Cherry Picking

Presents one contested hypothesis as settled, while competing accounts centred on cooking and on starch remain live in the literature.

Rests on the minority position in the literature and presents it as the settled view, while the body of evidence has moved in the other direction.

Prices the diet from meat substitutes and speciality products rather than from the staples that make up most of what is actually eaten.

Isolates one crop associated with plant-based foods while omitting the fact that most of its production is grown to feed livestock.

Selects the most water-intensive plant milk and treats it as representative of plant-based options as a whole, while the comparison that matters is with the product it is replacing.

Counts the sequestration side of the ledger and not the methane, and uses figures from the best-performing systems rather than typical ones.

Selects the accounting boundary that yields the smallest number, from among several defensible ones.

Rests on the limiting amino acid within a single food, while what determines adequacy is the diet as a whole.

It leans on one small cross-sectional study that points one way. Meanwhile it sets aside prospective cohorts and meta-analyses that measured fibre before diagnosis and point the other way, and it rejects larger studies as 'only observational' while relying on a weaker observational design itself.

Lists the compounds concentrated in animal foods and passes over those concentrated in plants, presenting one side of a comparison as though it were the whole of it.

Selects the single outcome where an animal food looks protective and presents it as the verdict, while total cancer incidence and cardiovascular outcomes in the same cohorts point the other way.

Focuses on one variable (absorption efficiency) and leaves out the outcome data, which is what the claim is really about. Lower absorption and higher deficiency rates are different things, and only the first is true.

Cites the deficiency research while omitting the part that settles the question: that supplemented individuals do not show the effect.

Presents Platonism as uniformly accepting meat-eating. It leaves out the meatless healthy city of the Republic, the Pythagorean influence on Plato, and Platonists like Porphyry and Plutarch who argued explicitly against killing animals for food.

It invokes a greater-good calculation but tallies only the benefits to humans. It leaves out the suffering and deaths of the animals, which the framework requires counting, and the climate and public health costs to humans themselves.

Selects the permissive passages and passes over those enjoining mercy, restraint and stewardship, which bear directly on how animals may be treated.