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Comment by jfritsch1984 | Hacker News Reader

jfritsch1984

If you are well informed you could just cook once a week and eat that. I do that on the weekend with my family of five and it's quite a nice ritual. We cook rice and potatoes, put beans and sauce on top. And then put it in 20 containers for the week. I can prepare these meals within 2 minutes with a microwave. Breakfast is basically the same every day: Oat meal with some fruits. In the evening we eat bread with spread (which we also make on the weekend).

I would say we spend way less on food than your typical American. It's really THAT cheap. Also we have a lot of food for CoViD-19 as we store a lot of food in our cellar all year around (lentils, whole oats, canned beans, etc.).

Ah, and we are not poor in any way. I'm among top 5% in Germany. I think it's just healthy and sustainable (for the same reason we don't own a car).

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Without any further context, this is most likely not a healthy diet. You're certainly missing out on B vitamins and heme iron due to lack of meat and likely have a poor Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio due to the use of plant oils over other fats. Just a guess.

You also probably get way too much sugar from sugary fruits which you overindulge in because your diet otherwise is so "healthy". Instead of soft drinks you have fruit juices, which have effectively the same amount of sugar. Again, just a guess.

You probably got your nutrition advice from ideologically based publications, or you're just "winging it" based on what makes sense to you, in which case you're likely going to be wrong as well.

I did my research. Also I tracked my nutrition with Cronometer in the first weeks. Not a single day did I miss on B-vitamins.

Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.

I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils. My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3. And all without pollutants from fish.

I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.

> I did my research. Also I tracked my nutrition with Cronometer in the first weeks. Not a single day did I miss on B-vitamins.

If you didn't have any animal foods, you're going to be missing out on B-vitamins, because of low bioavailability[1].

> Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.

An excess of many essential nutrients and vitamins is associated with disease, that doesn't mean you should cut them out. Non-heme iron is way less bioavailable, especially in combination with plant antinutrients[2], so you can end up iron-deficient.

> I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils.

You probably should be using oil, just not plant oils.

> My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3.

Unfortunately not, because those sources also have low bio-availability.

> And all without pollutants from fish.

Pollutants are unfortunate, but when it comes to nutrition, you have to pick your poisen. Salmon roe is a good source of Omega 3 that is low in pollutants.

> I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.

A plant-based diet is ideology that is cherry-picking and misrepresenting some insights of nutrition science while sweeping others under the rug. With his exaggerated claims[4], Greger isn't any more credible than certain people on "the other side".

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2843032

[2] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/91/5/1461S/4597424

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24261532

[4] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...

I think it is not productive to have this discussion. I have good blood markers after 6 years on this diet. LDL of 52. BP of 101/74. So for me this diet is way healthier than the omnivorous diet that I had before. If you want to believe that animals are essential for human health, go on. But in my opinion science does not back this up. But that is my interpretation.

Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated. It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.

May I ask where you get your information from?

> I have good blood markers after 6 years on this diet. LDL of 52. BP of 101/74. So for me this diet is way healthier than the omnivorous diet that I had before.

Perhaps, but we're talking about nutritional deficiencies, have you tested for all of those? A vitamin deficiency can take up to a decade to manifest in symptoms.

> If you want to believe that animals are essential for human health, go on.

I don't want to believe that, I would prefer not to have to believe that. On the other hand, many people want to believe that animals are not necessary, for ethical reasons. That causes distortion and misrepresentation, because it would be inconvenient if a plant-based diet was not entirely healthy and nutritionally complete.

> Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated.

Those aren't "my thoughts", that is scientific data. Show me yours.

> It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.

Source?

> May I ask where you get your information from?

I get it from all available sources. If Doctor So-and-so claims this-and-that, I look at the scientific publications supporting that.

On top of that, I try to look at what's plausible from an evolutionary history perspective. A plant-based diet doesn't seem plausible. That doesn't mean it's not good, of course - especially compared to a junk food diet. However, there's a lot of "ethical incentive" to misrepresent it as better than it is. You gotta watch out for that.

Regarding B6. The last days that I tracked I had 3-4 times the RDA of B6 with ~4mg. Even if the absorption were really low I still meet what my body needs. And other sources report way better absorption rates.

Have you measured it in the blood? Even if your B6 is fine, what about B12? That has even worse bioavailability from plants or supplements. Again, you need to measure it, furthermore B12 takes years to deplete.

My B12 was so high I had to lower my supplementation twice. Now I only take the spray every two weeks to allow my values to get down. But even on that dose my values are at the very top of the reference range.

The problem with B12 is more with low cobalt in the soil and genetically low absorption. There are now even bioactive plant forms of B12 like water lentil.

Who says that B12 supplementation works less good than eating meat? The last studies I read on supplementation all showed good results. Better results than among omnivorous people.

Vitamin B12 supplements require very high doses due to poor bio-availability. You have to ask yourself, could this be a healthy diet when you effectively need a pharmacy to maintain it? What else is your body missing out on that we might not be aware of?

That's why I say a plant-based diet is science experiment with no plausible basis in evolutionary history. I'm not saying it's bad per se, I'm saying we don't actually know if it's good.

Looks like you have done your homework and are not in fact deficient, at least in terms of those biomarkers and reference values. A lot of plant-based dieters are not that diligent, affluent or educated.

I think the current diet that 90% of the developed countries practice is the large experiment. Question is how long our health system can tolerate these rates of disease.

Also: Check how many people on SAD are fiber deficient.

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