"Cleaner"? What an odd use of that word. Are you talking about bacterial concentrations? Are you talking about amount of soil contained in the food? I don't think there are differences based on those criterial. All types of human food will rot if left unpreserved.
Does anyone know what is in meat that aids in the pleasurable sensation (both psychological and physiological) of eating it? And, is there a way to recreate that in an all plant based meal without introducing the same problems this study shows? I'd be happy to switch to full vegan if I felt full in a similar way for a similar length of time along with a "Wow, that was really good!" experience.
My sister was vegetarian for a couple of decades. There's a lot of vegetarian food that I really enjoy. They all have in common that they don't pretend to be meat.
However full vegan I could never do. There might be a few meals that I enjoy, but not enough to keep my will to live through a year.
I often eat meat-only meals. There isn't anything particularly satisfying or a feeling of being "full". Just the opposite - meat is being digested slowly and some feeling of satiety only kicks in after about 2 hours.
What you describe probably comes mostly from fat + carbs.
Shouldn't be that difficult to explain. I think the concept is called "tasty" :) And there is plenty of food with that property. Meat wouldn't even rank in top 10.
I’m plant based these days, and it’s not just that. I eat all sorts of things that taste fantastic, but they don’t hit that specific note. It’s something specific about the texture or I don’t even know. I think it might be a signifier of protein content, analogous to sweet taste signaling the presence of energy rich sugar.
When I was focused on growing muscle mass I ate around 200-250 grams of dietary protein a day. It was a chore. I had to eat well past satiety every meal. And this was on an 1800 calorie diet, so it was basically just lean protein and low glycemic index vegetables.
Protein is the most effective food macronutrient providing a satiating effect. I find the beefy/meaty flavor of the recent wave of meat analogues (Impossible Meat, Beyond Meat) very satisfying.
That's why the most satisfying vegan food (such as Indian food mentioned by a sibling comment) has lots of coconut milk, ghee, oil, or more recently, avocado.
Though I think there's definitely something about biting into the protein too, which is a big part of what Beyond Meat goes for.
The tongue has a set of receptors that fire for cooked meat. So yes, it is in fact the protein. I grew up and we learned about the 4 tastes and then stumbled across this a whole back and was fascinated. It probably explains why cooking meat first caught on.
In this randomized clinical trial of the cardiometabolic effects of omnivorous vs vegan diets in identical twins, the healthy vegan diet led to improved cardiometabolic outcomes compared with a healthy omnivorous diet.
Would like to see a couple of the middle ways peppered in (pescetarian, vegetarian).
Agree, but I do think there are real clinical benefits to short trials like this. For example, it's good to have evidence that one could quickly improve their cardiometabolic health immediately after a cardiovascular event just by switching to vegan.
My recollection is that pescatarian significantly outperforms all other eating patterns in terms of mortality, when treated as a distinct group. It is infrequently broken out in large studies, unfortunately. This also often isn't highlighted in the headlines for these studies, probably because they get more engagement along the popular "meat or plant" angle.
Can they repeat for vegetarian? As an ethically conflicted meat-eater, I do try to limit my consumption where possible, but full vegan would be tremendously difficult for me to adhere to for any length of time. Eggs are nearly the perfect food.
I would note that eight weeks is not terribly long for a radical dietary change. Presumably, the baseline consumption for participants was more akin to the omnivore diet. What would the study results look like at 4+ months duration? Would vegans creep back up to their original baseline as their body and habits adapted?
You know how they're trying to grow cultured meat? I think it's pretty neat and all but what I would like to see is a scenario where they grow some chicken oocytes in a lab that then grow eggs. To me that seems like an easier way to get to lab grown animal products than trying to get the taste/texture and appearance of stuff grown in a lab to approximate that the stuff that spends it's life in the body of an animal that is on a farm.
The apex of this kind of invention would be a little biomechanical appliance in your kitchen about the size of atoaster or microwave that you put electricity, water, and protein slurry into and out pop perfect little eggs.
The authors identify the fundamental limitation of their interpretation. To wit, you cannot be sure whether the improved biomarkers are a consequence of the different contents of the diets or the bulk caloric differences:
> Fifth, our study was not designed to be isocaloric; thus, changes to LDL-C cannot be separated from weight loss observed in the study.
Oh wow, I didn't get farther than how much meat they included to see that....that's a _very_ major methodological issue _especially_ when "weight loss" is one of the endpoints they tout!
As long as satiety is maintained enough to stay on the diet I don't see that it's necessarily an issue. Plants and nuts especially tend to be high in fiber and thus very filling per calorie. The mechanism of weight loss (lower caloric intake, here) isn't that important, as long as it's a sustainable mechanism.
If the vegan participants were eating less on their own because the diet induced greater satiation, then great! That's a fantastic result. But these participants were provided meals from a meal service, so they were being presented with fewer calories. That's a very, very major problem, one that the authors themselves admit in the conclusions. Which is why it's frustrating to see them take such stronger language in the beginning of the article. They know it's an issue but pretend it isn't until the end when they hope that most people won't see it.
> But these participants were provided meals from a meal service
Only for the first month. And if it didn't satisfy them sufficiently study dropout or cheating would become more likely. They appear to have been allowed to 'cheat' formally, anyway.
: Participants also purchased and consumed snacks to meet their energy requirements following guidance from health educators.
: Although weight loss was not discouraged, our diet design did not include a prescribed energy restriction and was not intended to be a weight loss study. Participants were told to eat until they were satiated throughout the study.
I'm more interested in their exclusion criteria, as this makes their study less generalizable to populations who may need it:
: We excluded participants who weighed 45.36 kg (100 lb) or less, had a body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) of 40 or higher, had an LDL-C level of 190 mg/dL or higher (to convert to millimoles per liter, multiply by 0.0259), had a systolic blood pressure of 160 mm Hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher, or were pregnant.
aka half of the entire study duration. As for "satisfaction" it didn't: diet satisfaction was reported lower in the vegan group. But while there may have been cheating, we know that the vegan group was consuming less calories, because they lost more weight. If they had been provided the same number of calories, that would tell us that they were cheating less or something similar. Because they were not though, we have no idea how much of it is due to some advantage of the diet vs. the difference in provided meals. The issue is not that this problem disproves advantages of a vegan diet. The problem is it makes it impossible to know. They have hopelessly confounded with a factor that we know is incredibly important in nutrition related health outcomes.
And the authors know it too:
>Fifth, our study was not designed to be isocaloric; thus, changes to LDL-C cannot be separated from weight loss observed in the study.
I personally think that this one throw away sentence is far too small for what is probably the largest methodological issue in the study.
Again, this problem doesn't disprove anything about vegan diets, it just makes it nearly impossible to learn anything from this study.
> If they had been provided the same number of calories, that would tell us that they were cheating less or something similar.
They were specifically told to snack as needed.
Given that they were told to eat until satisfied, and report that they were less satisfied, it seems that this study "proves" that the vegan diets used in this study are less satisfying than omnivorous diets, at least on average for a cohort who aren't used to vegan eating.
Did they also measure IQ, mood, libido, strength, etc? I’m not saying they’re wrong on what the did measure. Just that I did a vegan diet for a while and it was fucking depressing.
Hmmm. They say that "in order to distinguish it from a vegan diet", they included a minimum amount of meat consumption of 6-8 ounces per day, plus eggs and dairy.
6-8 ounces per day is less than the average American consumes (average daily American consumes ~12 ounces/day), but I also don't think that you'd call the average American diet a "healthy" omnivore diet. The study diet would come out to 180ish lbs per year, which is more than 3x the global average.
It's certainly more meat than I eat per day.
It seems weird to, when comparing "healthy" diets, to make sure that the two are "different enough" instead of starting from a "this is what we thing a healthy version of this diet is, on it's own".
They aren't quite guaranteeing there will be a difference, but you are pretty close.
This seems a pretty large methodological issue, and at a bare minimum is going to make me disagree with the characterization of "healthy" omnivorous diet that the authors use.
This study has a lot going for it, primarily the fact that it's actually a randomized control study (which is almost unheard of in nutrition). The fact that it's a twin study on top of that is even better. But it's low sample size and short duration (8 weeks), are two pretty big marks against it.
But given their choices in diet, I think that the strongest result that can possible come out of this is "Don't eat more meat than the average European" (5 ounces per day), which is very far from saying that "a Vegan diet is better than a healthy omnivore diet".
If I had a sum up: this is a very good study but the authors take a much stronger position than the design justifies.
-edit- I missed that these diets were not caloricly equivalent. The Vegan diet was lower calorie. That....almost entirely trashes the results and interpretation. It definitely explains the weight loss and likely the cholesterol as well. It is incredibly disappointing to see what was probably a very expensive and rare example of a random controlled trial in nutrition marred by some pretty major problems in the design of the diets.
> 6-8 ounces per day is less than the average American consumes (average daily American consumes ~12 ounces/day), but I also don't think that you'd call the average American diet a "healthy" omnivore diet. The study diet would come out to 180ish lbs per year, which is more than 3x the global average.
I think "less than the average American consumes" is a more accurate indication of an omnivorous diet than "3x the global average", because the global average is filled with malnourished populations.
Even when looking at the 5 ounce average for European diets, that's still including a lot of impoverished countries.
A healthy diet, on definition alone, is not going to be found in impoverished countries.
I don't feel like I have to try and restrict my meat consumption consciously at all, and I eat about 80 lbs a year, which is less than half of what was in this diet. I very much doubt that someone who was trying to come up with a "healthy" omnivorous diet in a vacuum would include 6-8 ounces of meat per day. Neither the American nor global averages were meant to be examples of what "should" be eaten, they were merely reference points. Even the USDA recommends less than 6 ounces per day, and if I had to guess, their recommendations are, if anything, on the high side.
And of course, all of this is ignoring that this study is hopelessly confounded with caloric differences between the two diets.
> 6-8 ounces per day is less than the average American consumes (average daily American consumes ~12 ounces/day)
I believe the median is going to be more like 6-8oz. In other studies I've come across it has been observed that a relatively small percentage of the US population (15%?) has meat consumption that greatly outsizes the typical American, which skews the results. Apparently there is a significant sub-population of Americans that get most of their calories from meat.
I think it’s odd that they cut people loose to freestyle their diet the last 4 weeks. As with most studies like this it’s very hard to draw any kind of conclusion. I guess the follow up would be longer term studies that constrain more variables.
I think it’s a stretch to say that it’s hard to draw any conclusion. There are many extremely useful conclusions one can draw. Especially when placed in other studies that have been done in this area.
There’s a lot more data that probably will come out of this study but the key to it is that it helps us eliminate genetic factors from many known effects.
: One hypothesis has to do with our DNA damage repair systems, which are regulated by the circadian clock. Food contains a mixture of nutrients and toxins. Plants produce toxins to avoid being eaten, such as psoralen, which is abundant in celery. Snacking at night introduces toxins that, at that hour, our repair systems are not ready to eliminate. There is also speculation that the major epidemic of epithelial cancers, such as colon cancer, in the U.S. is because of this.
Basically plants may be good in general, but become problematic to long-term health if, like anything else, eaten close to bedtime.
Edit: For god's sake downvoters, read what I wrote and THINK ABOUT IT before downvoting. I AM A VEGETARIAN, AND LIKE EATING VEGAN. I'm just warning people that VEG EATING LATE AT NIGHT comes with it's own RISK FACTORS. So YES, PLEASE DO CONSIDER A VEGAN DIET, BUT ALSO EAT HEALTHY BY NOT EATING CLOSE TO BEDTIME OR NIGHT SNACKING!!! OTHERWISE YOU MAY INCREASE YOUR CANCER RISK FROM EATING CERTAIN VEGETABLES CLOSE TO BEDTIME!!!!!!
This doesn’t say if it was done in a metabolic ward so I assume it wasn’t. Self reporting is so notoriously unreliable that any results outside of a metabolic ward are best ignored.
Also weight isn’t even the right metric. Body composition is what we should care about when judging a diet.
As an omnivore who tries to eat more plants and less meat, I'm going to recommend my favorite food blogger I discovered this year: https://rainbowplantlife.com/
The author is a vegan Indian-American cook, and her recipes are delicious and easy for me to follow as a moderately-experienced home cook. The first I tried was her tofu palak paneer (https://rainbowplantlife.com/vegan-palak-paneer-with-tofu/) but pretty much everything I've made has been a hit.
Did they design the two meal plans within similar calorie intake? If the whole vegan group is losing weight, it means the vegan diet plan has much less calories to the point of calorie deficiency to cause weight loss.
It looks like the trial was designed to skew the results. The trial becomes comparing a short term dieting plan to a full meal plan. It’s known that short term fasting and calorie restricted meals do improve health overall.
52 comments
[ 13.6 ms ] story [ 1844 ms ] threadThe real question is what's the difference on longevity and very long-term quality of life
However full vegan I could never do. There might be a few meals that I enjoy, but not enough to keep my will to live through a year.
What you describe probably comes mostly from fat + carbs.
I'm not vegan, but this was the first time I've had vegan food and felt both full and "wow, this was amazing".
That's why the most satisfying vegan food (such as Indian food mentioned by a sibling comment) has lots of coconut milk, ghee, oil, or more recently, avocado.
Though I think there's definitely something about biting into the protein too, which is a big part of what Beyond Meat goes for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami
In this randomized clinical trial of the cardiometabolic effects of omnivorous vs vegan diets in identical twins, the healthy vegan diet led to improved cardiometabolic outcomes compared with a healthy omnivorous diet.
Would like to see a couple of the middle ways peppered in (pescetarian, vegetarian).
I would note that eight weeks is not terribly long for a radical dietary change. Presumably, the baseline consumption for participants was more akin to the omnivore diet. What would the study results look like at 4+ months duration? Would vegans creep back up to their original baseline as their body and habits adapted?
You know how they're trying to grow cultured meat? I think it's pretty neat and all but what I would like to see is a scenario where they grow some chicken oocytes in a lab that then grow eggs. To me that seems like an easier way to get to lab grown animal products than trying to get the taste/texture and appearance of stuff grown in a lab to approximate that the stuff that spends it's life in the body of an animal that is on a farm.
The apex of this kind of invention would be a little biomechanical appliance in your kitchen about the size of atoaster or microwave that you put electricity, water, and protein slurry into and out pop perfect little eggs.
Usually I think of potatoes when thinking about a perfect food.
> Fifth, our study was not designed to be isocaloric; thus, changes to LDL-C cannot be separated from weight loss observed in the study.
Only for the first month. And if it didn't satisfy them sufficiently study dropout or cheating would become more likely. They appear to have been allowed to 'cheat' formally, anyway.
: Participants also purchased and consumed snacks to meet their energy requirements following guidance from health educators.
: Although weight loss was not discouraged, our diet design did not include a prescribed energy restriction and was not intended to be a weight loss study. Participants were told to eat until they were satiated throughout the study.
I'm more interested in their exclusion criteria, as this makes their study less generalizable to populations who may need it:
: We excluded participants who weighed 45.36 kg (100 lb) or less, had a body mass index (calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) of 40 or higher, had an LDL-C level of 190 mg/dL or higher (to convert to millimoles per liter, multiply by 0.0259), had a systolic blood pressure of 160 mm Hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher, or were pregnant.
aka half of the entire study duration. As for "satisfaction" it didn't: diet satisfaction was reported lower in the vegan group. But while there may have been cheating, we know that the vegan group was consuming less calories, because they lost more weight. If they had been provided the same number of calories, that would tell us that they were cheating less or something similar. Because they were not though, we have no idea how much of it is due to some advantage of the diet vs. the difference in provided meals. The issue is not that this problem disproves advantages of a vegan diet. The problem is it makes it impossible to know. They have hopelessly confounded with a factor that we know is incredibly important in nutrition related health outcomes.
And the authors know it too:
>Fifth, our study was not designed to be isocaloric; thus, changes to LDL-C cannot be separated from weight loss observed in the study.
I personally think that this one throw away sentence is far too small for what is probably the largest methodological issue in the study.
Again, this problem doesn't disprove anything about vegan diets, it just makes it nearly impossible to learn anything from this study.
They were specifically told to snack as needed.
Given that they were told to eat until satisfied, and report that they were less satisfied, it seems that this study "proves" that the vegan diets used in this study are less satisfying than omnivorous diets, at least on average for a cohort who aren't used to vegan eating.
6-8 ounces per day is less than the average American consumes (average daily American consumes ~12 ounces/day), but I also don't think that you'd call the average American diet a "healthy" omnivore diet. The study diet would come out to 180ish lbs per year, which is more than 3x the global average.
It's certainly more meat than I eat per day.
It seems weird to, when comparing "healthy" diets, to make sure that the two are "different enough" instead of starting from a "this is what we thing a healthy version of this diet is, on it's own".
They aren't quite guaranteeing there will be a difference, but you are pretty close.
This seems a pretty large methodological issue, and at a bare minimum is going to make me disagree with the characterization of "healthy" omnivorous diet that the authors use.
This study has a lot going for it, primarily the fact that it's actually a randomized control study (which is almost unheard of in nutrition). The fact that it's a twin study on top of that is even better. But it's low sample size and short duration (8 weeks), are two pretty big marks against it.
But given their choices in diet, I think that the strongest result that can possible come out of this is "Don't eat more meat than the average European" (5 ounces per day), which is very far from saying that "a Vegan diet is better than a healthy omnivore diet".
If I had a sum up: this is a very good study but the authors take a much stronger position than the design justifies.
-edit- I missed that these diets were not caloricly equivalent. The Vegan diet was lower calorie. That....almost entirely trashes the results and interpretation. It definitely explains the weight loss and likely the cholesterol as well. It is incredibly disappointing to see what was probably a very expensive and rare example of a random controlled trial in nutrition marred by some pretty major problems in the design of the diets.
I think "less than the average American consumes" is a more accurate indication of an omnivorous diet than "3x the global average", because the global average is filled with malnourished populations.
Even when looking at the 5 ounce average for European diets, that's still including a lot of impoverished countries.
A healthy diet, on definition alone, is not going to be found in impoverished countries.
And of course, all of this is ignoring that this study is hopelessly confounded with caloric differences between the two diets.
I believe the median is going to be more like 6-8oz. In other studies I've come across it has been observed that a relatively small percentage of the US population (15%?) has meat consumption that greatly outsizes the typical American, which skews the results. Apparently there is a significant sub-population of Americans that get most of their calories from meat.
There’s a lot more data that probably will come out of this study but the key to it is that it helps us eliminate genetic factors from many known effects.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/chronobiologist-an... from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38513782
: One hypothesis has to do with our DNA damage repair systems, which are regulated by the circadian clock. Food contains a mixture of nutrients and toxins. Plants produce toxins to avoid being eaten, such as psoralen, which is abundant in celery. Snacking at night introduces toxins that, at that hour, our repair systems are not ready to eliminate. There is also speculation that the major epidemic of epithelial cancers, such as colon cancer, in the U.S. is because of this.
Basically plants may be good in general, but become problematic to long-term health if, like anything else, eaten close to bedtime.
Edit: For god's sake downvoters, read what I wrote and THINK ABOUT IT before downvoting. I AM A VEGETARIAN, AND LIKE EATING VEGAN. I'm just warning people that VEG EATING LATE AT NIGHT comes with it's own RISK FACTORS. So YES, PLEASE DO CONSIDER A VEGAN DIET, BUT ALSO EAT HEALTHY BY NOT EATING CLOSE TO BEDTIME OR NIGHT SNACKING!!! OTHERWISE YOU MAY INCREASE YOUR CANCER RISK FROM EATING CERTAIN VEGETABLES CLOSE TO BEDTIME!!!!!!
Also weight isn’t even the right metric. Body composition is what we should care about when judging a diet.
The author is a vegan Indian-American cook, and her recipes are delicious and easy for me to follow as a moderately-experienced home cook. The first I tried was her tofu palak paneer (https://rainbowplantlife.com/vegan-palak-paneer-with-tofu/) but pretty much everything I've made has been a hit.
It looks like the trial was designed to skew the results. The trial becomes comparing a short term dieting plan to a full meal plan. It’s known that short term fasting and calorie restricted meals do improve health overall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxyxcTZccsE