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Comment by RanTig | Hacker News Reader

I really wish he did his research without being restricted to a vegan diet. He mentioned in one of his videos that his choice for a vegan diet isn't motivated by health, so I can't help but think that part of these recommendations are just there to mitigate the effects of that specific diet. For example, an omnivorous diet might not need certain supplements.

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I am glad he is focusing on a vegan diet (especially if no technological revolutions are made in artificially derived animal products). It's nice to learn about the downsides of it in order deal with them rather than just defaulting back to animal products.

One of his main points in the intro is not destroying our biosphere and going vegan is the single most impactful thing an individual can do to support that. Supplementing B12 is not that hard of a task to ask from a population which already swallows pills and powders by the kilograms a year.

> not destroying our biosphere

Not sure that having people live longer helps with that.

Why so? A vegan diet when supplemented is an easy way to avoid potential bad consequences of animal products, such as heart disease, cancer, obesity or diabetes.

The only real thing that meat-eaters do not have to supplement that vegans do is b12 (because livestock are supplemented with it) and maybe omega 3.

40% of the population is B12 deficient: https://eatingourfuture.wordpress.com/science-studies-vegan-...

So most people should supplement, not just vegans.

This directly contradicts the Wikipedia article on the subject [1], and in general the page you link looks more like pseudoscience than not. Do you have a better source, maybe from a published paper or the NIH?

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency

Presumably referring to this sentence from the Wikipedia page you linked to, quote: "Marginal deficiency is much more common and may occur in up to 40% of Western populations.".

If the vegan diet was one of the outcomes from his experiments (where the goal is to optimize for anti-aging), I'd be fine with it. But it's a restriction he put on himself based on a ethical/philosophical motivation.

Why would he have to experiment with it? He didn’t have to experiment with exercise before starting an exercise plan.

I'm not deeply familiar with all the things he tried, but from what I understand, he tried many different changes in nutrition and lifestyle. He also attempts to optimize his sleep schedule and exercise plan for his goal of slowing down/reversing aging.

Nutrition is a very big component of his plan/blueprint and excluding a very big chunk of the search space (animal based foods) doesn't give me as much confidence that he found an optimal or close to optimal plan (especially compared to the effort required) to achieve his goal.

>b12 (because livestock are supplemented with it)

What do you mean "supplemented"? The vitamin comes from animal sources.

Livestock is given B12 supplements. B12 only occurs naturally in soil, where the concentrations are too low for even animals to bind. Prehistoric humans probably ate more dirt and had enough of it.

This comment has a lot of sources compiled https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/7ujsaf/comment/dtlj7...

>B12 only occurs naturally in soil

LOL. Patently false. B12 is produced by bacteria in herbivores' guts.

Sorry, cobalt only occurs in soil js what I meant. Do you have a comment on the point itself?

Sure, here you go: eating cobalt from the soil wouldn't give you B12, because bacterial fermentation in humans is occurring in the colon, while B12 is absorbed by the ileum.

But actually there's a solution for vegans. As the following paper in Nature eloquently puts it:

"Human faeces contain appreciable quantities of vitamin B12 or vitamin B12-like material presumably produced by bacteria in the colon, but this is unavailable to the non-coprophagic individual."

https://www.nature.com/articles/283781a0

And maybe omega-3? That’s underplaying the role of long chain PUFAs by a lot.

And when you say annual products, are you talking about all animal products, like seafood? Because there is a vast difference between oysters, muscles, and salmon, and industrial farm raised beef.

And animal products, again, are you excluding the organ meats, which are extremely high in many things that could possibly extend our lifespan? Like riboflavin, manganese, zinc,?

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