I’m passionate about improving our food system and have been with ProVeg since 2017. I organise Berlin’s Effective Animal Advocacy community and donate one month’s salary each year to high-impact organisations in food system change, AI safety and EA field building. My academic background is in theoretical physics and business management, and I’m particularly interested in nutrition science, moral philosophy, and long-term thinking.
Chris Popa
Karma: 349
Thanks, this is really helpful context.
I took a closer look at the NVV nutrition pages, and my impression is actually that the information there is exceptionally evidence-based and detailed compared with most vegan nutrition communication I’ve seen. It is also helpful that the Dutch dietary recommendations themselves are relatively nuanced in some areas, for example by applying a 1.3 factor to protein recommendations for vegans to account for lower digestibility.
I agree with your point about scientific consensus and definitely don’t think vegan organisations should jump on every new study or give advice that contradicts established evidence. At the same time, I don’t see a conflict between the approach I’m proposing and following the scientific consensus. On protein specifically, saying that higher intakes may be beneficial does not seem to me to conflict with established recommendations, and I’d be curious whether there are other parts of what I propose that you think depart from the scientific consensus. More generally, I think we can cite established intake recommendations while making clear that they are primarily designed to prevent deficiency, that deficiency is not the same as inadequate or suboptimal intake, and that vegans often fall short on certain nutrients. We can also be transparent where major nutrition authorities do not fully agree, since that often reflects remaining uncertainty in the evidence. On zinc, for example, the NVV follows the Dutch recommendations but does not mention that EFSA recommends substantially higher intakes for high-phytate diets, which vegan diets typically are. On pregnancy, the page highlights supportive nutrition authorities without mentioning more cautious positions from others, while also citing the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ expired 2016 position paper.
These are areas where I still see some room for improvement, but overall, I find the quality and depth of the NVV’s nutrition information genuinely impressive, especially if much of the work relies on volunteers. I would probably not have written such a post if this were representative of nutrition communication in the vegan movement more broadly.
I also very much agree with your point about regularly drawing attention to nutritional challenges and to new findings on vegan diets in both directions, rather than only highlighting positive ones.
Thanks, really appreciate the thoughtful comment. :)
First of all, I don’t think this is mainly an issue with informal verbal advice. When I look at the nutrition guidance of major vegan organisations, I see the same broader pattern quite consistently, even though some vegan challenges and beginner guides may be more nuanced. I’d be curious what you think if you compare the specific case studies I discuss with how different organisations communicate about these issues.
On your first point, I agree that inadequate nutrient intakes are not unique to vegans. I added a note in the Nutrition Review for exactly that reason, since standard Western diets have plenty of nutritional problems of their own. At the same time, inadequate intakes are more common among vegans for a substantial number of nutrients. For example, Table 4 in Sobiecki et al. (2016) compares the prevalence of inadequate intakes across different diet groups.
On iron and iodine, I agree that both would have been reasonable additions, and I also considered including them as well as vitamin A, selenium, choline, and several other nutrients. In the end, I decided to keep the selection relatively small because the aim was to illustrate a broader pattern rather than to provide a comprehensive review of every potentially relevant nutrient.
On EPA/DHA, I agree that the evidence does not establish that every healthy vegan needs to supplement it. At the same time, the evidence base is still developing, and there are already several indications of potential long-term health benefits from direct EPA/DHA intake. I therefore think a precautionary approach is reasonable, since we may only find out much later whether relying on ALA alone is sufficient. Given that direct EPA/DHA intake from microalgae is relatively easy, I think there is a strong case for avoiding that risk. I could have made these complexities more explicit, though, so I appreciate you raising it.
I hope this is helpful! :)
Building a Stronger Vegan Movement Through Evidence-Based Communication
Effective Animal Advocacy Meetup
Thanks for writing this! This really resonated with me, and I agree that we would benefit a lot from using the V-word much less in many, if not most, contexts.
There are a few contexts, though, where I would still want to use it. One is when eating out, where saying that you are vegan or want a vegan meal communicates a clear dietary requirement very efficiently. Another is in the context of nutrition science, where vegan diets can be a relevant and distinct category, although that is admittedly a more niche use case.
More generally, I think the word is much more likely to be problematic when it is used to categorise a person than when it describes a food, meal, restaurant, etc.
But overall, I agree that tabooing the word in many of the contexts you describe could help create a much more welcoming. :)
Thanks for your comment! Yes, helping vegans be more tolerant of non-vegan allies is certainly one of the intentions behind this post. :)
I also think you raise an important point and I do touch on this to some extent in the following footnote:
For example, many people see veganism not merely as a way of eating, but as an ethical principle according to which animals should not be viewed as resources. The resulting identity and strong commitment to this principle can make veganism appear meaningful and aspirational to some, while making it appear isolating and restrictive to others. Whether these influences ultimately encourage or discourage others depends on how they are perceived, which varies substantially across individuals and socio-cultural contexts.
A clear principle like “don’t eat animals” can be a useful heuristic that guides behaviour and makes the underlying moral values more salient. This could be described as reducing speciesism, or more broadly as increasing moral concern for animals. At the same time, because such a principle asks for all or nothing, it may also push some people away.
That said, my impression is that a meaningful proportion of non-vegans genuinely care about farmed animals having good lives, even if they don’t question the norm of eating animals itself. At the same time, I agree it does seem comparatively rare for that concern to translate into activism without a vegan identity.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree that any such graphic inevitably risks conveying more confidence than is warranted. At the same time, I felt it was important to visualise the framework, as I think it becomes much less intuitive if left purely abstract. That was a trade-off I consciously made. As I mention in the footnote:
Although the curves could be aggregated into a single curve once relative weights have been assigned to the different objectives, this is deliberately omitted because doing so could inadvertently endorse one particular weighting and imply a level of quantitative precision the model is not intended to convey. Accordingly, each curve should be interpreted on its own scale in the vertical dimension, so their relative heights do not imply any particular weighting between the objectives.
I’m not sure there’s a perfect solution here, but this felt like the best compromise to me.
Thanks for sharing this! The Balluch curve is very much aligned with how I think about effort, and I like that he explores in depth how advocacy can reshape the landscape over time, thereby effectively changing our empirical assumptions. I especially like the visual intuition of people “rolling” towards the local minimum. A very elegant way of thinking about the curves. :)
The only point I’d qualify is the assumption that a balanced mixed diet and a vegan diet are roughly equally healthy. I discuss this in a bit more detail in the section on health risk:
More generally, there is greater uncertainty about the health outcomes of dietary patterns that substantially restrict or eliminate food groups that have formed part of the human diet throughout evolution, particularly with regard to long-term health and critical life stages such as pregnancy, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. This reflects both the limited evidence base for comparatively novel and rare dietary patterns and the broader methodological limitations of nutrition science. A greater health risk is therefore assigned to dietary patterns at either extreme of the spectrum.
For that reason, I think health risk may be just as decisive as effort, depending on how people weight the different objectives.
Thanks! I actually intended culinary enjoyment to be incorporated into the model already. As I write in the Effort section:
The more a diet deviates from the norm in a given context, the greater the associated costs tend to be in terms of time, money, attention, as well as psychological and social costs related to factors such as culinary enjoyment, culture, community, or identity.
So the idea is that giving up culinary enjoyment makes a diet more costly, i.e. more effortful. I decided to include it this way because, like the other factors grouped under effort, I think it tends to have a U-shaped relationship with the proportion of animal-based foods in the diet, making it natural to combine them into a single curve. It also makes the optimisation framework mathematically more elegant by treating all of these as costs to be minimised.
Thanks, these are all good points.
First, I want to emphasise that the curves are highly contestable. My goal isn’t to argue that these particular curves are correct, but rather to encourage readers to think explicitly about what their own curves would look like.
That said, here are my thoughts on your specific points:Effort of vegan vs carnivore diets: My intuition is that a carnivore diet can often be implemented largely by leaving out certain plant-based foods, whereas a vegan diet usually requires suitable replacements to maintain a nutritionally complete diet. But I can also see arguments in the other direction, especially given that veganism is much more common and socially accepted than carnivore diets in many contexts. What I’m much more confident about is that, for most people currently eating a typical omnivorous diet, eating more animal-based foods is generally easier than eating fewer.
Health risk of vegan vs predominantly animal-based diets: As explained in the assumptions section, I’m comparing reasonably well-planned implementations (better than average, but not theoretically optimal). So “predominantly animal-based” shouldn’t be interpreted as a diet centred on red and processed meat (although I think the evidence against unprocessed red meat is relatively weak). My own best judgement is that a well-planned predominantly animal-based diet carries lower health risk than a well-planned vegan diet, but this is certainly contestable.
Wild animal welfare beyond climate change: In principle, the external harm curve is intended to reflect all harms. However, soil animal welfare is a domain with substantial empirical uncertainty. As a result, I currently don’t have sufficiently confident views to incorporate those considerations into the curves, but they could certainly matter under some assumptions.
Hope this is helpful!
Dietary Choices: A Multi-objective Optimisation Problem
Thanks, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective! I’ve mostly thought about the signalling benefits of pledges so far, not so much the potential downsides. But I can see how that might play out in some contexts.
Effective Animal Advocacy Meetup
Effective Animal Advocacy Meetup
Effective Animal Advocacy Meetup
Congrats on the recent pledge! :)
I agree that the flexibility to choose which charities to support makes the pledge feel much less constraining. At the same time, there is still a lock-in in committing to giving itself and to a fixed share of income.
That said, it’s great to hear the current framing worked well for you. My impression is just that different people respond to different approaches to commitment, and I think the 10% pledge is the most aspirational option for some but not for everyone.
Good question, thanks for bringing this up!
A few thoughts come to mind:
Long-term commitments can fade over time, so periodic recommitment could help by creating moments of reflection and renewed motivation. In that sense, successive time-bound pledges might be more effective than an open-ended pledge that is very similar to a recurring donation membership at a charity.
OFTW directs donations to a curated set of charities focused on global poverty. That reduces decision complexity, but it also means pledgers have less agency and cannot support other cause areas.
The 1% framing lowers the barrier substantially but, as you note, may not resonate as strongly with people who want to give very ambitiously, which I think is closer to the audience GWWC wants to reach.
Overall though, for the goals they are pursuing and the people they are trying to reach, their framing seems very sensible to me.
I think an important point here is that the primary goal of nutrition authorities is to prevent deficiencies in the general population. I therefore don’t think vegan organisations should just reproduce official recommendations. They should of course stay aligned with them, but add context that is relevant specifically for vegans.
The Dutch protein recommendation is actually a good example: it applies a 1.3 factor for vegans because of lower protein digestibility, whereas many other national recommendations don’t make such an adjustment. That’s of course not because Dutch vegans have higher protein requirements. One plausible explanation for differences like this is that nutrition authorities have limited resources and may not prioritise issues that primarily affect small minorities like vegans. This is where vegan organisations can add value. So if the official recommendations in a country do not include a vegan-specific adjustment, I think it makes sense for vegan organisations to provide that additional guidance themselves. I don’t see this as conflicting with official recommendations, because those tell us about the minimum intake for adequacy, not the optimal intake. For example, the interview with Don Layman that I linked at the relevant timestamp in the protein section explains this distinction quite well with regard to the 0.8 g/kg/day protein recommendation.
I agree, though, that it is important to be transparent that there is no consensus on the optimal protein intake. So I think a more precise version of my proposed narrative could be: we don’t currently know the optimal protein intake, but based on the available evidence, around 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day is a plausible target range for healthy adults, with particularly strong evidence for higher intakes in groups such as older adults, people losing weight, and those doing resistance training. That’s what I had earlier condensed into “vegans should ideally aim for around 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day.” There is always a trade-off between nuance and accessibility, and different organisations have to decide where to strike that balance depending on their audience.
Regarding pregnancy and zinc, thanks for taking this back to your team. :)