>What about non-meat cultures such as the vegetarian Hindus in India?  I
>believe their tradition of vegetarianism goes back many generations.  Do they
>have high levels of these autoimmune diseases?


They have significantly higher rates of them than any hunter/gatherer
peoples, but lower incidence of them than most Americans and others in
industrialized nations.

Possibly this is in part due to the fact that they aren't eating the
processed, homogenized, devitalized junk foods so common in the west.
Possibly it has something to the fact that they don't tend to live as long
in general as Westerners, with large numbers of them being wiped out
regularly by malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, elephantitis, syphilis, and
etc.

Malnutrition in general a serious problem in all countries in which
vegetarianism is rampant.

It's also difficult to find countries in which widespread cultural
vegetarianism is really a voluntary thing.  Most Hindus are not vegetarian
by choice; they have religious problems with eating -certain- animals, but
will happily eat any of the non-sacred animals.  The problem is that most
are too poor to be able to get their hands on any meat.  Hindus whose
religion forbids the eating of any meat at all are a fairly small minority.
In general these are -not- the healthiest people on earth.

I happen to know a researcher readying a paper on the effects of the forced
vegetarian diet of many Hindus over the last 2,000 or so years.  Hopefully
the paper will be published in the next six months or so, it should be very
worth discussing.