I was talking with someone who said that folks recommending the diet like that suggested on these forums ignore all the studies showing the health benefits of meat no matter what. Would you agree at all? This was the gist of my response...
Careful study of the overwhelming bulk of the quality literature does not suggest that any meat (or other off-plan foods, including refined plant foods like oil and sugar) improves health when it replaces anything in a minimally processed and naturally low-fat plant based diet with a recommended reasonable variety of foods. This is what would have to happen to show that meat or anything is truly health-promoting: if a significant amount of it replaces a significant amount of foods in the most health-promoting diet known, and shows an improvement or no change.
Of course if you replace donuts with wild game you could see an improvement. Of course if you replace a nutrient deficient diet with a diet that includes meat and is nutrient-sufficient, you might show an improvement. But the test for any food -- to see if it is in fact recommendable over (or in addition to) what we think is best -- is to displace something with it and see an improvement. And to show that something is no better or worse than something else it must replace it and cause no change or a drop in health.
That's why it's even misleading to recommend replacing carrots with more kale, or bananas with more apples, when the person is already eating a good diet. Because even if a study showed an improvement when using those foods to replace something less healthy, doing so has not yet been shown to make a clinically significant improvement when the diet is already good. A lot of studies showing something to be better try to do so by replacing something harmful with something slightly less harmful (especially in an already poor diet). The appropriate comparison is important.
