That’s an oversimplification of the evidence. The strongest associations in nutritional research are usually with ultra-processed foods, excess caloric intake, obesity, alcohol, smoking, low fiber intake, and poor cardiometabolic health overall, not simply “meat bad.”

There’s also an important distinction between processed meat and unprocessed meat. The evidence linking processed meats like hot dogs and deli meats to colorectal cancer is much stronger than the evidence against unprocessed meat, like steak or fish fillets.

Nutrition science also struggles with confounding variables. People who eat large amounts of vegetables often differ in many other ways too: lower smoking rates, more exercise, lower alcohol intake, higher income, better healthcare access, etc. Untangling those effects is difficult.

Even “plant-based” processed foods are not automatically healthy. Many modern substitutes are highly refined products with isolated proteins, emulsifiers, seed oils, sugars, and micronutrient fortification used to imitate the nutrient profile of animal foods. And those are the good ones! The bad ones just slap oat milk on a box put a bunch of water and sugar in it and that's about all it is.

Matching nutrient labels is not necessarily the same thing as matching bioavailability, digestion kinetics, or long-term physiological effects.

A more scientifically defensible generalization would simply be: diets centered around minimally processed whole foods tend to correlate with better long-term health outcomes than diets dominated by ultra-processed foods, regardless of whether those foods are animal- or plant-derived.