The Brain Needs Animal Fat
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
She supports the keto-diet, which has no real basis in history or science, the person she cites actively disagrees with her dietary suggestions. She cites inflammation and healing as side effects, but doesn't describe what gets inflamed, where it gets inflamed, or how.
She also makes a claim that vegans and vegetarianism will lead to mental disorder because of this lower DHA claim. Well where's the data that vegans/vegetarians have higher instances of this? Should be easy to produce right?
She even makes the claim that vegetables have no science to prove that they are healthy.
How did this even get onto HN, it's obviously garbage?
Sources:
http://www.2ketodudes.com/show.aspx?episode=156
People here jump to prompt criticism and ad hominem when there is a pro-meat submission. And right now that Burger King vegan burger loaded with questionable ingredients is being lauded as the greatest achievement in nutrition.
Aside from that, even if the article is wrong about one thing, it doesn't mean it's wrong about everything.
The search results surrounding some of the topics this article touches on do show heavy pro-meat biases. But even with an agenda, it doesn't make all of the information garbage.
If meat industry pundits are extremists, vegans are similar in their fanaticism, even if tactics differ. Ultimately, the fighting itself is tiresome.
Humans are omnivores, and it's never going to go all one way.
When cost is used as a proxy for ease of supply, essential nutrients are most readily sourced from a menu that is neither one nor the other option, but really well-rounded and omnivorous.
Unfortunately, that means extremists on both sides have partially valid arguments.
Yes humans are omnivores, no one, including myself said otherwise. I'm not sure where you're getting that from what I said in the comment.
There is considerable peer-reviewed research going back at least a couple of decades that would back up this claim, even if it has been elusive to demonstrate. It's widely accepted that DHA heavily accumulates in the brain during early life, infants require a large amount 'pre-formed', and insufficient supply is detrimental to cognitive and visual development. A quick pub med search will illustrate this rather quickly. The findings are so significant that most infant formula now contains DHA and ARA, in addition to LA and ALA. Even if mom does not consume animal meat, she still converts ALA into DHA and passes this on to her offspring during the third trimester and after birth through milk.
[1] vegans disagree on this point, but that's a different debate
Not even speaking about the fact that it's pretty difficult for somebody who lives in a city and doesn't own a car.
If you buy eggs from a shop, I'd say there is a fair chance that the animals are not treated that well.
EDIT: I now realize many others have already made this point in other comments, oopsie.
-Maximum of 3000 chickens in a flock and a maximum of 6 chickens per square meter in the coops, which must allow daylight in.
-The chickens must have access to perches and nests.
-At least one third of the flooring must be loose bedding, such as straw or sand, to allow the chickens to dust bathe.
-The chickens must have all-year access to outdoor areas with at least 4 square meters per chicken. It must be covered by grass or other vegetation, and must provide shelter from wind/weather. An outdoor area must stand unused every other year, for parasite prevention and to let the vegetation regrow.
-Beak trimming is prohibited.
-Feed must be organic and must include roughage.
While it's not perfect, it's a damn sight better than battery caged hens.
Under the HFAC standard, antibiotics are forbidden, mammalian proteins in feeds are forbidden, beak trimming has strict guidelines, etc.
Note that HFAC paradoxically/disappointingly doesn't require chickens to be have range, but if the package says free range, there's a 108 sq.ft.-per-bird requirement. Pete and Gerry's eggs are marked free-range.
I eat eggs myself, so I'm not preaching. I just sometimes wonder whether I should.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/22/worlds-f...
While I agree with you, the people/companies who supply those chickens to the local supplier still have no use for the male chicks.
So even if you're buying eggs laid by hens that have a great life, you're still causing animals to be killed.
Like I said, I have no right to be preachy. I just want more people to think clearly about this stuff.
I hope the "no-kill" method becomes widespread.
Some roosters would obviously be preserved as breeding stock, just as they are now.
The only way to determine the gender of a chick (until very recently!) is a visual check done after the animal is born.
Or you get into a situation where harvesting crops is morally wrong because it deprives animals of food.
It does deprive them of food, but to me it seems theres enough distance between the 2 things, that harvesting isn't morally implicated.
It seems less cruel for an animal to spend its life standing in a field than for it to be stuck laying eggs its whole life or being milked twice a day for as long as its useful, only to be led to the slaughterhouse. In fact, commercial chickens are the most cruel industry, chickens are so cheap they are treated like a bulk good, rather than like a living animal. Even free range chickens live a shit life.
We talk about treating our servers like cattle, rather than pets. But cattle are actually treated very well, there's a lot of value in a single beast and it's worth looking after them when they're sick. Chickens are so cheap (they cost, what, $7 at the supermarket?) that if they're sick or injured, it's cheaper just to turn them into fertiliser.
Of course, that's just the commercial industry. Home raised laying hens tend to live a comfortable life.
For every egg-laying chicken out there, a male chicken is slaughtered, and both egg-laying and dairy milking harm the animals (for instance, compare avg. life span of a dairy cow with their natural life-span).
There's also the factor of number of animals killed - One lamb feeds a lot more people than one chicken, yet both are living animals capable of pain and suffering.
That's not to say that either is particularly ethical, but (as a vegan), I don't think you can easily say that eating eggs is intrinsically more ethical than eating meat.
But the point of my comment us not that Lambs are less ethical than chickens...but killing and eating a few week old animal is hardly "more" ethical.
Is that not better than letting them suffer for a year?
Obviously the debate has a lot to do with your belief in consciousness and ego. Does a lamb have an ego and is it conscious of its own mortality (in the abstract sense)? Does the sheep suffer existential angst? Are these requirements for the industrialised raising and slaughter of animals for food to be unethical?
If you can find eggs from birds that are used this way I think that's a fairly ethical thing. Yes the birds are being used but they're also living pretty close to how they would otherwise.
I first heard of this from Joel Salatin, how exactly I stumbled onto that I have no idea. He's an interesting character for sure, but I can't help but have respect for the way he thinks about farming and what he calls honoring the animals.
Is it? Seems quite central to the debate to me.
I wholeheartedly recommend fruitarianism if you can make it work (might not be easy).
I think dairy also applies. Yes, lots of dairy operations in business today are cruel. But they don't have to be.
There are dairy operations now that let the cattle decide when to be milked. The machines are fully automatic. The cattle need not be separated from their calves, either.
With all of those systems in place, there is no real ethical difference between the dairy operation and a human mother using a breast pump and donating the excess to a milk bank.
I don't think it's immoral to keep livestock, I'm questioning whether the situations are analogous in an ethical sense.
Yeah, the animal is not autonomous. Do animals understand autonomy? Can they tell the difference? Maybe whales in capyivity can, but they are used to roaming the vast oceans. I think cattle would be perfectly happy in such an environment. Anthropomorphizing them is not helpful.
None of that is an argument that it is necessarily unethical or immoral to take milk from an animal.
Repeating the point: to me, the ethics of collecting milk from autonomous creatures that willingly give it are a separate thing from the ethics of taking milk from creatures that do not have autonomy.
You are, actually. You're extending a human concept, with human morals and human judgement, to a non-human animal. It is not known whether non-human animals understand the concept of autonomy, let alone value it.
Given that many humans do not understand autonomy, I doubt that any non-human animal does.
But that's all beside the point. With these automated machines, if the animal chooses not to give milk, then no milk is collected from the animal. Since the animals do choose to give milk, it can hardly be argued that they are coerced in any way.
Vegetarianism/veganism has the same problems with calcium and B12, as those are typically gotten through animals in omnivore diets. It doesn't mean that vegetarianism/veganism is bad, just that you have to be conscious of your diet. We have a phrase in our house: "You need to eat all the colors." We include a wide variety of foods in our diet, and milk replacement products with calcium.
As a critical thinker, it bothers me when something says "Well, we don't understand what this relationship is or its importance; therefore, you should conclude.." Seems like a hit piece on vegetarianism/veganism more than anything else. Nevertheless, recognizing the importance of certain fats in your body is a good thing.
The only thing a vegan has to supplement with a proper diet is B12. Eating tofu and fortified soy milk every day gets you most of the way there for calcium (it’s set using calcium sulfate as coagulant). I’ve already had 300mg in my breakfast today by eating oats with fortified soy milk.
> Thankfully, vegetarian and vegan-friendly DHA supplements [..] are available.
Both from the same article
The headline implies that vegans should all be dead now, assuming we interpret "need" as necessary to survival.
A more accurate title might be "The Brain Benefits From Animal Fat". But who would click that, right?
The amount of these fatty acids needed by the brain is quite small and even at low conversion rates can easily be met by conversion from other plant sources too.
Summary of research on the subject:
The article does note that the bioavailability of this for humans may be very low. We are not fish. We did not evolve to eat algae. If you'd like to be as healthy as you can be, eat meat, sometimes, and don't ignore your body's cravings for fat.
Animal welfare is a big one, and only by highlighting the problem and use sustainable farming practices will it work. Note that large scale vegetable farming practices are also bad for the environment, due to mono culture, soil degradation etc. So the best way is to farm both in a symbiotic relationship.
I would need to find the study (it might be the one you're thinking of) but a plant based diet is still many, many, more times more sustainable than the current general western levels of animal product consumption. I would need to find the study, but I think for animal agriculture to not have great negative effects would need to be reduced to something like 10% of current levels. Again, I‘m not positive on these numbers and would need to find the study.
Just because one might be cheaper then the other doesn't mean it's better. It's more likely worse. If we can reach sustainable farming in all aspects why fight against meat?
In fact grass is the best crop to grow for sustainable farming, it's just we can't eat it. So let the cows eat it, we eat them and it's good all round.
I can pull out links to support sustainable farming too https://www.primalmeats.co.uk/sustainable-eat-meat/
Depending on your definition of "sustainable." Grass-fed beef produces substantially more greenhouse gas per human-edible Calorie, in terms of global warming potential, than growing the crops that humans eat directly. I think it will be tough to argue that meat farming is sustainable until net global greenhouse gas emissions are at a sustainable level, which is clearly not the case today.
And the point of the article is that you can't have plant only edible calories. A calorie of meat is not the same as a calorie of plant. It's just a unit of energy and too simplistic a measure to compare with.
‘BUT’ – I hear you say… “Cows burp and fart too much which is causing climate change and we can’t feed 8 billion people from this ‘out of date’ system – the world’s different now!”.
Once upon a time in the USA there used to be a vast area of prairie (pasture) called the Great Plains. This story can be replicated on any of the world’s grasslands. This vast grassland was a giant ‘carbon sink’ with deep soils of up to 15% organic matter and was a rich habitat for thousands of different species of flora and fauna. Even through severe droughts, the plains supported somewhere in the region of 110 million wild ruminants. 50-70 million of those were the giant one-tonne bison – the equivalent to about 2 small beef steers. We now, in the USA, have roughly the same number of domestic ruminants. 1
Wild animals burp and pump too! So how come pre-industrialisation these ‘evil’ ruminant beasts didn’t wreck our climate?
Healthy soils contain soil microbes called methanotrophs that reduce atmospheric methane. So the grassland on which the cattle are grazing can absorb a large amount of the methane they produce. The highest methane oxidation rate recorded in soil to date has been 13.7 mg/m2/day (Dunfield 2007) which, over one hectare, equates to the absorption of the methane produced by approximately 100 head of cattle! 2, 3
‘Methane sinks’ bank up to 15% of the earth’s methane. Converting pasture into arable production reduces the soil’s capacity to bank methane and releases carbon into the atmosphere. Fertilising and arable cropping reduce the soils methane oxidation capacity by 6 to 8 times compared to the undisturbed soils of pasture. The use of fertilisers makes it even worse, reducing the soils ability to take up methane even further.4, 5, 6
So to convert pasture to arable land in a ‘quick fix’ to try and grow more plant-based foods considerably accelerates the climate change situation.
And anyway let’s put enteric methane (cow burping methane) into context. According to the 2014 UN Climate Change Convention held in December in Lima, Peru, the analysis of GHG’s when converting other gases to CO2 equivalents found that in the US and EU enteric fermentation accounted for 2.17% of GHG emissions. (26.79% of agriculture emissions with all agricultural emissions in total being 8% of total GHG emissions).7
Have you looked into the methane output of rice paddies recently?
Actually we can and did through various stages of human history. In the 1960s it was also seen as a way to feed a population that was considered out of control (that didn't happen but lots of research into eating algae happened)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirulina_(dietary_supplement)
It's not fun, but it can feed people.
You’re implying the article casts doubt on DHA supplement bioavailability. It doesn’t. It casts doubt on any notion some vegans/vegetarians may have that simply eating seaweed in their diet is enough, because there’s doubt on its bioavailability in that form (she even points to fiber as possibly being part of the problem).
You're actually just confirming what the article states and slightly disagreeing with the means to obtain DHA and dosage.
DHA is vital to the fattest organ in our body, the brain.
The fact that an individual poster is vegan and, in his opinion, "is fine" is obviously not useful.
The fact that hundreds of millions of people in India are to some extent mostly plant based and are are "Ok" is not useful because a) they are not necessarily 100% plant based and b) what is the definition of "Ok"? They continue to live obviously but who's to say they can't be better? There are plenty of negative characteristics of Indian health - as there are for any population - that could be correlated. If there is a causal link found, maybe it would prolong life and/or life quality.
The assertion that the writer is funded by big meat is not useful. If someone says the sky is blue, the first thing to do is look at the sky to see if it's blue - not question whether or not the speaker is paid by the pro-blue sky lobby.
It's unfortunate to see cultural movements smother science. I'm not saying that this article is science or is even correct science. But until a rational discussion is allowed that even allows such an evaluation we can't know.
Questions that might clarify the facts surrounding these claims are left conspicuously unanswered and unasked. Likely because the purpose of the article is not to to present the available evidence and carefully draw conclusions, but to support a diet based on animal fats by cherry picking from the science where convenient.
EDIT: I remember imprecisely. For more information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6052662/ (2018)
There is no such thing as clinical DHA defiency established in the literature. What regulates ALA metabolism is poorly understood, but it seems when you don’t get DHA and EPA your body does fine, as evidenced by every vegan alive.
Also there isn’t much DHA or EPA in a diet that includes fish. You can’t get the 1.5g a day that’s recommended by eating fish or eggs in your diet. Yet humans were doing just fine before fish oil supplements.
Milk cows are forcibly impregnated year after year to keep their milk flowing. All this shortens their lifespan to 4 years instead of their natural 20.
Milk is a product of cruelty.
In India, vegetarianism is usually synonymous with lacto vegetarianismI'm sure this wasn't meant to be funny but it gave me a good laugh and brightened up my morning so thank you! :)
What if the article is true and you are only using, let's say 80% of your capacity.
It will be fun if you try to make some Sudoku or something similar and test the time, then eat those animal meat and try it out.
eg: When I drink coffee I become at least 20% better solving problems
That's intereseting. Is this something you have measured, logged, and accounted for other factors (e.g. via double-blinding etc)?
There is a massive amount of evidence the the healthy fats are animals fats, coconut oil, avocado oils etc and not the "vegetables" oils which aren't really vegetables.
Note that article mentions both naturally pressed plant oils, and the hydrogenated oils, but then a point that mentions what oils are only allowed to be called vegetable oils: In the US, the Standard of Identity for a product labeled as "vegetable oil margarine" specifies only canola, safflower, sunflower, corn, soybean, or peanut oil may be used.[8] Products not labeled "vegetable oil margarine" do not have that restriction.
Again note none of them are vegetables, they are all seeds, and go through a hydrogenatation process which makes them brittle. Again all mentioned in the article you linked to me.
Also interesting is that right at the end of the article is how some countries insist that labelling them vegetable oils isn't enough and that the true ingredient must be listed.
Also notice they do rename things for marketing, like canola instead of rapeseed (as they though rape wouldn't sell). I guess "hydrogenated seed oils" doesn't sell as well and so they called them "vegetable oils".
The effects of a nutrition deficiency may not manifest for years. The article describes the substance as having a role in brain development. It also mentions psychosis. Now, I don't have any more information than what's in the article. But it's perfectly plausible, for example, that under-supply of this thing will contribute to your having some kind of dementia later.
Or it could ultimately be harmless. But you can't dismiss something like this solely because of (subjective and) short-term effects.
so, by consuming pre-formed DHA/EPA on a regular basis, the argument goes, a human body must bear the burden of dealing with a fat that oxidizes readily and damages other bodily cells.
I'm just as appalled as anyone else when it comes to the ethical treatment of animals, but to deny that we didn't evolve to be omnivores despite overwhelming evidence is... well it's silly.
Whatever drove our ancestral evolution is no longer a major part of our environment. We selectively bred plants and animals, wiped out various diseases and created environmental pressure for others to change, and the development of preservatives and refrigeration and cheap long-distance travel means we can combine foods which our ancestors could never find in the same place at the same time.
Plus the whole 33 year life expectancy at birth/54 year life expectancy if you reached 15 in the Paleolithic.
ALA->DHA reformation has an efficiency of less than 10%. The point that is made here is that you certainly have to ingest a lot of ALA rich food to make that work, and it is not recommended for children at all because of brain development. Furthermore, DHA levels ARE lower in vegans and vegetarians.
So either you claim the human body actually does not need DHA, or you you claim that the body can do ALA->DHA. In the latter case, the article talks about it.
Consider that diets that include fish don’t get anywhere near 1.5g a day of DHA, and that many humans didn’t eat fish at all. Fish oil supplements are a relatively recent phenomenon that came about without any evidence of deficiency.
I don’t consume any dietary DHA or EPA and don’t supplement. I’m fine, as is every person like me (vegan or not).
That's true, but is that pathway effective enough to effectively provide what the body needs for optimal function? IIRC, the ALA -> DHA pathway is quite rate limited.
> I have a hard time believing anything said about the need for certain kinds of nutrients. I've done all-cheese diets, all-meat diets, and all-plant diets for months on end with no serious side effects other than constipation and boredom of eating a monodiet. The human body is resilient and doesn't need to be fed as much as people think.
I don't think a few anecdotal short-term experiments with extreme diets say much about what the human body needs to function well. The human body can be somewhat resilient in the face of malnourishment, but it doesn't follow from that malnourishment is an acceptable state.
It's sort of like this: If you've got a four-server cluster for your application, would you rather it be in a state where two offline due to hardware failures, or would you rather they all be functioning normally? The former might be an example of "resilience," but your users might also be experiencing slowness issues due to the reduced capacity.