Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword (1999) [pdf]

I, personally, began experiencing this myself. If I'm eating healthy, I can add in cereal. If I'm not, I feel physically horrible eating cereal. So I just avoid it and try to eat healthy meals all the time. Keeps my productivity and mood high, and you would not believe how good my skin looks when I've been eating plenty of vegetables for the last week.

At the moment, believe it or not, Soylent is vegan.

One thing I've noticed in lots of diet advocacy literature is that you'll find statements like "this nutrient is available in that food" without ever specifying the amount or how much you have to eat to make up for the lack of meat/gluten/whatever the diet is trying to keep you from eating.

Quite often people will then build up meals in that diet thinking that they'll have all of the various nutrients they need, but it turns out it doesn't have sufficient concentrations of certain important ones. And you would have to eat multiple kilograms of the replacement food to get enough of the nutrient to be useful.

The amount of nutrition and food science somebody has to know to live healthily on an alternative diet can sometimes be staggering.

The crowd is generally right about things. Over the last 10,000 years or so, everyone with the resources to do so has adopted a omnivorous diet. You offset the cost of meat and fresh fruits with grains. There's a reason that you'll get a potato and asparagus with your $50 steak at a restaurant.

In our society today, we've created a desert in a sea of abundance. We have the ignorant and lazy getting by on a diet of cheap bread, ramen and sugar fortified with vitamins. Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.

You're conflating a "vegetarian diet in a developed nation" with a "diet that has severely limited food options", and making it seem as though a vegetarian in a developed nation would have a hard time remaining healthy. This is misleading.

It is at least as easy to be a healthy vegetarian in a developed location as it is to be a healthy omnivore in the same location.

You are also conflating "vegetarian diet" with "cereal-grain heavy diet" which is also misleading when applied to the developed world. Vegetarians in much of the developed world have effectively unlimited access to non-cereal grain foods, and there are many excellent vegetarian zinc sources (nuts, seeds, and beans among them).

In short: This paper cannot usefully be applied to the eating habits of people in developed nations in the way that you are applying it, because it is based primarily on the premise of a diet that is heavily cereal grain based, by necessity, which is not a description that matches the population you're attempting to apply these results to.

> It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you eat meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients.

And, this one is just inaccurate. A balanced vegetarian diet in the developed world is no more difficult than a balanced omnivorous diet in the developed world. A fully vegan diet does introduce the necessity to think about B12, as it is not readily available in a vegan diet.

There's vast swaths of solid science indicating that reducing meat consumption has positive health impacts. Only when you read it through the lens of a "paleo" diet fanatic does one interpret the data to mean the opposite.

The quote you gave refers to cereals specifically, not vegetarian diets in general. Fruits and vegetables are very high in a wide variety of nutrients and I would argue that it's far easier to eat an all vegetarian diet vs an all meat diet. Sadly, bacon just doesn't have the nutritional profile of spinach.

EDIT: Just for the heck of it, here's spinach vs bacon at similar calorie counts:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=spinach+2.3lb http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bacon+0.1lb

And I'm just using spinach as an example...A vegetarian diet should have a wide range of fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. and you should do your research on it before starting.

It depends on how you define meat. I'm a vegetarian, and it doesn't seem to be hard to get enough zinc without eating beef, chicken, etc.

http://bembu.com/foods-high-in-zinc

Eat some shrimp, spinach, peanuts, etc and you should be good. I've been test a number of times and haven't had a problem with zinc.

I cannot access that link, but I think it's important to note that the subject of the publication is mainly cereal grains (seeds of gramineae). Other sources of carbohydrates (such as root vegetables) have very different nutritional profiles (e.g. many are a source vitamin C). Chris Masterjohn has written about the consumption of starch among hunter-gatherers.

The civil war claim is pretty weak. There was no refrigeration in those days (at least in the field). The soldier's provided nutrition mostly came from hardtack and salted pork/bacon/beef. They also had stuff like dried peas and beans. At some point the union soldiers had some access to condensed milk.

The soldiers bought stuff (or were preyed upon) by various camp followers selling more stuff.

Generally speaking, the South had a weak supply chain, so they were more often to go without. I think that fact spoke more to the eventual Union victory.... industrial economies can absorb more punishment than a agrarian slave economy.

Bioavailability is rather complicated: for any given nutrient it can be enhanced by the presence of certain other nutrients but diminished by others.

Your comment also ignores phytonutrients* (which includes flavonoids and some anti-oxidants) and the effects of diet on gut flora, both of which topics we are just beginning to understand.

This is why, until we really understand the nitty-gritty of all of the hundreds (thousands?) of chemicals contained in food and how they interact, the best recommendations involve eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked.

* http://extension.psu.edu/health/news/2012/the-importance-of-...

This article points out problems with unbalanced vegetarian and vegan diets. A balanced one is not that hard to achieve, there are many good resources that give you examples of such varied diets. If well done, supplements are unnecessary apart from vitamin B12. Even B12 doesn't need to be in pills: vegans can get it from marmite/vegemite, and vegetarians from eggs and diary.

That being said, it's still advisable to check for deficits, of course.

I hope the claim was based on more than "The Union won". Otherwise we can say:

The Union soldiers wore blue. The Confederate soldiers wore grey. The Union won. The conclusion is obvious.

> Of course, people still need protein. You won't get that from a cheap vitamin pill, and it's tricky to do right with a vegan diet

Not really - lentils, beans, peas, seeds, nuts, tofu and tempeh are all good sources of protein.

ouch, my brain.

Nice !

It's not really a paradox, though, because "being a double-edged sword" is a comparison that's being made with regards to the decision of using that particular single-edge sword.

And "being a single-edge sword" here is a technical description of the physical object.

But that quote is something worth writing down somewhere.

You're kidding, right?