Comment by ashelmire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashelmire | Hacker News Reader

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> Vegan diets are being proved by lots of studies at being pretty shitty for you.

As far as I can tell, this is completely false. Vegan diets do a lot of things well: reduce salt, saturated fat, and cholesterol intake, for example. Vegetarian / vegan diets improve cholesterol, blood sugar levels, and other things.

Here's some citations of studies and papers that demonstrate vegan diets are better for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/

Several more listed at https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies#sect...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26508743 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25684089 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23695207 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16164885

The consensus of scientific evidence seems pretty clearly in favor of plant-based diets. The evidence is as clear as the world being round or climate change being real.

Truth is that there's very little consensus on this, it's all politics at the moment. You have pro-vegans and pro-meat/keto tribes, and they all have their claims and proofs. My own purely anecdotal experience is that actually both approaches work just fine, if done in a sensible way.

The only politics is when you look at dozens of studies on NIH and say "it's all politics" and counter with your anecdotal experience. This is like denial of climate science. Stop doing it. I'm not part of any tribe but the science tribe. Eating meat is unambiguously worse for the environment and worse for your health than non-meat diets. The scientific theory and studies on the subject are clear.

And I eat meat. Chowing on a burrito al pastor as we speak.

There are no studies that show that a diet where one consumes animal products occasionally like 2-3 times per months is worse for health then pure plant diet. This is even when one does eat meat, one eats it a lot. Apparently body is able to recover from any negative effects of animal products within 10-14 days. And one avoids a potential for deficiencies like B12, iron, K2 that one may run on a pure plant diet unless one is careful. And even for environment it can be better if the animal products on those days come from slaughtered caws that are grass-feed on land where growing grains etc. is impractical.

So the problem is really not the meat, but it’s amount.

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