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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

My vegetarian friends say that they literally can't eat meat any more, in the sense that their stomach physiology (acids? bacteria? not sure) isn't capable of digesting it. Yes, it was voluntary at some point, but it's not clear that you can still apply that label.

As someone with food allergies, I could understand (and be unhappy) if a captor decided to feed me allergens as intentional punishment, but I'd be pretty upset and feel pretty dehumanized if a captor just did so because it was the cheapest way to prepare a meal.

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"in the sense that their stomach physiology isn't capable of digesting it"

Its a very popular strightdope urban legend discussion topic. You'd die pretty quickly if you couldn't adsorb complete proteins. Astrologically speaking, iron ions from spinach are dramatically different than iron ions from a steak, but your biochemistry won't know the difference.

You can get three interesting effects:

1) Any time you mess with your diet you mess with your gut flora and ... residue. Not to mention the "feel" in your stomach before its all broken down to constituent molecules indistinguishable from plant sources (other than less fiber) So minor tummy ache is theoretically possible. Less fiber intake = less... output the next day, etc.

2) From my M-i-Ls adventures in gallbladder problems, its theoretically possible for vegan types to chug olive oil especially in the form of salad dressing, but to really consume huge quantities of oil/fat all at once you need a greasy triple cheeseburger with bacon. So you can have some bile / gallbladder related fun (whoa I just ate three days worth of oils/greases in one meal, totally freaking out my gallbladder type of reaction). You'll be fine.

3) Psychologically you can get really messed up. Try eating some dog sometime in a foreign country and then focusing on your stomach (assuming you're standard American) is going to be all messed up. Still meat is meat and if they told you it was pork you wouldn't have blinked, but here you are feeling like you're gonna hurl. Its really not as much fun as my description sounds. Think of that soy stuff instead of cows/chicken/fish/pigs/dogs and you'll be just fine as long as you can avoid getting all anxious. Being anxious is never fun, no matter if due to diet or relationships or tiny enclosed spaces or public speaking or whatever.

It's actually for the same reason people get sick when the visit countries with poor water quality and drink the water. They aren't used to the pathogens.

Check page 2 of this Consumer Reports article[1] for an example.

> Enterococcus was the most common bacterium we found, occurring in 79.8 percent of our samples. Next was E. coli, in 65.2 percent of them; campylobacter, 43 percent; klebsiella pneumoniae, 13.6 percent; salmonella, 10.8 percent, and staphylococcus aureus, 9.2 percent.

It's part of the reason that only some people experience the problems as a lot of it depends on how long you have not eaten meat, at what age you stopped eating meat, the overall strength of you immune system and just if you were unlucky the first time you resumed eating meat and ate something with higher percentage of pathogens present. Also, if you regularly cooked and ate from a kitchen that was mixed use or non meat.

[1] http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/02/the-high...

> Astrologically speaking, iron ions from spinach are dramatically different than iron ions from a steak, but your biochemistry won't know the difference.

In general, this is not true. In particular, we can read the straight dope ( http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/696/why-was-spinach... ):

> Spinach's star dimmed once more research was done. It turned out the iron in it couldn't be readily absorbed by the body.

I don't believe your friends. They may notice the meat in their stomachs and feel more 'full' than usual, even feel bad. But 'incapable of digesting it'? Not likely. What, the toilet has whole hotdog pieces in it?

I stopped eating meat as a regular part of my diet nearly four years ago, and now eating more than a little tiny bit will make me physically ill with severe stomach distress. I would certainly count that as 'not capable of digesting', and to say otherwise is pure pedantry.

And if you're putting whole hotdog pieces in your stomach you might want to consider chewing a little more carefully, that way leads to choking.

I think the point is that 'not capable of digesting' is an inaccurate description of the issue. Most likely it would just take some time to integrate meat back into their diet... I've made much smaller changes to my diet which caused discomfort, but it lasted a week or two, and my body was fine with it. Likely this friend's transition would be more uncomfortable, and lengthy, but I can't imagine that if for some reason they HAD to eat meat again, their body would completely reject all meat indefinitely.

To counter your anecdote: I was vegetarian for 26 years (and had been vegan for 5 of those years) and I had no problems eating beef, mutton, lamb, or pork.

Anecdotal evidence is stupid and pointless (includng my anecdotal evidence) and it's weird to see it so often on HN.

Wait, why is it stupid and pointless in this case?

We have multiple anecdotes indicating people have had problems; we have at least one indicating people don't. This is, to me, clearly evidence against both "Everyone has problems" and "Nobody has problems" and in favor of "Some people have problems", and for the specific policy question at hand, we're trying to evaluate "Some people have problems".

No in fact with questions of religion, psychiatry, diets, etc it usually comes to 'large bodies of populations' or even 'majorities of populations', you're going to find 'some' of everything.

Sure. The question is whether your body can sufficiently adapt to voluntary dietary choices that it would be cruel for a prison to feed you food that you can no longer tolerate. If you can find "some" of it, then I would say yes, a mature society should be inclined to treat this as a legitimate concern.

Whether there's any particular guarantee of this happening is another question entirely and completely irrelevant. It would be relevant if you could determine that there is a guarantee this won't happen, but that's it.

I suspect - but can't be sure without some form of experiment - that just like it took time to get you to adapt to not eating meat it will take time to re-adapt to eating meat again. The only way to be sure is by sticking to a meat diet for a longer time after going vegetarian for long enough that you're no longer supporting a set of bacteria that can easily digest the meat.

I'm not sure how long that would take and if it would happen with all people but just like it takes a while before newborns can digest food properly I suspect that a similar adaptation would not happen overnight in adults that radically change their diet from one set of foods to another.

Apropos: vegetable matter is far harder to digest in general than meat (due to plants having cell walls that need to be broken down first).

Any new diet can cause digestive issues at first. People generally aclumate over time.

[Note: i personally am in full support of prisoners being allowed to keep their diet while being incarcerated. Especially as someone who has a special diet myself. ]

Well, you would have to introduce it slowly. I lived in an anarchist separatist vegan collective in my time in germany (long story), with the result of me not eating any animal products for over a year. The first time (after 11 months) that I ate meat after that (a steak. bleu) I puked my guts out and had the runs for over a week.

It took about a month of slowly introducing meat before I was back to normal. There are others that made the switch cold turkey without problems though.

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