Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
> He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator.
If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves.
> Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
I heard that's mostly a myth
edit:
there was apparently different Pythagoras, who was a boxer.