More Millennials Are Having Strokes

Beans, nuts and tofu may be 'good' vegetable sources of zinc but they're still awful compared with meat. You'd have to eat 2.5 cups of baked beans every single day to maintain recommended daily intake.

(Not concern-trolling, just a vegetarian who was disgruntled to discover how easy it is to become zinc deficient, after specifically asking a GP if I needed to take any supplements, and was told no. I take a 25mg daily supplement now.)

Source: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-HealthProfessional/

How can a vegan diet be more balanced? It lacks diversity which as far as I understand is the primary foundation for good healthy diet. Many different things in not too much quantity.

He mentioned that they're not very careful about what they eat. Regardless of the diet, you have to pay attention to what you're consuming, otherwise you're going to have problems.

It's actually pretty rare to eat too much meat. Meat is expensive, despite subsidies. Unless you deliberately go out of your way to eat lots of meat, you won't be eating that much.

Furthermore, the combination of meats, vitamin D-added milk, and enriched cereals, the latter two courtesy of the FDA who have centuries of history fighting malnutrition, and who for example introduced hominy grits to the South to combat pellagra, tends to hit everybody's basic nutrition requirements with the exceptions of dietary fiber, vitamin C, and potassium. While good health is still dependent on eating a variety of vegetables, it's important to give the US food system its due -- it produced pretty good results before the modern Age of Excessive Sweeteners.

Eating a diet largely based on plants but with meat every now and then has all the benefits of a purely plant based diet but without the problems

This is true, but the bioavailability of non-heme iron is 14-18% of heme iron https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iron-HealthProfessional/

It makes sense to just eat a balanced diet.

What is the "standard american diet"? Are you talking junk food which is certainly a bad diet? Or are you talking about the food plate/pyramid which is definitely a good diet?

Some vegetarians in developing countries do not have a B12 problem (which also causes anemia) because their food and water are more dirty, and there (B12) bacteria producing. For those vegans at least, their best bet is to accidentally eat enough food contaminated with bacteria or feces to consume decent quantities of B12.

Source: The Dietitian's Guide to Vegetarian Diets, 3rd edition, 2011. See page 192.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eJ10HoYQ2woC&pg=PA183#v=on...

Actually, there are higher incident of B12 deficiency in Indian vegetarians as found by a study done in late 90s (sorry I don't have specific reference).

Indians dont have a practice of regular/ preventive doctor visits, annual checkup and diagnostic testing. They only go to doctor when there are significant medical issues. So these issues are not found until they morph into bigger problems.

I have a quite a few younger cousins who died in their 30's. Not a single one ever was tested for cholesterol despite poor eating habits and obesity.

Recently I noticed a few startups in India focusing on diagnostic testing. But their user base seems to still be elderly than young people.

India also has an established traditional eating pattern which is supportive of health and good nutrition. For example, cumin seeds are extremely high in iron, and make their way into lots of Indian cuisine. The mineral content of seeds generally isn't very bioavailable, but the extensive wet grinding and precooking of spices followed by cooking with starch and acid is a nearly ideal (and quite impressive) technique to convert locked-up metal phytates to bioavailable citrates and lactates. That prehistoric Indians were able to figure this out suggests that it brought significant benefits.

> This is surprising to me, as in India a large part of the population is vegetarian. We don't seem to be susceptible to the same problems.

In India, vegetarians typically do eat dairy products (although not eggs). Dairy doesn't contain a ton of iron and cobalamin (vitamin B12), but it's a non-negligible amount, and it's possible that that alone accounts for the difference. Remember that vegetarians in India also eat a ton of lentils, which are a great source of iron when consumed in large quantities.

(While it's hard to ingest the full daily recommended amount of each from dairy products alone, an otherwise-healthy individual can make do with a lot less than the recommended levels without developing anemia).

Vegan is a lot more restrictive than vegetarian though- I know many Indians who are vegetarians, but I don't think any of them are vegans.

Indians eat a fuck ton of dairy and eggs. Vegetarian diets aren't a problem -- human cultures have not eaten meat since basically forever. However, vegan diets are a modern thing. No civilization has ever adopted a completely vegan diet.

How do people with Lactose intolerance get their nutrients then?

Eh, op is right and wrong. You certainly can get everything you need and be very healthy as a vegan, but... if you eat about what a normal person eats except without the meat and cheese? you are, as they say, gonna have a bad time.

As a child, I insisted on being a vegitarian - as long as my parents cooked for me (and were careful to see to it that I had a balanced diet, compete proteins, lots of nutritional yeast, etc... They had spent time as vegetarians themselves, so knew how to do that.) I was quite healthy.

After I moved out? I did very poorly, because I wasn't willing or able to put in the effort to see to it that I had balanced nutrition.

That's the thing; as a meat eater? There are a lot of ways for me to get complete nutrition (and yes, it comes with a lot of other things that I don't need, but at least I get what I do need.) - so even someone who puts minimal effort into eating a balanced diet is not going to suffer from deficiencies very often, if they eat meat in the traditional manner. (Quite the opposite, really.) If you put the same effort in but avoid all meat and animal products? at least in the place and time where I live? You are probably going to make yourself sick.

In a culture where most people eat meat, you need to put in a lot more effort and research in order to avoid deficiencies as a vegetarian.

You could argue that this is a truism and that the same could be said for a meat-eater in a culture that just ate vegetables. Most cultures have evolved a traditional set of foods that won't leave you with severe deficiencies of anything, and so if you cut out certain classes of food from that tradition, you need to pay more attention to what you are consuming in order to see to it that you get enough of the nutrients you need.

That's not how statistical inference works.

"In women of reproductive age, periods are the most common cause of iron deficiency anaemia."

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Anaemia-iron-deficiency-/Pages/...

The flip side is hemochromotosis, women doesn't necessarily become symptomic while pre menopausal. The blood loss masks/treats it until menopause.

Excess iron in men also elevates cancer incidence, so I don't think one should take an iron supplement if there's no need. A blood test is necessary. If you look closely at the men and women's multivitamins that are sold in stores, you'll see that there is no iron on the men's multivits.

Excess iron can be reduced by donating blood.

Also important: cast iron cookware introduces a non-insignificant amount of iron into cooked food, which can be detrimental (or beneficial) depending on the subject.

In fairness the article actually does bring up the drug angle twice, but in passing.

>in our data we saw this [youthful stroke] increase independently of that,” says Brett Kissela, professor and chair of the Department of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Cincinnati, who headed the 2012 work. It is likely drug use among the younger adult population also plays a role, he says

>Ralph Sacco, president of the American Academy of Neurology, notes that “data has been scant” about strokes among younger people. “There has been mounting evidence from different studies suggesting that even though the incidence and mortality of stroke is on the decline, the rates may not be dropping quite as much—and even [may be] increasing—among younger populations,” Sacco says. “The reasons for these trends are not entirely clear but there are concerns about obesity, diabetes and physical inactivity having a greater impact in younger stroke victims.” Drug use may be another factor, he adds.

I starting working in games in the early 2000s. The first game I worked on (Black & White) had me working 16-20 hour days, 6-7 days a week for 9 months. It destroyed my health and turned me into an agoraphobic for at least a year, with related conditions lasting much longer. I've seen people have to check into mental health institutions after shipping games.

At one place I worked, there was a "crack board", where they would have sweepstakes on who was going to come apart at the seams and lose it. Who knew mental health issues could be so fun? "lol".

Needless to say I no longer work in games, it has done damage to my body and psyche for very little return..

The gaming industry is notorious.

Then why are you doing it? Serious question. Is the pay so far above average that it's justified to sacrifice your health, or is the job market too tight to get a less cruel job?

Yeah that's pretty common in grad school, but it varies a lot by advisor, goals, etc.

Likewise. I'm interested in nootropics, but have two relatives with different types of epilepsy.

He probably meant Parkinson's.

I think molly is stupid, and would never try it. BUT molly-induced brain damage is usually hyponatremia, or a subtler form of damage to the serotonin system. not stroke.

The problem with your theory is that driving is optional and not something we engage in 24/7. Being alive is a continuous thing and we don't understand all the myriad things that contribute to stuff like weight gain.

I was seriously overweight for a time. It did not get better until I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder and began getting proper treatment for that. Until I had a proper diagnosis, my body just did not seem to work the way everyone told me bodies worked.

I ate healthy. I exercised regularly. I was well educated and well read. Yet my problems seemed to defy solutions for a lot of years, until I finally got the right diagnosis.

Most people who are overweight wish they could solve it. They often don't know how, even after taking all the usual advice.

New research into things like gut biome is beginning to cast light on such phenomena, but this is hardly a solved problem, contrary to what many people seem to think.

Insurance is priced according to risk, yes. However, most insurance is priced against fairly good odds that they will not pay to an individual. Which ultimately points to health care being a relatively stupid place to trust to an insurance market.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I think you start getting into challenging grey area with pre-existing conditions. Is being overweight a consumer responsibility but an auto-immune disease isn't? How do you effectively draw a line between disease or health risks someone should be responsible for versus not.

Hey, if your family has a history of cancer, they should also charge you more right? It's only fair.

That isn't how insurance works. To do an insurance pool, you have to have a lot of people, knowing that you won't be paying out to most of them. Otherwise, it is not insurance, but some sort of group savings/pay as you go.

That is, the main variable that gets you to lower rates, is higher participation. Anything else doesn't come close.

You have to let it sink in that you can not have a small subset "save up" enough to pay for "their share." It just doesn't work without having large groups lose out and be completely unable to cover the costs in their group. Instead, this would be akin to group gambling where eventually one loser will bankrupt the entire pool.

Now, there is a related concept that you need to diversify your risk pool such that you don't fall prey to the same risk on everyone. This is what hit some major flood insurance providers after Katrina. I could see similar arguments for not wanting to insure a bunch of folks from the same locale. (Oddly, insurance doesn't typically branch out beyond locales...)

There is a concept of trying to get the higher risk pool to pay more through some rough proxies (typically age, for car insurance) to pay higher premiums. Again, though, most young drivers do not have accidents. Nor do the insurance companies typically actually need such high premiums to cover costs. As evidenced by their fairly mediocre savings plans they offer folks for not having an accident.

All of this, though, really just points out that calling this an "insurance" for health is just silly and is ultimately the wrong model.