And before you went off on your little rant there, what made you pre-suppose that I am advocating uncooked, "pure vegan" diets? (Geez, given that industrial farming is what is used to grow most vegetables too, and there've been at least two instances of serious contamination on that count in California in the last 2-3 years, one involving spinach - eating uncooked food wouldn't be the smartest thing to do where I happen to live).This is the sort of post which infuriates. You're dealing with educated people here and you assume they're unaware? Do you honestly think the ridicule stems from ignorance?
Seriously, grow up. It's not about 'choosing' to use data, the data is the juice here. There's no serious consensus even on the construct/internal validity of measures used to inform half the stuff some environmentalists use. So, no, the 'evidence' is far from overwhelming.
Just to pick on the Vit B12 example again;
Guess what, the Vitamin B12 in meat products is produced by....
...bacteria. Same way that B12 gets into plant based foods.
You're not going to claim eating plants with the right bacteria will serve B12 needs are you? Because, sorry to say, it ain't the case. If you have access to an academic journal search;
Rauma AL, Torronen R, Hanninen O, Mykkanen H. Vitamin B-12 status of long-term adherents of a strict uncooked vegan diet ("living food diet") is compromised. J Nutr. 1995 Oct;125(10):2511-5.
And the Indian example Redbacks mentioned essentially found that the Indian population only satisfied their VitB12 needs from bacteria because they had drinking water polluted by human faeces.
Albert MJ, Mathan VI, Baker SJ. Vitamin B12 synthesis by human small intestinal bacteria. Nature. 1980;283(Feb 21):781-2.
This furthers the old theory that plant-eating animals satisfy their Vit B12 needs from eating their own faeces. Further confirmed by the classic study where vegans were fed extracts from their own stools (no kidding, wouldn't get past an ethics committee now that's for sure) which stopped their Vit B12 deficiency dead in its tracks;
Herbert V. Vitamin B-12: plant sources, requirements, and assay. Am J Clin Nutr 1988;48:852-8.
This is from a 2 minute OVID search, I saw heaps more.
And, waddayaknow, even pro-vegan sites agree;
Vitamin B12: Are You Getting It? : Are Intestinal Bacteria a Reliable Source of B12?
The point? Even raw food adherents, faecal bacterial crawling all over their food, have to supplement. There's no way you can eat any non-meat foods and get all the B12 you need. Sure you could eat your own faeces but I doubt I'd have to post any studies to prove how bad that would be for you or mention all the other health problems the Indian population in the study above had.
</grump>
EDIT: Not that it matters but I don't eat a lot of red meat, ridiculously expensive anyway. Just tired of the propaganda.
[ BTW I've been talking of vegeterian not vegan, which in the case of most non-meat eating Indians tends to be a lacto-vegeterian diet or even an ovo-lacto-vegeterian diet. My family eats meat very infrequently, and I'm pretty sure that most of our B12 comes from dairy products.].
Go find your bogeymen some other place, me - I'm just trying to keep the planet in good enough shape for my kids. Hope you do not have a problem with that.