Edit: I currently have debilitating pain levels due to a spinal injury, and have been distracting myself with this content, resulting in writing comments increasingly stream-of-consciousness style. I fear my comments have long become increasingly incoherent. Apologies.
***
Third: I also think the responses to your text are a bit all over the text, because the overall pragmatic goal/motivation behind the research question remained unclear.
Like, when it comes to veganism, having concluded that eating vegan would be much better for animal rights and the planet, in order to make my own diet choices and advocacy, these were things I needed to settle and needed data for:
Is it possible for me to live vegan, without compromising my health or happiness significantly? (The data I saw made it plausible enough for me to decide to try in 2009. Actually going vegan and checking my values across 14 years confirmed it, and I found it much easier than expected.)
Is it possible for specific person x (say, a friend of mine) to live vegan, without compromising their health or happiness? (Very probably, but depends on the person. Need to listen to them to understand their individual needs and issues to assist them in making a transition to a point they pick for themselves, to e.g. see if we can still find a particular nutrient if they can’t digest a particular class of food. But for the most part, again, I found people overestimated how tricky it would be.)
Is is sensible for humanity on average to significantly reduce meat consumption? (Definitely yes. Whatever positive role meat may play for some people, the quantities currently consumed are definitely unnecessary and harmful for the planet and health, so advocacy in this direction is likely to promote average health. So getting vegan food into my university cafeteria, or reducing tax breaks for meat producers, is a good idea.)
But none of these questions seem to require the kind of data you are looking for, although I’d be very interested in reading the data regardless if it exists. Like, it is possible that if I take an entire city filled with unhealthy omnivores, and force them to become a 100 % vegan without giving them any information or taking any account of existing health issues, their health would worsen slightly on average, because some of the garbage they ate beforehand happened to contain a key nutrient as well and they no longer eat it now. (No idea if this would happen, but I could imagine it.) But… noone is doing that. (Nor should we. I think there are some people who would not do well on such a diet, I object to coercion, and any major campaign would definitely need education and support.) And if we found huge number of clueless omnivores going 100 % vegan without doing any research, and having their health worsen, my conclusion from that would be “understand what is going wrong, and then advocate for the right supplements or educational policies”. Not “accept that veganism is bad for health in general”, because we have so many examples of vegans who are perfectly fine, so I’d want to understand what sets these individuals apart—and I think, often it will be bad implementation.
I once met a dude who told me he used to be vegan, but he got critically clinically protein deprived despite everything he tried, so he no longer is. I said that surprised me, did he have special issues? Well, no. How curious, what had his diet been like, then? He said, well, seeing as mushrooms are the main vegan source of high quality protein (?!?), he tried to eat mushrooms at least twice a week. I waited for him to continue. That was it. Turns out that this man discovered that two handfuls of mushrooms per week do not, in fact, meet human protein needs. Maybe because 100 g of champignons contain a whooping 2,7 g of protein. My conclusion that day was that that man was an idiot, and that our communities need proper nutritional knowledge in schools. Not that vegan diets cannot provide protein. I assume the same man now runs around and says he and his pregnant wife make sure they get all their folate by making sure they eat chicken nuggets twice a week.
Edit: I currently have debilitating pain levels due to a spinal injury, and have been distracting myself with this content, resulting in writing comments increasingly stream-of-consciousness style. I fear my comments have long become increasingly incoherent. Apologies.
***
Third: I also think the responses to your text are a bit all over the text, because the overall pragmatic goal/motivation behind the research question remained unclear.
Like, when it comes to veganism, having concluded that eating vegan would be much better for animal rights and the planet, in order to make my own diet choices and advocacy, these were things I needed to settle and needed data for:
Is it possible for me to live vegan, without compromising my health or happiness significantly? (The data I saw made it plausible enough for me to decide to try in 2009. Actually going vegan and checking my values across 14 years confirmed it, and I found it much easier than expected.)
Is it possible for specific person x (say, a friend of mine) to live vegan, without compromising their health or happiness? (Very probably, but depends on the person. Need to listen to them to understand their individual needs and issues to assist them in making a transition to a point they pick for themselves, to e.g. see if we can still find a particular nutrient if they can’t digest a particular class of food. But for the most part, again, I found people overestimated how tricky it would be.)
Is is sensible for humanity on average to significantly reduce meat consumption? (Definitely yes. Whatever positive role meat may play for some people, the quantities currently consumed are definitely unnecessary and harmful for the planet and health, so advocacy in this direction is likely to promote average health. So getting vegan food into my university cafeteria, or reducing tax breaks for meat producers, is a good idea.)
But none of these questions seem to require the kind of data you are looking for, although I’d be very interested in reading the data regardless if it exists. Like, it is possible that if I take an entire city filled with unhealthy omnivores, and force them to become a 100 % vegan without giving them any information or taking any account of existing health issues, their health would worsen slightly on average, because some of the garbage they ate beforehand happened to contain a key nutrient as well and they no longer eat it now. (No idea if this would happen, but I could imagine it.) But… noone is doing that. (Nor should we. I think there are some people who would not do well on such a diet, I object to coercion, and any major campaign would definitely need education and support.) And if we found huge number of clueless omnivores going 100 % vegan without doing any research, and having their health worsen, my conclusion from that would be “understand what is going wrong, and then advocate for the right supplements or educational policies”. Not “accept that veganism is bad for health in general”, because we have so many examples of vegans who are perfectly fine, so I’d want to understand what sets these individuals apart—and I think, often it will be bad implementation.
I once met a dude who told me he used to be vegan, but he got critically clinically protein deprived despite everything he tried, so he no longer is. I said that surprised me, did he have special issues? Well, no. How curious, what had his diet been like, then? He said, well, seeing as mushrooms are the main vegan source of high quality protein (?!?), he tried to eat mushrooms at least twice a week. I waited for him to continue. That was it. Turns out that this man discovered that two handfuls of mushrooms per week do not, in fact, meet human protein needs. Maybe because 100 g of champignons contain a whooping 2,7 g of protein. My conclusion that day was that that man was an idiot, and that our communities need proper nutritional knowledge in schools. Not that vegan diets cannot provide protein. I assume the same man now runs around and says he and his pregnant wife make sure they get all their folate by making sure they eat chicken nuggets twice a week.