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Comment by slothtrop | Hacker News Reader

Also, health and nutrition. Among health nuts many who consume meat advocate reducing intake whilst increasing legumes and veg. Even aping the popular aggregate "blue-zone" diets and the Mediterranean diet (the most researched of all) will lead to more restricted meat consumption than the standard western diet permits.

For those who like to heavily politicize diet, this is a perspective that gets buried by absolutists who like to identify as either pro/anti-meat. Silly.

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Avoiding meat consumption eliminates all dietary cholesterol intake, which is awesome for heart health.

A lot of that has been debunked with regular exercise. Many of the plaques and fatty deposits can be linked directly to high carbohydrate and high processed sugar diets in combination with sedentary lifestyles. That's been shown with the prevalence of putting type one diabetics on cholesterol medications in their upper thirties or lower fourties, as a practice, regardless of any other factors due to free sugars in their blood streams. Dietary cholesterol hasn't shown much of a spike in cardiovascular cholesterol at all, on recent studies, to be honest.... let me see if I can find the studies and I'll try and link it, if it wasn't behind a paywall. It might have been a Johns Hopkins, and I think they are paywalled.

There is a new-ish study that made waves which suggests dietary cholesterol does have a link to heart disease. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30874756

I take a middle view that too much cholesterol is probably best avoided but I don't think it demands being dispensed with. And just because we "don't need it" doesn't mean there aren't benefits, like a testosterone boost.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024687/

There's also eggs, which aren't 'meat' though have high levels. But yes reducing dietary cholesterol is one of the benefits. Skinless chicken breast has about 91mg cholesterol to 100g of chicken which isn't much. The daily allotted amount recommended by most guidelines is higher than that.

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