vegan
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Welcome
Welcome to c/vegan@lemmy.world. Broadly, this community is a place to discuss veganism. Discussion on intersectional topics related to the animal rights movement are also encouraged.
What is Veganism?
'Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals ...'
— abridged definition from The Vegan Society
Rules
The rules are subject to change, especially upon community feedback.
- Discrimination is not tolerated. This includes speciesism.
- Topics not relating to veganism are subject to removal.
- Posts are to be as accessible as practicable:
- pictures of text require alt-text;
- paywalled articles must have an accessible non-paywalled link;
- use the original source whenever possible for a news article.
- Content warnings are required for triggering content.
- Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future.
- before jumping into the community, we encourage you to read examples of common fallacies here.
- if you're asking questions about veganism, be mindful that the person on the other end is trying to be helpful by answering you and treat them with at least as much respect as they give you.
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Resources on Veganism
A compilation of many vegan resources/sites in a Google spreadsheet:
Here are some documentaries that are recommended to watch if planning to or have recently become vegan:
- You Will Never Look at Your Life in the Same Way Again
- Dominion (2018) (CW: gore, animal abuse)
Vegan Fediverse
Lemmy: vegantheoryclub.org
Mastodon: veganism.social
Other Vegan Communities
General Vegan Comms
Circlejerk Comms
Vegan Food / Cooking
!homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org
Attribution
- Banner image credit: Jean Weber of INRA on Wikimedia Commons
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Right, you can get plenty of fats from a vegan diet if you are smart about it. The tough part seems to be getting enough healthy fats and proteins. In both keto and vegan diets you can follow the diet and absolutely destroy your body if you don't also pay attention to essential fats, vitamins, etc.
Should be noted that you can actually do keto vegetarian but boy will it be hard. The more restrictive the diet, the more you need to pay attention to in terms of your nutrition.
You don't even need to be smart about it. French fries are vegan. As are Oreos, and probably a billion other things that can get you plenty of fats without trying.
People seem to have the misconception that vegans just eat raw fruits and veggies all day (as evidenced by the fact that the "vegan option" at my work Halloween party was just a Costco fruit bowl). Most of the cooked veggies I eat are tossed in olive or avocado oil, a great source of fats.
Sure, some of the vegans I know supplement D3 and B12 because plant based foods, unless fortified, are lacking in these nutrients, but guess what, those are super easy things to pick up at the grocery store vitamin aisle - a small price to pay for all of the other benefits of going vegan.
All of that said, I've never met a vegan who had any difficulty getting enough fat in their diet.
More people should be taking care of their vitamin D levels. It's a really common deficiency.
Getting enough fat is easy, but my vegan recipes are the only ones that I intentionally add extra oil to fix the macros. It's just easier to eat a reasonable amount of fat on a vegan diet compared to a constant excess in a non vegan diet.
You shouldnt be using vitamin pills for any dietary supplement. You uptake ~10-30% if youre lucky. The pill goes right through you. It needs to be in a food item with some mass, so it stays within the digestive tract.
..but you still get the 10-30%?
Yeah, it has worse uptake, just eat it with food.
Eating it with food doesnt change the uptake. It doesnt magically undissolve because there is food sitting beside it.
If youre only getting 10-30% of a supplemental nutrient, youre going to still be deficient. Youre just now spending money to be deficient, when before you got to keep the money.
..you do realize that if your body takes up too little, you just eat more, right?
I've taken blood tests. Nutrients in pill form work just fine.
Oh, cool, youve taken blood tests. Ill tell the body of research to burn their papers.
So, my doctor's are wrong, my blood tests are fake, the healthcare guidelines to take supplements of you are deficient are wrong, and 10-30% uptake actually means 0% uptake?
The scientific consensus is that supplements work just fine to treat nutrient deficiencies.
Yeah yeah, youre living proof that published research is all lies and scientists are all fakers, we get it. And Im former president obama
Do you honestly think that the scientific consensus is that nutrient supplements don't work for treating deficiencies?
You can google the papers yourself, I didnt make up that 10-30%. This is a known issue with pill supplements, and a massive criticism of the industry. Its a known scam, a waste of money that means people are "fixing" problems by buying expensive powder pills that do nothing for them.
Theres a minor push among medical professionals to stop advising patients take supplements and instead reccomend specific dietary additions, but there is some speculation that the reason its not taken on by more doctors is a mix of inertial laziness of "good enough" medicine practices and supplement manufacturers paying doctors for their brand to be the reccomendation of choice.
But sure bud, your anecdote about a blood test undermines all of that from the ground up.
You keep saying 10-30% and then that they are ineffectual. So which is it? Clearly you then absorb 10-30% of the nutrients.
And yeah, I don't think doctors are being paid by private companies to advertise here in Norway. Especially because I get prescribed generic versions.
Generic versions are still a brand being advertised, you just arent the person advertised to.
If you think a maximal 30% intake of a deficient nutrient is enough to prevent the problems youre taking supplements for, youre absolutely the target demographic for this scam.
But you clearly are more interested in an internet gotcha than your own health, so by all means bud. I dont give a shit if youre sick, and if you dont either more power to ya
Yeah, I'm sure you know more than my doctor.
Right, right, right. Thats why I cited my personal blood test, and not multiple public peer reviewed research papers.
Anti science kooks are a riot man, you should take this show on tour
Hey, kook, did it ever once occur to you that the reason youre "totally real and definitely happened" blood test comes up in the green is cause your diet is already sufficient? And your doc has you buying useless powder for no gain?
No, couldnt be. Perish the thought.
Fine.
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/do-i-need-vitamin-supplements/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6775441/ under supplementation
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9710417/ Under importance of dietary supplements
https://www.who.int/health-topics/micronutrients#tab=tab_1
First link is literally irrelevant
Second link, under your chosen section, used child gummi supplements which I explicitly said are suspected to avoid the powder pill problem E:( also this is about starving child deficiency, the one situation where a 10% intake means you are going from ZERO to SOME, so unless you are a starving stunted child its hardly a relevant comparison.)
Third study has a 3rd hand report of some correlation at multi vitamin use and lack of deficiency, the source of which did not show causation and did not even control for other dietary intake sources or socio-economic factors as an impact on diet
Last link is just like the first, neither research nor relevant
Were you hoping I would see blue links, get scared, and not click them?
Government sources, as well as the bloody WHO out of all sources, is irrelevant. Yeah, sure. I'll just listen to a rando instead of an organization lead by the leading experts in the medical field as well as my doctor.
Jesus Christ.
I have noticed you also never bothered to link anything of your own.
You cited a private blood test, I assumed you wouldnt read anything I gave you. Also, Im not your mother, the issues with these pills is widely googleable.
Government wiki paragraphs with the quality, accuracy, and peer review quality of webmd are 100% not sources, thats correct. You also shouldnt cite them in your science paper this term. Notice how the actual peer reviewed studies got proper responses? Shocker.
Lmao, no sources of your own. Figures.
Easy to dish out but not to take, eh?
Did you want me to go dig up those reports? I can do that for you when I get home, I just figured you got your blood test and you have repeatedly told me you do not value my input at all.
I wasnt about to waste the time reading papers to make sure I grab the right link for some numbnuts who wouldnt click em. Do you need me to do that for you?
Also looool, yeah bud its very easy to dish out a bunch of completely irrelevant links when you think a link is just a hollow gotcha that no one will read. Shame you couldnt find anything relevant, but if you need me to show you how to do that I am happy to.
Hey, actually? I got super lucky with the first article I found.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/8/1096
So for starters, this is specifically for B12. Not intentional, as my point applies to all powder pills, but sure as shit topical.
Article details dietary B12, an equivalent intake pill B12 supplement, and a 4x intake pill B12 supplement.
The dietary? Restored the deficiency.
The 2 pills? Not only signifigantly less effective, but also almost equivalently so.
Thats insane. I assumed that quadrupaling the dose would improve the intake, its just a huge waste of money to eat 4-8 vitamin pills a day. But the study shows a quadruple dose is completely ineffective!
Also, (and I skimmed this specific bit from the results) it seems that the pill based intake was primarily in the liver. Now, the study correctly makes no causational link here, but that lightly implies that the liver is filtering out supplementals rather than letting it enter the dietary process. No clue if thats true, but a big possibility that I hope gets looked into further.
(Article also implies its not the powder pill form but rather the dietary type used in the pill. But it doesnt isolate powder sources of both versions of B12, so thats not conclusive.)
So, uh. Yeah. Big research article for you, the pill doesnt do shit, eating more of them also doesnt do shit, you need to be eating it in the food.
And yet it does improve B12 levels sufficiently to resolve what would be a deficiency for rats.
I never claimed that dietary nutrients don't have a better uptake.
In addition, while rats and humans are similar, it's still done on rats and not humans. Maybe instead of a daily pill the rats needed a pill twice a day? And if we were rats that's what would recommendation would be? After all, rats need a lot more B12 than we do. In addition, this was just 6 weeks. Maybe given sufficient time both methods work just fine? You should note that even the dietary B12 failed to raise B12 levels back to the original value. The timescale may just be too short.
Sure, interesting study, but it's not conclusive for humans.
As a last note, the study that seems to be most commonly cited is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2532799/
The study literally demonstrated that a quadruple dose only provided a partial effective intake for the liver and failed to provide enough for the brain, and you think a double dose would work? The kook strikes again!
Also, you understand that rats are used for nutrient studies because our digestive systems are insanely similar? "Hurr but Im not a rat" hasnt been a real rebuttal in a century.
Wild, who would have guessed the blood test kook would deny peer reviewed evidence. Oh, shit, it was me? I called that? Gnarly. Guess I was right, giving you the link was a waste of time.
Cited about what? That study appears to be about diagnosing cause of specifically B12 deficiencies and response to injections, which 1) has nothing to do with powder pill vitamin intake and 2) is talking about malabsorption, not suplementation of an intentionally abandoned dietary intake.
If you want to talk about a study, you need to say what your context is. Lol who am I kidding, the kook doesnt give a shit about science
@wildginger @RvTV95XBeo Right, so you can just take it after a meal and uptake should be okay...
Not really, because the pill just dissolves and flushes out with your piss all the same.
Its not in the food. If you really are dedicated to using a pill form, you need to crush it and directly add it in with meal prep.
@wildginger Have there been actual tests on this? I'm sure there have, but I haven't looked into it too much.
Yes, usually with the angle of "those bottle of vitamins youre buying are a scam"
Its why vitamin gummies became a thing. The idea being that by making it a gummie, it needs to be digested, and thus will be uptaken.
But Ive not seen any studies saying that the gummies actually pull that off. Maybe they do, Ive just not seen anything about it.
Problem is the gummies are far less diverse and specific. Most are general purpose multivitamins. So if they do work, they usually miss the specific deficiencies people would want to target cause you just cant find em.
Many medicines have low uptake efficiency. It just means you need to take 3-10 times the dose you need. Like if your body needs 10mg, you might need to take a 30 to 100mg pill.
These arent meds.
Yeah but that's what the screenshot is talking about. People are so quick to express "concern" to vegans but not keto eaters
I think people are just addicted to meat, most people are convinced we need it in almost every meal. So they feel threatened, like threatening to take your last beer away threatened. Veganism aside, if the general population went to a much lower quantity of meat eating (like a couple times a week instead of a day) we would all be so much better off.
I stopped cooking meat at home and my consumption of it plummeted. For now, I will still eat it at restaurants or when my friends and family cook it....but I don't feel like I "need" it like I used to.
This was a big game changer for me - just learning how to cook delicious veggies/plant-based foods at home dropped my meat consumption dramatically. From there I started noticing which restaurants actually had good vegan/vegetarian options, and as my pallette shifted, so did my list of favorite restaurants.
That's how I picture it going going for me, too. Some people might say to just rip the band-aid off but I know myself too well - if I jump in fully, I'll eventually crack and feel so bad about it I'll give up the idea entirely. So I'm going slow and letting it happen naturally. I'm a few years in and I barely eat red meat but bacon and chicken are still obstacles to overcome
Nah man if you halve your current meat consumption you are doing a big benefit to society and it's much easier than going 100%. You don't really need to go 100% either, if it's about environment, eating sometimes whatever you want is completely valid, and I don't think I've met any vegan/vegetarian that criticises that.
If you want to sprinkle your beans with a bit of bacon, it's tasty as hell and not that big of a deal. If you want to eat some lentils with carrots and some slices of chorizo, it's really fine. Some days you will feel like eating fries with fake fish sticks, some days you will prefer to eat a sandwich with a slice of ham, idc. It's all really about reducing the intake and then, after doing it, having more freedom for picking higher quality products, which are more expensive but now you can allow them since you eat so much less of them.