My Rant on the book The China Study

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I get frustrated with it because it claims that we should be essentially herbivores, and that all our problems will be solved if we just stop eating meat. The author's anger, while somewhat understandable due to the trials and tribulations he has felt that he faces, or feels he faces as he attempts to convince everybody just to eat what he calls a "whole food, plant based diet" ad-nauseum neglects some of the real reasons behind people eating meat. He fails to address that if Socrates had "won" the argument for everybody to be vegan, our world would be very different. Not just in that we have a world of "doctors and lawyers" but also one where everybody would be poorer in materials, endeavors like art and technology would be very different. That vegan has always been a choice available, and people have worked very hard to become not vegan. That people who move to westernized countries choose to change their eating habits towards a western diet, and many westerners who move "east" bring their diets with them (see New Zealand and Australia). That means there is some underlying, multi-generational, human reason for wanting to eat meat. Associations with affluence, with being rich and lazy and fat and happy have gone with being carnivorous for as long as humans have been making lasting impressions. The simultaneous association of being poor and subsisting on vegetables and other plant products is just as deeply embedded in the human consciousness. This isn't an "American" idea or a "European" idea, or even a "modern" idea as the author likes to assume. He even uses the words "subsist" and "affluent" throughout his work to describe the differences between plant based and animal based diet cultures. There should be an example of an affluent nation who eats a plant based diet, while having many different classes and religious groups who eat differing amounts of animal proteins…doing their own scientific studies, having a nutritional based health care system…wait…you totally excluded this country from ALL of your studies. India was not once mentioned. This glaring omission bugged me more and more as I read the book. Yes, it was called the China Study. Yes, it was written by an American. I get that these two countries were the main focus. But you can't just ignore the biggest vegetarian country in the world! If milk and eggs are just as bad as meat, then India should have numbers similar to Greece, Spain and South/Central American countries. If milk and eggs aren’t the culprit, and just meat is the culprit than India's numbers should be about the same as the rest of Asia.
Hmm…instead I found a blog which went deeper into the china study itself, and simply playing with the statistics within the data set provided by Dr. Campbell, she found pretty much enough to show most of the claims which seemed outrageous were. I think I'm done ranting. Interesting perspective. Interesting read. Justification for a vegan diet for whomever would like it without too much "controversy".