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Comment by Carrok | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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