[bweitzman]

How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products? There are literally hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people that have been eating vegetarian diets for their entire lives, and these types of diets have been popular for millennia.

[tmotwu]

Those arguments always drive me nuts because they're all so bro sciencey, and I'm not even vegan or vegetarian. Sure, meat offers a different set of nutritional value than vegetables - you can most definitely replace it entirely with other sources and remain very healthy. Billions of people have done it for centuries and continue to do so, as you've said.

[kzrdude]

A counter argument - billions of people subsisted on ok food for centuries, but somehow in the 20th and 21st centuries people got taller, smarter and had earlier puberties because of better nutrition.

Doesn't that mean there is a quality (and quantity) to nutrition and not just subsisting, that we need to examine? And the claim about meat is that it has a quality that is beneficial.

[tmotwu]

Certainly you have to look at causations for that holistically. People have cooked and eaten meat in the past as well. It needs to be further studied on the qualities that has driven our growth in the industrial age. I think we now have a better understanding of our bodies and how to gamify our growth, through a myriad of ways whether or not eating certain amounts of meat and balancing it with other foods.

[dnissley]

Looking it up now I'm surprised to find that the only country with more than 15% of it's population being vegetarian is India. So now I'm somewhat skeptical of this claim. Will definitely need to do more research, but do you have any sources off hand? To be clear I'm looking to vet the claim that a vegetarian diet leads to similar health outcomes compared to a non-vegetarian diet.

[tmotwu]

There's really no way to answer those outcomes broadly because, for the vast majority of human beings, we don't count our calories or compute the macronutrients in our food. It's very difficult to see this unless you perform the study on twins, since birth, maintaining distinctly separate, perfectly controlled diets. The most consistent take is looking at it from an anthropological perspective - plenty of societies throughout history fed on a vegetarian lifestyle, which continues to persist today.

[dnissley]

It would be interesting to see the stats of a country like India though, where you don't have confounders like vegetarianism often being a class signal like in the developed world. Although the more I look into it, the more I find that "vegetarian" is a pretty loose label there.

What societies in the past have mainly been vegetarian? None except India seem to persist to this day. I hear the human race took a pretty big hit in the early agricultural era as far as life expectancy goes.

[tmotwu]

Buddhist societies and the sects formed around them immediately come to mind.

[numpad0]

It’ll be accurate enough to say Buddha argued it unethical to kill until he died from eating generously offered but spoiled pork so...

[Spare_account]

Does this cover off any of the areas you're interested in?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02615...

>Health outcomes associated with vegetarian diets: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses

>Conclusions: Vegetarian diets are associated with beneficial effects on the blood lipid profile and a reduced risk of negative health outcomes, including diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and cancer risk. Among vegetarians, SDA vegetarians could represent a subgroup with a further reduced risk of negative health outcomes. Vegetarian diets have adverse outcomes on one-carbon metabolism. The effect of vegetarian diets among pregnant and lactating women requires specific attention. Well-designed prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the consequences of the prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency during pregnancy and infancy on later life and of trace element deficits on cancer risks.

[novok]

It's not brosciency, it's called bioavailablity. Ex: Carrots have a lot of a vitamin A precursor in the form of beta carotene, but the rate it's absorbed compared to the form commonly in the liver (retinol), is significantly lower and is reduced even further if you have certain health problems, including common ones like diabetes or insulin resistance.

[ska]

> How are you comparing nutritional value between meat and plant products?

It's impossible to do this really rigorously, as there are too many unknowns in nutrition still. So this leaves holed you can drive all sorts of sized trucks through, which means a lot of argument but not a lot of resolution.

[maxerickson]

There's not magic shit in meat, it's mostly water and amino acids and the remaining fraction is mostly bad for you.

(I eat meat all the time, but we know a lot more than barely anything about nutrition. Figure out vitamin RDAs in milligrams if you want an example)

[DetroitThrow]

I'm shocked that people seriously believe that the fundamentals of nutritional science are a virtual mystery or has enough "wiggle room" to make ridiculously broad claims about diet necessities. We know almost exact micrograms of iodine we need per day to be healthy. We have a pretty great idea of what the body needs to function optimally and are getting a clearer picture every day.

Is this why GMOs became such a pariah?

[ska]

If what you were saying were true, we wouldn't have wildly divergent (macro) diet and nutrition claims being made in cycles without clear resolution. Most of them are wrong, it seems, but the science is hard.

You are right we have some pretty good information on deficiency problems with key things like iodine, B12 (topical) etc. We have much less understanding of how even dietary source actually work even with some key nutrients outside of lab conditions, and beyond that dietary nutrition is absolutely full of handwaving. We are nowhere near a clear picture; lot's of people will tell you we are but they still contradict each other regularly. This is not a mature science.

[maxerickson]

The hard part of modern diet isn't macro composition, it's measuring caloric requirements and sticking close to them over long periods of time. Macro composition can help with that, but eating way too much of the perfect diet is still going to be bad.

[ska]

Sure, we understand "too many calories is bad" also, but that wasn't my point. A lot of conflicting claims about macro composition are made for example, and it's really hard to definitely dismiss them (or even answer how much it matters) mainly because we don't understand it well enough.

[ska]

I didn't say we know "barely anything", just that the unknowns are significant enough to allow a lot of wiggle room and arguments. Including, for example, the accuracy of many vitamin RDAs.

[Spivak]

Look, this isn't the whole picture and it super misleading. Just because humans survived with a particular diet doesn't mean that they wouldn't have been healthier had they eaten meat. You can't just point to historical populations who didn't have widespread access to animal products and be like "see they lived."

I'm not saying your not correct that vegetarian diets are fine from a health perspective but this isn't evidence of it.

[arrrg]

Don’t you have the burden of proof exactly reversed?

[mft_]

It's not just that vegetarian diets are "fine" - there's actually a wealth of evidence that a meat-free diet is far healthier - in terms of risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, and various forms of cancer, for example.

https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/

[serverholic]

Fyi, the creator of that website (Dr. Gregor) can be pretty biased. If you google reviews of his books (from other doctors) you'll see that he sometimes leaves out important details from the studies he cites.

[Bancakes]

Thhere's also evidence for the contrary. If you care about any dieting at all and watch your micros and macros, you will invariably be above average in health.

[mft_]

Really? There's a body of evidence that a meat-containing diet is protective against heart disease, type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, versus a plant-based diet?

I'd genuinely be very interested for those sources to be shared, please...

[buckthundaz]

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/4/734/4690022?login...

https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/carnivore-diet-fo...

[La1n]

That first study compares to meat-containing diets with each other, see the methods section.

edit: I also have some doubts on the care taken in this study and it's peer-review. As there is an easy to spot mistake in table 2 (the dietary fat section).

[Bancakes]

I meant it as trial results that don't show meaningful gains from vegan diets.

[nicoburns]

I'm a vegetarian, I think this is true when comparing meat with whole plant foods. But to be fair the the GP comment, meat substitute products are almost certainly considerably less nutritious (micronutrient wise) than actual meat.

[Bang2Bay]

for generations we have been vegetarians and many of my carnivorous friends have told me the opposite. That is they feel better nourished with plant based meals.

[tomstoms]

Exactly how certain is it?

[elktea]

I'm comparing it by ... comparing the nutrients in each. There are lots of examples of nutrients in meat that aren't found in plants (carnitine, b12 etc) and even more where the type found in plants must be consumed in far greater quantities and converted to a form we can use (retinol vs beta-carotene, DHA vs EPA/ALA etc)

Millions of vegetarians doesn't mean meat is suddenly less nutritious.

[giantandroids]

The B12 in off the shelf beef , chicken is from it being injected by farmers (along with all manner of other stuff such as antibiotics).

The truth is that every living being is low on B12 due to soil erosion / over farming. So in a way a meat eater is supplementing B12 by proxy of an animal, where as a vegan is buying a pot off amazon (and in turn able to get a much more specific dose).

[munk-a]

But hundreds of millions of vegetarians does mean that eliminating that meat from our diet is extremely realistic and much more widely affordable.

[mythrwy]

By all means, feel free to eliminate meat from _your_ diet. But "Our" diet is a different issue.

[munk-a]

We all live on this planet together, what we do affects others and while I think meat should remain part of our diets I think it needs to become a much less central part of it.

I enjoy meat myself, but I use it more sparingly in combination with other central meal components.

[cphajduk]

I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.

If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.

[ska]

> however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.

That's not quite right. B12 is mostly produced by bacteria on the surface of plants. We can't synthesize it an neither can the animals we eat. So if you eat products of animals that have been eating such plants (or these days, maybe supplements), there is a source, and especially in developed countries is often the easiest one.

It's an important vitamin, deficiency wise, and for humans there are 3 practical approaches: eat products from animals that consume B12 on plants, eat those plants, or fortify another food more directly.

The 2nd one sounds like an easy win, but is made harder by the fact that most processing (e.g. even vigorous washing ) will remove all the B12 as it is superficial and water soluble.

It's also worth noting we don't need much B12, and we don't need it every day, so managing this isn't very difficult.

[pvarangot]

There's a lot of vegan sources for B12, mostly fermented stuff like tempeh or powdered yeast leftovers from making beer. Some plants also have it. They are cheap and plentiful and usually used in a lot of vegan foods like "substitute cheese" or people blend them shakes because they are also rich in other aminoacids.

You can get all the B12 you need and even more from this while still being balanced in macro and micro-nutrients. Also B12 deficiency will usually make you psychotic or very very tired and to die from it you have to be completely depleted, if you live in the modern world and eat products made with fortifried grains, like white bread, pasta or some breakfast cereals, you will probably never go below the threshold were you cause damage.

There's also multiple protein shakes or meal replacement shakes that sell for like 2 dollars that have enough B12 for the daily recommended intake which is far far more than what you actually need as it's based on the old 2000 calorie diet thing.

[pwinnski]

I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives, and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the age of two.

I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

[graeme]

Meat and eggs. So you need eggs. It’s also present in dairy.

So the parent’s claim is an argument against unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of vegetarianism doesn’t address that. Massive difference between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement or not.

[pwinnski]

Oh, you didn't click through, maybe. Or missed that the linked page included millions of vegans, too, in the same chart.

You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S., Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans, while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage, though those two are disputed.

[novok]

Strict vegans are the only ones that typically have the B12 issue. Most vegetarians still eat a lot of dairy and eggs so still get B12 in their diet. Also a lot of foods are 'fortified' by government regulation to avoid common nutritional deficiencies that would arise with their standard diets, so it's hard to take certain things at face value.

[cphajduk]

Yes sorry. You are right I wasn't very clear and also I didn't realize that B12 actually comes from bacteria and archaea.

The organisms that provide us vitamin B12 tend to host said bacteria and archaea within their GI.

Alternatively supplements are provided (as I mentioned). Nutritional yeast, dairy, and vitamin pills are some of the ways in which vegetarians survive. Apparently certain beans are high in B12 as well!

[pwinnski]

Beans are often a staple for vegetarian and vegan diets, so that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the follow-up!

[hamax]

Most omnivores get their B12 from supplements given to livestock.

It's the same supplements but with extra steps.

[kamranjon]

There is plenty of B12 in seaweed and mushrooms and I eat quite a bit of those - wonder if that's what's keeping me afloat.

[cphajduk]

Interesting. Turns out I just misunderstood the source of B12. Seems it comes from certain bacteria and archaea.

[jhickok]

Vitamin B12 can only be found naturally in the amounts we need in meat and eggs. With the advent of culturing there are now vegan sources at nearly every grocery store.

[yread]

It's ok you can just drink beer (!1l a day) to get B12

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11464234/

(Of course, this study is from Czech Republic where average beer consumption is something like 0.7l per capita)

[codyb]

I was under the impression alcohol impacted B vitamin absorption though, so this may not work?

I looked it up and it seems to be suggested that it does but I didn’t look long enough to find a study.

[chickenpotpie]

That is incorrect, B12 is abundant in nutritional yeast

[cphajduk]

Because nutritional yeast is fortified. Hence a supplement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_yeast#Nutrition

[chickenpotpie]

All purpose flour is fortified, doesn’t make it a supplement. Did you even read your own source. It literally says that nutritionally yeast can be unfortified and it have b12

[cphajduk]

I did read it indeed, did you?

> "Yeast cannot produce B12, which is naturally produced only by some bacteria.[8] Some brands of nutritional yeast, though not all, are fortified with vitamin B12. When it is fortified, the vitamin B12 (commonly cyanocobalamin) is produced separately and then added to the yeast."

Furthermore, fortified all purpose flour is not the same as fortified nutritional yeast. In fact, what you are referring to is likely _enriched_ all purpose flour. This has vitamin B1, B2, B3, B9 and iron added to it. There is no addition of vitamin B12.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_flour