One to two fifths of Indians are vegetarian [1]. The majority eat meat.
You misread the quote. Less than 30% consume meat regularly; 30% consume it infrequently.
Aside from the fact that red meat is not particularly nutritious in terms of calories or nutrient variety and has well established health hazards for us, the density of nutrition doesn't matter. The resources needed to produce a certain amount of calories / 'nutrition' involved do.
Beef has just about the worst possible resources-to-calories/'nutrition' value of any mass-produced food. The amount of water, land, and feed that goes toward growing cattle until they're old enough to go to the slaughterhouse is enormous compared to grains, legumes, nuts, chicken, fish, etc. Legumes often are a more complete source of "protein", which is actually several variations of protein.
And then there's cattle being the number one source of methane in the world, and methane is a major greenhouse gas.
>a mostly vegetarian country like India is heavily reliant on the milk that comes from cows for their protein requirement.
Legumes like chickpeas and lentils are far more likely than the more resource and labor intensive processes involved in dairy/cheese.
If you think otherwise you apparently don't do much grocery shopping.
Though I also contest the claim that animal foods are more nutrient dense compared to plants while singling out one nutrient.
What about nutrients like vitamin C, fiber, and vitamin E? What about averaging their %RDA across all nutrients per calorie or gram like the "All Targets" column on Cronometer?
Plant-based foods would rank above animal products in such a comparison.
[0]: https://chefscornerstore.com/blog/high-protein-vegetables/
500 calories (150g) of TVP (soy chunks) has 100%+ of each EAA while 500 calories (200g) of steak is sub-100% in three EAAs. The soy chunks also have 25g more protein than the steak. I use it in all recipes that call for ground beef as it's similar is texture.
The 500 calories of soy chunks also has 59% of the day nutrition while the steak only has 47% (source: Cronometer).
Seems to me that if you're going to bring up a concept like incomplete protein (which I think is a nonsensical concept), you'd have to bite the bullet on steak being incomplete and plant protein being superior.
I dismiss the concept because we aren't limited to 500 calories per day. But if we were, I'd rather be stuck with TVP.
Animal proteins are generally more complete, containing all essential amino acids, which is more difficult to find with plant protein.
> and has well established health hazards for us,
Mostly correlative studies, I wouldn't call them well established.
> The amount of water, land, and feed that goes toward growing cattle until they're old enough to go to the slaughterhouse is enormous
These stats are fairly deceitful. Cattle are raised on low quality "marginal land" that would otherwise not be able grow proper crops. Cows with their four stomachs can digest rough grasses that grow there, making the otherwise useless land useful. Generally when you hear the "amount of water" required to raise a cow, this is simply rainwater. These headlines that get thrown around imply a massive amount of resources being diverted away from growing crops to raise cattle instead, but that is completely false.
> densely nutritious
No, plant products are far more dense in proportion to water, fertilizer, land, and energy used to produce them. 10x the plants are required to get 1x the meat.
* The density of protein is not important at all. What is important is that you get the sufficient daily amount of protein, which is easily achievable by eating plant-based foods only.
* It is a myth that the "amino acid spectrum" is not always complete. Plants contain all essential amino acids, and as long as you aren't on a strict white-rice diet, you'll get everything you need from a modest variety of foods.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
At equivalent mass, red meat has 30% the protein of seitan.
If you're going to pick one nutrient of comparison (which doesn't even make sense since we need more than protein), why wouldn't you compare foods that are dense in that nutrient? Would you accept someone comparing tofu to pig skin to conclude that plants massively dominate animal flesh in protein?
Let's pretend you can only eat 500 calories per day (which is usually part of the weird implication in these claims). Seitan gives you 100%+ of all EAAs except one (70%). A steak gives you 100%+ of the EAAs except for three (85%, 80%, 77%). Seitan also contains double the total protein of the steak.
Wouldn't you have the bite the bullet on steak being nutritionally deficient if seitan is?
If that's not good enough for you, we could look at another protein dense plant-based food: TVP aka soy chunks. 500 calories of soy chunks have 100%+ of the EAAs, 25g more protein than steak, in 50g less food than steak.