Abhijit Banerjee* in an op-ed for the Times of India, asks, “Why then, if not for our primarily (but for the most part, not exclusively) vegetarian diet, is India the stunting and wasting capital of the world?”
In further discussion of the issue, Banerjee mentions IFPRI research, writing, “the recent EAT-Lancet reference diet suggests that people should get 29 percent of their calories from proteins. While there is probably a margin of error, the recent estimate by a team at IFPRI in Delhi led by Manika Sharma that rural Indians get just 6 percent of their calories from proteins has to be worrying. Even the richest Indians in the NSS data get only about half of the recommended amount. The problem, to come back to where we started, is not meat — the Lancet recommended diet is mostly vegetarian — but other, more sustainable proteins.”
* Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-American economist who shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”