LadyConstanze
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Joined: 2/18/2005
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You know a hell lot more about it than I do, I basically just stumbled over a few articles in library, a few guys who tried to get compensation, doctor's reports, etc.
But regarding some points you made above...
1) Pre-natal care would be relevant because it also leads to mortality in women and women dying in childbed, childbed-fever and such was a common cause of death, so it might account for a fair share of early deaths in women (remember that it was not unusual for men to have been widowed several times because the wife died while giving birth or after)
3) Better healthcare also means better monitoring, in a time when the solution for any illness was "Bleed them" and only the very wealthy could afford doctors, what were the chances that somebody got sound nutritional advice from a doctor or a doctor said "Oh, you're suffering from anemia, you need to have more iron..."
Actually I would agree that health care possibly was better in say ancient Greece than it was in the Middle Ages, the church made sure a lot of great medical works were burned because those heathens tried to heal when god alone decides who's to live and who's to die.
4) Alright, but how likely are you to find the bones of hunters and gatherers that died very young because they were killed by wild animals? Hunting was quite high risk.
5) Uhhhh their life-span was considerably shorter, life expectancy has risen dramatically over the last few centuries, hunters and gatherers usually didn't get to be very old (no medical care, an appendix was certain death, being gored by a wild boar was death, freezing to death in winter, a broken bone was most likely to leave you crippled and die earlier...) it's easier to have a full set of teeth with 20 or 30 than with 70 or 80. If you want to look at teeth I would say look at the Middle Ages, most rulers who had lots of meat had gout (I believe they called that rich man's disease) and were missing most of their teeth because they were also the ones who could afford to eat lots of sugar. That's a bit like saying "Oh, people in Ethiopia hardly have high cholesterol levels, they must be all very healthy."
I think in general the poor people had a lousy diet and terrible living conditions, hygiene was not something the Middle Ages were known for, if you eat what you can get and not starving to death is a challenge, you don't give much thought to a balanced diet, that's a luxury you simply can't afford (apart from the fact that they possibly didn't know much about nutritional facts).
Another thought, people on farms possibly didn't eat that much more meat, most animals (apart from pigs) were kept for their by-products (milk, eggs, etc.) or as work animals, only when they stopped being of any other use, they were used for the pot, meat was a pricy luxury very few could afford on a regular basis.
So I would take the results of your research with a grain of salt ;)
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RE: The health effects of vegetarianism... - 
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