Comment by coolso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coolso | Hacker News Reader

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My ex was vegan (most of the time; she would switch back and forth between vegan and vegetarian often) and she would go through times when she would experience extreme fatigue, nausea, faintness, etc.

Eventually I noticed this coincided in particular with the times she would be full vegan for a week or two at a time (though it still happened less frequently otherwise).

I did some research and discovered there are several key vitamins / minerals that you get from meat and dairy very easily but is almost (or totally?) impossible to get without supplementation if you’re vegan. So I bought her a multivitamin and the symptoms subsided substantially, though not ever completely.

Just going on gut instinct here but I personally refuse to undergo a diet that without external supplementation does not properly nourish the body with everything it needs. If our ancestors were vegan, I’m not sure we’d all be here today - and if we were I’m not sure we’d like the state we were in, especially if other societies moved away from the vegan diet.

(I’ve noticed most vegans tend to be… not very robust, shall we say. I think the world notices this too fortunately, which is why vegan will remain a fringe diet.)

You realized that most of the vitamins we get from a meat-based diet are in the food because we feed the multivitamins to the animals? It is just an unnecessary layer of indirection added.

It turns out that people who earn a living with producing meat are just a lot better to making sure their livestock gets everything they need (nutrition wise) than people who just eat stuff when they are hungry. If some professionals would create proper vegan diets and force feed it to us you can be sure there would be no deficits.

> You realized that most of the vitamins we get from a meat-based diet are in the food because we feed the multivitamins to the animals? It is just an unnecessary layer of indirection added.

How does that work, I wonder? Did ancient humans first start feeding their domestic animals multivitamins because they realised there weren't enough in meat? Do modern sub-saharan pastoral nomads feed their domestic animals multivitamins to avoid deficits?

Or is yours a statement that only applies to a restricted geographical locality and practice of meat production? What do you think?

I am of course talking about the meat you and I eat. Ancient cultures did have different bodies, different food source access, higher quality food probably, or, you know, most probably not the healthiest bodies of all time. After all they died at like 30 years old.

The _average_ life expectancy was 30 but that's because loads of children died at a young age. If you made it past your teens your life expectancy was that way higher.

> I am of course talking about the meat you and I eat.

Are you? How do you know what meat I eat? For example, I don't live in the US and I don't eat beef (I find it tasteless and I prefer mutton which is also traditional to my local cuisine). As far as I can tell, the animals I eat aren't given multivitamins and I don't even understand why that would be necessary.

I think you're generalising from your experience with meat in your country to the rest of the world without really being very well aware of what goes on in the rest of the world: how people eat and how they raise their animals. Perhaps that's something to think about before talking of what "we" do.

There is a lot of planet Earth outside the place you live, you know?

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