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Originally Posted by WereBear
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Quoting this, because of something I noticed in the plant proteins/glaucoma article, and it ties into where the protein comes from.
[Also, please don't take this the wrong way. It's not in any way meant to be racist, or some kind of ethnic profiling or religious discussion.]
According to the attribution at the bottom of the glaucoma article, the author is a Dr from India, and it says that he writes and edits medical articles regularly. In this process, he reviews and verifies all studies used in those articles. So whatever data he analyzed,
what it said to him is that the ones who avoided glaucoma ate plant based protein, not animal based protein.
The reason I specify that his analysis of the data says plant based protein is best is kind of a long story. A few years ago, a friend who is from India was told she was borderline diabetic, and her Dr told her to cut down on carbs. So she asked me for help in figuring out what she could eat that would help her cut down on carbs, because pretty much everything she ate was on the minimize/do not eat list.
I mentioned one thing she could definitely eat that wasn't carby was meat - she said that she's a vegetarian, and doesn't eat meat. But as the discussion continued, she said she eats pork and poultry, but doesn't eat beef, because she's a vegetarian.
This was the first I'd ever heard of someone identifying as vegetarian singling out only beef as being meat. But as we talked, I realized this was definitely not some kind of mental disconnect. I got the clear impression that hogs and chickens are somehow... simply
not meat in her culture and religion, so ok for them to eat. She's highly educated, so there's no question that she fully understands that hogs and chickens are part of the animal kingdom - it's a matter of not considering them to be meat, which is why I think it's some kind of cultural thing in India to not consider chicken and pork to be meat.
This very well may not be universal among people from India (for that matter, may only be her particular region of India), so it's entirely possible that the author of the glaucoma article was counting all animal products as meat. But the point is that there's a possibility thatjust like my friend, the author of that article may also not consider them to be meat either... which means there's a possibility that when reviewing the data from the food questionnaires, he put chicken and pork consumption in some other food category. I don't know what other category he could possibly put them in, because clearly they're not plants, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't consider them to be non-meat, which could be reflected in his analysis of the data.
To us it looks like he's trying to push a vegan diet, but that's not necessarily the case, if he doesn't put poultry and pork in the meat category, because of a religious and cultural definition of meat.
Just something to think about.