“In fact, weight loss is a common side effect of a vegan diet, which could explain all or most of any health upsides, rather than being vegan itself.”
This is more a point against your thesis than for it, I think. It doesn’t matter if the ideal meat diet is better than the ideal vegan diet, because people won’t ever actually eat either-this is just the point about how people won’t actually eat 2 cups of sesame seeds a day or whatever. If going vegan in practice typically causes people to lose weight, and this is usually a benefit, that’s a point in favour of veganism. Unless people can easily just lose weight another way-and they very much cannot as we know from how much almost everyone overweight struggles to get permanently healthy by dieting-it doesn’t matter if the benefit from veganism could theoretically be gained by some non-vegan diet that you could theoretically follow. I guess the main counter-argument here would be if you think the existence of ozempic now makes losing weight in another way sufficiently easy.
Ozempic seems potentially good. Also, many other diets also cause weight loss (e.g. Mediterranean, paleo, etc). As I understand it, most diets lead to weight loss as long as you can keep them up. So just pick a diet that you can maintain long term.
I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects.
“I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects. “
Fair point, I was thinking of vegans as a random sample in terms of their capacity for deliberate weight-loss dieting, when of course they very much are not.
“In fact, weight loss is a common side effect of a vegan diet, which could explain all or most of any health upsides, rather than being vegan itself.”
This is more a point against your thesis than for it, I think. It doesn’t matter if the ideal meat diet is better than the ideal vegan diet, because people won’t ever actually eat either-this is just the point about how people won’t actually eat 2 cups of sesame seeds a day or whatever. If going vegan in practice typically causes people to lose weight, and this is usually a benefit, that’s a point in favour of veganism. Unless people can easily just lose weight another way-and they very much cannot as we know from how much almost everyone overweight struggles to get permanently healthy by dieting-it doesn’t matter if the benefit from veganism could theoretically be gained by some non-vegan diet that you could theoretically follow. I guess the main counter-argument here would be if you think the existence of ozempic now makes losing weight in another way sufficiently easy.
Ozempic seems potentially good. Also, many other diets also cause weight loss (e.g. Mediterranean, paleo, etc). As I understand it, most diets lead to weight loss as long as you can keep them up. So just pick a diet that you can maintain long term.
I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects.
“I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects. “
Fair point, I was thinking of vegans as a random sample in terms of their capacity for deliberate weight-loss dieting, when of course they very much are not.