<i>This review draws from 204 studies, 20 of which you have cherrypicked one-line statements from.</i><p>There are more studies. How many would be an &quot;enough&quot; number to convince you that it is not trivial to achieve optimal health on completely meatless diet?<p>My point is that there are many vegetarians and vegans in imperfect health and lacking certain vitamins &#x2F; minerals. To make a blanket statement that they are all doing it wrong would be to fall into &quot;No true vegetarian&quot; fallacy.<p><i>Complexity of course exists, but not in the dishonest sense that you implied in your initial comment. What I am telling you, and anyone else that is listening, is that as of 2009 experts in the field have concluded that it is absolutely practical to be healthy on a well planned meatless diet, notional doctor and newspaper strawmen be damned.</i><p>So at least you agree that complexity exists. My disagreement lies in that I do not think it is &quot;absolutely practical&quot; to be healthy on a meatless diet. Your own words &quot;well planned&quot; suggest that there is an expectation for a person to be aware of all potential deficiencies one can experience on a meatless diet, and to have enough nutritional knowledge to plan ones diet around these deficiencies. While possible, it is not something I expect from an average person to do. An average Western person, unfortunately, does not even have enough knowledge in nutrition to keep a healthy weight, which is a much easier task compared to tracking micronutrients.<p>A practical thing would be to include at least some meat (I agree that most people in the west eat more than strictly necessary) and to avoid a lot of overhead, unless one really wants to study the subject.