PSA: if you are vegan, you might not know you are at increased risk of certain nutrient deficiencies; read (this link) to find out more and see your doctor if you have (list of symptoms) or want to get tested
I did. I also provided tests and supplement suggestions (none of which, AFAIK, led to anyone resuming animal consumption), and tried to get the ball rolling on vegans helping vegans. I kept getting pushback, public and private, that felt extremely epistemically uncooperative. People did not necessarily outright say “everyone can switch to veganism naively and suffer no trade-offs”, but the things they did say only made sense if that were true. This post is an attempt to get clarity on a fairly narrow question. I get why it feels loaded, but anything less blunt or less focused got rebuffed in obfuscated ways.
I love the Adventist study and hope to get to a deep dive soon. However since it focuses on vegetarians, not vegans, and I think those are very different, I don’t expect it to update me much about veganism. I also don’t think it will be informative about uninformed diets or transitions, since these are people growing up a culture that holds their dietary choices rather than switching.
The cardiac RCT looks very interesting, I will need some time to dig into that. Before I do, are there any flaws you want to declare ahead of time? Is this a paper you personally put high confidence in?
I see it did cite a specific vegan hazard ratio, however that ratio is tied with pescetarianism in men, and well above both pescetarianism and 1/week meat consumption in women. If you take this at face value it suggests small-but-present meat consumption, in addition to millk and eggs, are good for women, and fish at least is good for men.
[Note that the pescevegetarian and semivegetarian categories include unlimited milk and egg consumption]
Given the wide and greatly overlapping confidence intervals for all diets among women, it might be more fitting to interpret these tables as suggesting that “animal product consumption pattern doesn’t seem associated with mortality among women in this sample” than that “small-but-present meat consumption, in addition to millk and eggs, are good for women.” Based on the data presented, a variety of diets could potentially be optimal, and there isn’t a big difference between them. I think this fits my initial conclusion that veganism isn’t obviously bad for your health ex-ante if you supplement e.g. B12.
@Natália Coelho Mendonça I would really appreciate a reply or at least acknowledgement of my comment here. I took your initial comment to be a very strong endorsement of the paper in ways I think make a reply a fair request.
I did. I also provided tests and supplement suggestions (none of which, AFAIK, led to anyone resuming animal consumption), and tried to get the ball rolling on vegans helping vegans. I kept getting pushback, public and private, that felt extremely epistemically uncooperative. People did not necessarily outright say “everyone can switch to veganism naively and suffer no trade-offs”, but the things they did say only made sense if that were true. This post is an attempt to get clarity on a fairly narrow question. I get why it feels loaded, but anything less blunt or less focused got rebuffed in obfuscated ways.
I love the Adventist study and hope to get to a deep dive soon. However since it focuses on vegetarians, not vegans, and I think those are very different, I don’t expect it to update me much about veganism. I also don’t think it will be informative about uninformed diets or transitions, since these are people growing up a culture that holds their dietary choices rather than switching.
The cardiac RCT looks very interesting, I will need some time to dig into that. Before I do, are there any flaws you want to declare ahead of time? Is this a paper you personally put high confidence in?
That’s not true. The Adventist study I cited explicitly calculated the mortality hazard ratio for vegans, separately from non-vegan vegetarians.
(I’ll reply to the questions in your last paragraph soon).
I see it did cite a specific vegan hazard ratio, however that ratio is tied with pescetarianism in men, and well above both pescetarianism and 1/week meat consumption in women. If you take this at face value it suggests small-but-present meat consumption, in addition to millk and eggs, are good for women, and fish at least is good for men.
[Note that the pescevegetarian and semivegetarian categories include unlimited milk and egg consumption]
Given the wide and greatly overlapping confidence intervals for all diets among women, it might be more fitting to interpret these tables as suggesting that “animal product consumption pattern doesn’t seem associated with mortality among women in this sample” than that “small-but-present meat consumption, in addition to millk and eggs, are good for women.” Based on the data presented, a variety of diets could potentially be optimal, and there isn’t a big difference between them. I think this fits my initial conclusion that veganism isn’t obviously bad for your health ex-ante if you supplement e.g. B12.
[Details here.]
@Natália Coelho Mendonça I would really appreciate a reply or at least acknowledgement of my comment here. I took your initial comment to be a very strong endorsement of the paper in ways I think make a reply a fair request.
Oh cool, I misread a comment from the author.