Vegans need to eat just enough Meat—emperically evaluate the minimum ammount of meat that maximizes utility
Once I talked to a person who said they were asexual. They were also heavily depressed and thought about committing suicide. I repeatedly told them to eat some meat, as they were vegan for many years. I myself had experienced veganism-induced depression. Finally, after many weeks they ate some chicken, and the next time we spoke, they said that they were no longer asexual (they never were), nor depressed.
I was vegan or vegetarian for many consecutive years. Vegetarianism was manageable, perhaps because of cheese. I never hit the extreme low points that I did with veganism. I remember once after not eating meat for a long time there was a period of maybe a weak, where I got extremely fatigued. I took 200mg of modafinil[1], without having any build-up resistance. Usually, this would give me a lot of energy. But then I was barely able to enter some terminal commands to transcribe some of Rob Miles’ videos with a whisper such that he could add better captions. Another day I took 30mg of lisdexamfetamine[1:1] which would usually last the entire day and have a pretty strong effect, but this time I got so tired after 3 or 4 hours that I had to lay down and take a nap.
But then I ate some tuna. And felt a lot better the next day. Some time later I did a blood test that indicated iron deficiency as a probable cause.
But even when I take a lot of iron supplements and eat my soybeans (which contain a lot of iron) with bell peppers (which contain Vitamin C, which boosts iron absorption) I still notice a big difference when I eat meat after a long period of abstinence.
So here is my proposition. If you are working on AI alignment then what you think with your brain is very important. If don’t usually eat meat you might be missing some important nutrients that would help you think significantly better. As somebody who didn’t eat meat until my body screamed into my ear from 5 inches away, I think I understand why you don’t want to eat meat. But if you do the expected utility computation is it actually worth it?
What if it makes you only 5% worse at thinking? Is whatever animal suffering you prevent worth the tradeoff in reduced probability of saving the world? What about 10%? What about 50%? Don’t answer this question in the abstract. Instead, I recommend the following experiment:
Eat 7 days in a row a large amount of meat. E.g. 1kg of chicken every day. (Start with a lower quantity on the first day. My body sometimes does weird things when starting to eat meat after long abstinence.) The goal: Gather data. You want to eat too much meat (more than you likely end up needing) to make sure that if you are missing any nutrients, you’ll definitely get them by the end of the week, such that you can notice an as large as possible difference. While doing this experiment write a journal (ideally starting at least a couple of days before you start to eat meat) in which you precisely document:
Every 2 hours:
How you feel.
How much energy you have.
How easy is it to focus.
How well did you slept.
For each point give a 0-9 score, plus prose comments where appropriate.
This generates a lot of data on how much of a positive impact eating meat has.
If meat didn’t have a positive impact: Congratulations, you can continue not eating meat. And now you know that this is actually the correct thing to do, because you are not missing out cognitively.
If meat had a positive consider the following options:
Just start eating meat.
Research what exactly it was that was missing before from your diet such that you don’t eat meat. You’ll end up not eating meat, but eating meat was useful in noticing that something was wrong with your diet.
Combine the previous two approaches. Eat meat but try to minimize how much meat you eat by improving your diet over a longer duration. This way you don’t need to fix it all at once. I still haven’t managed to do fully do this after spending at least 20 hours on this (probably much more).
Important: Consider that you can minimize animal suffering by eating less meat. I’d guess usually people eat more than the optimal amount of meat (which I think is can even be unhealthy). If you eat 20% (this is a random guess) of what people eat on average it might be sufficient to avoid any negative nutritional side effects, while still reducing animal suffering.
It’s much easier to be fundamentalist about not eating meat. It makes things simple. Saying “Never eat meat, it’s evil” is quite simple, and an easy rule to follow. Saying “Animal farming is terrible, and how we treat “food animals” is one of the greatest moral failures of our time. But AI is gonna destroy the universe. You are trying to prevent this, and possibly not eating meat negatively effects how well you can utilize your brain. So you need to eat meat now first to figure out if there is a nutritional problem, and second to fix that nutritional problem if required. Because that is actually what maximizes the expected utility of getting a good future. But because animal farming is actually terrible you want to minimize the amount of meat that you eat.” This is much harder to act upon. It boils down to “Hey, you don’t know what’s best! You’d better run a bunch of experiments to find out.”
The heme iron in meat is absorbed better than the non-heme iron in iron supplements, but Impossible Burger has heme iron. It’s very frustrating that this biotech advance of in vitro heme production is so far only used for this specific brand of meat substitutes but that’s the situation. I’m not sure why iron supplements didn’t work for you, as that same paper shows that even non-heme iron is absorbed well when blood iron is low, but maybe it depends on the individual? In any case, and I promise the company isn’t paying me to say this, I recommend Impossible burgers to vegans. It has to be this specific brand, they have the patent. There was another company with a heme production patent but they recently shut down.
Why do you care about how effectively the iron in iron supplements gets absorbed? The iron that’s not absorbed just gets flashed out. Can’t you just supplement more to get what you need?
I’m replying to a post that said they lacked energy despite iron supplementation. Maybe it wasn’t iron deficiency, or maybe it could have been solved by raising the supplement dose, I don’t know, but if it was iron deficiency and the supplements weren’t helping then it’s good to know you can get iron in the same form as in meat from Impossible burgers.
Or try to buy lab grown meat paste? I am given to understand that they are expensive but available
On most axes except cost (i.e. ethicality, health, antibiotics exposure) replacing chicken here with beef is better.
The reason I mention chicken is that last time I ran this experiment with beef my body started to hurt really bad such that I woke up in the middle of the night. I am pretty sure that the beef was the reason. Maybe something weird was going on in my body at the same time. However, when I tried the same one week later with chicken I didn’t have this issue.
I want to push back a little in that I was fully vegan for a few years with no negative side effects, other than sometimes being hungry because there was nothing I would eat and annoying my friends with requests to accommodate my dietary preferences. I even put on muscle and cut a lot of fat from my body!
I strongly suspect, based on experience with lots of other vegans, that vegans who struggle with nutritional deficiencies are bad at making good choices about macro nutrients.
Broadly speaking, the challenge in a vegan diet is getting enough lysine. Most every other nutrient you need is found in abundance, but lysine is tricky because humans mostly get that amino acid from meat. Getting enough isn’t that hard if you know what to eat, but you have to eat enough of it in enough volume to avoid problems.
What does it take to get enough lysine? Beans, lots of beans! If you’re vegan and not eating beans you are probably lysine deficient and need to eat more beans. How many beans? Way more than you think. Beans have lots of fiber and aren’t nutrient dense like meat.
I met lots of vegans who didn’t eat enough beans. They’d eat mushrooms, but not enough, and lots of other protein sources, but not ones with enough lysine. They’d just eat a random assortment of vegan things without really thinking hard about if they were eating the right things. It’s a strategy that works if you eat a standard diet that’s been evolved by our culture to be relatively complete, but not eating a constructed diet like modern vegans do.
Now, I have met a few people who seem to have individual variation issues that make it hard for them to eat vegan and stay healthy. In fact, I’m now one of those, because I developed some post-COVID food sensitivities that forced me to go vegetarian and then start eating meat when that wasn’t enough. And some people seem to process protein differently in a way that is weird to me but they insist if they don’t eat some meat every 4 hours or so they feel like crap.
So I’m not saying there aren’t some people who do need to eat meat and just reduce the amount and that’s the best they can safely do, but I’m also saying that I think a lot of vegans screw up not because they don’t eat meat but because they don’t think seriously enough about if they are getting enough lysine every day.
I ate tons of beluga lentils. Sometimes 1kg (cooked) a day. That wasn’t enough. However, now I switched to eating 600g (cooked) soybeans every day, and that was a very significant improvement (like solving the problem to 75% or so). Soy is a complete protein. Soy beans are also very cheap.
huh, i think this may be the first time i’ve heard this, lysine is not mentioned[1] in examine.com’s vegan nutrition guide (ways to access: 1, 2).
actually, it’s mentioned once in passing in this excerpt:
If lysine is your problem but you don’t want to eat beans, you can also buy lysine supplements.
If someone has gone so far as to buy supplements, they have already done far more to engineer their nutrition than the vegans who I’ve known who struggle with nutrition.
Is there really no data on this already?
Are we not at the point where any effects can be reduced to nutritional content which can also be intaken in vegan ways? After all, things are fundamentally made of things much smaller than the level of analysis of “meat” or “not meat”.
This post is unfortunately not useful to me as the suggestion seems based on the anecdote of someone who was iron deficient, so approximately no evidence in either direction for me, as I already knew of that class of people, and it’s not infeasible to intake iron; for me, a useful version of the post would focus on the above two questions.
I think running this experiment is generally worth it. It’s very different to read a study and to run the experiment and see the effect yourself. You may also try to figure out if you are amino acid deficient. See this comment, as well as others in that comment stack.
I’d be willing to eat animals if I thought that could help me help others more effectively.[1] So I appreciate the post where you try to provide some relevant evidence, and I really appreciate your commitment to do what’s expedient for helping you save me, the people I love, and countless others from disaster—because that’s clearly where you’re coming from.
Otoh, my health seems unusually peak, despite the (somewhat unusual) vegan[2] diet I eat, so it seems unlikely I’m suffering from a crippling deficiency atm. This could be because either me or my body has somehow managed to compensate (psychologically or homeostatically) for whatever’s lacking in our diet, but it seems more likely that the peak-health thing is something that requires an adequate diet, so my guess is that I can’t un-inadequate it by eating animals?
My crux is just that I don’t have the self-experimentation setup to be able to detect the delta benefit/cost of eating animals, and that the range of plausible deltas there seems insufficient for me to invest in the experiment.
Sorry for confusementedly writing. I’m mainly just trying to reflect here, and wanted to write a comment to stabilize my commitment to go to extremes (like eating animals) in order to pursue altruism. I’d be happy if somebody convinced me it was worth the experiment, but this post didn’t bop me over the threshold. Thanks!
(I’d also be willing to murder random people and cook them for the same reason, if I thought that could help me help others more effectively. That seems less likely, however, for nutritional, practical, and psychological reasons. I just mention it because I think some morality-declarations are helpfwl.)
If people want to add to their anecdata, my details are:
vegan for 12 years.
major history with major depression (started before).
deep depressions stopped (afaict, so far) when I started taking ADHD-meds (first LDX, and now DEX) 2.5 years ago.
this is confounded by other simultaneous major life changes, like starting coworking on EA Gather Town (and meeting person I respected & Liked, who told me I wasn’t insane for thinking different, and taught me to trust in myself ^^), so take the anecdata with grains of salt.