Oddbean

doctors are trained monkeys. they can only tell you what they were taught. and what they were taught is meat = bad, and they were taught that because calorie for calorie meat has 10X more carbon footprint than plant food ( plus factory farming is unethical ). also they can't tell you that you're fat because they don't want to offend you, and also if you lose weight they will lose a customer. even if protein can trigger a gout attack ultimately when you die it will be from obesity and diabetes and not from Gout. Gout is your wake up call that tells you that you have bigger problems ( like heart attack and stroke ) coming down the line. Your response should be to lose weight, not to cut out protein. Cutting out protein of course is actually likely to make you gain weight because protein is more satiating than carbs.

not eating meat because you have Gout is like taking blood pressure meds because you have high blood pressure it's treating the symptom the underlying cause in both cases is obesity address the root cause or die

Vegetarians historically did it for ethical reasons. Pythagoras because he believed animals have souls, Plato too, Benedictine monks ate fish because fish don't care for their young so the parents won't be upset if you eat their children (!), etc, etc. Even Alex Gleason does it for ethical reasons. YET epidemiological studies show vegetarians living a very long time, and it's pretty obvious when you know a lot of them (I grew up a Seventh Day Adventist, many of my ancestors lived to about 100), and track health gurus and see the vegetarians living past 100 but the meat heavy promoters dying in their 60s. I've got a huge list of people, it's super obvious, but people just refuse to accept it because IMHO they like to eat meat, so their active brains construct reasons and logic to defend this position... which is the common backwards way most people think. I'm not saying a little meat is bad. It isn't. Pure vegetarianism has problems with iron, B-12, protein quality, and probably other things. That's why I'm not a vegetarian. And while I agree with Pythagoras that animals have souls (that is to say, they are conscious aware beings)... they don't after they are dead. After they are dead, they are meat, which is good as a food.

there is something called "healthy user bias" that confounds these epidemiological studies. namely in a society in which it is believed that meat is unhealthy and vegetables are healthy those who are health conscious will eat vegetables and those who are not will eat meat and the result will be that vegetarians will live longer than meat eaters simply because they are more health focused overall. by contrast if you look at different cultures / nations ( as opposed to different individuals within same nation / culture ) then Koreans eat the most meat ( they eat dogs too ) and live the longest ...

That is a good point. Also, I'm far more skeptical of the ability to correct for confounders than, say, Walter Willett is. For example, once they found a confounder and adjusted for it and their results changed massively, and an interviewer asked them about this problem, and they just tried to play it down. But clearly, getting the confounders correct is essential... and also impossible. Nonetheless, I'm also not convinced that this is entirely explanatory. Koreans are small. It is well known that within a species, the smaller individuals live longer. (Between species, the larger ones live longer). So that one is confounded too.

You are both correct, and there are ways for my mom and I to maintain our dietary perculiarires/sovereignty when with the broader family without influencing or drawing needless attention to how much rice or plantains we put on our plates vs how much meat and legumes are on the plate.