{"id":102811,"date":"2026-09-02T01:00:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102811"},"modified":"2026-09-01T11:32:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T15:32:56","slug":"qotd-the-great-natural-experiment-in-plant-based-eating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-the-great-natural-experiment-in-plant-based-eating\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The great natural experiment in plant-based eating"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 25px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>India is the great natural experiment in plant-based eating, and almost nobody wants to run the numbers on it.<\/p>\n<p>It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as a national experiment for thousands of years.<\/p>\n<p>The result. Around a third of its children are stunted, the largest share of the world&#8217;s stunted children of any nation. The Indian Dietetic Association reports 84% of the country&#8217;s vegetarians are protein deficient, against 65% of its meat eaters. And the nation that eats the least meat is the diabetes capital of the world, with over 100 million diabetics.<\/p>\n<p>Before anyone blames poverty, a <em>Journal of Nutrition<\/em> study found a vegetarian mother predicted stunting across every wealth bracket, rich families included. The diet was carrying its own weight.<\/p>\n<p>Bioavailable iron, zinc, B12 and complete protein build a child&#8217;s skeleton. Strip them out and it comes out smaller. The animal fat, meanwhile, got swapped for refined grain, sugar and seed oil. India is now the world&#8217;s biggest vegetable oil importer, per-person intake tripled since 2001.<\/p>\n<p>The diet sold to the West as optimal human nutrition has been run here, at the scale of a billion people, for longer than the West has existed. It did not produce optimal humans. It produced the largest population of stunted, diabetic, protein-starved people on earth.<\/p>\n<p>Sama Hoole, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/SamaHoole\/status\/2060960474749976819\" target=\"_blank\">The social media site formerly known as <em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, 2026-05-31.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>India is the great natural experiment in plant-based eating, and almost nobody wants to run the numbers on it. It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[74,66,7,23,41],"tags":[713,838],"class_list":["post-102811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-health-science","category-history","category-india","category-quotations","tag-biology","tag-hinduism"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qKf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104548,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102811\/revisions\/104548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}