How do you reconcile your theory with the fact the vegans are slimmer than omnivores by a large margin? They supposedly changed all animal fat for vegetable oil.
No clue, that would be a tough data point, taken as given that they got skinnier while also using more vegetable oil. I don’t know much about vegans so I’ll look into it, if you had to steelman it what would you say?
Perhaps they switch to oils relatively better for our health such as olive oil. My cursory googling points to this as a possibility.
Fighting the strongest version of this argument: let’s say someone does lose weight replacing meat with lots of soybean oil. If soybean oil primarily induces us to eat more, then veganism counteracts it by vastly reducing the choice set of palatable food, coming out slightly net positive for losing weight. In this scenario you’d expect veganism to be very, very hard to stick to assuming you add a lot of vegetable oil to your diet. In this scenario, veganism would have no special sauce vis a vis other diets, and would actually be a pretty uphill battle to lose weight.
Overall, my arguments would still leave a lot to be desired, the existence of healthy vegans chowing down on vegetable oils would certainly be a net negative for the plausibility of this theory
I could well imagine that there are there are strong selection effects at play (more health-concerned people being more likely to give veganism a shot), and the positive effects of the diet just outweighing the possible slight increase in plant oil usage. And I wouldn’t even be so sure if vegans on average consume more plant oil than non-vegans—e.g. vegans probably generally consume much less processed food, which is a major source of vegetable oil.
How do you reconcile your theory with the fact the vegans are slimmer than omnivores by a large margin? They supposedly changed all animal fat for vegetable oil.
No clue, that would be a tough data point, taken as given that they got skinnier while also using more vegetable oil. I don’t know much about vegans so I’ll look into it, if you had to steelman it what would you say?
Perhaps they switch to oils relatively better for our health such as olive oil. My cursory googling points to this as a possibility.
Fighting the strongest version of this argument: let’s say someone does lose weight replacing meat with lots of soybean oil. If soybean oil primarily induces us to eat more, then veganism counteracts it by vastly reducing the choice set of palatable food, coming out slightly net positive for losing weight. In this scenario you’d expect veganism to be very, very hard to stick to assuming you add a lot of vegetable oil to your diet. In this scenario, veganism would have no special sauce vis a vis other diets, and would actually be a pretty uphill battle to lose weight.
Overall, my arguments would still leave a lot to be desired, the existence of healthy vegans chowing down on vegetable oils would certainly be a net negative for the plausibility of this theory
I could well imagine that there are there are strong selection effects at play (more health-concerned people being more likely to give veganism a shot), and the positive effects of the diet just outweighing the possible slight increase in plant oil usage. And I wouldn’t even be so sure if vegans on average consume more plant oil than non-vegans—e.g. vegans probably generally consume much less processed food, which is a major source of vegetable oil.
Theory: Olive oil is fine and vegans are more likely to cook their own food and so they take a higher olive oil to seed oil ratio than average.