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Comment by at_compile_time | Hacker News Reader

I can't remember the source, but I remember hearing that the two demographics in society who average at a healthy BMI were endurance athletes and vegans.

I struggled through my 20s to keep my weight under 200 lbs at 6ft tall. Then I went vegan 4 years ago, and started running during the pandemic. Nothing crazy, just 5-8 km once or twice per week when it's nice out, and lots of beans and tofu in place of meat and dairy. I haven't weighed in over 185 since, and that's without fasting or counting calories.

I'm sure that viruses and environmental toxins and whatever else contribute some amount at the margin, but I'm convinced that it's diet and exercise, in that order, that are primarily to blame.

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The correlation between vegans and health is muddied by the fact that vegans put far more thought into their diet than the average person. Its entirely possible not eating meat is orthoganal to health and its just that they actually care about what they eat.

No evidence of this, but I also suspect that vegans care more about their health in other weights too (e.g. exercising, not smoking, etc). If they can keep up with a vegan diet, they likely also have the discipline to keep up with exercise regimes and keeping good habits.

Not just care about health, but they're on a very restrictive diet.

Many of my vegan friends can barely find something to eat when we're going out. As an omnivore you can eat anywhere, as a vegetarian, you can eat almost anywhere. As a vegan, at least in Germany, it's still somewhat restrictive.

If you're consistently refraining from eating, then you're likely to just consume a lot less calories.

Another factor here is that most restaurants cook for attractiveness, not for health. Adding copious amounts of butter, oil and sugar can make a lot of food taste better at the expense of a much higher caloric intake.

I have an overweight vegan friend. He eats fries everywhere. Fat and carbs makes vegans fat, too.

> they're on a very restrictive diet.

I'd argue it's basically entirely this. The modern food environment is incredible (over)-stimulating. Food is ubiquitous and abundant, with a dizzying array of novel variations. Food cues enticing you to eat are ever present.

Being vegan has the accidental side effect of counteracting much of this. A lot of the built-up food infrastructure suddenly becomes non-existent.

Imagine. You're walking into a busy mall in a foreign country. On your left, there's a café advertising a variety of tempting pastries. Your sister told you about that cafe. She loves their cream cheese cake. To your right, the sizzling flames from a steakhouse grab your attention. Moving to another level, you spot an ice cream parlor showcasing a new flavor: Strawberry Daifuku. But all this has to wait, because you're heading straight for the ramen shop you've heard so much about. They're known for their amazing pork bone broth. It's why your foodie friends have chosen to meet up here.

Now if you were vegan, all of that is just ... gone. Possibly the foodie friends as well ;)

Non-vegans don't think about this but they recognize it subconsciously -- most non-vegans would balk at having to go vegan even for a short time, just due to the inconvenience alone.

Some of the aspects of the modern food environment come back when you figure out where to look of course, but even the even a savvy vegan consumer won't encounter the same level of choice, variety and catering and let's not forget cost-competitiveness that a modern omnivore experiences.

It's only restrictive in a society that can't go a single meal without animal products. I don't eat animal flesh, secretions, or eggs. That leaves legumes, fungi, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and grains. A veritable cornucopia spanning three biological kingdoms if we're counting fermentation.

The restaurant scene seems to be a lot better in Canada. Most restaurants have vegan options. My work's Christmas lunch was at a steakhouse of all places, and I still had several options to choose from.

Most of what I refrain from eating is the junk food that seems to suffuse work and social life: donuts, cookies, and cake leftover from one meeting or another, and buttery/cheesy/eggy snacks at social gathering.

>A veritable cornucopia spanning three biological kingdoms if we're counting fermentation.

I didn't claim anything counter to that. I can cook plenty of tasty vegan food. But if I go out there's not much left in my country to eat. You have to go to a handful of specialized vegan restaurants in the city to have even somewhat a choice. Otherwise it's fries or noodles with tomato sauce, which personally I wouldn't consider a meal.

That it's better in Canada? Great. I believe you, but I've travelled a lot, and I haven't seen many places that have such a variety of vegan food as USA and Canada.

Most of Europe is very meat heavy, vegetarian is still easy, vegan is picky eating. In East Asia there are vegan options, but often tasteless, because they're meant for Buddhist monks. Otherwise even vegetarian is somewhat difficult.

In India vegetarian is easier than meat, especially considering food safety. Had 0 gastric issues with vegetarian food, while one bad piece of meat almost ended the trip for a friend of mine. But a lot of dishes have butter and milk, so vegan again is difficult.

I'm really not saying it's difficult to cook great vegan food, just that it limits your ability to eat outside in most of the world, which probably influences average BMI more than the diet itself.

> The correlation between vegans and health is muddied by the fact that vegans put far more thought into their diet than the average person

It's also likely that they simply eat less because vegan food just isn't very good.

There's vegan food, the processed, pale imitations of animal products you'll find in the health food aisle, and there's vegan food: rich, hearty vegetable and bean soup, fresh rustic sourdough bread, and vegetables roasted until they caramelize.

Most people would think these foods boring, but that's because they've only ever had the shitty, mass-produced versions.

> rich, hearty vegetable and bean soup

Add some fried bacon bits and tell me it's not infinitely better for it.

> fresh rustic sourdough bread

Which is great on its own, but much better with some butter and ham.

> vegetables roasted until they caramelize

Which is a great side dish next to a good steak.

Nothing wrong with vegetables, but none of these things are as satisfying as they would be combined with some animal products.

Chips are vegan you know. As is most sauce.

Interestingly (at least in Sweden) most chips used to not be vegan, but it's getting better. A lot of chips contain animal based flavor enhancers.

> A lot of chips contain animal based flavor enhancers.

I think this is mainly as a response to people using plant based fats for deep frying. Traditionally they were fried in beef tallow, no need for any flavour enhancers if you fry them in beef fat.

I stand corrected!

Good example. Fries used to be (when I was a kid) deep fried in beef tallow. Nowadays it's usually plant based fats and while still good, it's not nearly as good as those fried in beef tallow.

Also, fries need mayo, which is made with eggs.

Just be sure you're supplementing enough. If you've been vegan for 4 years, you're starting to enter the danger zone for running out of certain vitamins that your body stores.

B12 is the big obvious one, but you should also check out vitamins K2 and A (beta-carotene is only converted by about 70% of people), as well as carnitine, zinc, iron and iodine.

I take zinc, B12, D, K2 and algal omega-3. B12 is the big one, you're just trading diabetes and heart disease risk for stroke risk without that one. And everyone in northern climes should be taking vitamin D. Our salt is iodized.

That is really shocking - that a diet change that resulted in less calories and an increase in physical exercise led to weight loss! :)

Same experience here.

I‘m also vegan, but I would say cutting back on sugar and highly processed wheat products helped me the most to stay at a healthy weight.

The first time I tried an endurance sport I was already skinny, and I did well at it and that encouraged me to do it more. The running DID make me skinnier, dangerously so, but I reckon the correlation runs both ways here. It's very encouraging to take up a sport and see yourself whizzing past your peers.

I think BMI is a little confusing when it is applied to some categories of healthy individuals like endurance athletes and others. When I ran (a lot) in my early to mid-twenties my BMI was always "underweight". Yet I have never felt better.

The same probably goes for climbers. Some of the climbers I know are inredibly lean and their BMI is certainly not in the "normal weight" range. Yet they are able to push their bodies to incredible feats.

All that is to say, I suppose BMI stops to be useful at some point while, at the same time, it may be a good instrument to measure your progress during weight loss. It can be both useful and not, depending on who you apply it to.

BMI is really a tool for helping to give indications of risk factors. If you have a BMI of 15, it's likely you have risks of various diseases. It's not a slam dunk, but a risk. But if you've chatted with a health professional and you're both happy that you're outside of the risk factors, then you'd not need to worry much. Some people are fine at BMI 26 or 17, some are outside of their healthy range at 24 or 19. It's a guide, not a rule.

The people who DO fall outside of the model are not that common though, especially if you're white. And these days the model accounts for more minorities, so even though it has issues, it's still worth listening to as it can highlight potential problems before they actually become problems.

BMI measurements do have some signal for endurance athletes.

People who win running competitions are quite tightly grouped BMI-wise.

And for running I guess that makes sense, a kg of muscle weights as much as a kg of fat. Even if that kg of muscle is a lot healthier than the kg of fat.

Yes I should have clarified: I think the BMI levels (underweight, normal etc.), that is the "wording" cannot necessarily be applied to athletes (edit: and could be misleading for people and their self-concept when their weight is perfectly fine). You are right of course that the top runners in a competition likely stand out BMI-wise from the rest.

I've heard that waist-to-hip ratio is a better measure of overall health because it more directly measures the amount of visceral fat, but that wasn't wasn't what the study being quoted was measuring.

Could it be muscle loss?

I look lean, not wasted away.

"Protein-deficient vegans" is a joke among omnivores, who assume that anyone not eating meat must be malnourished, and among vegans, who find ignorance of that magnitude hilarious.

> I'm convinced that it's diet and exercise, in that order, that are primarily to blame

Prepare to be debated to death. Any solution to the problem of obesity involving personal effort is downvoted in favor of taking medicines.

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