It's not really a paradox, though, because "being a double-edged sword" is a comparison that's being made with regards to the decision of using that particular single-edge sword.
And "being a single-edge sword" here is a technical description of the physical object.
But that quote is something worth writing down somewhere.
So in countries where nutritionally varied food is not widely available, people are so reliant on cereal sources that they become afflicted by deficits in many nutrients. Doesn't have any easy solution.
But the paper also raises multiple times the point that vegetarian diets tend to be too reliant on cereals, such as here:
"Because the bioavailability of zinc from meat is four times greater than that from cereals [113], it is clear that the displacement of animal-based foods by cereal-grain- and plant-based diets is not only responsible for impaired zinc metabolism in developing countries, but also in western populations adopting vegetarian diets [114, 115]."
It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you add a bit of meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients. This can be challenging if you only use "traditional" food, but it's made easier by products like Vega powder (which I've been having recently, pretty good!), which specifically try to compensate frequent shortcomings of a vegan diet, or I suppose HN favorites like Soylent and Mealsquares. I'm not sure the last two are really appropriate as vegetarian complements, though.
I, personally, began experiencing this myself. If I'm eating healthy, I can add in cereal. If I'm not, I feel physically horrible eating cereal. So I just avoid it and try to eat healthy meals all the time. Keeps my productivity and mood high, and you would not believe how good my skin looks when I've been eating plenty of vegetables for the last week.
At the moment, believe it or not, Soylent is vegan.
One thing I've noticed in lots of diet advocacy literature is that you'll find statements like "this nutrient is available in that food" without ever specifying the amount or how much you have to eat to make up for the lack of meat/gluten/whatever the diet is trying to keep you from eating.
Quite often people will then build up meals in that diet thinking that they'll have all of the various nutrients they need, but it turns out it doesn't have sufficient concentrations of certain important ones. And you would have to eat multiple kilograms of the replacement food to get enough of the nutrient to be useful.
The amount of nutrition and food science somebody has to know to live healthily on an alternative diet can sometimes be staggering.
The crowd is generally right about things. Over the last 10,000 years or so, everyone with the resources to do so has adopted a omnivorous diet. You offset the cost of meat and fresh fruits with grains. There's a reason that you'll get a potato and asparagus with your $50 steak at a restaurant.
In our society today, we've created a desert in a sea of abundance. We have the ignorant and lazy getting by on a diet of cheap bread, ramen and sugar fortified with vitamins. Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.
I think stevoski meant "How do you explain [the relative health and sustained society of] the 500 million vegetarians in India [despite the negative health consequences of vegetarianism]?"
So your "religious ignorance" answer is kinda a flippant one.
I was trying to explain how that diet is sustained.
As for the "relative health" I don't think there's much to begin with to explain. Where did the parent saw it?
A quick search for "Indian life expectancy" puts it at 66 years, vs 78 for the US and 74 for China (results for 2012).
Diet of course is not the only factor in this, but it plays a role, and the numbers don't seem very "relatively healthy" to me. Are there other numbers people can point to to qualify the "relative health" point?
If we mean "relatively healthy" compared to a diet heavy in sugars, HFCS, sodium etc, with obesity like that in parts of the US (South, midwest etc), it might be better -- but that's a pretty low bar.
The correct comparison to perform would be with a stable diet that includes fruits, vegetables et al PLUS meat and fish.
Good one. At least they do consume milk and milk products. Otherwise 32M diabetics too [1]. Of course, it could be mostly form the non-vegetarian among them, but even in that case it would be a higher than expected portion of the population.
But doesn't [directly] kill any sentient being. Yay! <milk production still abuses said animals bred for production>
As aesthetically pleasing as I find it I still can't go totally vegitarian. I have however and somehow released my eating of beef. Tiny steps, right?
As aesthetically pleasing as I find it I still can't expect everyone else to go totally vegitarian. But I think we may have to edge there over the coming decades as it's so wildly inefficient.
Cows only produce milk for their young. A milk cow is constantly bred to produce young which she then produces milk for. We want the milk, so we tale the calf away from the mother. Male calves are mostly useless and are killed young for veal. Some of the females are kept to replenish the herd.
Make whatever choices you want, but cows milk is not something that just drops out of cows.
Very true. Thanks for the reminder. Even goats have the same situation. I guess the truest non violent solution would be to milk soy beans or nuts. At least no one can hear empathize with them as fellow sentient beings.
Even in the production of vegetables and grains many sentient beings are killed. They just happen to be mostly insects or smaller mammals.
Try going into a garden without stepping on anything, or using a thrasher without killing a single thing.
That's why Buddhists don't get too crazy with the whole vegetarian thing, most eat meat (albeit not necessarily in our North American super-size me portions)...
> But doesn't [directly] kill any sentient being. Yay! <milk production still abuses said animals bred for production>
Historically consumption of milk is more about efficiency in turning feed -> nutrients, not necessarily about non-violent principles. Even in the production of vegetables, sentient beings are killed all the time (just incidentally).
> Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.
What does skin color have to do with veganism? Nothing at all. And most vegans are actually brown, as the sibling comment has pointed out. This is not a "first world" problem, since in fact the first world is clearly consuming the most meat. (+)
Want to know what's decadent? The scale of industrial meat production. Keeping animals who never see any daylight in a much too small space for example. Eating beef everyday despite climate change.
(+) And, by the way, I have always disliked the term "first world problem". On average, life tastes pretty much the same for everyone, though obviously it's different in extreme circumstances. Suffering and pain and real and imagined problems feel essentially the same for everyone. By all means, let's improve the economic conditions in the third world but let's stop pretending economic abundance somehow equals happiness and a lack of problems.
You're conflating a "vegetarian diet in a developed nation" with a "diet that has severely limited food options", and making it seem as though a vegetarian in a developed nation would have a hard time remaining healthy. This is misleading.
It is at least as easy to be a healthy vegetarian in a developed location as it is to be a healthy omnivore in the same location.
You are also conflating "vegetarian diet" with "cereal-grain heavy diet" which is also misleading when applied to the developed world. Vegetarians in much of the developed world have effectively unlimited access to non-cereal grain foods, and there are many excellent vegetarian zinc sources (nuts, seeds, and beans among them).
In short: This paper cannot usefully be applied to the eating habits of people in developed nations in the way that you are applying it, because it is based primarily on the premise of a diet that is heavily cereal grain based, by necessity, which is not a description that matches the population you're attempting to apply these results to.
> It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you eat meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients.
And, this one is just inaccurate. A balanced vegetarian diet in the developed world is no more difficult than a balanced omnivorous diet in the developed world. A fully vegan diet does introduce the necessity to think about B12, as it is not readily available in a vegan diet.
There's vast swaths of solid science indicating that reducing meat consumption has positive health impacts. Only when you read it through the lens of a "paleo" diet fanatic does one interpret the data to mean the opposite.
The quote you gave refers to cereals specifically, not vegetarian diets in general. Fruits and vegetables are very high in a wide variety of nutrients and I would argue that it's far easier to eat an all vegetarian diet vs an all meat diet. Sadly, bacon just doesn't have the nutritional profile of spinach.
EDIT: Just for the heck of it, here's spinach vs bacon at similar calorie counts:
And I'm just using spinach as an example...A vegetarian diet should have a wide range of fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. and you should do your research on it before starting.
>The quote you gave refers to cereals specifically, not vegetarian diets in general.
That's wrong, the last sentence refers to "western populations adopting vegetarian diets" in general, and cites references that suggest this. That's why I chose it. I'm not arguing that vegetarian and vegan diets are quintessentially malnutritious. I'm arguing that many people are doing it wrong.
In fact I suspect that people are more likely to "do it wrong" in (some?) western populations.
If you grow up in a food culture that is primarily vegetarian/vegan or at least has a subset that is, you immediately have a source of familiar recipes that will likely meet your nutritional needs.
On the other hand, if all you know how to cook and all you've seen being cooked tends to rely on meat proteins for some of nutrient balance, you really need to do some research to know what to add to your diet to replace what you are taking away. This research isn't difficult, really, but it can be hard to know where to start.
I suspect that if you take pretty much any traditional diet and start taking things away from it if you aren't careful you will rapidly run into deficiencies.
I suppose an argument for the recent, significant, western trend to over consumption of macro nutrients has an upside in that even if your diet is fairly (but not seriously) unbalanced, if you eat enough of it you tend to mostly get the nutrients you need....
I'll likely get downvoted for being a vegetarian, but...
> I'm arguing that many people are doing it wrong.
I suppose this is true, but this doesn't really add much to the conversation, in my opinion. Take any statistic about Western health — or lack thereof – such as 70% of the United States being overweight or obese. The small number of people in western countries adopting vegetarian diets is not to blame for these things. People love to talk about potato-chips-and-french-fries vegetarians, but the truth is that almost nobody in the country eats well, regardless of whether or not they eat meat. I think singling out vegetarians is pretty unfair, even if it was mentioned in the paper.
Anecdotally, I've been a vegetarian since I was seven years old, and I make pretty much no effort to make sure I get the "right" amount of nutrients. I simply don't eat junk, and based on what I've read about nutrients I should supposedly be deficient in (B12, zinc, iron, etc.), I have never suffered from any of the symptoms associated with deficiency.
* Technically, lacto-ovo vegetarian, although eggs only come in the form of occasional junk food (e.g. cakes and brownies), and dairy comes from the very rare occurrence of eating out. At home, I eat vegan 99% of the time.
> I think singling out vegetarians is pretty unfair, even if it was mentioned in the paper.
Heck, just the starting to think about what you put in your piehole that vegetarianism forces people to do would immensely help with food-related health issues in places like the U.S.
I'm not a vegetarian, but it's glaringly obvious vegetarianism isn't the cause of the majority of the food-related health issues today. As another poster put it, you generally cook/eat what you grew up with; how many people think fresh fruits and veggies are "too expensive" or cooking is "too hard" because they've been raised on fast food? Even if you look at more vegetarian friendly and offbeat sites like E2, they have articles with titles like "a vegetarian dish that isn't just another bowl of brown gack".
> I'm not arguing that vegetarian and vegan diets are quintessentially malnutritious. I'm arguing that many people are doing it wrong.
You seem to be implying that vegetarian diets are more problematic that meat based diets. You haven't shown data to back this up as far as I can tell. Sure, many vegetarians are doing it wrong, and many meat eaters are doing it wrong. For your implication to stand, you need to show that vegetarians are doing it wrong at a higher rate than meat eaters.
I know that multivitamin pills have bad rap in various circles. But the bioavailability of many simple vitamins is very high when given in tablet form.
So what I'd really like to know is what happens with
cereal / vegetarian / vegan diet
plus
cheap, easily available multivitamin
and mineral supplement pills
Maybe that's most of what's needed? The article does mention supplements, but only piecemeal.
Of course, people still need protein. You won't get that from a cheap vitamin pill, and it's tricky to do right with a vegan diet. Fortunately I live in the USA and beef is relatively cheap. "Beef. It's what's for dinner".
BTW I have vague recall of Northern vs Southern diets in the US Civil War. The claim was that this played an important part in the health and strength of the soldiers. The Union soldiers had more beef and wheat in their diets. The Confederate soldiers had more pork and corn. The Union won.
The civil war claim is pretty weak. There was no refrigeration in those days (at least in the field). The soldier's provided nutrition mostly came from hardtack and salted pork/bacon/beef. They also had stuff like dried peas and beans. At some point the union soldiers had some access to condensed milk.
The soldiers bought stuff (or were preyed upon) by various camp followers selling more stuff.
Generally speaking, the South had a weak supply chain, so they were more often to go without. I think that fact spoke more to the eventual Union victory.... industrial economies can absorb more punishment than a agrarian slave economy.
Bioavailability is rather complicated: for any given nutrient it can be enhanced by the presence of certain other nutrients but diminished by others.
Your comment also ignores phytonutrients* (which includes flavonoids and some anti-oxidants) and the effects of diet on gut flora, both of which topics we are just beginning to understand.
This is why, until we really understand the nitty-gritty of all of the hundreds (thousands?) of chemicals contained in food and how they interact, the best recommendations involve eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked.
Have there been any meta-analyses on the effects of phytonutrients? A recent analysis on antioxidants failed to disprove the null hypothesis (no effect) for most of them other than Vitamin D.
And then, there's the (IMO certain) outcome that, when we come to "really understand," we'll realize that "eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked" is the most economically viable option for keeping optimal health, when there is access to a healthy natural environment.
This article points out problems with unbalanced vegetarian and vegan diets. A balanced one is not that hard to achieve, there are many good resources that give you examples of such varied diets. If well done, supplements are unnecessary apart from vitamin B12. Even B12 doesn't need to be in pills: vegans can get it from marmite/vegemite, and vegetarians from eggs and diary.
That being said, it's still advisable to check for deficits, of course.
I cannot access that link, but I think it's important to note that the subject of the publication is mainly cereal grains (seeds of gramineae). Other sources of carbohydrates (such as root vegetables) have very different nutritional profiles (e.g. many are a source vitamin C). Chris Masterjohn has written about the consumption of starch among hunter-gatherers.
50 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 73.6 ms ] threadIt's not really a paradox, though, because "being a double-edged sword" is a comparison that's being made with regards to the decision of using that particular single-edge sword.
And "being a single-edge sword" here is a technical description of the physical object.
But that quote is something worth writing down somewhere.
It's from a Louis C.K. routine.
But the paper also raises multiple times the point that vegetarian diets tend to be too reliant on cereals, such as here:
"Because the bioavailability of zinc from meat is four times greater than that from cereals [113], it is clear that the displacement of animal-based foods by cereal-grain- and plant-based diets is not only responsible for impaired zinc metabolism in developing countries, but also in western populations adopting vegetarian diets [114, 115]."
It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you add a bit of meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients. This can be challenging if you only use "traditional" food, but it's made easier by products like Vega powder (which I've been having recently, pretty good!), which specifically try to compensate frequent shortcomings of a vegan diet, or I suppose HN favorites like Soylent and Mealsquares. I'm not sure the last two are really appropriate as vegetarian complements, though.
One thing I've noticed in lots of diet advocacy literature is that you'll find statements like "this nutrient is available in that food" without ever specifying the amount or how much you have to eat to make up for the lack of meat/gluten/whatever the diet is trying to keep you from eating.
Quite often people will then build up meals in that diet thinking that they'll have all of the various nutrients they need, but it turns out it doesn't have sufficient concentrations of certain important ones. And you would have to eat multiple kilograms of the replacement food to get enough of the nutrient to be useful.
The amount of nutrition and food science somebody has to know to live healthily on an alternative diet can sometimes be staggering.
By far the best source of info I've found is http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list which is a database of all foods, even pre-packaged ones.
And this is helpful too to know daily intake recommendations: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI/DRI_Tables/recommended_inta...
I had no part in this app, but have used it too, and it's based on the gov data from above: cronometer.com
In our society today, we've created a desert in a sea of abundance. We have the ignorant and lazy getting by on a diet of cheap bread, ramen and sugar fortified with vitamins. Then then we have the decadent white folks with first world problems complicating things with crazy vegan diets.
Though why bother asking? The parent has his mind all made up.
Also, a lot of them live in harsh conditions and have low life expectancy.
So your "religious ignorance" answer is kinda a flippant one.
As for the "relative health" I don't think there's much to begin with to explain. Where did the parent saw it?
A quick search for "Indian life expectancy" puts it at 66 years, vs 78 for the US and 74 for China (results for 2012).
Diet of course is not the only factor in this, but it plays a role, and the numbers don't seem very "relatively healthy" to me. Are there other numbers people can point to to qualify the "relative health" point?
If we mean "relatively healthy" compared to a diet heavy in sugars, HFCS, sodium etc, with obesity like that in parts of the US (South, midwest etc), it might be better -- but that's a pretty low bar.
The correct comparison to perform would be with a stable diet that includes fruits, vegetables et al PLUS meat and fish.
[1] http://www.who.int/diabetes/facts/world_figures/en/index5.ht...
As aesthetically pleasing as I find it I still can't go totally vegitarian. I have however and somehow released my eating of beef. Tiny steps, right?
As aesthetically pleasing as I find it I still can't expect everyone else to go totally vegitarian. But I think we may have to edge there over the coming decades as it's so wildly inefficient.
edit: pedantry
Make whatever choices you want, but cows milk is not something that just drops out of cows.
Try going into a garden without stepping on anything, or using a thrasher without killing a single thing.
That's why Buddhists don't get too crazy with the whole vegetarian thing, most eat meat (albeit not necessarily in our North American super-size me portions)...
Historically consumption of milk is more about efficiency in turning feed -> nutrients, not necessarily about non-violent principles. Even in the production of vegetables, sentient beings are killed all the time (just incidentally).
What does skin color have to do with veganism? Nothing at all. And most vegans are actually brown, as the sibling comment has pointed out. This is not a "first world" problem, since in fact the first world is clearly consuming the most meat. (+)
Want to know what's decadent? The scale of industrial meat production. Keeping animals who never see any daylight in a much too small space for example. Eating beef everyday despite climate change.
(+) And, by the way, I have always disliked the term "first world problem". On average, life tastes pretty much the same for everyone, though obviously it's different in extreme circumstances. Suffering and pain and real and imagined problems feel essentially the same for everyone. By all means, let's improve the economic conditions in the third world but let's stop pretending economic abundance somehow equals happiness and a lack of problems.
It is at least as easy to be a healthy vegetarian in a developed location as it is to be a healthy omnivore in the same location.
You are also conflating "vegetarian diet" with "cereal-grain heavy diet" which is also misleading when applied to the developed world. Vegetarians in much of the developed world have effectively unlimited access to non-cereal grain foods, and there are many excellent vegetarian zinc sources (nuts, seeds, and beans among them).
In short: This paper cannot usefully be applied to the eating habits of people in developed nations in the way that you are applying it, because it is based primarily on the premise of a diet that is heavily cereal grain based, by necessity, which is not a description that matches the population you're attempting to apply these results to.
> It's so much easier to have a vaguely balanced nutrition when you eat meat. It's also perfectly possible to have it as a vegetarian, but it really requires that you know what you're doing and that you make sure you get necessary nutrients.
And, this one is just inaccurate. A balanced vegetarian diet in the developed world is no more difficult than a balanced omnivorous diet in the developed world. A fully vegan diet does introduce the necessity to think about B12, as it is not readily available in a vegan diet.
There's vast swaths of solid science indicating that reducing meat consumption has positive health impacts. Only when you read it through the lens of a "paleo" diet fanatic does one interpret the data to mean the opposite.
EDIT: Just for the heck of it, here's spinach vs bacon at similar calorie counts:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=spinach+2.3lb http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bacon+0.1lb
And I'm just using spinach as an example...A vegetarian diet should have a wide range of fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. and you should do your research on it before starting.
That's wrong, the last sentence refers to "western populations adopting vegetarian diets" in general, and cites references that suggest this. That's why I chose it. I'm not arguing that vegetarian and vegan diets are quintessentially malnutritious. I'm arguing that many people are doing it wrong.
If you grow up in a food culture that is primarily vegetarian/vegan or at least has a subset that is, you immediately have a source of familiar recipes that will likely meet your nutritional needs.
On the other hand, if all you know how to cook and all you've seen being cooked tends to rely on meat proteins for some of nutrient balance, you really need to do some research to know what to add to your diet to replace what you are taking away. This research isn't difficult, really, but it can be hard to know where to start.
I suspect that if you take pretty much any traditional diet and start taking things away from it if you aren't careful you will rapidly run into deficiencies.
I suppose an argument for the recent, significant, western trend to over consumption of macro nutrients has an upside in that even if your diet is fairly (but not seriously) unbalanced, if you eat enough of it you tend to mostly get the nutrients you need....
> I'm arguing that many people are doing it wrong.
I suppose this is true, but this doesn't really add much to the conversation, in my opinion. Take any statistic about Western health — or lack thereof – such as 70% of the United States being overweight or obese. The small number of people in western countries adopting vegetarian diets is not to blame for these things. People love to talk about potato-chips-and-french-fries vegetarians, but the truth is that almost nobody in the country eats well, regardless of whether or not they eat meat. I think singling out vegetarians is pretty unfair, even if it was mentioned in the paper.
Anecdotally, I've been a vegetarian since I was seven years old, and I make pretty much no effort to make sure I get the "right" amount of nutrients. I simply don't eat junk, and based on what I've read about nutrients I should supposedly be deficient in (B12, zinc, iron, etc.), I have never suffered from any of the symptoms associated with deficiency.
* Technically, lacto-ovo vegetarian, although eggs only come in the form of occasional junk food (e.g. cakes and brownies), and dairy comes from the very rare occurrence of eating out. At home, I eat vegan 99% of the time.
Heck, just the starting to think about what you put in your piehole that vegetarianism forces people to do would immensely help with food-related health issues in places like the U.S.
I'm not a vegetarian, but it's glaringly obvious vegetarianism isn't the cause of the majority of the food-related health issues today. As another poster put it, you generally cook/eat what you grew up with; how many people think fresh fruits and veggies are "too expensive" or cooking is "too hard" because they've been raised on fast food? Even if you look at more vegetarian friendly and offbeat sites like E2, they have articles with titles like "a vegetarian dish that isn't just another bowl of brown gack".
You seem to be implying that vegetarian diets are more problematic that meat based diets. You haven't shown data to back this up as far as I can tell. Sure, many vegetarians are doing it wrong, and many meat eaters are doing it wrong. For your implication to stand, you need to show that vegetarians are doing it wrong at a higher rate than meat eaters.
http://bembu.com/foods-high-in-zinc
Eat some shrimp, spinach, peanuts, etc and you should be good. I've been test a number of times and haven't had a problem with zinc.
Sure, if you're a vegetarian who eats seafood, it's easy.
So what I'd really like to know is what happens with
plus Maybe that's most of what's needed? The article does mention supplements, but only piecemeal.Of course, people still need protein. You won't get that from a cheap vitamin pill, and it's tricky to do right with a vegan diet. Fortunately I live in the USA and beef is relatively cheap. "Beef. It's what's for dinner".
BTW I have vague recall of Northern vs Southern diets in the US Civil War. The claim was that this played an important part in the health and strength of the soldiers. The Union soldiers had more beef and wheat in their diets. The Confederate soldiers had more pork and corn. The Union won.
The soldiers bought stuff (or were preyed upon) by various camp followers selling more stuff.
Generally speaking, the South had a weak supply chain, so they were more often to go without. I think that fact spoke more to the eventual Union victory.... industrial economies can absorb more punishment than a agrarian slave economy.
Your comment also ignores phytonutrients* (which includes flavonoids and some anti-oxidants) and the effects of diet on gut flora, both of which topics we are just beginning to understand.
This is why, until we really understand the nitty-gritty of all of the hundreds (thousands?) of chemicals contained in food and how they interact, the best recommendations involve eating a variety of foods, both fresh and cooked.
* http://extension.psu.edu/health/news/2012/the-importance-of-...
That being said, it's still advisable to check for deficits, of course.
The Union soldiers wore blue. The Confederate soldiers wore grey. The Union won. The conclusion is obvious.
Not really - lentils, beans, peas, seeds, nuts, tofu and tempeh are all good sources of protein.
http://breadflower.com/
The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/682587