
The Brain Needs Animal Fat - sridca
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/201903/the-brain-needs-animal-fat
======
cannonedhamster
This article is written by a crusader for meat with a clear agenda of being
vehemently pro-meat.

She supports the keto-diet, which has no real basis in history or science, the
person she cites actively disagrees with her dietary suggestions. She cites
inflammation and healing as side effects, but doesn't describe what gets
inflamed, where it gets inflamed, or how.

She also makes a claim that vegans and vegetarianism will lead to mental
disorder because of this lower DHA claim. Well where's the data that
vegans/vegetarians have higher instances of this? Should be easy to produce
right?

She even makes the claim that vegetables have no science to prove that they
are healthy.

How did this even get onto HN, it's obviously garbage?

Sources:

[http://www.2ketodudes.com/show.aspx?episode=156](http://www.2ketodudes.com/show.aspx?episode=156)

[https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/myth-
buster/](https://www.judytsafrirmd.com/myth-buster/)

[https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/](https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/)

~~~
_i____ii_______
At this point in my observation of the diet wars I have concluded that no diet
is based in science and everyone is wrong. Like religion.

~~~
sridca
Yup. Have you also observed that the HN community has a vegan/vegetarian-bias?

People here jump to prompt criticism and ad hominem when there is a pro-meat
submission. And right now that Burger King vegan burger loaded with
questionable ingredients is being lauded as the greatest achievement in
nutrition.

~~~
xtiansimon
I dunno about the Vegan BK Whopper. But when apples cost > $1 each, head of
cauliflower is $4.99, and yet you can buy chicken, cuts of beef, for the same
price or less, something is up. That animal, raised, fed, given medical care,
housed for some years. Seems like a lot of built in cost compared to seasonal
produce. Either the government is subsidizing it up the wazoo and/or the meat
industry in the US is King Kong size. Since it was mentioned, the same goes
for the meat in the dollar menu. Ewww.

------
mmastrac
As a former vegetarian (now a pesco-pollo-tarian?) the important of eggs can't
be understated. Arguably the one source of animal protein and fats that can be
ethically sourced without harming the animal [ _1_ ].

[ _1_ ] vegans disagree on this point, but that's a different debate

~~~
Insanity
I'm a vegetarian not a vegan, and thus I eat eggs. But the 'ethically' sourced
part is something I'm not that sure about. Sure they can be (and I get them
from my grandparents who keep some chickens.. so that's ethical IMO).

If you buy eggs from a shop, I'd say there is a fair chance that the animals
are not treated that well.

EDIT: I now realize many others have already made this point in other
comments, oopsie.

~~~
ravenstine
Most of what people think are "ethical" eggs that are sold in stores are
basically a scam. Sure, they're _eggs_ , but "free range" can mean the
chickens have access to a little door and a puny plot of land for an hour, and
"cage free" can mean the chickens never go outside. Pasture-raised eggs are
your best bet, and that's all I'll buy, but even I'm skeptical because I've
been burned so many times by believing my eggs were ethical.

~~~
KozmoNau7
It depends on local regulations, but here in Denmark, organic eggs must meet
the following regulations:

-Maximum of 3000 chickens in a flock and a maximum of 6 chickens per square meter in the coops, which must allow daylight in.

-The chickens must have access to perches and nests.

-At least one third of the flooring must be loose bedding, such as straw or sand, to allow the chickens to dust bathe.

-The chickens must have all-year access to outdoor areas with at least 4 square meters per chicken. It must be covered by grass or other vegetation, and must provide shelter from wind/weather. An outdoor area must stand unused every other year, for parasite prevention and to let the vegetation regrow.

-Beak trimming is prohibited.

-Feed must be organic and must include roughage.

While it's not perfect, it's a damn sight better than battery caged hens.

------
cdumler
> It is difficult to be sure precisely how much DHA we need, as DHA conversion
> rates and availability can vary significantly depending on age, gender,
> genetics, and dietary composition

Vegetarianism/veganism has the same problems with calcium and B12, as those
are typically gotten through animals in omnivore diets. It doesn't mean that
vegetarianism/veganism is bad, just that you have to be conscious of your
diet. We have a phrase in our house: "You need to eat all the colors." We
include a wide variety of foods in our diet, and milk replacement products
with calcium.

As a critical thinker, it bothers me when something says "Well, we don't
understand what this relationship is or its importance; therefore, you should
conclude.." Seems like a hit piece on vegetarianism/veganism more than
anything else. Nevertheless, recognizing the importance of certain fats in
your body is a good thing.

~~~
alexmingoia
There are plenty of sources of calcium in vegetables, it’s not comparable to
B12 (which _has_ been found to be produced in the human upper intestinal tract
as evidenced by multiple studies going as far back as 1980
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/7354869/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/7354869/),
despite the claims all over the Internet otherwise. It’s just poorly
understood why some guts lack it).

The only thing a vegan has to supplement with a proper diet is B12. Eating
tofu and fortified soy milk every day gets you most of the way there for
calcium (it’s set using calcium sulfate as coagulant). I’ve already had 300mg
in my breakfast today by eating oats with fortified soy milk.

------
kantord
> The Brain Needs Animal Fat

> Thankfully, vegetarian and vegan-friendly DHA supplements [..] are
> available.

Both from the same article

~~~
ensignro2340
lmao that’s was my reaction. I’ve been taking DHA supplements and eating a
plant-based diet for over a decade. I thought the article might expose some
skeezy marketing ploys on the part of BigVitamin, that I had been buying into
all along, but alas.

------
nickelcitymario
The article is okay. The headline is clickbait nonsense.

The headline implies that vegans should all be dead now, assuming we interpret
"need" as necessary to survival.

A more accurate title might be "The Brain Benefits From Animal Fat". But who
would click that, right?

------
andosteinmetz
This article appears to have a clear agenda and does a poor job of hiding it.
The conclusions, which might be summarized "animal fats are good and plant
fats are bad" also seem pretty feebly supported by the evidence offered. I am
not a scientist, but to my eye this shows the marks of industry supported
junks science.

------
cageface
This is nonsense. As the article itself states, if you're really paranoid
about this then just take an algae supplement, which contains plenty of DHA.
That's where fish get it. They don't make it themselves. And it doesn't come
with all the pollutants you get from fish these days either.

The amount of these fatty acids needed by the brain is quite small and even at
low conversion rates can easily be met by conversion from other plant sources
too.

Summary of research on the subject:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMA5ij-
bsKc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMA5ij-bsKc)

~~~
eggie
> ... if you're really paranoid about this then just take an algae supplement,
> which contains plenty of DHA. That's where fish get it. They don't make it
> themselves. And it doesn't come with all the pollutants you get from fish
> these days either.

The article does note that the bioavailability of this for humans may be very
low. We are not fish. We did not evolve to eat algae. If you'd like to be as
healthy as you can be, eat meat, sometimes, and don't ignore your body's
cravings for fat.

~~~
cageface
The linked video addresses this. Supplements work in this case. Eating meat
and fish has a lot of downsides too. For your health, for animal welfare, and
the environment.

~~~
dalore
Eating meat isn't unhealthy. The studies quoted often are correlation studies
where they don't take into account people who eat red meat probably don't do a
lot of things they are told to do and so statistically die more, but it's not
from red meat.

Animal welfare is a big one, and only by highlighting the problem and use
sustainable farming practices will it work. Note that large scale vegetable
farming practices are also bad for the environment, due to mono culture, soil
degradation etc. So the best way is to farm both in a symbiotic relationship.

~~~
wyre
Dont equate the evils of animal agriculture with the evils of corporate
farming just by saying they are both bad.

I would need to find the study (it might be the one you're thinking of) but a
plant based diet is still many, many, more times more sustainable than the
current general western levels of animal product consumption. I would need to
find the study, but I think for animal agriculture to not have great negative
effects would need to be reduced to something like 10% of current levels.
Again, I‘m not positive on these numbers and would need to find the study.

~~~
dalore
Yes but the point is that we can't survive and be healthy on an vegetable only
diet. Our brains and intelligence only came from us eating fatty animal meats.

Just because one might be cheaper then the other doesn't mean it's better.
It's more likely worse. If we can reach sustainable farming in all aspects why
fight against meat?

In fact grass is the best crop to grow for sustainable farming, it's just we
can't eat it. So let the cows eat it, we eat them and it's good all round.

I can pull out links to support sustainable farming too
[https://www.primalmeats.co.uk/sustainable-eat-
meat/](https://www.primalmeats.co.uk/sustainable-eat-meat/)

~~~
tfehring
> _In fact grass is the best crop to grow for sustainable farming_

Depending on your definition of "sustainable." Grass-fed beef produces
substantially more greenhouse gas per human-edible Calorie, in terms of global
warming potential, than growing the crops that humans eat directly. I think it
will be tough to argue that meat farming is sustainable until net global
greenhouse gas emissions are at a sustainable level, which is clearly not the
case today.

~~~
dalore
Yes but the grasslands the cows graze on will easily mop up all that excess
carbon.

And the point of the article is that you can't have plant only edible
calories. A calorie of meat is not the same as a calorie of plant. It's just a
unit of energy and too simplistic a measure to compare with.

‘BUT’ – I hear you say… “Cows burp and fart too much which is causing climate
change and we can’t feed 8 billion people from this ‘out of date’ system – the
world’s different now!”.

Once upon a time in the USA there used to be a vast area of prairie (pasture)
called the Great Plains. This story can be replicated on any of the world’s
grasslands. This vast grassland was a giant ‘carbon sink’ with deep soils of
up to 15% organic matter and was a rich habitat for thousands of different
species of flora and fauna. Even through severe droughts, the plains supported
somewhere in the region of 110 million wild ruminants. 50-70 million of those
were the giant one-tonne bison – the equivalent to about 2 small beef steers.
We now, in the USA, have roughly the same number of domestic ruminants. 1

Wild animals burp and pump too! So how come pre-industrialisation these ‘evil’
ruminant beasts didn’t wreck our climate?

Healthy soils contain soil microbes called methanotrophs that reduce
atmospheric methane. So the grassland on which the cattle are grazing can
absorb a large amount of the methane they produce. The highest methane
oxidation rate recorded in soil to date has been 13.7 mg/m2/day (Dunfield
2007) which, over one hectare, equates to the absorption of the methane
produced by approximately 100 head of cattle! 2, 3

‘Methane sinks’ bank up to 15% of the earth’s methane. Converting pasture into
arable production reduces the soil’s capacity to bank methane and releases
carbon into the atmosphere. Fertilising and arable cropping reduce the soils
methane oxidation capacity by 6 to 8 times compared to the undisturbed soils
of pasture. The use of fertilisers makes it even worse, reducing the soils
ability to take up methane even further.4, 5, 6

So to convert pasture to arable land in a ‘quick fix’ to try and grow more
plant-based foods considerably accelerates the climate change situation.

And anyway let’s put enteric methane (cow burping methane) into context.
According to the 2014 UN Climate Change Convention held in December in Lima,
Peru, the analysis of GHG’s when converting other gases to CO2 equivalents
found that in the US and EU enteric fermentation accounted for 2.17% of GHG
emissions. (26.79% of agriculture emissions with all agricultural emissions in
total being 8% of total GHG emissions).7

Have you looked into the methane output of rice paddies recently?

------
mbostleman
It's too bad that the reactions to this article are so quickly approached as
if it's a wholesale indictment of plant-based diets. Maybe it doesn't mean
that veganism should be immediately stopped worldwide. Maybe it means there's
opportunities to optimize what is already a mostly good thing.

The fact that an individual poster is vegan and, in his opinion, "is fine" is
obviously not useful.

The fact that hundreds of millions of people in India are to some extent
mostly plant based and are are "Ok" is not useful because a) they are not
necessarily 100% plant based and b) what is the definition of "Ok"? They
continue to live obviously but who's to say they can't be better? There are
plenty of negative characteristics of Indian health - as there are for any
population - that could be correlated. If there is a causal link found, maybe
it would prolong life and/or life quality.

The assertion that the writer is funded by big meat is not useful. If someone
says the sky is blue, the first thing to do is look at the sky to see if it's
blue - not question whether or not the speaker is paid by the pro-blue sky
lobby.

It's unfortunate to see cultural movements smother science. I'm not saying
that this article is science or is even correct science. But until a rational
discussion is allowed that even allows such an evaluation we can't know.

~~~
andosteinmetz
I think the main problem with the article is that its modest scientific
content about the benefits of DHA is buried in a pile of overblown
conclusions, assertions that consuming meat products is essential to good
mental health, and innuendo that vegetable oils are unhealthy, none of which
claims are adequately supported here.

Questions that might clarify the facts surrounding these claims are left
conspicuously unanswered and unasked. Likely because the purpose of the
article is not to to present the available evidence and carefully draw
conclusions, but to support a diet based on animal fats by cherry picking from
the science where convenient.

------
floatingatoll
ARA has been found to be produced by a lichen, iirc, and so is now available
as a vegetarian supplement. (It may or not be vegan, depending on whether you
consider lichen animals.)

EDIT: I remember imprecisely. For more information,
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6052662/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6052662/)
(2018)

------
jgalvez
Be careful. This article's sole purpose is to help sell decades' worth of
toxic fish oil supply that's become worthless in light of more in-depth
research. DHA accumulates in the brain with age and dementia as esters of
cholesterol.

[http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/fishoil.shtml](http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/fishoil.shtml)

------
detcader
Talks given by this person includes "Attention: Is your diet causing your
ADHD?" and "Beyond Medication: How to Improve Mood, Attention and Memory
Through Diet." I hope you caught her talk at the "Boulder Carnivore
Conference" last month!

------
alexmingoia
This is nonsense. I’ve been a vegan for years and do not supplement DHA or
EPA. My body converts everything from ALA. My blood levels are great.

There is no such thing as clinical DHA defiency established in the literature.
What regulates ALA metabolism is poorly understood, but it seems when you
don’t get DHA and EPA your body does fine, as evidenced by every vegan alive.

Also there isn’t much DHA or EPA in a diet that includes fish. You can’t get
the 1.5g a day that’s recommended by eating fish or eggs in your diet. Yet
humans were doing just fine before fish oil supplements.

------
bena
There's a phenomenon known as "rabbit starvation" that is related to this.
Rabbit is an incredibly lean meat and apparently you can eat and eat and eat
and still be hungry.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning)

------
amai
Ramanujan was vegetarian, many other geniuses, too:
[https://www.care2.com/greenliving/10-genius-
vegetarians.html](https://www.care2.com/greenliving/10-genius-
vegetarians.html)

------
maxxxxx
There are plenty of life long vegetarians in India so this article seems
nonsense. I would agree that people should watch their diet and make
adjustments but categorically declaring that we need animal fat doesn’t make
sense.

~~~
Angostura
From my travels it seemed that most Indian vegetarians were happy to drink
milk, and quite a few ate eggs.

~~~
isolli
It reminds me of a vegetarian restaurant owner in India, who told me he
followed the advice of his guru: from the egg comes a chicken (so no), from
the milk comes no calf (so yes).

~~~
cageface
Except there is only milk because there was a calf at some point, which was
taken away from its mother and sold for veal if it was a male calf or turned
into another milk machine if it was female.

Milk cows are forcibly impregnated year after year to keep their milk flowing.
All this shortens their lifespan to 4 years instead of their natural 20.

Milk is a product of cruelty.

~~~
jtms
This sounds like udder nonsense

------
onnnon
Here is the author's personal website if you're interested in more information
on the subject.

[https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/](https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/)

------
purplezooey
The article mentions coconut oil which seems to be a big mystery. Some people
say it's long chain saturated fat which is bad, but others say it's actually
medium chain and good for you.

------
IWeldMelons
I am a vegetarian, and consume very little animal fat. My brains works just
fine. Generally this article goes against massive amount of evidence that
vegetable fats just healthier than animal fats.

~~~
lelima
"My brains works just fine"

What if the article is true and you are only using, let's say 80% of your
capacity.

It will be fun if you try to make some Sudoku or something similar and test
the time, then eat those animal meat and try it out.

eg: When I drink coffee I become at least 20% better solving problems

~~~
svrtknst
> When I drink coffee I become at least 20% better solving problems

That's intereseting. Is this something you have measured, logged, and
accounted for other factors (e.g. via double-blinding etc)?

------
HillaryBriss
i'm not sure which side has the better balance of evidence, but, FWIW, one
argument i've seen on the other side of this discussion is: DHA/EPA are highly
polyunsaturated and, at human body temperatures, oxidize more easily than they
do at cold water fish body temperatures.

so, by consuming pre-formed DHA/EPA on a regular basis, the argument goes, a
human body must bear the burden of dealing with a fat that oxidizes readily
and damages other bodily cells.

------
sneakernets
Any anthropologist or scientist worth their salt knew this for years. Cooking
meat is one of the main reasons fire was controlled, and anyone who didn't eat
meat was usually for religious reasons or during a famine.

I'm just as appalled as anyone else when it comes to the ethical treatment of
animals, but to deny that we didn't evolve to be omnivores despite
overwhelming evidence is... well it's silly.

~~~
ben_w
That’s not a very effective argument for doing it _now_.

Whatever drove our ancestral evolution is no longer a major part of our
environment. We selectively bred plants and animals, wiped out various
diseases and created environmental pressure for others to change, and the
development of preservatives and refrigeration and cheap long-distance travel
means we can combine foods which our ancestors could never find in the same
place at the same time.

Plus the whole 33 year life expectancy at birth/54 year life expectancy if you
reached 15 in the Paleolithic.

------
ravenstine
[deleted]

~~~
zwaps
Re-read the article.

ALA->DHA reformation has an efficiency of less than 10%. The point that is
made here is that you certainly have to ingest a lot of ALA rich food to make
that work, and it is not recommended for children at all because of brain
development. Furthermore, DHA levels ARE lower in vegans and vegetarians.

So either you claim the human body actually does not need DHA, or you you
claim that the body can do ALA->DHA. In the latter case, the article talks
about it.

~~~
alexmingoia
DHA levels in blood being lower doesn’t mean much if they get enough DHA.
Higher blood levels may mean those people consume more than is needed. AFAIK
there is no clinical DHA deficiency established by the literature.

Consider that diets that include fish don’t get anywhere near 1.5g a day of
DHA, and that many humans didn’t eat fish at all. Fish oil supplements are a
relatively recent phenomenon that came about without any evidence of
deficiency.

I don’t consume any dietary DHA or EPA and don’t supplement. I’m fine, as is
every person like me (vegan or not).

------
DonnyV
I love pork chops, steak, lamb and eggs. Nothing wrong eating any meat
products. Now I do have issue on how they are raised because I believe it
affects the quality of the meat. But you have to be honest with yourselves.
These animals have been modified for human consumption. They are not what
nature intended them to be. Cows are almost completely different to what they
were originally. Chickens are like 3 times bigger than what they used to be.
These animals have been made to be eaten.

