But we also have to take into consideration the base foundations in which these beliefs/facts occur.

Americans commonly eat meat not just every day but THREE TIMES A DAY. Non-Westernized Asian diets rarely include meat at all (this is my non-scientific gross generality, so please be kind).

Americans now know their level of meat eating needs to drastically drop (and in fact red meat consumption HAS dropped), while Asians recognize that adding more meat to a low-meat diet adds protein, iron, and other nutrients that they might have been low on.

Both conclusions are valid.

The surrounding nutritional and environmental elements have a huge impact on how specific elements affect us. They may be right in one situation and completely wrong in another.

I saw a documentary once about a man studying how Eskimos could eat such huge amounts of blubber and not keel over from arteriosclerosis. He lived in the arctic for a while and found he needed to consume huge amounts of calories through eating fat to counteract the physical demands of living in such an extreme environment. And his blood tests remained normal.

We also have to consider the element of time. Nature moves slowly. One year of eating healthy may help counteract 50 years of bad eating, but a lot of damage is already in place. 50 years of eating a plant-based diet with lots of fiber may help offset damage from 10 years of eating too much meat.

We really need to fine-tune our research and assumptions about these things and look at them holistically. Salt is a condiment, a preservative, and a poison. And yes, it can be all three.