Hacker News Reader

Comment by solarbunny | Hacker News Reader

Vegetarian diet more healthy? In what criterion? Lean body mass? Sprint speed? Hint: vegetarians are known to be slow [1]. I think whether vegetarian diet is more healthy depends on personal traits: gut flora, genetics, even climate one lives. Basically there is no such one-fits-all scenario for a diet.

[1] Louise Burke - Clinical Sports Nutrition

View on HN

You're less likely to have numerous health problems by following a vegetarian diet. As a vegetarian you are, for example, less likely to have heart disease, the number one killer in the United States. [1] Interestingly, some of the oldest people in the world eat a primarily plant-based diet (though not exclusively). [2]

The issue is that you need a well planned veg diet. You can't just eat french fries and white bread and expect to maintain your health, obviously. For me, after a couple months of tracking my food and learning the calories/fat/protein of a lot of plant foods, I don't really have to think hard about creating well-balanced meals. It's a learning process.

I'm sure it's possible to have a healthy diet that includes a very small amount of non-red meat. That small amount is probably not going to hurt you that much. [3] However, you can get every vital nutrient you would get from meat from a plant source without the tacked-on fat and cholesterol.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/30/vegetarians-heart-h...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-...

[3] http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/study-urges-moderation-in...

You can't get B12 from any plant source, though.

Not from plants, but from micro-organisms and bacteria! Yum! Many of my foods are fortified with B12.

50% DV in my soy/almond milk, 40% in a single tbsp of nutritional yeast. I have a cup with cereal in the morning and a cup with dinner at night and I'm set. It's quite easy.

Personally, I'd rather get a shot than have to eat nutritional yeast.

Are you kidding? Nutritional yeast is delicious! You can put it on popcorn, include it in any recipe that calls for Parmesan (like risotto or cheesy pastas), use it for breading tofu, use it to make vegan mac n cheese. I love nutritional yeast...in case you can't tell. :) It just has an awful name.

I fail to see how sprint speed, or indeed any other sports-based metric, is related to health. A strictly vegetarian diet is more healthy in the sense that it dramatically reduces the chances of getting various diseases. These include some of the top killers in developed countries, like heart disease and stroke. Vegans are also far less likely to be obese, and obesity is an important risk factor of many diseases.

The three main factors that influence health (in the sense above) are smoking habits, diet, and exercise. The factors you mention are secondary. I refer you to the sources I cited above for more details and evidence.

> Basically there is no such one-fits-all scenario for a diet.

That's a bit like saying that not everyone should avoid arsenic... There are of course personal variations, but the fact that meat, dairy and eggs are bad for you is not one of them. The basic mechanisms that cause animal-based food to be harmful, like the fact that saturated fats increase bad cholesterol, are well-studied and do not vary greatly from person to person.

On the other hand, a vegan diet is not one-size; it's not like we just eat lettuce all day. In fact, when you go vegan you discover that you do not lose any diversity, because there are many plant foods that non-vegans usully don't consider eating (for no good reason).

Sprinter speed is mostly determined by genetics and training (and often, PEDs). Diet is largely irrelevant - Usain Bolt's "power food" is mcnuggets, Yohan Blake's is a 16 banana smoothie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com