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[DJ]

Avoiding organ meats isn't a Western thing, it's a USA thing. Liver, kidneys etc are quite popular in most of Europe.

I can't argue with the diet planning thing. But yeah, given equal consideration, I think that a diet that includes all the major food groups would beat one that excludes some.

[G-Flex]

Avoiding organ meats isn't a Western thing, it's a USA thing. Liver, kidneys etc are quite popular in most of Europe.

I can't argue with the diet planning thing. But yeah, given equal consideration, I think that a diet that includes all the major food groups would beat one that excludes some.

"Food groups" are a pretty arbitrary concept. What matters is actual nutrition; "food groups" are just a way (and a fairly culturally-specific way) to achieve that. It's not really that difficult for a vegetarian diet to be nutritionally complete, especially if you aren't going totally vegan.

[kaijyuu]

Most nutritional concerns for vegetarians/vegans come from not eating enough in volume, not variety. A strictly planned diet is far from necessary so long as you eat more than 3 things and have more than 1 meal a day.

[Bauglir]

Right. That's generally true, to be fair; particularly with fortified flour being so ubiquitous, you tend to get most of the nutrients in meat from grain products. Still, even structuring a diet to avoid meat in particular helps.

The main thing with avoiding meats being "possibly better" is that there's some stuff in them that is actually unhealthy to eat in excess (mostly higher cholesterol and saturated fats than vegetables, although that's not a 100% sure thing, given the variety available in vegetation and the different parts of the animal you can eat). In the USA, at least, meat consumption tends to be far higher than is nutritionally required to get useful nutrients, so beyond that it's just the stuff that's a problem in excess.

There's also the part about charred meat causing cancer (like everything, only this one's actually pretty significant; only smoking is a more significant factor, if I recall toxicology correctly), but cooking methods can avert that. It's less meat, and more about what you do with it (IIRC, you get something similar, but less potent, by charring non-meats; the really dense protein is a big player). Seriously, though, either boil your meat (sauces are good for this) or fry it in oil, stopping before it chars. At least for your usual meals, the odd barbecue now and then isn't really going to affect your odds. This paragraph based on a grad course I took nearly a year ago, so take it with a nutritionally appropriate grain of salt.