
Brain food: a nutrient vegans lack - cyunker
https://espresso.economist.com/2e3a567dcc390811e4dfa8d478e4a149
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larssorenson
As a vegan who tracks their nutrients and vitamins pretty closely, I do not
have trouble getting enough choline. The big hits in the vegetable world are:
soybeans, cauliflower, potatoes, peanuts, kidney beans, quinoa.... and on and
on. There's really no difficulty if you eat a sufficiently diverse diet.

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dahx4Eev
What’s the recommended way to track? Is it done by blood tests?

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vsajip
Response by the UK Vegan Society:

[https://www.vegansociety.com/whats-new/news/statement-
media-...](https://www.vegansociety.com/whats-new/news/statement-media-
reports-about-choline-and-vegan-diets)

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esotericn
Does anyone else find this obsessive attitude towards vegan/vegetarian diets
and their supposed lack of nutrition to be thinking about the wrong problem?

We evolved over a long period of time to basically eat whatever we could hunt
and find. Depending on location that might have included meat or meat might
have been very hard to come across indeed.

It's unclear to me that we'd have such a strong dependency on specific foods.
I think for the most part what happens is that it's actually way too easy in
modern life to hyperfocus on a specific subset of nutrients to the exclusion
of others. Someone could go days at a time eating bread and potatoes alone
with various condiments/spices for example and eventually get ill because then
they would of course be missing something.

A lot of the vegans I know, myself included, tend to bias towards that,
because like, roast potatoes are gorgeous innit.

Does that make sense at all? Basically that, if you had some sort of like,
randomized stock cupboard (I don't know how the sampling would work), you'd be
fine in almost any circumstance even if you deliberately excluded certain
things?

B12 is apparently difficult in modern times primarily because we clean things.
My understanding was that earthy foods or a berry you eat from a tree might
have natural B12.

So maybe we just need to stop being... err.. picky eaters? (exclude meat, but
don't _choose_ your meals as much)?

The way the media makes it sound, before agriculture almost every human must
have been chronically malnourished. It doesn't sound like a legitimate
evolutionary path.

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scottLobster
I think it's just a backlash towards the more militant vegans who make all the
noise. Veganism predicates itself on moral grounds (no animal products period,
because hurting animals/climate change/etc), not nutritional ones like
vegetarianism, and as with any moral cause some people decide to get all Deus
Vult! about it.

So as a response the opposition points out that veganism "morally" excludes
certain nutrients as a way to call it an unhealthy/stupid lifestyle.

And there's technically a legitimate point to it IMO, maybe being pure vegan
is nutritionally sub-optimal compared to some other options. Maybe kids
shouldn't be vegan for ideal health. At the very least you have to seriously
worry about various nutrients that you don't have to worry about with a less
restrictive diet. But IMO that's like saying people into restoring/driving
antique cars are driving sub-optimal vehicles. Yeah it's technically true, but
that's their lifestyle/hobby so who cares?

And "malnourished" depends on your definition. It's no coincidence that we
started growing taller and having more babies with the advent of agriculture.
It's like putting a plant under a grow-lamp. Is the plant fueled by natural if
imperfect sunlight "malnourished" relative to the plant under the grow-lamp?

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Tucanix
I see more anti-vegan militant people than I see actually militant vegans,
then again I might be biased. I think the "backlash" is more an effect of
cognitive dissonance than anything else, people "have" to push back as they
have an inherent desire to justify their actions and beliefs to themselves.

If I have a problem I don't want to admit to myself I just blame it on you,
that way I don't have to deal with the problem. This is exactly how cognitive
dissonance works and how our minds "solve" it.

Also why would anyone care about "militant vegans" at all if they didn't feel
some kind of inner discomfort about it.

The choice for a vegan diet isn't necessarily just a moral one.

Half of people say that animals/morals is their main reason, health takes the
other half. Today there are even more reasons as we learn more, like climate
(one of the biggest things any individual can do) and fitness.

Also a vegan diet isn't sub-optimal to a normal diet or vegetarian diet, quite
the opposite, there's literally years difference in life expectancy.

I don't care what anybody eats, that's their own business, but I like to be
factual.

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daneel_w
Choline is very common in vitamin B12 supplements, which most vegans -
assuming they aren't the poorly educated lifestyle type of vegan - know they
need to supplement unless they want to make algae and seaweed staples of their
kitchen.

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ficklepickle
Floradix FTW. That stuff saved my life.

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annadane
Can vegans, then, take a pill that provides this?

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bootlooped
Amazon sells many choline supplements. I haven't at all looked into their
bioavailability or efficacy.

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rosybox
Is this the entire article or this an excerpt for an article hidden behind a
paywall? I can't seem to access whatever this is except for a paragraph and an
incognito window isn't helping.

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zenlot
I am always surprised when I see that vegans/plant-based dieters may be
lacking one or more nutrients in their well balanced diet. Most of the time
you should only be concerned about getting all vital nutrients if you're
following non plant-based diet.

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jtms
This is a flawed line of reasoning given that the overwhelming majority of
meat eaters also eat a significant percentage of their calories from plants.
It is referred to as a balanced diet for a reason.

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robotron
Anecdotally, most people who eat meat-based diets really downplay the role of
vegetables in their diet. Eating meat is more masculine and the only food
worthy of focusing on. Vegetables are relegated to dressing up meats or acting
as half-forgotten side dishes.

Disclaimer: I am not vegetarian/vegan but eat one or two meatless meals per
day.

