The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won't improve your health or save the planet

I think it is important to read and really digest this book with an open mind. It is really well researched and covers nearly the whole breadth of the debate. Some of the criticism sighted in other reviews suggest they haven’t read the science carefully enough, and may be feeling defensive of their own personal stance. Who knows having read a lot about this subject maybe I also fall foul of confirmation bias. But this book is really worth all of us reading to see how we have been manipulated over the years by government institutions, big business, and junk food companies to veer radically away from our natural ancestral diet which yes would be highly animal based. The book is also a good primer into the work of many courageous scientists who are pushing against the vegan narrative that has be foisted on us all. Anyway it’s a really good read, while we should all make our opinions about our diet and health this is a good place for a lot of us to start.

The Great Plant-Based Con rightly points out the many faults of a vegan diet: the assumption that it is healthy when it depends on supplements, the view that all land could be turned over to crops when much of it is suitable only for livestock, the artificiality of almond and other milk substitutes which often rely on (effectively) importing water from areas where it is in short supply. It successfully argues that a vegan diet is no more moral than an omnivorous diet.But sometimes it lurches in the other direction. Humans are omnivores and low carb or carnivorous diets are just as bad as vegan. Eating only vegetables would be joyless - but so would be a diet without bread and beer and pizza and pasta.The science, too, is often questionable. I can understand that there is a cow methane cycle, where the cows emit methane and after a while it is broken down to CO2, absorbed by plants, eaten by cows and so on. But if there were fewer cows, the amount of methane in the cycle - and therefore in the atmosphere - would reduce. There are long lists of references but many from the same people.So, yes and no. Extreme diets are wrong, but don't replace one extreme with another. Omnivorous and balanced is best.

Firstly, I should say that I am broadly on-board with the whole food/regenerative farming story – that pasture fed beef and lamb are better for people and planet than chicken or highly processed plant-based food. It’s also fair to say that this book is packed with useful and often persuasive information. But it is ultimately a let down that fails to be honest on key issues.Buxton starts on health and dismisses all evidence that red meat is unhealthy as being base on weak observational studies rather that what we might think of as real science. There’s something in this challenge, but then she spends many pages arguing that plant-based diets are unhealthy based on reams of frankly only anecdotal evidence – even weaker than the studies she derides. Reality: there are plenty of societies where people live well on almost entirely animal-based diets. But there are also nearly half a billion vegetarians in India whose diet (based on serious analysis) is broadly more nutritious than that of India’s meat-eaters, and delivers the required protein levels for fewer calories. The flaw in Buxton’s argument is that she intentionally conflates plant-based diets with ultra-processed food diets ignoring that it is possible to have the first without the second.Moving onto the environment and again Buxton’s sleight-of-hand is clumsy. She argues (correctly) that much of the argument about cows and methane is flawed, (rightly) encouraging those interested to explore GWP* as the appropriate way to calculate the global warming potential of farming’s methane emissions. She makes a good case for the carbon sequestration potential of pasture fed livestock using regenerative farming techniques. But she fails to take on the realities of feed-lot cattle rearing in the US, or to mention that grass-fed beef in the US accounts for only 4-5% of the total market – so the bucolic image of western beef production she alludes to is largely a figment of imagination – she simply refuses to engage with the question of how much pasture fed beef and lamb can be produced for the world within realistic land use constraints. She also completely ignores any questions of animal welfare – other than to say (again, with some justification) that all farming involves killing animals, either intentionally or not – but this point, while valid, is not enough to address the broader issues of animal welfare.Part three of the book deals with how big business is manipulating the media coverage of plant-based food in favour of those set to profit from selling nutritionally suspect, highly processed plant based food. Much of the presentation is valid, but could be said in far fewer pages – I don’t need someone to explain that film-makers sometimes take artistic licence in quite so much detail. Part four is Buxton’s solution to how the world should eat – but by this stage the discerning reader will be taking it all with a pinch of organic, locally-sourced salt.Don’t get me wrong – livestock grazing on pasture has much to commend it – but Buxton’s argument, that all of us should eat significant amounts of pasture fed beef and lamb on an (almost) daily basis in order to protect our health and environment doesn’t stand up – or at least, she hasn’t found the evidence to support it.All of which leads you to conclude, based on the evidence that she does provide, that we can look forward to a healthy, sustainable food future based on whole foods, but that good quality meat will play a smaller, rather than larger, role in that future for the vast majority of people. This isn’t what she wants you to conclude, and she lacks the honesty to say it, but it is the logical conclusion to draw from her evidence. Which makes the book a bit of a con.

Brilliant, informative and very interesting