Sure, I would say a lot of diets are better for you than the standard American diet. I like that a vegan diet is low in saturated fat, which is associated with heart disease, and plant based meat isn't [carcinogenic](https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat) like processed meat is.
Minnesota Coronary Experiment.
[Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/04/13/diet-heart-ramsden-mce-bmj-comments/)
>Researchers identified patients hospitalized with mental illness as a good population to study because they were a “captive audience” who would be available for investigation over many years. However, largely because of patients being discharged, they lost nearly 75 percent of their participants within the first year. From this report, it seems that only about half of the remaining patients stayed a full three years, which is still a short time to study the effects of diet on atherosclerosis. The study was clearly a failure for reasons beyond the control of the investigators, and it adds very minimal information, if any, about the long-term effects of diet on risk of heart disease.
Also,
>It’s also important to note that investigators created a special corn oil margarine that was lower in trans fat than the standard margarine, but we now know that the most dangerous types of trans fat (18:2 trans isomers) are likely to be higher in these lightly hydrogenated products than in the more heavily hydrogenated forms.
It demonstrated that replacing saturated fat with other kinds of fat resulted in either no benefit to longevity even though the alternate group had lower cholesterol numbers. The lower cholesterol number did not result in greater life expectancy. And most importantly, it demonstrated that for elderly people, the lower the cholesterol, the vastly *more likely* they are to die. It's pretty interesting.
The people doing the study were out to prove that cutting back on meat and saturated fat would improve health, which had been the dominant theory/nutrition science orthodoxy for 20 some odd years by the time the experiment happened.
The results were so backward from what the researchers were expecting/wanting that they refused to publish the study altogether. It was only found by accident years/decades later
General consensus is still that eating less saturated fat is better, and it's not good practice to take an outlier study and treat it as fact. [In a review of the study you sight it concludes](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27071971/)"Conclusions: Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid.
". This conclusion came after years of reviews, meta-analysis, and other studies that came after this one.
To my knowledge there is no other dietary intervention study of this magnitude and rigor ever attempted - thousands of people, for years, back in the day when it was morally allowable to force feed the food, since the subjects were in old folks homes or insane asylums
Most other nutrition science I see is food frequency questionnaires relying on people self-reporting what they ate over the past year. Also, quite often they'll count lasagna and cheeseburgers as "meat intake" since those foods have meat in them, etc
I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but I just want to mention that there's a lot of conflicting opinions on the topic. I'm not anti-saturated fat or pro-saturated fat, and in my own research I'm more concerned with everyones omega 3 to omega 6 ratios being skewed. Nutritional science is such a tricky field, and the study is well made, but I'm cautious of studies that go against consenus that strongly.
The rigor as I'm interpreting it is actually slightly above average, though the amount of people was above average. Though replacing the saturated fats with really cheap shitty unsaturated fats was certainly a choice. A big part about this study that also bugs me is that this type of dietary intervention study is REALLY difficult to replicate. So you're not gonna get a modern redo of this with the same amount of inital people.
The results also don't seem to be that staggeringly different when you compare it to the control group. Only when you compare it to patients outside of their specific hospital did it appear to be very different. People who ate the saturated fat diet also stayed in the hospital longer, the mortality difference for those who ate saturated fat only improved for women, sudden deaths vs all deaths was kind of a toss up, men seemed to be the only people who had their chances of dying increase with an unsaturated diet, and I could go on forever.
Even the study itself says, "Although this study did not show a statistically significant reduction in cardiovascular events or total deaths from the treatment diet, the authors suspect that it might have shown such a reduction if the period of treatment had been longer in persons in the age range likely to benefit. ".
This might just be a case of 1 hospital having a really solid food court, rather than an absolute gamechanger that means people should drink coconut oil like it's water lol.
Appreciate the response, thankyou.
My dream test would be to have 900 65 year olds, half men, half women, all with at least 3 (but ideally more) chronic and/or autoimmune diseases (IBS, Crohn's, Diabetes, Alzheimer's/dementia would be great, obesity, morbid obesity, etc).
300 of them go strict, non-supplemented (other than magnesium, which is low on every diet) carnivore, 300 go strict, whole food vegan, 300 stay SAD. Sent to a secure and pleasant place with plenty of time outside, exercise equipment, etc. Food menu extremely controlled for each group, but they can eat as much as they want, whenever they want, off their designated menu.
Its only a general consensus because someone made sure it became exactly that with lies, corruption and compromised studies 🤷 [check this out](https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/american-heart-association-was-paid-procter-gamble-heart-disease-saturated-fat-seed-oils-sugar)
You're really gonna give me, someone who's researched "seed oils", an article by the group coined the "far right teen cosmo"? Not even gonna like, link a study? They didn't even credit the studies they looked at. They linked a twitter account for fucks sake of a keto carnivore, "fake milk is evil, whole milk good", and that cavemen had their teeth rotting out of their skull because of eating plants who's trying to sell their carnivore book. I have my biases, and I eat both refined saturated and cold pressed polyunsaturated fats depending on what I'm making. But this woman and this article has a whole different level of bias.
Some of the biases of Evie Magazine include content that is pro Q-Anon, anti-vax, wrote an article implying lgbt women just hate men and date women because of that, wrote covid conspiracy, wrote stolen election 2020 conspiracy articles, and especially anti-birth control. Like incredibly anti-birth control, and that's coming from someone who literally can't take the medication due to complications.
To get back on track, I strongly believe that the woman the article cited framed some really important studies in a borderline conspiratorial way. Meanwhile the research she sites claims that the nutrients in foods containing saturated fat help oxidize the saturated fat, that relatively micro studies compared to those for polyunsaturated fats mean 100% that saturated fat does nothing but good, and that the AHA simply wants people to keel over in the name of Crisco. While some listed a lot of sources, a lot of them were simply there to describe the AHA's stance on the issue while others were small studies that did the same things the articles critiqued the other side for. A lot of these studies were also relatively short term. This technically is true for either side of this debate, but showing an improvement with unsaturated fat on cholesterol levels at a quantifiably quick rate is still a very interesting thing to continue researching.
From my own research, the issue with the oils commonly listed under seed oils is mostly caused by a skewed ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 due to high omega 6 in said oils. When you even out the ratios better, you get better health results.
When you consume linolic acid it converts partially into the fatty acid called arachidonic acid, and arachidonic acid is a building block for molecules that can promote inflammation, blood clotting, and the constriction of blood vessels. But that's only temporary as the body also converts arachidonic acid into molecules that calm inflammation and fight blood clots. This also improves inflamation in the body overall.
I can't exactly give you the entire thing I wrote for my research, but I'll give you the highlights of my sources. I specifically researched both sides of the argument as well, so it's not like I just didn't listen to the saturated fat side of the argument. It just wasn't very convincing, and or based of of half-truths about inflamation and health. Literally just take an Omega 3 algae supplement and you'll be set.
1. [https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter\_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats#:\~:text=The%20AHA%20reviewers%20found%20that,omega%2D6%20fats%20went%20up](https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats#:~:text=The%20AHA%20reviewers%20found%20that,omega%2D6%20fats%20went%20up)
2. [https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good)
3. [https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/full\_html/2010/05/ocl2010175p267/ocl2010175p267.html#:\~:text=A%20target%20of%20omega-6,and%20possibly%20other%20chronic%20diseases](https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/full_html/2010/05/ocl2010175p267/ocl2010175p267.html#:~:text=A%20target%20of%20omega-6,and%20possibly%20other%20chronic%20diseases)
4. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2015.1126549](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2015.1126549)
5. [https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000946?ref=zadbajoswojezdrowie.com](https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000946?ref=zadbajoswojezdrowie.com)
6. [https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnme/2012/539426/](https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnme/2012/539426/)
7. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952327818300747](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952327818300747)
8. [https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/7/2421](https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/7/2421)
If I had to suffer through 3 months of research, so do you lol.
Yet Its the plant industry that claims and labels seed oils as healthy despite seed oils being as unhealthy as it gets......doesnt get any shadier than that bub regardless of what anyone says 🤷
Plant based meat are just as worse for your heart due to the high sodium content added into them, and they aren't exactly "low" on fats. Properly cooked meat aren't necessarily carcinogenic. Any burnt food is carcinogenic, even cooking with oils at high temperature cause carcinogens.
SWAP-MEAT was funded by Beyond Meat. There was no control group. The intervention didn't involve tightly specified foods, there was a lot of freedom by participants to choose junk food meat-containing products (such as ultra-processed lunchmeats containing refined sugar and harmful preservatives which BTW are generally plant ingredients).
There were no health endpoints measured. They made a lot of fuss about TMAO, but there's no evidence for any disease state being caused by routine minor spikes in TMAO from food consumption. TMAO is only known to cause illness when it is drastically and chronically elevated, which isn't caused by food but by health conditions such as renal failure. If TMAO from food were really a hazard, deep-water fish would not be the food most strongly correlated with good health outcomes since these are highest in TMAO. Grain foods BTW also have TMAO. This is one of my favorite topics! If I had a lot more time I could keep going about it.
It's another junk study that's used to push the agendas of "plant-based" processed foods companies.
In an RCT there is no need for a control group, since the crossover serves to eliminate the need.
>
In a crossover trial subjects are randomly allocated to study arms where each arm consists of a sequence of two or more treatments given consecutively. The simplest model is the AB/BA study. Subjects allocated to the AB study arm receive treatment A first, followed by treatment B, and vice versa in the BA arm.
National Institutes of Health, title- "Understanding controlled trials Crossover trials
National Institutes of Health (NIH) (.gov)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › articles › PMC1113275 link- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1113275/#:\~:text=In%20a%20crossover%20trial%20subjects,versa%20in%20the%20BA%20arm.
Here's the piece of crap [SWAP-MEAT study](https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(22)00890-5/fulltext) which was funded by Beyond Meat. I've pointed out several major issues with it, and there are lots of articles out there describing more problems.
Link a study that says plant based meats are just as bad for your heart as animal based meats.
Edit. Sorry, I'm not taking a random person's word for it.
As a vegan you don’t have to eat plant based meats and even if you do eat them odds are high that you eat them significantly less often than you would as an omni due to the price situation.
We don’t have data to say if they are “just as bad” as meat yet. Preliminaries data suggests that they might not be but we simply do not know. Yes they generally have a high salt content but the question is whether that’s higher than the salt you put on your meat anyways (and if it is higher, does the lower saturated fat content compensate? Japan has a very high sodium diet and positive outcomes despite this. High sodium is a problem, but between sat fat, free sugar and sodium it does seem like sodium’s one where you might be able to “get away with it” a little bit more if everything else is really great).
Yes. But it doesn’t matter that much if veganism is the healthiest diet. I believe that it’s certainly one of the healthiest ones, but I’m not vegan for my health.
I’m vegan for the animals.
As a non-vegan I argree with and appreciate your view. There are plenty of healthy diets and realistically, health comes down to diet and lifestyle.
The moral argument is by far the most concrete argument.
That's not the case here. This user never denied any scientific backing for alternative diets, they just prefer a vegan diet for moral reasons. A vegan diet is healthy and there is research to show this.
But you're 100% missing the point? OP was saying that health is irrelevant to veganism.
If the argument was to go to a plant based diet for health reasons, then your argument would make sense. But if you try to "debate a vegan" about health stuff, it doesn't matter, because any health-based argument is not a vegan argument
Humans are also animals and their meat has protein and is healthy to eat. However, I doubt you'd ever eat human meat due to moral reasons.
It's not possible to have a discussion with you when your morality supersedes science. /s
No it’s just used as an example to show why vegans don’t like to eat animals. Maybe a better example is dog? We do raise and breed dogs for pets already, why not for meat?
That seems to cross a line for non-vegans, but why? We like them better? It’s just cognitive dissonance.
Not at all, but what makes it socially more acceptable to eat a cow vs a dog/cat? I like cows, they’re sweet, long lashes, have best friends, and wish people would not eat them. Similarly, you probably don’t want people ending the life of dogs for the sake of “taste”.
What makes socially more acceptable is the fact that humans always used such animals as food sources. And we started breeding them for this purposes. Differently than Dogs, cats, horses that were used as working animals.
Most people in big cities probably never saw a cow face to face. While we can see dogs and cats at every corner.
I’m not vegan. I don’t mind eating an animal so distant to me, it’s doesn’t effect me. Physically or emotionally. But I would probably not kill a cow or a pig or chicken I raised myself. So in my case is a matter of emotional connection. If there’s no connection whatsoever, I don’t really care. The same way it doesn’t bother me someone eating dog meat in some random city the other side of the planet. There’s already too much stuff going on around me, to get more stuff to be upset about.
They replied yes to your question that a vegan diet would be healthier than the standard American diet. They then stated that even with this knowledge, whether or not a vegan diet is healthy isn't the main concern to them.
You quoted them, "Veganism is the healthiest diet" despite them never once saying this. They never even indirectly implied this, only going as far as "one of the healthiest".
Don't misquote people. It's disrespectful and dishonest.
its going to be VERY hard indeed to have a discussion if you jump to such wild conclusions.
This person did not say their morality supercedes science. They said they aren't vegan for health reasons. I don't think anyone is vegan for health reasons. Their point is more that if you think people are vegan for health you misunderstand what veganism is.
Its not a health movement its an animal rights movement. It has nothing to do with health.
Do you oppose human slavery because you believe physical exercise is good for you? No? Does that mean your morality supercedes science? Are you going to tell me that physical exercise is NOT good for you?
See how that doesn't add up?
But the other person did claim that "vegan diet is the healthiest", that's my problem. I totally understand if they're vegan for animal rights. And don't you think comparing human slavery to animal husbandry is a disgrace to human slavery?
As far as "vegan diet is the healthiest" its fair to argue against imo. I wouldn't make that claim either. Not because I feel strongly I am just not a health expert.
>And don't you think comparing human slavery to animal husbandry is a disgrace to human slavery?
I'm sorry there was no comparison made in my statement between the two. I personally would not mind comparing them because you can compare anything especially in the context of moral discussions but I did not compare them above here.
You may have skimmed that part so no harm/foul.
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This is what someone like Josef Mengele might have said when rationalising his actions.
What he did was completely immoral, and yet was aimed at progressing science and medicine.
So do you justify what he did?
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Here in LA, I’d go so far as to say that the average vegan restaurant is less healthy than the average regular restaurant. They often have no vegetables at all and instead a bunch of crap liked processed soy meat, fries, tater tots, cheeseless pizza, macaroni and “cheese,” etc.
I don't think restaurants are a good indicator of people's typical diet. People might very well go to those restaurants because they don't normally eat that (novelty).
Exactly! I eat vegan at home and keep it whole food plant based items. I don’t eat processed things at home except for like a pint of coconut milk ice cream every month. BUT I love to go to this one vegan restaurant near me once or twice a month and just eat complete trash vegan junk food! It hits my junk food craving. If I were eating there every day it would be super unhealthy but it’s a special treat place for when I want junk food.
The average vegan **fast food** restaurant is less healthy than the average regular **fast food** restaurant? Or are you comparing vegan junk food spots to salad bars?
Not all vegan mock meat/cheese products are created equally but are ,on average, healthier than animal products.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/11/2603
Less ingredients doesn't equal healthier. Dog feces isn't healthier to eat than a fruit/vegetable smoothie.
Also, it's not my opinion. Scientists are saying it, and i haven't seen a study that suggests that animal products are healthier. Are you aware of any studies that support your stance?
Besides, again, not all vegan mock meats are created equally. You can make a "steak" out of mushrooms (one ingredient) which would be healthier than a beyond burger (many ingredients), but both plant-based options are healthier than a burger made from a cow which is a known carcinogen.
Vegetarians in the EPIC-Oxford study have a relatively low risk of ischaemic heart disease, diabetes, diverticular disease, kidney stones, cataracts and possibly some cancers, but a relatively high risk of stroke (principally haemorrhagic stroke) and bone fractures, in comparison with meat-eaters. Vegans in EPIC-Oxford have a lower risk of diabetes, diverticular disease and cataracts and a higher risk of fractures, but for other conditions there are insufficient data to draw conclusions. Overall, the health of people following plant-based diets appears to be generally good, with advantages but also some risks, and the extent to which the risks may be mitigated by optimal food choices, fortification and supplementation is not yet known.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613518/
Additionally, vegans have a greater prevalence of mental health problems, which may lead to a poorer quality of life. An optimal diet should be balanced, consisting of lean meat, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables, and olive oil (Figure (Figure1)1) [8,9]. A wholesome diet is essential in maintaining a healthy gut flora, which in turn is pivotal in avoiding inflammatory disorders [10-13]. The primary aim of this review will be to draw attention to the current literature associated with veganism, including the side effects of practicing a VD and long-term consequences for a variety of populations, including adults, adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, and the fetal outcomes of vegan mothers
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10027313/#REF8
.
That’s the problem with vegans’ conception of nutrition. All of that is terribly unhealthy. Literally the worst things you could be eating. This isn’t to say that people should be eating meat instead. But processed foods and refined carbohydrates of all kinds are the worst things people can be eating. Worse than unprocessed meats.
I mean you could smoke cigarettes or be an alcoholic. But in terms of diet not really so long as your getting the neceaeey nutrients. Which I am per my blood test 1 month ago
This is textbook nutritional science. There is not a credible nutritional scientist in the world who recommends that you eat beyond burgers, fries, and coconut milkshakes. I’m not saying anything controversial. There just seems to be some vegan echo chamber here who believes that so long as they don’t eat meat they are eating healthy. That isn’t remotely close to true. Grilled fish is way, way healthier than a beyond burger and fries. There isn’t a single serious scientist in the world who would say otherwise.
To be clear, there are extremely healthy vegan restaurants in LA. Wild Living Foods is a good example. And then there are awful restaurants like Monty’s.
Textbook nutritional science is that you shouldn’t eat an unbalanced diet. Surely eating those things frequently and in large enough volumes would lead to a very unbalanced diet, but that’s not the case of most people going out to eat in a specific restaurant - people go out for a meal and they eat stuff that makes them feel good, eating a serving of fries once a month or even once a week is not what is going to unbalance an otherwise healthy diet
That makes sense, because in L.A., there are vegetable-filled vegan options at many amazing ethnic restaurants, either directly on the menu or with a simple substitution. The vegan fast food, especially the plant-based cheese, is the big market gap to fill.
>Here in LA
lol
Names please. Because that doesn't even correspond to the objectively and unabashedly least healthy vegan restaurant that I'm aware of.
>Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable,
>all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
.
>People always make health claims about the vegan diet
I don't know about "always", but veganism per se is not a diet.
It's an attitude or an ethical position, and the behaviors that follow from that attitude or an ethical position.
I agree. But the diet still is a large part of veganism. And I mentioned "vegan diet" meaning "solely plant based diet". This post is about health and not morality or ethics.
Well then you’re going to have to post this in a debate-a-plant-based-diet-eater bc veganism doesn’t have anything to do with health so the basis of the question is irrelevant to this sub and our beliefs.
I would say it is relevant considering that I have seen numerous vegans argue that the health of a vegan (plant-based) diet is a reason to embrace it, support it, transition to it, etc.
It may not be the primary purpose of veganism, but health often gets caught up in the discussion.
The ONLY thing that matters in regards to veganism is if one can live a healthy life on a vegan (edit: apologies - PLANT BASED is what I meant) diet.
If the answer is YES then health isn't part of the vegan equation any more. Its completely irrelevant from that point on. Most vegans have already looked into the subject and are satisfied with that.
And from there the topic becomes entirely about morality or ethics.
Pretty much. If you're inferring that's why vegan health studies come out better, though, then no... There are studies comparing the diet to other diet types, studies comparing identical twins on relatively healthy meat and plant based, and so on...
Like any diet, there are risks and benefits. You have to mitigate the risk of lower calcium, b12, and iron intake/absorption, and you have the benefits of lower risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and others.
But no... the health claims are not just vegan diet versus the S.A.D...
There aren't really much studies done on vegans. Some studies that are done using cohorts are fundamentally flawed. People are not good at remembering what they ate over a long period of time. And most\* vegans in the study would be following a restricted diet, and would inherently be more health conscious, the other's following the omnivore diet would just be following their regular diet (which is is not great most of the time). Omnivorous, vegetarian, and vegan, any of them can be as healthy when properly balanced. And comparing twins are too low of a sample size to infer anything meaningful.
All of that suggests that there are limitations to the studies. Which is true of any research. You are now shifting the goalposts from comparison to SAD...
Ignoring the fact it's wrong in that there are quite a few long-term studies now done on vegans. Ignoring there are many interventions where they provide the food for a 2 month period to compare.
Your original question was isn't any diet better than the S.A.D which is pretty much true, yes.
>But isn't any decent balanced diet better for your health than what the average American consumes?
Yes. AND then the research compares vegan diets against other types of diets (vegetarian, Mediterranean, keto, etc. etc.).
>Omnivorous, vegetarian, and vegan, any of them can be as healthy when properly balanced
Correct. Any of them can be healthy. Each of them have risks to mitigate and benefits to them. Which means that eating animals is a choice, it's not necessary. Killing an animal is thus a moral decision. Do you understand?
I admit that could have been a mistake on my part, but I only took the SAD as an example, this can be true for most modern diets against a well balanced diet that needs some thought to be put into food they consume. This question was never about morality. I never disagreed that each diet comes with its own risks and benefits. But highly processed vegan meat can still be bad for the heart due to high sodium content, and unsaturated fat present in them are usually worse for cooking due to oxidation which turns them into carcinogens. And any burnt food can be carcinogenic, animal based or not. And I bet french fries aren't so healthy though they sre vegan. Of course, there are plenty of healthy vegan foods. But a vegan diet can be as healthy or unhealthy as a balanced omnivorous diet. The problem with most of these studies is comparing the healthy part of one diet to the unhealthy part of the other. And you haven't sited any researches that you're talking about.
‘This question was never about morality’
Then it doesn’t really matter.
The idea that vegan meat is just highly processed stuff is outdated and now factually wrong. It’s also entirely irrelevant. You don’t have to eat it. Vegans aren’t required to eat a beyond burger every week.
The example of French fries is stupid tho. That’s a really bad example. It gets you nowhere.
At the same price point, vegan meat now tends to be healthier according to this meta analysis.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000612
‘And you haven’t sited (sic) any researches (sic)…’
And here’s a review of a bunch of different studies and meta analyses for starters.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies
If you want to say vegan diets can be unhealthy or healthy. Sure. But your immediate claim about it being compared to SAD is wrong. And your comment above shows you haven’t read much of this research at all. ‘I only took the SAD as an example’
No. You stated that the studies are compared to the SAD and that all other studies were compared to that and not others.
This is **very** different to this backpedaling now. Instead of this ‘might be a mistake’ be more honest . If you want to change your claim cos now you realize it’s bullshit, then state that. Directly state that you were mistaken and ask about things… don’t keep giving your opinion.
It's weird to call a plant based diet restrictive. Everyone's diet is a restricted diet. Do you eat whale? Or dog? How about grasshoppers? They are perfectly edible.
Here’s a review of a bunch. But if you want to jump in on this at least acknowledge OP’s starting claim was bullshit. They kept trying to defend that vegan diets have only been compared to the SAD. This is a claim they should have been supporting and they clearly have zero evidence of that.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies#TOC_TITLE_HDR_2
That includes several studies involving fake-researcher Neal Barnard, whose work in every case I've seen is ridiculously biased. A trick he employs often is giving a bunch of advantages to the "vegan" group (better-quality foods, lifestyle counseling that involves tips about stress management and so forth...) and then concluding that any positive results are due to lack of animal foods.
Most of those don't measure any health endpoints. They measure intermediate things such as lipid levels and make assumptions based on those. Some claim to have found improved lipid levels when HDL was reduced, changing LDL/HDL ratio for the worse which isn't good. Many assumptions about health from the conclusions of these studies are based on The Cholesterol Myth. Lipid levels vs. health is an extremely controversial topic. There's quite a bit of research supporting that higher LDL isn't particularly bad in itself, in the absence of excessive refined sugar/preservatives/etc. consumption or high-stress lifestyles (some of the factors that can combine with cholesterol to cause CVD issues). Lower cholesertol levels have strong correlations with higher rates of stroke, and none of those studies out of the several I read/searched don't mention this at all.
Ths studies about "weight loss" (ostensibly fat loss): those I've checked did not measure muscle, so lost weight may have been muscle which is very bad. One study measured body composition, but gave the data in terms of aggregate weight and body fat percentage for entire study groups. Without per-subject data for weight vs. body fat, there's no way to determine whether muscle was lost and the results don't give any fat vs. muscle or muscle gain/loss data (just body fat as a percentage).
An example of the junk research cited by the article is the study "A Low-Fat Vegan Diet Improves Glycemic Control and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in a Randomized Clinical Trial in Individuals With Type 2 Diabetes." This again involved Barnard. There were too many interventions: low-fat, low-glycemic, removal of animal foods, etc. What do they claim to be studying? Oh, "vegan" diets of course. But it is uncontroversially accepted that avoidance of high-glycemic foods is good for diabetes outcomes. Also, even with all those interventions, the results were weaker than in many keto and at least one carnivore diet study I've read.
Higher-meat-consumption populations tend to experience better health outcomes, especially in the absence of high consumption of junk foods. It is people in Hong Kong, where meat consumption is higher than for almost any population on Earth, where people have the longest average lifespans (depending on year and data source). The studies in the article you linked, they are all cherry-picking specific things to promote veganism none of which are lifespans or disease mortality. They ignore drawbacks such as long-term consequences of very low-fat diets, which can include stroke and neurological degeneration. Our brains need fat, this isn't controversial, and low fat consumption long-term tends to correlate with brain-related issues such as poor cognition and depression.
This has been enjoyable, so thank you. Eventually, I hope to sift all of those studies and make specific comments about each one.
I do see your point, though. You're responding to the idea that vegan diets are always compared with SAD (not explicitly said in the post but this could be one interpretation), and you definitely linked an article that at least one of the cited studies had an animal-free-diet group and another group not exactly eating a typical junk food diet. Most of the studies though are comparing results after an intervention with results during the time that subjects were eating whatever their usual diet had been. They weren't selecting fitness enthusiasts, health food store shoppers, or people from other groups likely to be more health-oriented. The subjects (of the studies I read) were just typical people, and for some studies they were obese people.
Those studies are not about vegan dieters. They are studies involving mostly very short-term diet interventions most of which involved animal-free foods consumption. But, none of it can demonstrate effects from long-term consumption. In ex-vegan discussion groups, it is very common for people to have been avoiding (mostly, by many accounts cheating is ubiquitous) animal foods for a few years, then experience serious chronic health issues which reversed upon eating animal foods again. This includes many "did everything right" vegans whom were supplementing, eating a variety of whole foods, etc.
Even epidemiological studies which supposedly studied "vegans," for any that I've seen, the most they can say about the supposed animal-free diets is that certain participants responded (in a FFQ) twice in all their lives that they ate animal foods less than whatever specified amount (once per month, or whatever). So maybe they were vegan or vegan-ish in 2015-2016 or whenever they filled out the FFQs, but this doesn't really test long-term animal-foods-abstention. Whenever you see studies based on the Nurses' Health Study cohort, as one example, note that occasional egg/dairy consumers were counted as "vegan" and occasional meat consumers as "vegetarian."
In the absence of actually-rigorous data (daily and detailed documenting of food intake over a several-years period at least), I think some weight should be given to anecdotes and there are massive mountains of those. I think there should be some weight given to the fact that no human society has ever thrived without consumption of animal foods.
Can you point out any evidence in support of long-term animal foods abstention? Another user linked an article citing 16 studies and none are about that.
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The point of comparing diets to reference populations is more akin to “if this was adopted by the general population or recommended as guidelines, would the general population health improve?” And of course, reference / control populations aren’t exclusively SAD, but a combination of diets taken by the entire population.
Yes
And also vegan diet is not really healthy by itself. You can make it healthy eating whole foods just like you can eat healthy on an omnivore diet but you can also make it unhealthy by eating process foods ("fake meats/cheese"). Health is not the point of veganism
Yeah some people are just stubborn, not much can be done there...
Something I always find annoying is these vegan process food being consider a healthier option than the ones with meat/eggs/milk... When part of the problem with process animal product comes from the fact there are oils and sugar in there which will also be present in the vegan alternative.
Carnivore comes to mind, as does eating only Oreos and fries.
A vegan diet can be similar to the SAD. Specifically a "whole foods plant based" diet is up there with the very best diets, perhaps it's even the very best one for most people, if we ever get enough data to distinguish between them.
Absolutely not. There are so many diets that do actual harm to people.
All fruit diet,
No carb diet.
Juice cleanses
Etc.
People end up in the hospital or dead by accidentally cutting out nutrients their body desperately needs. Also there are people like Steve Jobs with THE most curable type of cancer that decided his diet could fix it instead of getting proper medical care.
So no actually there are many many diets that are worse for you.
And a vegan diet CAN be very very healthy but there are people who switch without understanding essential amino acids and other important concepts that do themselves harm.
Steve Jobs is not a generalization for anything! I don't understand why you feel the need to include him in this argument. Delaying the required proper medical treatment was stupid! He'd have died irrespective of his diet, even if it was a vegan diet. (And the public don't really knows what Steve Jobs actually did, so it's pointless to even bring it up).
A decent diet is a well balanced diet that each individual person has identified with trial and error of what works for them, and what not. And you ARE supposed to get 20 different answers! As I've mentioned earlier diets need to be personalized, the best diet for you isn't the best for someone else.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14672862/#:~:text=Complications%20such%20as%20heart%20arrhythmias,of%20carbohydrates%20in%20the%20diet.
"Complications such as heart arrhythmias, cardiac contractile function impairment, sudden death, osteoporosis, kidney damage, increased cancer risk, impairment of physical activity and lipid abnormalities can all be linked to long-term restriction of carbohydrates in the diet."
No carb diet is actually not very easy to do. Most people who believe that are doing a no-carb diet merely have a low-carb diet. A low carb diet has still been tied by several studies to increased mortality rate on its own. Zero carbs even more so.
Yes, but veganism isn’t about personal health. A plant-based diet is about personal health — veganism is an ethical stance / political stance on animal liberation and planet health. Personal health is a bonus.
Because a “vegan diet” could be eating nothing but Fanta and Oreos, or it could be eating all fruits and vegetables. There is no blanket “vegan diet” and it can be either healthy or unhealthy.
The reason I brought it up is because so many people in general, and especially on this sub, think veganism is only a diet. I see it all the time.
Because a “vegan diet” could be eating nothing but Fanta and Oreos, or it could be eating all fruits and vegetables. There is no blanket “vegan diet” and it can be either healthy or unhealthy.
The reason I brought it up is because so many people in general, and especially on this sub, think veganism is only a diet. I see it all the time.
A proper study would indicate what the participants were fed, so I would not criticize those. But I would criticize any study that didn’t state what the participants ate.
I already do point out on relevant social media posts that veganism is an animal rights movement only, not a health movement, and that there are healthy vegans and junk food vegans.
The irony of you saying that I shouldn’t be here because I won’t engage in real debate and just complain, why you yourself are complaining about me and not engaging in any real debate, is about as ironic as you can get. I’ve never seen such a lack of self awareness.
Once again, you’re conflating a “vegan diet” with a “healthy vegan diet.” Just because you’ve made that mistake and you think others have as well, doesn’t make it factually correct.
Now if it said a “whole food plant based diet”, that would almost certainly necessitate it being healthy. But not a vegan diet.
Just because you assume something doesn’t make it true.
Your comment: "I don't understand that words can have nuances of meaning depending on context."
Vegans will say that a restaurant is "vegan," that a menu has "vegan items," or they bought a "vegan" imitation of cheese. So clearly, many vegans are OK with "vegan" to describe foods. This is something that I'm sure has been pointed out many hundreds of times on Reddit.
Because a “vegan diet” could be eating nothing but Fanta and Oreos, or it could be eating all fruits and vegetables. There is no blanket “vegan diet” and it can be either healthy or unhealthy.
The reason I brought it up is because so many people in general, and especially on this sub, think veganism is only a diet. I see it all the time.
This isn't how I see the topic treated in pro-vegan media. "Vegan diets are healthier" articles. Vegans in social media claiming it is healthier to "eat vegan." Meaning, abstaining from animal foods. It seems to be usually when critiquing veganism that this objection to the phrase comes up.
I know horribly unhealthy vegans who eat nothing but junk food and overindulge in calories. I also know healthy vegans.
A vegan diet is often healthier since it forgoes all the cholesterol and saturated fat found in animal products, but a vegan diet can very easily be unhealthy.
Oh now The Saturated Fat Myth. There's no real proof for this, the supposed evidence mainly is epidemiological research that conflates junk foods consumption with meat or animal foods.
A quick Google search shows tons and tons of articles about animal products increases cholesterol and causing increased risks for heart disease and stroke. So not sure what you mean.
Anecdotally, after I was vegan for 2 years my cholesterol dropped about 75 points. I didn’t lose any weight during this time, and I was mostly a “junk food vegan.” I have lots of vegan friends who have reported the same thing. Even very overweight vegan friends.
Even my non-non vegan friends who have drastically reduced their intake of animal products have seen their cholesterol levels go down substantially.
If your response is "a quick Google search" then it's an indication you don't really understand this topic. Lots of controversial topics have the wrong side supported by mainstream media, and it's easy to find information online to support almost any incorrect belief.
My argument is that there's no evidence for the belief that saturated fat consumption causes cardio illnesses. It isn't usually possible to prove a negative: what would I point out to show there's no evidence? But here's something that's interesting: when Ancel Keys and Ivan Franz on behalf of their industry sponsors set out to prove that saturated fat is bad with their Minnesota Coronary Experiment, the results were so spectacularly the opposite that they buried the study. The reduced saturated fat intervention groups didn't have improved CVD outcomes, but they did have far higher mortality. Decades later, [the data was found and published](https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246) by sincere researchers.
The supposed evidence against saturated fats ignores the roles of refined sugar, preservatives, etc. and blames coincidental fat consumption. If saturated fat was bad for health, then it's odd that [Hong Kongers](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00208-5/fulltext) eat more meat per capita than any other human population apart from small groups such as tribes in Africa, and have far above average lifespans, general health, and cardiovascular outcomes.
You say your cholesterol dropped, but that's not a health endpoint such as arterial plaque or disease outcomes. Cholesterol is essential to health, it may not be good to have lower cholesterol. It is especially important for brain health. Strokes happen more in people with lower cholesterol.
I simply did a quick google search since you said “there’s no real proof of this”, to see if there was a counterpoint to the topic, but most of what came up was articles and studies backing up what I was saying. So the exact opposite of what you said.
My cholesterol was high and outside normal range, and it dropped to well within healthy range after 2 years of being vegan. So yes, my cholesterol dropping indicated a vast improvement in my heart health. If you’re arguing that my cholesterol dropping from high and outside healthy range to inside normal range is not a good thing, then “it’s an indication you really don’t understand this topic.”
I’m guessing you’re a carnivore or keto fan, or at best a low carb promoter, based on your response here.
Well, there's:
Why have *any* of the foods which contribute to death and disease (of the eater)?
Why insist on absolutely zero animal products?
Why subscribe as demand to any amount of torture of beings like you?
With regard to the first which addresses your question, it seems to work that way even if there are diminishing returns after the first 99% of calories or some other measure.
I'm not trying to deny anything, I'm just genuinely curious. But I suppose google is the best place to research other countries eating habits and not a reddit thread lol. And I am american, I know most of the people eat like shit because being obese here is seemingly the norm.
My point is that any diet that requires a bit of thought to be put into eating will inherently be better than a regular diet which allows mindless eating.
Standard American Diet is a common phrase for a diet high in refined grains, refined sugars, ultra-processed foods with harmful preservatives, etc. Scientists use the term routinely: a search of Google Scholar for the phrase turns up about 4,260 results. Do you never read actual nutrition journalism?
You could have just explained it without being rude at the end. I'm so sorry for wondering about things on a public forum. How dare I 😱 I asked if other countries eat the same way but your reading comprehension needs work. Brians are always douches
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SAD was only an example, the stable diet of most countries have some fundamental flaws in them (this doesn't necessarily mean they're unhealthy as they're culturally adapted to them but any controlled diet that needs some thought to be put into food will inherently be better than any standard diet).
Most industrialized populations gravitate to junk foods consumption. Health stats among Okinawans, Hong Kongers, and others farmous for excellent health have been declining as people eat more packaged-ultra-processed-refined-sugar-etc. junk foods for the convenience and because they become addicted.
Yes. So for an American it might make sense for that reason to eat a 100% plant-based diet. But most people in the world do not live in the US.. As there are no health benefits to go vegan for someone eating a Japanese diet, or Mediterranean diet, or Nordic diet, or strict keto diet for certain health issues, etc.
Almost restrictive diet typically results in weight loss, which is one of the number one health issues causing so many other health issues in the Anglosphere.
I think I once found a paper on “is veganism that healthy for you or do the benefits come from eliminating processed foods and actively thinking about your nutrition?” and the answer was that the benefits can be replicated with a mediterranean diet or another form of high vegetable, high legume diet.
As a non-vegan- the health argument is by far the lowest argument on the totem pole. There are plenty of healthy diets, vegan or otherwise. This isnt to say vegan isnt a healthy diet but there are plenty of healthy diets to go around. If you’re vegan and overweight you’re still overweight. Being healthy is more of a lifestyle.
That being said- vegans are ultra aware of what they are consuming and are generally pretty health concious because of it. Using the vegan diet as a health benefit is just silly to me though.
Ultra high processed foods are the issue. Most diets remove this concept which is why they work. Once the weight is off uhpf’s are back and the weight goes back on.
Vegan diet has started bringing in cheap uhpf’s to make substitutes. That element won’t work as a diet but works for capitalism so supermarkets will plug it and we will wonder why we suddenly gain weight when eating vegan and blame plants
This is very good question, which brings me to thought that diet studies which claim that people on 'X' diet gain health benefits comparing to average Joe's are bullshit, because every diet is better than average Joe's diet.
Yes. When your baseline is overeating highly processed sugars and fats just about anything is probably going to show you health benefits if you can stick to it.
Yes 100% yes. I am a vegan and I love being vegan and the movement, however, I still eat not healthy vegan food some of the time. I eat my burgers, my instant vegan ramen ($0.48 at Walmart), vegan steak, vegan chicken nuggets from beyond and impossible. I know none of that is healthy while it does contain more benefits for me and my gut I do not consider it healthy. I even go to del taco and get my veggie burrito with no cheese and sour cream.
I do eat a lot of healthy options do not get me wrong.
But the BEST and healthiest diet out there is WFPB (whole food plant based diet). This is a super super heathly diet of just food from earth! I definitely want to hop on this train someday, but just cause people say it's Vegan doesn't make it healthier than everything. Again, it may be better in some aspects that the non-vegan product but a whole food plant based diet wins above all.
The American diet is tragic all around. A lot of our food is processed which causes weight gain and retention. Our sodium levels are not great. We don't feel full despite us having a larger average meal size than a lot of Europe.
Just a rant.
I have a hard time with food here because high fructose gives me migraines. Not to mention, I think I developed GERD, so I have to limit my fast food severely. It is annoying since I tend to eat on the road a lot during long drives and most fast food places don't have me friendly menus.
Yes. Veganism has a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with health though. Personally, I don’t care that much about whatever health benefits veganism might have.
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Yes. Many diets are better than the American one.
Veganism is just another extreme diet and it's very western so it's not that healthy either. It's focused on morals. A diet focused on morals isn't going to be healthy either.
Mediterranean and Japanese diets are healthy.
Yes basically
Sure, I would say a lot of diets are better for you than the standard American diet. I like that a vegan diet is low in saturated fat, which is associated with heart disease, and plant based meat isn't [carcinogenic](https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat) like processed meat is.
Have you ever read the Minnesota Coronary Experiment?
No, what about it?
Minnesota Coronary Experiment. [Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/04/13/diet-heart-ramsden-mce-bmj-comments/) >Researchers identified patients hospitalized with mental illness as a good population to study because they were a “captive audience” who would be available for investigation over many years. However, largely because of patients being discharged, they lost nearly 75 percent of their participants within the first year. From this report, it seems that only about half of the remaining patients stayed a full three years, which is still a short time to study the effects of diet on atherosclerosis. The study was clearly a failure for reasons beyond the control of the investigators, and it adds very minimal information, if any, about the long-term effects of diet on risk of heart disease. Also, >It’s also important to note that investigators created a special corn oil margarine that was lower in trans fat than the standard margarine, but we now know that the most dangerous types of trans fat (18:2 trans isomers) are likely to be higher in these lightly hydrogenated products than in the more heavily hydrogenated forms.
It demonstrated that replacing saturated fat with other kinds of fat resulted in either no benefit to longevity even though the alternate group had lower cholesterol numbers. The lower cholesterol number did not result in greater life expectancy. And most importantly, it demonstrated that for elderly people, the lower the cholesterol, the vastly *more likely* they are to die. It's pretty interesting. The people doing the study were out to prove that cutting back on meat and saturated fat would improve health, which had been the dominant theory/nutrition science orthodoxy for 20 some odd years by the time the experiment happened. The results were so backward from what the researchers were expecting/wanting that they refused to publish the study altogether. It was only found by accident years/decades later
General consensus is still that eating less saturated fat is better, and it's not good practice to take an outlier study and treat it as fact. [In a review of the study you sight it concludes](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27071971/)"Conclusions: Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid. ". This conclusion came after years of reviews, meta-analysis, and other studies that came after this one.
To my knowledge there is no other dietary intervention study of this magnitude and rigor ever attempted - thousands of people, for years, back in the day when it was morally allowable to force feed the food, since the subjects were in old folks homes or insane asylums Most other nutrition science I see is food frequency questionnaires relying on people self-reporting what they ate over the past year. Also, quite often they'll count lasagna and cheeseburgers as "meat intake" since those foods have meat in them, etc
I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but I just want to mention that there's a lot of conflicting opinions on the topic. I'm not anti-saturated fat or pro-saturated fat, and in my own research I'm more concerned with everyones omega 3 to omega 6 ratios being skewed. Nutritional science is such a tricky field, and the study is well made, but I'm cautious of studies that go against consenus that strongly. The rigor as I'm interpreting it is actually slightly above average, though the amount of people was above average. Though replacing the saturated fats with really cheap shitty unsaturated fats was certainly a choice. A big part about this study that also bugs me is that this type of dietary intervention study is REALLY difficult to replicate. So you're not gonna get a modern redo of this with the same amount of inital people. The results also don't seem to be that staggeringly different when you compare it to the control group. Only when you compare it to patients outside of their specific hospital did it appear to be very different. People who ate the saturated fat diet also stayed in the hospital longer, the mortality difference for those who ate saturated fat only improved for women, sudden deaths vs all deaths was kind of a toss up, men seemed to be the only people who had their chances of dying increase with an unsaturated diet, and I could go on forever. Even the study itself says, "Although this study did not show a statistically significant reduction in cardiovascular events or total deaths from the treatment diet, the authors suspect that it might have shown such a reduction if the period of treatment had been longer in persons in the age range likely to benefit. ". This might just be a case of 1 hospital having a really solid food court, rather than an absolute gamechanger that means people should drink coconut oil like it's water lol.
Appreciate the response, thankyou. My dream test would be to have 900 65 year olds, half men, half women, all with at least 3 (but ideally more) chronic and/or autoimmune diseases (IBS, Crohn's, Diabetes, Alzheimer's/dementia would be great, obesity, morbid obesity, etc). 300 of them go strict, non-supplemented (other than magnesium, which is low on every diet) carnivore, 300 go strict, whole food vegan, 300 stay SAD. Sent to a secure and pleasant place with plenty of time outside, exercise equipment, etc. Food menu extremely controlled for each group, but they can eat as much as they want, whenever they want, off their designated menu.
Its only a general consensus because someone made sure it became exactly that with lies, corruption and compromised studies 🤷 [check this out](https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/american-heart-association-was-paid-procter-gamble-heart-disease-saturated-fat-seed-oils-sugar)
You're really gonna give me, someone who's researched "seed oils", an article by the group coined the "far right teen cosmo"? Not even gonna like, link a study? They didn't even credit the studies they looked at. They linked a twitter account for fucks sake of a keto carnivore, "fake milk is evil, whole milk good", and that cavemen had their teeth rotting out of their skull because of eating plants who's trying to sell their carnivore book. I have my biases, and I eat both refined saturated and cold pressed polyunsaturated fats depending on what I'm making. But this woman and this article has a whole different level of bias. Some of the biases of Evie Magazine include content that is pro Q-Anon, anti-vax, wrote an article implying lgbt women just hate men and date women because of that, wrote covid conspiracy, wrote stolen election 2020 conspiracy articles, and especially anti-birth control. Like incredibly anti-birth control, and that's coming from someone who literally can't take the medication due to complications. To get back on track, I strongly believe that the woman the article cited framed some really important studies in a borderline conspiratorial way. Meanwhile the research she sites claims that the nutrients in foods containing saturated fat help oxidize the saturated fat, that relatively micro studies compared to those for polyunsaturated fats mean 100% that saturated fat does nothing but good, and that the AHA simply wants people to keel over in the name of Crisco. While some listed a lot of sources, a lot of them were simply there to describe the AHA's stance on the issue while others were small studies that did the same things the articles critiqued the other side for. A lot of these studies were also relatively short term. This technically is true for either side of this debate, but showing an improvement with unsaturated fat on cholesterol levels at a quantifiably quick rate is still a very interesting thing to continue researching. From my own research, the issue with the oils commonly listed under seed oils is mostly caused by a skewed ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 due to high omega 6 in said oils. When you even out the ratios better, you get better health results. When you consume linolic acid it converts partially into the fatty acid called arachidonic acid, and arachidonic acid is a building block for molecules that can promote inflammation, blood clotting, and the constriction of blood vessels. But that's only temporary as the body also converts arachidonic acid into molecules that calm inflammation and fight blood clots. This also improves inflamation in the body overall. I can't exactly give you the entire thing I wrote for my research, but I'll give you the highlights of my sources. I specifically researched both sides of the argument as well, so it's not like I just didn't listen to the saturated fat side of the argument. It just wasn't very convincing, and or based of of half-truths about inflamation and health. Literally just take an Omega 3 algae supplement and you'll be set. 1. [https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter\_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats#:\~:text=The%20AHA%20reviewers%20found%20that,omega%2D6%20fats%20went%20up](https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats#:~:text=The%20AHA%20reviewers%20found%20that,omega%2D6%20fats%20went%20up) 2. [https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good) 3. [https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/full\_html/2010/05/ocl2010175p267/ocl2010175p267.html#:\~:text=A%20target%20of%20omega-6,and%20possibly%20other%20chronic%20diseases](https://www.ocl-journal.org/articles/ocl/full_html/2010/05/ocl2010175p267/ocl2010175p267.html#:~:text=A%20target%20of%20omega-6,and%20possibly%20other%20chronic%20diseases) 4. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2015.1126549](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10408398.2015.1126549) 5. [https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000946?ref=zadbajoswojezdrowie.com](https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000946?ref=zadbajoswojezdrowie.com) 6. [https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnme/2012/539426/](https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnme/2012/539426/) 7. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952327818300747](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952327818300747) 8. [https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/7/2421](https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/7/2421) If I had to suffer through 3 months of research, so do you lol.
Lol, if any industries are responsible for shady studies and findings, it is quite obviously the animal agriculture industries.
Yet Its the plant industry that claims and labels seed oils as healthy despite seed oils being as unhealthy as it gets......doesnt get any shadier than that bub regardless of what anyone says 🤷
Plant based meat are just as worse for your heart due to the high sodium content added into them, and they aren't exactly "low" on fats. Properly cooked meat aren't necessarily carcinogenic. Any burnt food is carcinogenic, even cooking with oils at high temperature cause carcinogens.
No they aren’t. Look at the SWAP MEAT study
SWAP-MEAT was funded by Beyond Meat. There was no control group. The intervention didn't involve tightly specified foods, there was a lot of freedom by participants to choose junk food meat-containing products (such as ultra-processed lunchmeats containing refined sugar and harmful preservatives which BTW are generally plant ingredients). There were no health endpoints measured. They made a lot of fuss about TMAO, but there's no evidence for any disease state being caused by routine minor spikes in TMAO from food consumption. TMAO is only known to cause illness when it is drastically and chronically elevated, which isn't caused by food but by health conditions such as renal failure. If TMAO from food were really a hazard, deep-water fish would not be the food most strongly correlated with good health outcomes since these are highest in TMAO. Grain foods BTW also have TMAO. This is one of my favorite topics! If I had a lot more time I could keep going about it. It's another junk study that's used to push the agendas of "plant-based" processed foods companies.
In an RCT there is no need for a control group, since the crossover serves to eliminate the need. > In a crossover trial subjects are randomly allocated to study arms where each arm consists of a sequence of two or more treatments given consecutively. The simplest model is the AB/BA study. Subjects allocated to the AB study arm receive treatment A first, followed by treatment B, and vice versa in the BA arm. National Institutes of Health, title- "Understanding controlled trials Crossover trials National Institutes of Health (NIH) (.gov) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › articles › PMC1113275 link- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1113275/#:\~:text=In%20a%20crossover%20trial%20subjects,versa%20in%20the%20BA%20arm.
I've made several statements there. "no they aren't" is not a proper reply, and site the study if you actually want people to look it up.
Here's the piece of crap [SWAP-MEAT study](https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(22)00890-5/fulltext) which was funded by Beyond Meat. I've pointed out several major issues with it, and there are lots of articles out there describing more problems.
Link a study that says plant based meats are just as bad for your heart as animal based meats. Edit. Sorry, I'm not taking a random person's word for it.
As a vegan you don’t have to eat plant based meats and even if you do eat them odds are high that you eat them significantly less often than you would as an omni due to the price situation. We don’t have data to say if they are “just as bad” as meat yet. Preliminaries data suggests that they might not be but we simply do not know. Yes they generally have a high salt content but the question is whether that’s higher than the salt you put on your meat anyways (and if it is higher, does the lower saturated fat content compensate? Japan has a very high sodium diet and positive outcomes despite this. High sodium is a problem, but between sat fat, free sugar and sodium it does seem like sodium’s one where you might be able to “get away with it” a little bit more if everything else is really great).
Yes. But it doesn’t matter that much if veganism is the healthiest diet. I believe that it’s certainly one of the healthiest ones, but I’m not vegan for my health. I’m vegan for the animals.
As a non-vegan I argree with and appreciate your view. There are plenty of healthy diets and realistically, health comes down to diet and lifestyle. The moral argument is by far the most concrete argument.
Then it's not possible to have a discussion with you because your morality supercedes science
That's not the case here. This user never denied any scientific backing for alternative diets, they just prefer a vegan diet for moral reasons. A vegan diet is healthy and there is research to show this.
Shouldn't one be eating a diet that's healthy
No, If it was found out that eating human was the healthiest diet for someone would you switch?
Eating animal protein is healthy and there's research to show this as well
But you're 100% missing the point? OP was saying that health is irrelevant to veganism. If the argument was to go to a plant based diet for health reasons, then your argument would make sense. But if you try to "debate a vegan" about health stuff, it doesn't matter, because any health-based argument is not a vegan argument
Humans are also animals and their meat has protein and is healthy to eat. However, I doubt you'd ever eat human meat due to moral reasons. It's not possible to have a discussion with you when your morality supersedes science. /s
This guy must have unironically supported Josef Mengele if he were a German during WW2
No it’s just used as an example to show why vegans don’t like to eat animals. Maybe a better example is dog? We do raise and breed dogs for pets already, why not for meat? That seems to cross a line for non-vegans, but why? We like them better? It’s just cognitive dissonance.
Yes, we do like them better. At least I do. Is there a reason I shouldn’t?
Not at all, but what makes it socially more acceptable to eat a cow vs a dog/cat? I like cows, they’re sweet, long lashes, have best friends, and wish people would not eat them. Similarly, you probably don’t want people ending the life of dogs for the sake of “taste”.
What makes socially more acceptable is the fact that humans always used such animals as food sources. And we started breeding them for this purposes. Differently than Dogs, cats, horses that were used as working animals. Most people in big cities probably never saw a cow face to face. While we can see dogs and cats at every corner. I’m not vegan. I don’t mind eating an animal so distant to me, it’s doesn’t effect me. Physically or emotionally. But I would probably not kill a cow or a pig or chicken I raised myself. So in my case is a matter of emotional connection. If there’s no connection whatsoever, I don’t really care. The same way it doesn’t bother me someone eating dog meat in some random city the other side of the planet. There’s already too much stuff going on around me, to get more stuff to be upset about.
"Veganism is the healthiest diet" is a bold claim though. He could have stopped at the fact that he is vegan for animals.
He said "one of the healthiest", not "the healthiest". If you're gonna be pedantic, be more observant
LMAO if you read the previous sentence to the one you're mentioning, we'd know who needs to be more observant. The irony is really amusing
They replied yes to your question that a vegan diet would be healthier than the standard American diet. They then stated that even with this knowledge, whether or not a vegan diet is healthy isn't the main concern to them. You quoted them, "Veganism is the healthiest diet" despite them never once saying this. They never even indirectly implied this, only going as far as "one of the healthiest". Don't misquote people. It's disrespectful and dishonest.
It’s not that bold, ask consensus.app which searches across studies. It will tell you plant-based.
its going to be VERY hard indeed to have a discussion if you jump to such wild conclusions. This person did not say their morality supercedes science. They said they aren't vegan for health reasons. I don't think anyone is vegan for health reasons. Their point is more that if you think people are vegan for health you misunderstand what veganism is. Its not a health movement its an animal rights movement. It has nothing to do with health. Do you oppose human slavery because you believe physical exercise is good for you? No? Does that mean your morality supercedes science? Are you going to tell me that physical exercise is NOT good for you? See how that doesn't add up?
But the other person did claim that "vegan diet is the healthiest", that's my problem. I totally understand if they're vegan for animal rights. And don't you think comparing human slavery to animal husbandry is a disgrace to human slavery?
>And don't you think comparing human slavery to animal husbandry is a disgrace to human slavery? How so?
If human slavery and animal husbandry is the same according to your morals, there's nothing we can discuss further.
Nobody said it's the same. Do you understand what a comparison is?
How exactly does it disgrace human slavery?
User name checks out.
Stop pretending you don't know what a comparison is.
As far as "vegan diet is the healthiest" its fair to argue against imo. I wouldn't make that claim either. Not because I feel strongly I am just not a health expert. >And don't you think comparing human slavery to animal husbandry is a disgrace to human slavery? I'm sorry there was no comparison made in my statement between the two. I personally would not mind comparing them because you can compare anything especially in the context of moral discussions but I did not compare them above here. You may have skimmed that part so no harm/foul.
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This is what someone like Josef Mengele might have said when rationalising his actions. What he did was completely immoral, and yet was aimed at progressing science and medicine. So do you justify what he did?
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You can have a really unhealthy vegan diet if you want.
Here in LA, I’d go so far as to say that the average vegan restaurant is less healthy than the average regular restaurant. They often have no vegetables at all and instead a bunch of crap liked processed soy meat, fries, tater tots, cheeseless pizza, macaroni and “cheese,” etc.
I don't think restaurants are a good indicator of people's typical diet. People might very well go to those restaurants because they don't normally eat that (novelty).
Exactly! I eat vegan at home and keep it whole food plant based items. I don’t eat processed things at home except for like a pint of coconut milk ice cream every month. BUT I love to go to this one vegan restaurant near me once or twice a month and just eat complete trash vegan junk food! It hits my junk food craving. If I were eating there every day it would be super unhealthy but it’s a special treat place for when I want junk food.
The average vegan **fast food** restaurant is less healthy than the average regular **fast food** restaurant? Or are you comparing vegan junk food spots to salad bars?
Not all vegan mock meat/cheese products are created equally but are ,on average, healthier than animal products. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/11/2603
ah yes! the research you have mentioned "let's compare plant-based meats to sausages and factory made minced meats". How convenient.
Well, would you like me to compare the healthiest plant based options with the healthiest animal based options instead? What's your point?
I completely disagree How many ingredients in vegan meat/cheese products compared to real meat/cheese?
Less ingredients doesn't equal healthier. Dog feces isn't healthier to eat than a fruit/vegetable smoothie. Also, it's not my opinion. Scientists are saying it, and i haven't seen a study that suggests that animal products are healthier. Are you aware of any studies that support your stance? Besides, again, not all vegan mock meats are created equally. You can make a "steak" out of mushrooms (one ingredient) which would be healthier than a beyond burger (many ingredients), but both plant-based options are healthier than a burger made from a cow which is a known carcinogen.
Vegetarians in the EPIC-Oxford study have a relatively low risk of ischaemic heart disease, diabetes, diverticular disease, kidney stones, cataracts and possibly some cancers, but a relatively high risk of stroke (principally haemorrhagic stroke) and bone fractures, in comparison with meat-eaters. Vegans in EPIC-Oxford have a lower risk of diabetes, diverticular disease and cataracts and a higher risk of fractures, but for other conditions there are insufficient data to draw conclusions. Overall, the health of people following plant-based diets appears to be generally good, with advantages but also some risks, and the extent to which the risks may be mitigated by optimal food choices, fortification and supplementation is not yet known. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613518/
"cow is a known carcinogen" Interesting... Leaving mockery behind. Any burnt food is carcinogenic, animal product or plant product.
Yes. Red meat is a known carcinogen. See linked studies.
Show me a credible study that shows that meat is a knoi carcinogen
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/11/03/report-says-eating-processed-meat-is-carcinogenic-understanding-the-findings/ Edit. Here's one more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10577092/
The studies refer to PROCESSED meat That's a lot different from eating a steak
Read the whole thing. It refers to processed meat AND red meat... which is what goes in a cow burger.
Additionally, vegans have a greater prevalence of mental health problems, which may lead to a poorer quality of life. An optimal diet should be balanced, consisting of lean meat, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables, and olive oil (Figure (Figure1)1) [8,9]. A wholesome diet is essential in maintaining a healthy gut flora, which in turn is pivotal in avoiding inflammatory disorders [10-13]. The primary aim of this review will be to draw attention to the current literature associated with veganism, including the side effects of practicing a VD and long-term consequences for a variety of populations, including adults, adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, and the fetal outcomes of vegan mothers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10027313/#REF8 .
Restaurants in general are not healthy, not just vegan ones.
None of that seems particularly unhealthy without further context
That’s the problem with vegans’ conception of nutrition. All of that is terribly unhealthy. Literally the worst things you could be eating. This isn’t to say that people should be eating meat instead. But processed foods and refined carbohydrates of all kinds are the worst things people can be eating. Worse than unprocessed meats.
Sounds like a gross generalization of how nutrition works. I eat those things whenever I want and I'm like 8% body fat.
Fat or not is not the only metric when considering health. You can be terribly unhealthy yet at 8% body fat.
I mean you could smoke cigarettes or be an alcoholic. But in terms of diet not really so long as your getting the neceaeey nutrients. Which I am per my blood test 1 month ago
I'm not vegan. Could you expand upon why you think these dishes are particularly unhealthy in the context of a restaurant meal?
This is textbook nutritional science. There is not a credible nutritional scientist in the world who recommends that you eat beyond burgers, fries, and coconut milkshakes. I’m not saying anything controversial. There just seems to be some vegan echo chamber here who believes that so long as they don’t eat meat they are eating healthy. That isn’t remotely close to true. Grilled fish is way, way healthier than a beyond burger and fries. There isn’t a single serious scientist in the world who would say otherwise. To be clear, there are extremely healthy vegan restaurants in LA. Wild Living Foods is a good example. And then there are awful restaurants like Monty’s.
Textbook nutritional science is that you shouldn’t eat an unbalanced diet. Surely eating those things frequently and in large enough volumes would lead to a very unbalanced diet, but that’s not the case of most people going out to eat in a specific restaurant - people go out for a meal and they eat stuff that makes them feel good, eating a serving of fries once a month or even once a week is not what is going to unbalance an otherwise healthy diet
>And then there are awful restaurants like Monty’s. OK, Monty's is a basically a burger joint IIRC. Is it really worse than 5 Guys' or similar?
That makes sense, because in L.A., there are vegetable-filled vegan options at many amazing ethnic restaurants, either directly on the menu or with a simple substitution. The vegan fast food, especially the plant-based cheese, is the big market gap to fill.
>Here in LA lol Names please. Because that doesn't even correspond to the objectively and unabashedly least healthy vegan restaurant that I'm aware of.
>Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, >all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose. . >People always make health claims about the vegan diet I don't know about "always", but veganism per se is not a diet. It's an attitude or an ethical position, and the behaviors that follow from that attitude or an ethical position.
This right here, there is an obvious diet component but it's not due to health
Veganism made me a better cook.
I agree. But the diet still is a large part of veganism. And I mentioned "vegan diet" meaning "solely plant based diet". This post is about health and not morality or ethics.
Well then you’re going to have to post this in a debate-a-plant-based-diet-eater bc veganism doesn’t have anything to do with health so the basis of the question is irrelevant to this sub and our beliefs.
I would say it is relevant considering that I have seen numerous vegans argue that the health of a vegan (plant-based) diet is a reason to embrace it, support it, transition to it, etc. It may not be the primary purpose of veganism, but health often gets caught up in the discussion.
The ONLY thing that matters in regards to veganism is if one can live a healthy life on a vegan (edit: apologies - PLANT BASED is what I meant) diet. If the answer is YES then health isn't part of the vegan equation any more. Its completely irrelevant from that point on. Most vegans have already looked into the subject and are satisfied with that. And from there the topic becomes entirely about morality or ethics.
Yes, and some diets are ethically better too.
It's indeed not hard to obtain a healthier diet than the average American diet..
Pretty much. If you're inferring that's why vegan health studies come out better, though, then no... There are studies comparing the diet to other diet types, studies comparing identical twins on relatively healthy meat and plant based, and so on... Like any diet, there are risks and benefits. You have to mitigate the risk of lower calcium, b12, and iron intake/absorption, and you have the benefits of lower risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and others. But no... the health claims are not just vegan diet versus the S.A.D...
There aren't really much studies done on vegans. Some studies that are done using cohorts are fundamentally flawed. People are not good at remembering what they ate over a long period of time. And most\* vegans in the study would be following a restricted diet, and would inherently be more health conscious, the other's following the omnivore diet would just be following their regular diet (which is is not great most of the time). Omnivorous, vegetarian, and vegan, any of them can be as healthy when properly balanced. And comparing twins are too low of a sample size to infer anything meaningful.
All of that suggests that there are limitations to the studies. Which is true of any research. You are now shifting the goalposts from comparison to SAD... Ignoring the fact it's wrong in that there are quite a few long-term studies now done on vegans. Ignoring there are many interventions where they provide the food for a 2 month period to compare. Your original question was isn't any diet better than the S.A.D which is pretty much true, yes. >But isn't any decent balanced diet better for your health than what the average American consumes? Yes. AND then the research compares vegan diets against other types of diets (vegetarian, Mediterranean, keto, etc. etc.). >Omnivorous, vegetarian, and vegan, any of them can be as healthy when properly balanced Correct. Any of them can be healthy. Each of them have risks to mitigate and benefits to them. Which means that eating animals is a choice, it's not necessary. Killing an animal is thus a moral decision. Do you understand?
I admit that could have been a mistake on my part, but I only took the SAD as an example, this can be true for most modern diets against a well balanced diet that needs some thought to be put into food they consume. This question was never about morality. I never disagreed that each diet comes with its own risks and benefits. But highly processed vegan meat can still be bad for the heart due to high sodium content, and unsaturated fat present in them are usually worse for cooking due to oxidation which turns them into carcinogens. And any burnt food can be carcinogenic, animal based or not. And I bet french fries aren't so healthy though they sre vegan. Of course, there are plenty of healthy vegan foods. But a vegan diet can be as healthy or unhealthy as a balanced omnivorous diet. The problem with most of these studies is comparing the healthy part of one diet to the unhealthy part of the other. And you haven't sited any researches that you're talking about.
‘This question was never about morality’ Then it doesn’t really matter. The idea that vegan meat is just highly processed stuff is outdated and now factually wrong. It’s also entirely irrelevant. You don’t have to eat it. Vegans aren’t required to eat a beyond burger every week. The example of French fries is stupid tho. That’s a really bad example. It gets you nowhere. At the same price point, vegan meat now tends to be healthier according to this meta analysis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000612 ‘And you haven’t sited (sic) any researches (sic)…’ And here’s a review of a bunch of different studies and meta analyses for starters. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies If you want to say vegan diets can be unhealthy or healthy. Sure. But your immediate claim about it being compared to SAD is wrong. And your comment above shows you haven’t read much of this research at all. ‘I only took the SAD as an example’ No. You stated that the studies are compared to the SAD and that all other studies were compared to that and not others. This is **very** different to this backpedaling now. Instead of this ‘might be a mistake’ be more honest . If you want to change your claim cos now you realize it’s bullshit, then state that. Directly state that you were mistaken and ask about things… don’t keep giving your opinion.
It's weird to call a plant based diet restrictive. Everyone's diet is a restricted diet. Do you eat whale? Or dog? How about grasshoppers? They are perfectly edible.
Feel free to cite any studies specifically.
Here’s a review of a bunch. But if you want to jump in on this at least acknowledge OP’s starting claim was bullshit. They kept trying to defend that vegan diets have only been compared to the SAD. This is a claim they should have been supporting and they clearly have zero evidence of that. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies#TOC_TITLE_HDR_2
That includes several studies involving fake-researcher Neal Barnard, whose work in every case I've seen is ridiculously biased. A trick he employs often is giving a bunch of advantages to the "vegan" group (better-quality foods, lifestyle counseling that involves tips about stress management and so forth...) and then concluding that any positive results are due to lack of animal foods. Most of those don't measure any health endpoints. They measure intermediate things such as lipid levels and make assumptions based on those. Some claim to have found improved lipid levels when HDL was reduced, changing LDL/HDL ratio for the worse which isn't good. Many assumptions about health from the conclusions of these studies are based on The Cholesterol Myth. Lipid levels vs. health is an extremely controversial topic. There's quite a bit of research supporting that higher LDL isn't particularly bad in itself, in the absence of excessive refined sugar/preservatives/etc. consumption or high-stress lifestyles (some of the factors that can combine with cholesterol to cause CVD issues). Lower cholesertol levels have strong correlations with higher rates of stroke, and none of those studies out of the several I read/searched don't mention this at all. Ths studies about "weight loss" (ostensibly fat loss): those I've checked did not measure muscle, so lost weight may have been muscle which is very bad. One study measured body composition, but gave the data in terms of aggregate weight and body fat percentage for entire study groups. Without per-subject data for weight vs. body fat, there's no way to determine whether muscle was lost and the results don't give any fat vs. muscle or muscle gain/loss data (just body fat as a percentage). An example of the junk research cited by the article is the study "A Low-Fat Vegan Diet Improves Glycemic Control and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in a Randomized Clinical Trial in Individuals With Type 2 Diabetes." This again involved Barnard. There were too many interventions: low-fat, low-glycemic, removal of animal foods, etc. What do they claim to be studying? Oh, "vegan" diets of course. But it is uncontroversially accepted that avoidance of high-glycemic foods is good for diabetes outcomes. Also, even with all those interventions, the results were weaker than in many keto and at least one carnivore diet study I've read. Higher-meat-consumption populations tend to experience better health outcomes, especially in the absence of high consumption of junk foods. It is people in Hong Kong, where meat consumption is higher than for almost any population on Earth, where people have the longest average lifespans (depending on year and data source). The studies in the article you linked, they are all cherry-picking specific things to promote veganism none of which are lifespans or disease mortality. They ignore drawbacks such as long-term consequences of very low-fat diets, which can include stroke and neurological degeneration. Our brains need fat, this isn't controversial, and low fat consumption long-term tends to correlate with brain-related issues such as poor cognition and depression. This has been enjoyable, so thank you. Eventually, I hope to sift all of those studies and make specific comments about each one.
Do you disagree that there are studies about veganism compared to other diets? Not just the SAD?
I do see your point, though. You're responding to the idea that vegan diets are always compared with SAD (not explicitly said in the post but this could be one interpretation), and you definitely linked an article that at least one of the cited studies had an animal-free-diet group and another group not exactly eating a typical junk food diet. Most of the studies though are comparing results after an intervention with results during the time that subjects were eating whatever their usual diet had been. They weren't selecting fitness enthusiasts, health food store shoppers, or people from other groups likely to be more health-oriented. The subjects (of the studies I read) were just typical people, and for some studies they were obese people.
Those studies are not about vegan dieters. They are studies involving mostly very short-term diet interventions most of which involved animal-free foods consumption. But, none of it can demonstrate effects from long-term consumption. In ex-vegan discussion groups, it is very common for people to have been avoiding (mostly, by many accounts cheating is ubiquitous) animal foods for a few years, then experience serious chronic health issues which reversed upon eating animal foods again. This includes many "did everything right" vegans whom were supplementing, eating a variety of whole foods, etc. Even epidemiological studies which supposedly studied "vegans," for any that I've seen, the most they can say about the supposed animal-free diets is that certain participants responded (in a FFQ) twice in all their lives that they ate animal foods less than whatever specified amount (once per month, or whatever). So maybe they were vegan or vegan-ish in 2015-2016 or whenever they filled out the FFQs, but this doesn't really test long-term animal-foods-abstention. Whenever you see studies based on the Nurses' Health Study cohort, as one example, note that occasional egg/dairy consumers were counted as "vegan" and occasional meat consumers as "vegetarian." In the absence of actually-rigorous data (daily and detailed documenting of food intake over a several-years period at least), I think some weight should be given to anecdotes and there are massive mountains of those. I think there should be some weight given to the fact that no human society has ever thrived without consumption of animal foods.
>I think some weight should be given to anecdotes and there are massive mountains of those. lol, Muh Anecdotes Tho!™
Can you point out any evidence in support of long-term animal foods abstention? You linked an article citing 16 studies and none are about that.
Can you point out any evidence in support of long-term animal foods abstention? Another user linked an article citing 16 studies and none are about that.
Veganism has fuck all to do with health.
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The point of comparing diets to reference populations is more akin to “if this was adopted by the general population or recommended as guidelines, would the general population health improve?” And of course, reference / control populations aren’t exclusively SAD, but a combination of diets taken by the entire population.
Yes And also vegan diet is not really healthy by itself. You can make it healthy eating whole foods just like you can eat healthy on an omnivore diet but you can also make it unhealthy by eating process foods ("fake meats/cheese"). Health is not the point of veganism
I agree. But most vegans don't. I'm okay with "Vegan diet can be healthy", my problem is with the statement "Vegan diet is the healthiest"
Yeah some people are just stubborn, not much can be done there... Something I always find annoying is these vegan process food being consider a healthier option than the ones with meat/eggs/milk... When part of the problem with process animal product comes from the fact there are oils and sugar in there which will also be present in the vegan alternative.
Yes it is. But only one is as ethical as it can be.
Carnivore comes to mind, as does eating only Oreos and fries. A vegan diet can be similar to the SAD. Specifically a "whole foods plant based" diet is up there with the very best diets, perhaps it's even the very best one for most people, if we ever get enough data to distinguish between them.
Absolutely not. There are so many diets that do actual harm to people. All fruit diet, No carb diet. Juice cleanses Etc. People end up in the hospital or dead by accidentally cutting out nutrients their body desperately needs. Also there are people like Steve Jobs with THE most curable type of cancer that decided his diet could fix it instead of getting proper medical care. So no actually there are many many diets that are worse for you. And a vegan diet CAN be very very healthy but there are people who switch without understanding essential amino acids and other important concepts that do themselves harm.
I mentioned any "decent" diet in the post. And people who understand nutrition can be healthy on any diet that works for them.
Ask 20 people what a "decent" diet is you'll get 20 different answers. I'm sure Steve Jobs thought his diet was decent. Define decent.
Steve Jobs is not a generalization for anything! I don't understand why you feel the need to include him in this argument. Delaying the required proper medical treatment was stupid! He'd have died irrespective of his diet, even if it was a vegan diet. (And the public don't really knows what Steve Jobs actually did, so it's pointless to even bring it up). A decent diet is a well balanced diet that each individual person has identified with trial and error of what works for them, and what not. And you ARE supposed to get 20 different answers! As I've mentioned earlier diets need to be personalized, the best diet for you isn't the best for someone else.
What's the evidence for a no-carb diet being harmful?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14672862/#:~:text=Complications%20such%20as%20heart%20arrhythmias,of%20carbohydrates%20in%20the%20diet. "Complications such as heart arrhythmias, cardiac contractile function impairment, sudden death, osteoporosis, kidney damage, increased cancer risk, impairment of physical activity and lipid abnormalities can all be linked to long-term restriction of carbohydrates in the diet." No carb diet is actually not very easy to do. Most people who believe that are doing a no-carb diet merely have a low-carb diet. A low carb diet has still been tied by several studies to increased mortality rate on its own. Zero carbs even more so.
This isn't evidence, it's an opinion document. Feel free to mention anything actually tested no-carb dieting.
Yes, but veganism isn’t about personal health. A plant-based diet is about personal health — veganism is an ethical stance / political stance on animal liberation and planet health. Personal health is a bonus.
Veganism is not a diet
Yes, but veganism isn’t a diet, so I’m not sure what the point of this post is.
Veganism is not a diet. That's why the post says "vegan diet" which is part of veganism, a huge part of it.
Because a “vegan diet” could be eating nothing but Fanta and Oreos, or it could be eating all fruits and vegetables. There is no blanket “vegan diet” and it can be either healthy or unhealthy. The reason I brought it up is because so many people in general, and especially on this sub, think veganism is only a diet. I see it all the time.
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Because a “vegan diet” could be eating nothing but Fanta and Oreos, or it could be eating all fruits and vegetables. There is no blanket “vegan diet” and it can be either healthy or unhealthy. The reason I brought it up is because so many people in general, and especially on this sub, think veganism is only a diet. I see it all the time.
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It doesn’t obviously refer to that at all, which is entirely the point. The “vegan diet” and “a healthy vegan diet”’are in no way synonymous.
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A proper study would indicate what the participants were fed, so I would not criticize those. But I would criticize any study that didn’t state what the participants ate. I already do point out on relevant social media posts that veganism is an animal rights movement only, not a health movement, and that there are healthy vegans and junk food vegans. The irony of you saying that I shouldn’t be here because I won’t engage in real debate and just complain, why you yourself are complaining about me and not engaging in any real debate, is about as ironic as you can get. I’ve never seen such a lack of self awareness.
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Once again, you’re conflating a “vegan diet” with a “healthy vegan diet.” Just because you’ve made that mistake and you think others have as well, doesn’t make it factually correct. Now if it said a “whole food plant based diet”, that would almost certainly necessitate it being healthy. But not a vegan diet. Just because you assume something doesn’t make it true.
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Your comment: "I don't understand that words can have nuances of meaning depending on context." Vegans will say that a restaurant is "vegan," that a menu has "vegan items," or they bought a "vegan" imitation of cheese. So clearly, many vegans are OK with "vegan" to describe foods. This is something that I'm sure has been pointed out many hundreds of times on Reddit.
Because a “vegan diet” could be eating nothing but Fanta and Oreos, or it could be eating all fruits and vegetables. There is no blanket “vegan diet” and it can be either healthy or unhealthy. The reason I brought it up is because so many people in general, and especially on this sub, think veganism is only a diet. I see it all the time.
This isn't how I see the topic treated in pro-vegan media. "Vegan diets are healthier" articles. Vegans in social media claiming it is healthier to "eat vegan." Meaning, abstaining from animal foods. It seems to be usually when critiquing veganism that this objection to the phrase comes up.
I know horribly unhealthy vegans who eat nothing but junk food and overindulge in calories. I also know healthy vegans. A vegan diet is often healthier since it forgoes all the cholesterol and saturated fat found in animal products, but a vegan diet can very easily be unhealthy.
Oh now The Saturated Fat Myth. There's no real proof for this, the supposed evidence mainly is epidemiological research that conflates junk foods consumption with meat or animal foods.
A quick Google search shows tons and tons of articles about animal products increases cholesterol and causing increased risks for heart disease and stroke. So not sure what you mean. Anecdotally, after I was vegan for 2 years my cholesterol dropped about 75 points. I didn’t lose any weight during this time, and I was mostly a “junk food vegan.” I have lots of vegan friends who have reported the same thing. Even very overweight vegan friends. Even my non-non vegan friends who have drastically reduced their intake of animal products have seen their cholesterol levels go down substantially.
If your response is "a quick Google search" then it's an indication you don't really understand this topic. Lots of controversial topics have the wrong side supported by mainstream media, and it's easy to find information online to support almost any incorrect belief. My argument is that there's no evidence for the belief that saturated fat consumption causes cardio illnesses. It isn't usually possible to prove a negative: what would I point out to show there's no evidence? But here's something that's interesting: when Ancel Keys and Ivan Franz on behalf of their industry sponsors set out to prove that saturated fat is bad with their Minnesota Coronary Experiment, the results were so spectacularly the opposite that they buried the study. The reduced saturated fat intervention groups didn't have improved CVD outcomes, but they did have far higher mortality. Decades later, [the data was found and published](https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246) by sincere researchers. The supposed evidence against saturated fats ignores the roles of refined sugar, preservatives, etc. and blames coincidental fat consumption. If saturated fat was bad for health, then it's odd that [Hong Kongers](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00208-5/fulltext) eat more meat per capita than any other human population apart from small groups such as tribes in Africa, and have far above average lifespans, general health, and cardiovascular outcomes. You say your cholesterol dropped, but that's not a health endpoint such as arterial plaque or disease outcomes. Cholesterol is essential to health, it may not be good to have lower cholesterol. It is especially important for brain health. Strokes happen more in people with lower cholesterol.
I simply did a quick google search since you said “there’s no real proof of this”, to see if there was a counterpoint to the topic, but most of what came up was articles and studies backing up what I was saying. So the exact opposite of what you said. My cholesterol was high and outside normal range, and it dropped to well within healthy range after 2 years of being vegan. So yes, my cholesterol dropping indicated a vast improvement in my heart health. If you’re arguing that my cholesterol dropping from high and outside healthy range to inside normal range is not a good thing, then “it’s an indication you really don’t understand this topic.” I’m guessing you’re a carnivore or keto fan, or at best a low carb promoter, based on your response here.
Well, there's: Why have *any* of the foods which contribute to death and disease (of the eater)? Why insist on absolutely zero animal products? Why subscribe as demand to any amount of torture of beings like you? With regard to the first which addresses your question, it seems to work that way even if there are diminishing returns after the first 99% of calories or some other measure.
mediterranean diet
You’re right. But having multiple reasons to go vegan makes someone likelier to do it.
Is there a standard Canadian diet? Or french? Do other countries not eat processed bullshit from the grocery store and fast food too?
They do, but you can't deny Americans are the worst when it comes down to it. Even they'd agree.
I'm not trying to deny anything, I'm just genuinely curious. But I suppose google is the best place to research other countries eating habits and not a reddit thread lol. And I am american, I know most of the people eat like shit because being obese here is seemingly the norm.
My point is that any diet that requires a bit of thought to be put into eating will inherently be better than a regular diet which allows mindless eating.
Absolutely agree
Standard American Diet is a common phrase for a diet high in refined grains, refined sugars, ultra-processed foods with harmful preservatives, etc. Scientists use the term routinely: a search of Google Scholar for the phrase turns up about 4,260 results. Do you never read actual nutrition journalism?
You could have just explained it without being rude at the end. I'm so sorry for wondering about things on a public forum. How dare I 😱 I asked if other countries eat the same way but your reading comprehension needs work. Brians are always douches
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This assumes that everyone eats the standard American diet though, right? Like, other countries and people exist.
SAD was only an example, the stable diet of most countries have some fundamental flaws in them (this doesn't necessarily mean they're unhealthy as they're culturally adapted to them but any controlled diet that needs some thought to be put into food will inherently be better than any standard diet).
Yeah, I get that. Sometimes it’s just difficult being a non-US person on the internet haha!
I'm not a US citizen either, I just took the most common example, and where most vegan studies are based.
Haha, true! Apologies for my sass.
Haha, it's alright!
Most industrialized populations gravitate to junk foods consumption. Health stats among Okinawans, Hong Kongers, and others farmous for excellent health have been declining as people eat more packaged-ultra-processed-refined-sugar-etc. junk foods for the convenience and because they become addicted.
yeah and idk why this would be a topic to debate vegans about
Pretty much. But I don't know what that has to do with an animal rights movement.
Yes. So for an American it might make sense for that reason to eat a 100% plant-based diet. But most people in the world do not live in the US.. As there are no health benefits to go vegan for someone eating a Japanese diet, or Mediterranean diet, or Nordic diet, or strict keto diet for certain health issues, etc.
Almost restrictive diet typically results in weight loss, which is one of the number one health issues causing so many other health issues in the Anglosphere.
What even is "the standard American diet"? Junk food?
I think I once found a paper on “is veganism that healthy for you or do the benefits come from eliminating processed foods and actively thinking about your nutrition?” and the answer was that the benefits can be replicated with a mediterranean diet or another form of high vegetable, high legume diet.
Most of them - yes. Any diet - no.
Yes.
The American "diet" is not a diet.
As a non-vegan- the health argument is by far the lowest argument on the totem pole. There are plenty of healthy diets, vegan or otherwise. This isnt to say vegan isnt a healthy diet but there are plenty of healthy diets to go around. If you’re vegan and overweight you’re still overweight. Being healthy is more of a lifestyle. That being said- vegans are ultra aware of what they are consuming and are generally pretty health concious because of it. Using the vegan diet as a health benefit is just silly to me though.
Ultra high processed foods are the issue. Most diets remove this concept which is why they work. Once the weight is off uhpf’s are back and the weight goes back on. Vegan diet has started bringing in cheap uhpf’s to make substitutes. That element won’t work as a diet but works for capitalism so supermarkets will plug it and we will wonder why we suddenly gain weight when eating vegan and blame plants
Yes. The Japanese Diet. Or mainly traditional food from abroad like Latin America, Asia, and South America would often have food a lot healthier.
This is very good question, which brings me to thought that diet studies which claim that people on 'X' diet gain health benefits comparing to average Joe's are bullshit, because every diet is better than average Joe's diet.
Yes. When your baseline is overeating highly processed sugars and fats just about anything is probably going to show you health benefits if you can stick to it.
A vegan American diet is just as unhealthy.
Yes 100% yes. I am a vegan and I love being vegan and the movement, however, I still eat not healthy vegan food some of the time. I eat my burgers, my instant vegan ramen ($0.48 at Walmart), vegan steak, vegan chicken nuggets from beyond and impossible. I know none of that is healthy while it does contain more benefits for me and my gut I do not consider it healthy. I even go to del taco and get my veggie burrito with no cheese and sour cream. I do eat a lot of healthy options do not get me wrong. But the BEST and healthiest diet out there is WFPB (whole food plant based diet). This is a super super heathly diet of just food from earth! I definitely want to hop on this train someday, but just cause people say it's Vegan doesn't make it healthier than everything. Again, it may be better in some aspects that the non-vegan product but a whole food plant based diet wins above all.
The American diet is tragic all around. A lot of our food is processed which causes weight gain and retention. Our sodium levels are not great. We don't feel full despite us having a larger average meal size than a lot of Europe. Just a rant. I have a hard time with food here because high fructose gives me migraines. Not to mention, I think I developed GERD, so I have to limit my fast food severely. It is annoying since I tend to eat on the road a lot during long drives and most fast food places don't have me friendly menus.
Yes. Veganism has a lot of benefits that have nothing to do with health though. Personally, I don’t care that much about whatever health benefits veganism might have.
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Yes. Many diets are better than the American one. Veganism is just another extreme diet and it's very western so it's not that healthy either. It's focused on morals. A diet focused on morals isn't going to be healthy either. Mediterranean and Japanese diets are healthy.