My major concern is that this article is too one-sided: it mentions the difficulties/trade-offs of vegan diets, without mentioning difficulties/trade-offs of non-vegan diets. Eating a non-vegan diet is also not easy. Some examples of what you have to tell to people who want to eat animal products:
Don’t eat too much meat, that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites how much gram per day is too much, according to your age and bodily needs.
Fry the meat well enough, because (almost all) meat can contain harmful bacteria. Also wash well enough all the cutlery, the knife, the chopping board and everything that was in contact with the meat, because of contamination risks.
But don’t fry your meat too much. Frying meat can produce carcinogenic substances. Especially when there is a dark or black crust visible, the meat was fried too much. For the same reason, avoid barbeque and flambé. Heating up meat in the microwave oven is not good enough to kill the bacteria. If you don’t know how to cook your meals properly, you can eat vegan meat alternatives: they can be safely eaten even uncooked (or used in the microwave oven).
Don’t drink unpasteurized milk.
Animal products don’t contain dietary fiber, so make sure to eat a proper source of dietary fiber.
Meat doesn’t contain vitamin C, so make sure to eat a proper source of vitamin C. There are websites that tell you which products contain vitamin C.
Avoid processed meat: that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites what counts as processed meat. I think bacon and ham also count as processed.
Many meat products, especially fresh products, don’t show an expiration date on the package. You can look for some information on the internet how to learn to detect when your meat is expired. If you don’t know how to smell expired meat, don’t keep your meat too long in the fridge, or eat plant-based meat alternatives as they show a best before date on the package.
In many cases, cheaper meat products may be unhealthier than more expensive meat products. There is often a trade-off between price and health/quality of the meat product. Consult a nutritionist to figure out the best diet according to your budget.
Almost none of the meat eaters had a recent blood test to check if they have for example too much bad cholesterol that could be the result of eating too much animal products. They also don’t know if their bodies can properly absorb for example the iron in the meat. It is recommended to visit a nutritionist and ask for a blood test.
Some people are allergic to milk, fish, and other animal products. You can consult your doctor if you don’t know about your potential allergies.
These examples should be enough to show that eating animal products is equally difficult as eating vegan. My worry is that focusing too much on vegan nutrition issues (telling people a lot about how to eat a healthy vegan diet), might give people the impression that veganism is difficult, and then they continue eating animal products and causing harm to animals. But focusing too little might be counterproductive as well, because then people don’t eat enough healthy vegan diets, they become ill and revert back to animal products.
So I recommend that when you tell potential vegans how to eat a healthy vegan diet, you also mention the health concerns related to animal products, to make clear that eating a healthy non-vegan diet is equally difficult or easy.
I think there’s a reasonable case that, from a health perspective, many people should eat less meat. But “less meat” !== “no meat”.
Elizabeth was pretty clear on her take being:
Most people’s optimal diet includes small amounts of animal products, but people eat sub-optimally for lots of reasons and that’s their right.
i.e. yes, the optimal diet is small amounts of meat (which is less than most people eat, but more than vegans eat).
The article notes:
It’s true that I am paying more attention to veganism than I am to, say, the trad carnivore idiots, even though I think that diet is worse. But veganism is where the people are, both near me and in the US as a whole. Dietary change is so synonymous with animal protection within Effective Altruism that the EAForum tag is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the animal suffering tag. At a young-EA-organizer conference I mentored at last year, something like half of attendees were vegan, and only a handful had no animal-protecting diet considerations. If keto gets anywhere near this kind of numbers I assure you I will say something.
My major concern is that this article is too one-sided: it mentions the difficulties/trade-offs of vegan diets, without mentioning difficulties/trade-offs of non-vegan diets
I’d like to talk about this post’s goals and why it seemed like the best route to them.
Last year I gave nutritional tests and supplement suggestions. This was focused on vegans but not exclusive to them. When I wrote up my results I got responses, public and private, that felt extremely epistemically uncooperative. Some would outright admit that education was necessary for switching to veganism, if only because any major dietary change requires education, but they still thought I should have done a diet-neutral project, or just not mentioned issues with veganism. Some were less explicit, but the things they said only made sense if they believed every single person could smoothly transition to veganism with no effort or trade-off. And I could not get them to present their reasoning for that claim in a legible way.
The goal of this post was never “provide comprehensive information about the relative costs and benefits of various diets”. It was “get the people making a particular claim to spell out their reasoning.” And this came in the form of a blunt post because my gentler attempts had been rebuffed.
I think your list of reasons animal products can be difficult would be a major hurdle for someone raised in a vegan culture that wanted to start eating meat. I would definitely recommend that person read the carnivore equivalent of veganhealth.org. That doesn’t cancel out the difficulty a given omnivore has switching to veganism. Except for the lucky goat people, all serious diets impose trade-offs and require new education, and I find the question of “which transition requires exactly how much work?” much less interesting than making sure everyone is properly onboarded to the diet they chose.
It seems that you make nothing but a very trivial claim, that if you are used to A, a change from A to B is difficult. But then you frame it like B being difficult. But it is the transition which is difficult, not B itself. As an analogy, let’s discuss whether Chinese is difficult. You would say yes, because it is not your native language. It will take some effort for you to learn Chinese. But a Chinese person thinks Chinese is easy, and English is difficult. Who is right? In the end, once you have learned to speak Chinese, it is as easy as most other languages that you have learned. Some languages are objectively more difficult than others (like Dutch is probably more difficult than Afrikaans, and English is more difficult than Esperanto), and for the same reason, some diets are objectively more difficult than others. But you make it look like veganism is objectively more difficult than other diets. I disagree with that: just see how much you have to learn for a healthy diet with meat. I think a healthy vegan diet is as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and an unhealthy vegan diet is as easy as an unhealthy omnivorous diet. Transitions may be difficult, but they involve one time transition costs, which become negligible in the long run. Once you have learned a foreign language, the cost of learning drops to zero, and the new language becomes easy for the rest of your life.
yeah, it seems like a trivial claim to me as well, which is why I’m confused so many people argue against it so vehemently.
If I saw people making a strong ethical argument for eating meat in a meat-naive population, and the converts hurting themselves food poisoning and scurvy, I would absolutely think the meat advocates were doing something wrong and be advocating for a fix.
fwiw I’ve felt confused about this post because it seemed like you were making such an unobjectionable claim that I didn’t understand why you bothered to write the post, and therefore figured I had just not read it closely enough, but I think maybe you are just actually making an unobjectionable claim?
I know you tried to flag this at the beginning of your post, and it’s very possible that I’m still misunderstanding things, but it would help me if you had a one sentence summary of your claim.
A one sentence summary is a really reasonable request that’s difficult for me to fulfill because:
Reality is very complicated
Any simplifications I make that exaggerate the challenges of veganism will be viewed extremely uncharitably.
Which is how I got to an excruciatingly clause-filled 6000-word post in the first place.
I’m going to try for one sentence, but I’d also like to offer you a video call or in-person meeting, with or without a double crux mediator. The mediator I have in mind is even near-vegan, although I don’t know if he’s available. [Ben West is not the only person I’d do this with but it’s not an open invite either.]
My one-sentence summary:
Diet and health are complex multidimensional problems; if you remove a wide swath of your current tools you make the problem harder.[1] You can make it easier with education,[2] but that’s not being done for young EA vegans and the subsequent malnutrition is hurting them. [3]
That’s two sentences with three footnotes, which I think is the best I can do.
To answer your implied question of “why was this post necessary” I wanted to direct you to this comment, but it’s a grandparent of your comment so probably you’ve already seen it.
Most of the time. Sometimes it’s technically harder but people have enough slack in their life it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the options were net harmful so removing them is helpful- which wouldn’t be necessary for Homo economicus but seems fine to include as a benefit for real people.
But how much slack you can add varies a lot by person. For some it’s pretty easy to restore 95%+ of the slack, and for others no amount of education will render the problem solvable without large sacrifices in health.
E.g. I can’t prove one person’s peripheral neuropathy was caused by a B12 deficiency, but it did stop progressing when he started supplements, and if he’d been told that from the beginning it could have saved him potentially lifelong pain.
Thanks! That’s a helpful summary. (And I don’t disagree with those two sentences.)
It sucks that you put a bunch of work into helping vegans with nutrition and got epistemically uncooperative responses. I was appreciative of your work there.
It is funny[1] how long the post ended up & how much we’ve all ended up debating in the comments, given that I am in 100% agreement with the two-sentence summary and all three footnotes.
I agree with your two sentences, but the first one is very ambiguous. You mention someone with a B12 deficiency. The way I see it, both vegans and omnivores remove sources of B12 from their diet: the vegan doesn’t eat animal products that contain B12, the omnivore doesn’t eat B12 supplements (or B12-enriched products that are suitable for vegans). Many omnivores even refuse to eat those vegan B12 supplements, just like vegans refuse to eat meat. Now you have someone who doesn’t eat either of those B12 sources: no meat and no vegan supplement. You can call it a too restrictive, unhealthy vegan diet (because the diet doesn’t contain meat), but you can equally call it a too restrictive, unhealthy omnivorous diet (because the diet doesn’t contain vegan B12-sources). There is a kind of symmetry.
This feels very muddled to me. Could you rewrite it with your explicit cruxes/assumptions/beliefs, and the logical chain between them and your conclusion?
I was pointing at a non-vegan bias in the way how you framed your argument: that a vegan diet is restrictive. But non-vegans also eat a restrictive diet, as they don’t eat (and often refuse to eat) vegan foods. Vegans don’t eat non-vegan sources of B12, and non-vegans don’t eat vegan sources of B12.
Your bias is comparable to a native English speaker who has an English bias and claims that French is a difficult language because the French people don’t use those simple words like “door” and “table”. So when you want to speak French, you first have to learn new words. But the fact that the French language doesn’t use the words that you use, doesn’t make it a difficult language. For native French people, French is an easy language.
So the crux is: a vegan diet is not difficult, but changing diet is difficult. For vegans (who learned how to eat vegan), a vegan diet is easy, just like a non-vegan diet is easy for non-vegans (who learned how to eat non-vegan).
I don’t think the claim that non-vegans don’t eat vegan foods is well-supported. For instance, a cake made with eggs and butter still consists of mostly vegan foodstuffs; that a non-vegan may refuse to eat a vegan cake does not mean they are restricting specific foodstuffs from their diet. Likewise, non-vegans do not categorically refuse to eat vegan B12 supplements (I assume the B12 in a multivitamin is made in a lab?) even if they do not eat them as part of 100 percent vegan completed foods.
Most non-vegans don’t take vegan B12 supplements. That means this vegan product is excluded from the non-vegan’s diet. The reason why non-vegans exclude it (whether they don’t like it, consider it as immoral...), is not important because reasons are not health related. Whether or not someone who doesn’t take the B12 supplement categorically refuses to take it, has no impact on that person’s health.
a vegan diet is not difficult, but changing diet is difficult. For vegans (who learned how to eat vegan), a vegan diet is easy, just like a non-vegan diet is easy for non-vegans (who learned how to eat non-vegan)
Accepting this arguendo, it doesn’t seem like an argument against education for vegan converts.
I read a few of your points, skimmed the rest. It sounds like you’re talking about a healthy omnivorous diet, which I agree is maybe as hard as a vegan diet. However, I eat a convenient diet, not a healthy one, filled with microwave and fast food, and it’s much more likely to eat a convenient omnivorous diet.
I’d say a healthy vegan diet is roughly as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and a convenient vegan diet is roughly as easy as a convenient omnivorous diet.
My major concern is that this article is too one-sided: it mentions the difficulties/trade-offs of vegan diets, without mentioning difficulties/trade-offs of non-vegan diets. Eating a non-vegan diet is also not easy. Some examples of what you have to tell to people who want to eat animal products:
Don’t eat too much meat, that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites how much gram per day is too much, according to your age and bodily needs.
Fry the meat well enough, because (almost all) meat can contain harmful bacteria. Also wash well enough all the cutlery, the knife, the chopping board and everything that was in contact with the meat, because of contamination risks.
But don’t fry your meat too much. Frying meat can produce carcinogenic substances. Especially when there is a dark or black crust visible, the meat was fried too much. For the same reason, avoid barbeque and flambé. Heating up meat in the microwave oven is not good enough to kill the bacteria. If you don’t know how to cook your meals properly, you can eat vegan meat alternatives: they can be safely eaten even uncooked (or used in the microwave oven).
Don’t drink unpasteurized milk.
Animal products don’t contain dietary fiber, so make sure to eat a proper source of dietary fiber.
Meat doesn’t contain vitamin C, so make sure to eat a proper source of vitamin C. There are websites that tell you which products contain vitamin C.
Avoid processed meat: that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites what counts as processed meat. I think bacon and ham also count as processed.
Many meat products, especially fresh products, don’t show an expiration date on the package. You can look for some information on the internet how to learn to detect when your meat is expired. If you don’t know how to smell expired meat, don’t keep your meat too long in the fridge, or eat plant-based meat alternatives as they show a best before date on the package.
In many cases, cheaper meat products may be unhealthier than more expensive meat products. There is often a trade-off between price and health/quality of the meat product. Consult a nutritionist to figure out the best diet according to your budget.
Almost none of the meat eaters had a recent blood test to check if they have for example too much bad cholesterol that could be the result of eating too much animal products. They also don’t know if their bodies can properly absorb for example the iron in the meat. It is recommended to visit a nutritionist and ask for a blood test.
Some people are allergic to milk, fish, and other animal products. You can consult your doctor if you don’t know about your potential allergies.
These examples should be enough to show that eating animal products is equally difficult as eating vegan. My worry is that focusing too much on vegan nutrition issues (telling people a lot about how to eat a healthy vegan diet), might give people the impression that veganism is difficult, and then they continue eating animal products and causing harm to animals. But focusing too little might be counterproductive as well, because then people don’t eat enough healthy vegan diets, they become ill and revert back to animal products.
So I recommend that when you tell potential vegans how to eat a healthy vegan diet, you also mention the health concerns related to animal products, to make clear that eating a healthy non-vegan diet is equally difficult or easy.
I think there’s a reasonable case that, from a health perspective, many people should eat less meat. But “less meat” !== “no meat”.
Elizabeth was pretty clear on her take being:
i.e. yes, the optimal diet is small amounts of meat (which is less than most people eat, but more than vegans eat).
The article notes:
I’d like to talk about this post’s goals and why it seemed like the best route to them.
Last year I gave nutritional tests and supplement suggestions. This was focused on vegans but not exclusive to them. When I wrote up my results I got responses, public and private, that felt extremely epistemically uncooperative. Some would outright admit that education was necessary for switching to veganism, if only because any major dietary change requires education, but they still thought I should have done a diet-neutral project, or just not mentioned issues with veganism. Some were less explicit, but the things they said only made sense if they believed every single person could smoothly transition to veganism with no effort or trade-off. And I could not get them to present their reasoning for that claim in a legible way.
The goal of this post was never “provide comprehensive information about the relative costs and benefits of various diets”. It was “get the people making a particular claim to spell out their reasoning.” And this came in the form of a blunt post because my gentler attempts had been rebuffed.
I think your list of reasons animal products can be difficult would be a major hurdle for someone raised in a vegan culture that wanted to start eating meat. I would definitely recommend that person read the carnivore equivalent of veganhealth.org. That doesn’t cancel out the difficulty a given omnivore has switching to veganism. Except for the lucky goat people, all serious diets impose trade-offs and require new education, and I find the question of “which transition requires exactly how much work?” much less interesting than making sure everyone is properly onboarded to the diet they chose.
It seems that you make nothing but a very trivial claim, that if you are used to A, a change from A to B is difficult. But then you frame it like B being difficult. But it is the transition which is difficult, not B itself. As an analogy, let’s discuss whether Chinese is difficult. You would say yes, because it is not your native language. It will take some effort for you to learn Chinese. But a Chinese person thinks Chinese is easy, and English is difficult. Who is right? In the end, once you have learned to speak Chinese, it is as easy as most other languages that you have learned. Some languages are objectively more difficult than others (like Dutch is probably more difficult than Afrikaans, and English is more difficult than Esperanto), and for the same reason, some diets are objectively more difficult than others. But you make it look like veganism is objectively more difficult than other diets. I disagree with that: just see how much you have to learn for a healthy diet with meat. I think a healthy vegan diet is as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and an unhealthy vegan diet is as easy as an unhealthy omnivorous diet. Transitions may be difficult, but they involve one time transition costs, which become negligible in the long run. Once you have learned a foreign language, the cost of learning drops to zero, and the new language becomes easy for the rest of your life.
yeah, it seems like a trivial claim to me as well, which is why I’m confused so many people argue against it so vehemently.
If I saw people making a strong ethical argument for eating meat in a meat-naive population, and the converts hurting themselves food poisoning and scurvy, I would absolutely think the meat advocates were doing something wrong and be advocating for a fix.
fwiw I’ve felt confused about this post because it seemed like you were making such an unobjectionable claim that I didn’t understand why you bothered to write the post, and therefore figured I had just not read it closely enough, but I think maybe you are just actually making an unobjectionable claim?
I know you tried to flag this at the beginning of your post, and it’s very possible that I’m still misunderstanding things, but it would help me if you had a one sentence summary of your claim.
A one sentence summary is a really reasonable request that’s difficult for me to fulfill because:
Reality is very complicated
Any simplifications I make that exaggerate the challenges of veganism will be viewed extremely uncharitably.
Which is how I got to an excruciatingly clause-filled 6000-word post in the first place.
I’m going to try for one sentence, but I’d also like to offer you a video call or in-person meeting, with or without a double crux mediator. The mediator I have in mind is even near-vegan, although I don’t know if he’s available. [Ben West is not the only person I’d do this with but it’s not an open invite either.]
My one-sentence summary:
Diet and health are complex multidimensional problems; if you remove a wide swath of your current tools you make the problem harder.[1] You can make it easier with education,[2] but that’s not being done for young EA vegans and the subsequent malnutrition is hurting them. [3]
That’s two sentences with three footnotes, which I think is the best I can do.
To answer your implied question of “why was this post necessary” I wanted to direct you to this comment, but it’s a grandparent of your comment so probably you’ve already seen it.
Most of the time. Sometimes it’s technically harder but people have enough slack in their life it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the options were net harmful so removing them is helpful- which wouldn’t be necessary for Homo economicus but seems fine to include as a benefit for real people.
But how much slack you can add varies a lot by person. For some it’s pretty easy to restore 95%+ of the slack, and for others no amount of education will render the problem solvable without large sacrifices in health.
E.g. I can’t prove one person’s peripheral neuropathy was caused by a B12 deficiency, but it did stop progressing when he started supplements, and if he’d been told that from the beginning it could have saved him potentially lifelong pain.
Thanks! That’s a helpful summary. (And I don’t disagree with those two sentences.)
It sucks that you put a bunch of work into helping vegans with nutrition and got epistemically uncooperative responses. I was appreciative of your work there.
It is funny[1] how long the post ended up & how much we’ve all ended up debating in the comments, given that I am in 100% agreement with the two-sentence summary and all three footnotes.
Not blaming you, of course. Just observing
I agree with your two sentences, but the first one is very ambiguous. You mention someone with a B12 deficiency. The way I see it, both vegans and omnivores remove sources of B12 from their diet: the vegan doesn’t eat animal products that contain B12, the omnivore doesn’t eat B12 supplements (or B12-enriched products that are suitable for vegans). Many omnivores even refuse to eat those vegan B12 supplements, just like vegans refuse to eat meat. Now you have someone who doesn’t eat either of those B12 sources: no meat and no vegan supplement. You can call it a too restrictive, unhealthy vegan diet (because the diet doesn’t contain meat), but you can equally call it a too restrictive, unhealthy omnivorous diet (because the diet doesn’t contain vegan B12-sources). There is a kind of symmetry.
This feels very muddled to me. Could you rewrite it with your explicit cruxes/assumptions/beliefs, and the logical chain between them and your conclusion?
I was pointing at a non-vegan bias in the way how you framed your argument: that a vegan diet is restrictive. But non-vegans also eat a restrictive diet, as they don’t eat (and often refuse to eat) vegan foods. Vegans don’t eat non-vegan sources of B12, and non-vegans don’t eat vegan sources of B12.
Your bias is comparable to a native English speaker who has an English bias and claims that French is a difficult language because the French people don’t use those simple words like “door” and “table”. So when you want to speak French, you first have to learn new words. But the fact that the French language doesn’t use the words that you use, doesn’t make it a difficult language. For native French people, French is an easy language.
So the crux is: a vegan diet is not difficult, but changing diet is difficult. For vegans (who learned how to eat vegan), a vegan diet is easy, just like a non-vegan diet is easy for non-vegans (who learned how to eat non-vegan).
I don’t think the claim that non-vegans don’t eat vegan foods is well-supported. For instance, a cake made with eggs and butter still consists of mostly vegan foodstuffs; that a non-vegan may refuse to eat a vegan cake does not mean they are restricting specific foodstuffs from their diet. Likewise, non-vegans do not categorically refuse to eat vegan B12 supplements (I assume the B12 in a multivitamin is made in a lab?) even if they do not eat them as part of 100 percent vegan completed foods.
Most non-vegans don’t take vegan B12 supplements. That means this vegan product is excluded from the non-vegan’s diet. The reason why non-vegans exclude it (whether they don’t like it, consider it as immoral...), is not important because reasons are not health related. Whether or not someone who doesn’t take the B12 supplement categorically refuses to take it, has no impact on that person’s health.
Accepting this arguendo, it doesn’t seem like an argument against education for vegan converts.
I read a few of your points, skimmed the rest. It sounds like you’re talking about a healthy omnivorous diet, which I agree is maybe as hard as a vegan diet. However, I eat a convenient diet, not a healthy one, filled with microwave and fast food, and it’s much more likely to eat a convenient omnivorous diet.
I’d say a healthy vegan diet is roughly as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and a convenient vegan diet is roughly as easy as a convenient omnivorous diet.