topics:
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/vegetables.shtml
Richard Wrangham points out in his new book ('Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human') that we can't extrapolate from monkey diets either. Having domesticated animals, bred plants, and cooked our food, we've evolved to find the wild plants they eat almost inedibly bitter/fibrous/astringent/sour.
On dairy, people are right to be suspicious of 'large scale industrialised dairy production'. What the animal is eating is obviously crucial. If other sources of animal protein and fat are available, it's inessential, although its low iron content is more conducive to long term health, particularly for men, than red meat. If people don't 'like' milk, if it isn't genetic, this may simply be due to never having had good milk. Unpasteurised whole milk from animals on pasture is simply one of the most delicious single foods (rarely) available. Infinitely more nutritious than any vegetable, too - especially with the cream, which contains the fat-soluble nutrients A, D, E & K.
It is best to restrict your intake to diary products that are lower in saturated fats, for the purposes of avoiding a cardiologist for as long as possible.
[...]This is undoubtedly true, esp in the U.S.--red meats are high in saturated fat and thus correlate with high rates of heart disease.
The whole saturated fat causes heart disease argument is pretty much discredited now.
e.g.
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/cholesterol_myth_2.html Your sentence gives it away with 'correlated'. Do Americans eat only high saturated fat red meat? Don't we need to examine the diet as a whole? I would argue that saturated fat is by far the healthiest kind of fat to consume.
The opposite of what the FSA would have you believe is in fact true: unsaturated oils - vegetable oils (with the exception of olive oil) and the much-lauded fish oils - are uniquely dangerous.
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturatedfats.shtml
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/fishoil.shtml
http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsuitablefats.shtml
But is there any evidence that people who consume dairy products (and have otherwise reasonably healthy lifestyles) are less healthy than people who don't?
The world's oldest man until his death at 113 few weeks ago Tomoji Tanabe insisted on drinking a glass of milk a day. Quick google gave me this too:
Some data just released by the Medical Research Council (MRC) should create some interesting controversy among medical circles during the next several months. Peter Elwood, director of the Epidemiology Unit at Landough Hospital in Penarth, South Glamorgan, dropped a bombshell. His ongoing life-style study of 5000 men produced some startling and very unpopular findings. He discovered that
men who drank the most full-fat milk and ate butter (rather than margarine) had a lower risk of suffering from heart attacks! (New Scientist 1991; 129(1759):17)
...Elwood's study collected data on 5,000 British men between the ages of 45 and 59 for a period of 10 years. Of those that drank at least a pint of whole milk a day, only 1% suffered heart attacks
also, on the soy-heroes the Okinawans:
Japan is reported to have low levels of death from coronary heart disease but Okinawa has the lowest of all. Yet Okinawa’s cholesterol levels are similar to those in Scotland – much higher than the average in Japan. In 1992 a paper examined the relationship of nutritional status to further life expectancy and health in the Japanese elderly based on three population studies.[Shibata H, et al. Nutrition for the Japanese elderly. Nutr Health 1992; 8: 165-75] It found that
Japanese who lived to the age of 100 were those who got their protein from meat rather than from rice and pulses. The centenarians also had higher intakes of animal foods such as eggs, milk, meat and fish; significantly, their carbohydrate intake was lower than that of their fellow countrymen who died younger. see
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/e...t_uids=1407826&query_hl=7&itool=pubmed_docsum
The Okinawans also historically cooked all their food in lard, not vegetable oil.