Not to dump a bunch of homework on you, but… could I encourage you to write up vegan nutrition tips and tricks on the EAForum? I think imparting the same nutrition culture hardcore vegans get into the wider community of EA vegans would be extremely useful.
And while I’m making a wishlist, I think “optimizing your health per unit animal suffering” would be a good blog series. Organ meats (lots of health benefits, few health costs, lower marginal cow production) certainly seem more justifiable to me than chicken nuggets or egg custard.
(Long nerd rant ahead, I find nutrition genuinely interesting.)
I find it difficult to give general nutrition advice, because good nutrition is such a very individual topic. Eating lots of vegetables is one of the few things with really good support, but depending on the person, they might have huge difficulties digesting them, at which point the benefits become completely outweighed by their constantly digestive issues. I have very bad opinions on high sugar high calorie diets, and know people who do great on low carb, but also people who get absolutely fucked on keto, especially women, and see lower carb lower glycemic index as a good alternative, too. I generally consider fibre and fermentables and wild ferments healthy and very important, but depending on your gut problems, some types can completely screw you. Protein is extremely important, but frankly, the type of people who worry about nutrition often overconsume. Eating a great variety of differently naturally coloured foods is generally a good rule, but if you have serious disease states, you will likely need an elimination diet to get to the bottom of it. The whole idea of particular substances being “easily digestible” or even more so “healthy” very much depends on the individual, and on the quantities—too much of even the healthiest things will kill you. On the other hand, there are a lot of substances that humans do not strictly need, because they can in theory synthesise them, but de facto, you in particular may not be able to. (E.g. I recommend that all vegans supplement algae oil, because humans utterly suck at producing the omega 3 from the precursors you encounter in things like flaxseed, and find it ludicrous for any person in the global North to believe they can synthesise their own D3; but in a lot of people with depression or chronic fatigue, it also makes sense to try to up products that your body ought to be able to synthesise, but may be failing to) But it all depends on where you are, your genes, your microbiome, your allergies, your hormonal cycle. But telling people that it really depends on them individually is often read as “Well, I should just follow my intuition, and live off dessert”, which is a really bad idea. Nutrition has such an incredible impact on health and well-being, I think so many people do not realise how much it holds them back.
Pretty much the only approach I universally recommend to people who do badly (!) is to spend a month tracking everything they eat, weighed (because if you aren’t weighing it, your estimate is worthless) in an online tracker that resolves the core things you are interested in (like protein), incl., if you have any suspicions in that direction from less detailed food diaries previously failing, how it was prepared (for FODMAPs and ferments) and how long it was stored (for histamine content), while tracking well-being parameters, while weighing themselves daily under the same conditions, and comparing very comprehensive blood work before and after. And if their issues are really bad, to start this period with an elimination diet. But the point afterwards where they debug this data to find a solution for them depends on what they are experiencing, how they are feeling and responding. And the solutions themselves also depend crucially on what they want. They need to find the diet tasty, affordable, easy to make, available, it has to make them feel happy and good, otherwise it won’t work, and what people consider doable and pleasant differs a lot. I like my diet, but I think a lot of other people would not.
And the only thing I universally recommend preventably to any vegan, whether they do badly or not, is yearly comprehensive blood work, and reasonable vitamin B12, D3 and algae oil supplementation unless the blood work actively contradicts it—and an awareness that nutrition has the power to make you feel really, really good, and massively impact longevity, in ways that you will really regret taking lightly and fucking up.
Ironically, I see two major forces of potential severe damage among vegans.
The one is the people who literally do not worry about nutrition at all while eating what they must know is garbage. I had a friend I once co-organised a workshop with, which ended with me eating what he did for a day. It was vile. I felt awful. No protein, no fibre, no vitamins, and the amount of sugar I ingested essentially purely, and Jesus Christ, I had no idea vegan fats could be this bad. (Palm fat, if anyone is interested, is one of the few vegan ways to really fuck yourself up with fat, as well as margerine optimised for trans fats. Shortly followed by isolated, super heated plant oils with bad omega 6 ratios, like sunflower oil, that have been heated to deep frying, which my friend was also a fan of. I have literally felt better overeating on goose.) And I thought it was a one-off, and then realised, no, this is what he eats literally all the time. I told him, in detail, that he was setting himself up to be seriously sick in so, so many ways. With concrete studies, and advice, recipes, links, the works. He ignored me. He is now morbidly obese and has nerve damage from lack of B12, as well as severe fatigue and depression, and beyond accepting B12 injections, did not change a thing. I would be very surprised if this man lived to be 70. I had another vegan friend who literally lived of marzipan, French fries, and peanut butter. For what it is worth, I have omni friends like this as well, and they don’t do better for living off bacon and cake; the fact that the theoretical range of foods is much broader is amply made up by the fact that the range of fast food is also much, much greater, allowing you to set yourself up in a complete mess. My mum works with pregnant women, and I have always been confused how any of them manage to get insufficient folate, when it is so abundant in diet. Until I started realising how many people consider five portions of vegetables a day utterly unrealistic. So just being omni is no protection there.
But there is another group that tries to really, really optimise, and those are honestly often just as bad. Had a friend who tried to make her own better huel from scratch. Except she never got a fine scale for the micros, or lab analysis. Caused herself long term damage. (Though come to think of it, I think she was still consuming whey at the time. Did not save her.) Others who drown themselves in so many supplements they actually manage to get nerve damage effects from water-soluble vitamins. (You’d think that is impossible, because the body would flush out the excess. Turns out that reasoning presumes that the quantities consumed are not literally insane.) Or who ingest so much green tea concentrate they give themselves liver damage. Young people who actually enter kidney failure in a bizarre attempt to be healthy. Often out of the strange idea that healthy things are universally healthy for everyone, and that more is always better. This is also the terrifying group that looks at the soy based baby formula they can get in stores, that is perfectly vegan except for the D3, has passed all tests and is perfectly safe, and say… but wait, the D3 isn’t vegan, you know what, fuck this so nearly perfect option, let’s make our own in our dirty kitchen and without any knowledge of pediatric nutrition! And then proceeds to needlessly starve their child to death in the middle of a rich nation, by feeding a growing organism a diet that was developed to help adult humans with a fully developed digestive tract lose weight.
And yet, there is the group I would perceive as the sane ones with reasonable caution, which is in the middle, and the majority. Within the vegan range, they eat a large variety of foods, to cover all their bases, while not hugely overdosing on any one thing. They usually cook from scratch and eat whole foods, but also sometimes eat what I would consider crap. They eat a normal amount of calories, so even if their individual food items aren’t super nutrient dense, they end up getting enough. (If your vegan diet is temporarily only like 800 kcal, then you absolutely need to fucking plan each little bit; but if you are eating full caloric range, that compensates a lot of silliness.) They get a blood test with their regular physical. If they don’t feel well, they take it seriously, and investigate, and then make careful changes based on empirical data, and verify that it helped. I think a lot of them could do better, and get peak health—but I am not worried any of them are about to do themselves any serious harm, and I am definitely not more worried about them than about their omni counterparts. Where I am in Europe at least, this is where most vegans I know seem at, and I don’t worry that badly, or more about them than the omnis.
***
Also, I would be very interested in the whole optimising your health per animal suffering thing. I’m not vegan because I think this is 100 % aligned (not everything non-vegan is unethical, not everything vegan is ethical), but because I think the alignment is close enough that anything running a more subtle division is a bitch to implement socially and practically for me personally, with none of the exceptions crucially relevant for me personally. Like, there are conditions under which I would find eating animal products ethically acceptable, but the cognitive load of telling them apart each time with their unclear sources and arguing for the exceptions just didn’t seem worth it or necessary for me in the end, mostly cause none of them were things I genuinely enjoyed eating, and because “I’m okay eating these waste organs but I do not want them fried in your industrially produced butter” is a path to madness for me. The things I used to really like definitely weren’t in the health necessity camp. The things I have been considering consuming for health reasons certainly aren’t attractive as delicious to me. (Lots of animal connective tissues, for one.) But I know people who do not find this stressful, and live accordingly, e.g. a dude who is mostly vegan, but eats mussels, because he finds them tasty and healthy, is convinced they aren’t sentient, and has a climate friendly harvesting process, and I found his take convincing, a lot of seafood arguably falls in the healthy camp. (I just hate seafood, tastewise.) - I do also think optimising for ethics and health should not stop at being vegan. See palm oil—that stuff isn’t just an atrocity health wise, it is also an atrocity ethically, vegan or not. Growing plants is generally more climate friendly by a significant margin than raising animals, but there are cases where this is inverted.
Also for pet food. I’d really like an optimally healthy and ethical pet food. For some reason, the commercial options are generally either “feed your cat this meat flavoured grain deprived of all moisture and covered in sugar for no reason who knows why she has kidney and dental issues” or “feed your cat this extremely expensive human grade beef steak that she neither needs health wise nor enjoys and that is extremely harmful for the planet and animal welfare and also lacking in key micronutrients, we also threw in a bunch of human superfoods which cats have never historically eaten that have not been tested on cats and might poison them for no bloody reason at all, oh, and we don’t test our food for whether it is complete despite wanting you to feed your cat nothing else, we think this will just be fine because it is all natural and made with love”. I’d fucking love a reasonable option, that optimises not for what sounds good, but for what would actually make sense. But somehow, other vegan animal rights activists do not share my enthusiasm for obtaining animal waste products to feed their carnivore pets. (E.g. you know about this horrifying process where people raise mono chickens just good for eggs and not meat, and hence at birth, sort the chicks and kill all the male ones? Super common, at large scale. Horrid, I hate it, have protested it forever. But I also think… wait, you are saying there are huge quantities of whole small prey animals that are currently being killed and wasted, anyway? This is literally an ideal cat diet. Can I have them? Can we redirect this so the harm is at least a little bit less wasteful and pointless? And yet, I think people wouldn’t want to buy this ethical food consisting of whole chicks and eggshells and so much other stuff that we toss that cats find delicious and good for them.)
Not to dump a bunch of homework on you, but… could I encourage you to write up vegan nutrition tips and tricks on the EAForum? I think imparting the same nutrition culture hardcore vegans get into the wider community of EA vegans would be extremely useful.
And while I’m making a wishlist, I think “optimizing your health per unit animal suffering” would be a good blog series. Organ meats (lots of health benefits, few health costs, lower marginal cow production) certainly seem more justifiable to me than chicken nuggets or egg custard.
Not who you’re responding to, but I’ve just written up my vegan nutrition tips and tricks: http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2023/06/02/vegan_nutrition.html
It’s an open request.
(Long nerd rant ahead, I find nutrition genuinely interesting.)
I find it difficult to give general nutrition advice, because good nutrition is such a very individual topic. Eating lots of vegetables is one of the few things with really good support, but depending on the person, they might have huge difficulties digesting them, at which point the benefits become completely outweighed by their constantly digestive issues. I have very bad opinions on high sugar high calorie diets, and know people who do great on low carb, but also people who get absolutely fucked on keto, especially women, and see lower carb lower glycemic index as a good alternative, too. I generally consider fibre and fermentables and wild ferments healthy and very important, but depending on your gut problems, some types can completely screw you. Protein is extremely important, but frankly, the type of people who worry about nutrition often overconsume. Eating a great variety of differently naturally coloured foods is generally a good rule, but if you have serious disease states, you will likely need an elimination diet to get to the bottom of it. The whole idea of particular substances being “easily digestible” or even more so “healthy” very much depends on the individual, and on the quantities—too much of even the healthiest things will kill you. On the other hand, there are a lot of substances that humans do not strictly need, because they can in theory synthesise them, but de facto, you in particular may not be able to. (E.g. I recommend that all vegans supplement algae oil, because humans utterly suck at producing the omega 3 from the precursors you encounter in things like flaxseed, and find it ludicrous for any person in the global North to believe they can synthesise their own D3; but in a lot of people with depression or chronic fatigue, it also makes sense to try to up products that your body ought to be able to synthesise, but may be failing to) But it all depends on where you are, your genes, your microbiome, your allergies, your hormonal cycle. But telling people that it really depends on them individually is often read as “Well, I should just follow my intuition, and live off dessert”, which is a really bad idea. Nutrition has such an incredible impact on health and well-being, I think so many people do not realise how much it holds them back.
Pretty much the only approach I universally recommend to people who do badly (!) is to spend a month tracking everything they eat, weighed (because if you aren’t weighing it, your estimate is worthless) in an online tracker that resolves the core things you are interested in (like protein), incl., if you have any suspicions in that direction from less detailed food diaries previously failing, how it was prepared (for FODMAPs and ferments) and how long it was stored (for histamine content), while tracking well-being parameters, while weighing themselves daily under the same conditions, and comparing very comprehensive blood work before and after. And if their issues are really bad, to start this period with an elimination diet. But the point afterwards where they debug this data to find a solution for them depends on what they are experiencing, how they are feeling and responding. And the solutions themselves also depend crucially on what they want. They need to find the diet tasty, affordable, easy to make, available, it has to make them feel happy and good, otherwise it won’t work, and what people consider doable and pleasant differs a lot. I like my diet, but I think a lot of other people would not.
And the only thing I universally recommend preventably to any vegan, whether they do badly or not, is yearly comprehensive blood work, and reasonable vitamin B12, D3 and algae oil supplementation unless the blood work actively contradicts it—and an awareness that nutrition has the power to make you feel really, really good, and massively impact longevity, in ways that you will really regret taking lightly and fucking up.
Ironically, I see two major forces of potential severe damage among vegans.
The one is the people who literally do not worry about nutrition at all while eating what they must know is garbage. I had a friend I once co-organised a workshop with, which ended with me eating what he did for a day. It was vile. I felt awful. No protein, no fibre, no vitamins, and the amount of sugar I ingested essentially purely, and Jesus Christ, I had no idea vegan fats could be this bad. (Palm fat, if anyone is interested, is one of the few vegan ways to really fuck yourself up with fat, as well as margerine optimised for trans fats. Shortly followed by isolated, super heated plant oils with bad omega 6 ratios, like sunflower oil, that have been heated to deep frying, which my friend was also a fan of. I have literally felt better overeating on goose.) And I thought it was a one-off, and then realised, no, this is what he eats literally all the time. I told him, in detail, that he was setting himself up to be seriously sick in so, so many ways. With concrete studies, and advice, recipes, links, the works. He ignored me. He is now morbidly obese and has nerve damage from lack of B12, as well as severe fatigue and depression, and beyond accepting B12 injections, did not change a thing. I would be very surprised if this man lived to be 70. I had another vegan friend who literally lived of marzipan, French fries, and peanut butter. For what it is worth, I have omni friends like this as well, and they don’t do better for living off bacon and cake; the fact that the theoretical range of foods is much broader is amply made up by the fact that the range of fast food is also much, much greater, allowing you to set yourself up in a complete mess. My mum works with pregnant women, and I have always been confused how any of them manage to get insufficient folate, when it is so abundant in diet. Until I started realising how many people consider five portions of vegetables a day utterly unrealistic. So just being omni is no protection there.
But there is another group that tries to really, really optimise, and those are honestly often just as bad. Had a friend who tried to make her own better huel from scratch. Except she never got a fine scale for the micros, or lab analysis. Caused herself long term damage. (Though come to think of it, I think she was still consuming whey at the time. Did not save her.) Others who drown themselves in so many supplements they actually manage to get nerve damage effects from water-soluble vitamins. (You’d think that is impossible, because the body would flush out the excess. Turns out that reasoning presumes that the quantities consumed are not literally insane.) Or who ingest so much green tea concentrate they give themselves liver damage. Young people who actually enter kidney failure in a bizarre attempt to be healthy. Often out of the strange idea that healthy things are universally healthy for everyone, and that more is always better. This is also the terrifying group that looks at the soy based baby formula they can get in stores, that is perfectly vegan except for the D3, has passed all tests and is perfectly safe, and say… but wait, the D3 isn’t vegan, you know what, fuck this so nearly perfect option, let’s make our own in our dirty kitchen and without any knowledge of pediatric nutrition! And then proceeds to needlessly starve their child to death in the middle of a rich nation, by feeding a growing organism a diet that was developed to help adult humans with a fully developed digestive tract lose weight.
And yet, there is the group I would perceive as the sane ones with reasonable caution, which is in the middle, and the majority. Within the vegan range, they eat a large variety of foods, to cover all their bases, while not hugely overdosing on any one thing. They usually cook from scratch and eat whole foods, but also sometimes eat what I would consider crap. They eat a normal amount of calories, so even if their individual food items aren’t super nutrient dense, they end up getting enough. (If your vegan diet is temporarily only like 800 kcal, then you absolutely need to fucking plan each little bit; but if you are eating full caloric range, that compensates a lot of silliness.) They get a blood test with their regular physical. If they don’t feel well, they take it seriously, and investigate, and then make careful changes based on empirical data, and verify that it helped. I think a lot of them could do better, and get peak health—but I am not worried any of them are about to do themselves any serious harm, and I am definitely not more worried about them than about their omni counterparts. Where I am in Europe at least, this is where most vegans I know seem at, and I don’t worry that badly, or more about them than the omnis.
***
Also, I would be very interested in the whole optimising your health per animal suffering thing. I’m not vegan because I think this is 100 % aligned (not everything non-vegan is unethical, not everything vegan is ethical), but because I think the alignment is close enough that anything running a more subtle division is a bitch to implement socially and practically for me personally, with none of the exceptions crucially relevant for me personally. Like, there are conditions under which I would find eating animal products ethically acceptable, but the cognitive load of telling them apart each time with their unclear sources and arguing for the exceptions just didn’t seem worth it or necessary for me in the end, mostly cause none of them were things I genuinely enjoyed eating, and because “I’m okay eating these waste organs but I do not want them fried in your industrially produced butter” is a path to madness for me. The things I used to really like definitely weren’t in the health necessity camp. The things I have been considering consuming for health reasons certainly aren’t attractive as delicious to me. (Lots of animal connective tissues, for one.) But I know people who do not find this stressful, and live accordingly, e.g. a dude who is mostly vegan, but eats mussels, because he finds them tasty and healthy, is convinced they aren’t sentient, and has a climate friendly harvesting process, and I found his take convincing, a lot of seafood arguably falls in the healthy camp. (I just hate seafood, tastewise.) - I do also think optimising for ethics and health should not stop at being vegan. See palm oil—that stuff isn’t just an atrocity health wise, it is also an atrocity ethically, vegan or not. Growing plants is generally more climate friendly by a significant margin than raising animals, but there are cases where this is inverted.
Also for pet food. I’d really like an optimally healthy and ethical pet food. For some reason, the commercial options are generally either “feed your cat this meat flavoured grain deprived of all moisture and covered in sugar for no reason who knows why she has kidney and dental issues” or “feed your cat this extremely expensive human grade beef steak that she neither needs health wise nor enjoys and that is extremely harmful for the planet and animal welfare and also lacking in key micronutrients, we also threw in a bunch of human superfoods which cats have never historically eaten that have not been tested on cats and might poison them for no bloody reason at all, oh, and we don’t test our food for whether it is complete despite wanting you to feed your cat nothing else, we think this will just be fine because it is all natural and made with love”. I’d fucking love a reasonable option, that optimises not for what sounds good, but for what would actually make sense. But somehow, other vegan animal rights activists do not share my enthusiasm for obtaining animal waste products to feed their carnivore pets. (E.g. you know about this horrifying process where people raise mono chickens just good for eggs and not meat, and hence at birth, sort the chicks and kill all the male ones? Super common, at large scale. Horrid, I hate it, have protested it forever. But I also think… wait, you are saying there are huge quantities of whole small prey animals that are currently being killed and wasted, anyway? This is literally an ideal cat diet. Can I have them? Can we redirect this so the harm is at least a little bit less wasteful and pointless? And yet, I think people wouldn’t want to buy this ethical food consisting of whole chicks and eggshells and so much other stuff that we toss that cats find delicious and good for them.)