A second big thing to highlight is the study disclosure at the bottom of this article. Four of the six authors "have previously received funding from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association."
I am patiently waiting for a study brought to you by Carl’s Jr. any day now.
Hey, Rick, do you have any studies by researchers funded by the National Right to Life Committee that show that women who haven't had abortions suffer less depression and anxiety?
Oops. About that. 2005 was a long time ago, eh?
The Guardian is an extremely liberal paper, but they simply do not approach the level of disinformation that you see in American papers.
Now I'm vegetarian because meat is just too effing expensive when purchased ethically. I can't justify $40 steaks and $20/lb chicken, and to be honest, steak just really isn't that tasty... and bacon is awful for you. I'm also tired of chicken for the most part. Now that I've found soy curls I make way more fake-meat dishes than ever before.
I'm not vegan because trying to get protein from vegan sources is too difficult. I still eat fish and eggs (but not milk, cuz cow milk is nasty) and I'll never give up cheese even though milk is taken from baby cows/sheep waaay to soon (they are switched to milk substitutes).
But I get it, I like to cook, and if you don't like to cook, nothing is easier than throwing a steak on a grill.
TVP, yeah? That stuff is magic, easily my favourite protein source. I can make dishes that blow people away with it
Its cheap as, and at tonnes of asian supermarkets or vegan stores.
Rehydrate with beef-style or chicken-style stock and you're off to the races. Some of my friends have started using it to save money on meat despite not being vegan :)
The texture of soy curls is closer to seitan than anything else made from soy. I had bbq soy curls for dinner earlier tonight.
Apparently it’s possible to get a similar texture using tofu by freezing and thawing it twice: http://www.marystestkitchen.com/best-vegan-fried-chicken-glu....
I haven’t attempted this yet.
Send me an email (its in my profile) and I'll make sure to send the link to you when I chuck them up on my site in the next week or so?
But in short: rehydrate the TVP with boiling water with a cube or two of beef-style stock. Let it sit for about 5 minutes or so, it should become soft.
Drain it, and really squeeze the stock out of it if you're doing a nice stir-fry or similar; it'll fry better the less water is in it.
In a wok or fry-pan, add half a tablespoon of oil, add the TVP. Crack salt, black and white pepper over them. Don't stir too much to begin with, you want it to brown, almost char in places. Then stir, fry as normal.
Now you can use it to replace most beef protein sources in stir-frys, pasta sauces (if you use the "mince" versions) and so on.
My partner and I have come up with some from-scratch(ish) sauces that go best with it, but it's great even without those. My particular favourite recipes are: "beef" and black bean, Thai basil and chili, bolognaise (which is more like a pomodoro with TVP mince added), soy and garlic stir frys, and some others I'm likely forgetting.
Those are the ones I'm writing up :)
Is this proven true?
That's another correlation, and if true it would actually mean that not eating meat is good for depression and anxiety in some people.
While eating meat = depressed
While eating vegan = depression and anxiety got better
I would expect the results to show vegans had less depression if that were true. That's not what the study found.
An example of a case with inverse causation vs correlation is "A study found out that there is a strong correlation between the number of firemen at a house on fire and how large the fire is. As such, we should send fewer firemen to fires to ensure they are smaller".
The parent poster isn't claiming the same sort of reverse-causation is true here, but merely pointing out that it's possible.
To explain more clearly the parent poster's hypothetical: let's say there's the normal population, which is say 20% depressed and 5% vegan. Let's say there's a second population which suffers an 80% depression rate while eating meat, and a 50% depression rate while vegan. If that second population entirely goes vegan, they now have a 50% depression rate, which is 30% higher than the normal population, so a study would show "this group of vegans are more depressed than a typical group of meat eaters", but at the same time it would be true that being vegan improved their rates of depression.
Unless you are very comited into calculating your intake in every mineral and vitamin, I would recommend to take some supplements if you are going vegan (which is something I support but did not totally go through yet)
edit: I'm not disputing the benefits of fiber for the average person, but the implied necessity of fiber is just false. Fact: A zero fiber diet is not guaranteed cause disease, whereas essential nutrient deficiencies will cause disease.
"Previous studies have linked a higher fibre diet to protection from heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and certain cancers."
Heart disease is #1 killer of Americans, diabetes is #7 according to CDC [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
American Heart Association says "Dietary fiber can help you improve blood cholesterol levels and lower your risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity and even type 2 diabetes" [1]
American Diabetes Association says "eating foods higher in fiber can also improve your digestion, help you manage your blood sugar and reduce your risk of heart disease." [2]
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
[2] https://diabetes.org/healthy-living/recipes-nutrition/unders...
Just because it's not as severe as rickets or scurvy doesn't mean people should ignore the needs of their gut microflora, especially given that the majority of cells in our bodies are (mostly beneficial) bacteria.
From what I can tell, meat eaters are even less likely than vegans to calculate their nutritional intake (naturally so, vegans are much more likely to read ingredient and nutrient lists because how else can you shop vegan?), and the claim that it's easy to not have enough nutrients on a vegan diet goes both ways. It's easy to miss having enough of specific nutrients on a meat diet too if you don't carefully calculate your intake.
From what I can tell, in practice some amount of nutritional deficiency just isn't that big a deal for most people. College kids that live on a diet of 80% ramen still survive relatively well, as do people who spend time attempting to balance their nutritional intake. The level of impact varies by person I'm sure.
B12 deficiency can have quite profound neurological effects, though thats in pretty severe cases, IIRC
Note that I did not say it is impossible to get these through a vegan diet, just that it takes some efforts and care to have the daily dose necessary to avoid a deficit.
Yes, I agree that almost no one calculates their nutrients intake, but when you go full vegan, you remove more than half of your food diversity, it opens yourself more easily to deficits.
> From what I can tell, in practice some amount of nutritional deficiency just isn't that big a deal for most people. College kids that live on a diet of 80% ramen still survive relatively well
People with mild depression survive relatively well, and this is what is discussed here.
I used to have very bad dietary habits when I was working like crazy at my first job, and managed to get a deficiency in vitamin C. As I was young and in good conditions, it did not trigger any medical problem, but I can tell you that my quality of life improved greatly after I started taking vitamins (and later just rebalancing my diet a bit). It was removing a constant fog from my brain.
I think this is a reason why so many pseudo-scientific dietician advice abound: "surviving relatively well" is not a good enough criterion anymore, yet that's what the medical research focuses on. Well-being is also something that people seek to achieve. Being more alert, more focused, less depressed, less stressed are things that a diet can have an influence on, and the scientific data on that is pretty scarce.
Again this has only been demonstrated in a couple of studies. But if you’re on a plant-based diet consider giving it a try.
Omega-3 fats can also be important, but I’m not sure if there’s any vegan options there (it’s been a few years, maybe someone is synthesizing them now.)
Which Omega-3 fatty acids are you referring to? It can’t be all of them. There are plant sources like flax seeds, walnuts and others for ALA and EPA. DHA is the one that’s a bit difficult to get (or be synthesized in the body from the others). That has been solved by algal oil or algae based supplements (fish get DHA from algae).
Vegetarian diets, as I understand the common saying, need to actively contain or be supplemented with B vitamin sources.
If you're veg but live on nutrient-poor junk food, I could see nutritional deficiencies entering the mix. I think it's relatively uncontroversial that malnutrition has mental health side effects.
I would guess that lots of things had bacteria, but not in large enough quantities to supply enough B12. It would need to be accumulated somehow.
Cows have special hardware in their digestive tract to cultivate bacteria that can supply the B12. Why would that exist if cows could just get it from unsterilized water?
He references a paper [2] which states "Logistic regression analysis showed independent association between use of RO water and Vitamin B12 deficiency" in Western India.
That evidence isn't as iron-clad as I would like, and I haven't been able to find any study directly measuring B12 in city/well/stream water.
I don't know much about cow digestive systems, but I know evolution has created many weird solutions across different animals. The cow GI system is very different from humans (4 large stomach parts, sometimes referred to as separate stomachs) which is different from cats (obligate carnivores).
[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-symptoms-of-vitamin-B12...
Meat-based diets need their meat to be actively supplemented with B vitamin sources.
If you're a carnist but live on nutrient-poor junk food, I could see nutritional deficiencies entering the mix. I think it's relatively uncontroversial that malnutrition has mental health side effects.
How did all the (meat eating) humans survive before b12 supplements were around? Animals surely do not receive supplements in the wild. In the factories is where they are deprived of their natural diet that would provide the b12.
Perhaps, but I think the next step, showing that vegetarian diets / vegan diets are more likely to have poor nutrition, is harder.
There's a portion of meat-eaters who live on terrible diets and don't get enough nutrition due to their primary source of vegetables being the potatoes in fries. Is that portion more or less than the portion of vegans/vegetarians that have poor nutrition?
Studies about diets and longevity usually show vegans and vegetarians living mildly longer than typical meat eaters, which to me seems like at least a small data-point that nutritional deficiencies aren't more pronounced in the former group.
Developing a good diet from scratch is no easy thing. It's a lot easier to follow your family and culture around you with some minor adaptations.
There doesn't seem to be a difference to this to me. When I go to the supermarket or eat out I simply have a lot of choices excluded from me.
> It's a lot easier to follow your family and culture around you with some minor adaptations.
While I wrote what to cook, I guess figuring out what dishes I want to cook isn't really tough. I'm more stressed by logistical issues: it's more necessary to be able to cook, and also, when you're lazy or don't have time, pre-mix and intermediate ingredients that allow you to skip steps usually don't cater to the vegetarian or vegan.
While this meta-analysis suggests that there may be correlation here, I would wait for more proper studies to be conducted and maybe an eventual meta-analysis with better studies included preferably funded by a disinterested party before concluding that a correlation exists.
[1] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/the-t...
Not if you keep in mind that the animal you're eating likely got in effect tortured in an animal farm
And that eating meat speeds up climate change -- creates more violent storms and wildfires, and droughts and famines, and land conflicts and migration and wars.
I like meat too btw (although I no longer eat it, unless it's about to be thrown away anyway)
You got your cause right there in the open.
Surely that decreases your smarts? But have to be hip! (SCNR)
OTOH: I think this has no merit if not taken into account the larger populations where meat is taboo for some longer time, instead of the current hype.
Like Jains and some Hindus(or all?(don't know exactly)), for instance?
Perhaps this is less a case of causality, and more a case of correlation ... specifically with where you are on the sliding scale towards full sociopathy.
p.s. I say this as someone who eats meat and knows it is objectively immoral.
I hoped that the article itself would make at least some attempt to deal with the issue, but it does not. It’s a meta study (meta meat?) that includes a set of studies. Those studies do not randomly assign people to eat/abstain from meat. It’s as bad as it sounds. Further, they use their poor study to criticise other, poorer, studies.