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Comment by jshaqaw | Hacker News Reader

I am not a vegan but this article conflates a bunch of issues. Shocker- the consumer packaged goods industry has latched onto veganism to sell more high margin processed food. As to arguments about the need for supplements to get vital nutrients missing even in a whole food vegan diet that may have more heft. I will say as a sample set of one I’m a vegetarian but I eat lots of eggs which I try to buy from humane sources. Middle aged in my late forties. I have a very scientific test of my physical status. If I can still hold my own against someone 20 years younger who weighs 50 pounds more in martial arts then don’t tell me my diet makes me weak!

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Yes but how about your cognitive performance?

Surprisingly, the children who were given the soup containing meat each day seemed to have a significant edge. By the end of the study, they outperformed all the other children on a test for non-verbal reasoning. Along with the children who received soup with added oil, they also did the best on a test of arithmetic ability

In fact, there are several important brain nutrients that simply do not exist in plants or fungi. Creatine, carnosine, taurine, EPA and DHA omega-3 (the third kind can be found in plants), haem iron and vitamins B12 and D3 generally only occur naturally in foods derived from animal products

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200127-how-a-vegan-diet...

I mean, the person is eating lots of eggs which contains a lot of good brain nutrients.

Eggs are neat in that they contain everything needed to construct a living organism. It's hard to find a more nutririonally well rounded food.

Granted humans aren't chickens, but we're closer to chickens than chickpeas that's undeniable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtGf2FuzKo4

"Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising."

> we're closer to chickens than chickpeas that's undeniable

So the best food for people is human meat? Soylent green, anyone?

I'd take any nutritional science with a serious grain of salt. Due to practical limitations in how you can study living people over the sort of timescales you need to see results, it's pretty difficult to good science in this field. Got a lot of studies coming out that don't replicate a little bit.

> So the best food for people is human meat? Soylent green, anyone?

Well, sure, taken to the logical extreme. Cultures that lean heavily into meat do tend to eat the whole animal though. You've basically got the choice of scarfing down brains and liver as a dessert, or to compensate with vegetables on the side of your steak.

Absurd p-hacking:

3 treatments (meat, milk, oil "energy"), plus control, and 3 tests.

> children receiving supplemental food with meat significantly outperformed all other children on the Raven's Progressive Matrices.

> Children supplemented with meat, and children supplemented with energy, outperformed children in the Control group on tests of arithmetic ability.

> There were no group differences on tests of verbal comprehension.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14672297/

> there are several important brain nutrients that simply do not exist in plants or fungi. Creatine, carnosine, taurine, EPA and DHA omega-3 (the third kind can be found in plants), haem iron and vitamins B12 and D3 generally only occur naturally in foods derived from animal products

This is demonstrably false nonsense.

Omega-3 fatty acids exist in almost all plants (especially leafy greens) and is synthesized to EPA/DHA in the body. If you eat junk food with high omega-6 content, the conversion process won't be efficient enough, and you need to take an algae-based EPA/DHA supplement; but unlike nasty fish from the polluted ocean, this supplement comes from a hermetic lab with third party purity testing.

The rest of the nutrients purported to be lacking in a plant-based diet and be debunked with a few easy web searches as well. Obviously, one has to be mindful of macro and micro-nutrient consumption, but this is true with any diet, and is even more so if health is of concern.

I’m trying to say this without sounding like a conceited jack@&$ but failing so I’ll just do it. Based on what seem to be objective markers of cognitive performance over the last quarter century this hasn’t been an issue. Neither has it been an issue for my kids who have been vegetarian since birth when benchmarked vs peers and they are easily at the top edge of their grade cohorts of reasonably similar socioeconomic status. Maybe my kids or I would have unified quantum field theory and gravity by now if we ate meat. I don’t know but it seems unlikely. Again though, FWIW we do our best without being zealots to eat varied foods (ie not just spaghetti and Mac/cheese), limit processed food, drink 99.9 percent water vs sugared drinks, etc…. And we are not vegan so eggs and other dairy provide some balance.

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