My last post on truthseeking in EA vegan advocacy got a lot of comments, but there’s one in particular I want to highlight as highly epistemically cooperative. I have two motivations for this:
having just spotlighted some of the most epistemically uncooperative parts of a movement, it feels just to highlight good ones
I think some people will find it surprising that I call this comment highly truthseeking and epistemically cooperative, which makes it useful for clarifying how I use those words.
In a tangential comment thread, I asked Tristan Williams why he thought veganism was more emotionally sustainable than reducitarianism. He said:
Yeah sure. I would need a full post to explain myself, but basically I think that what seems to be really important when going vegan is standing in a certain sort of loving relationship to animals, one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute
I guess the first time I thought about this was with my university EA group. We had a couple of hardcore utilitarians, and one of them brought up an interesting idea one night. He was a vegan, but he’d been offered some mac and cheese, and in similar thinking to above (that dairy generally involves less suffering than eggs or chicken for ex) he wondered if it might actually be better to take the mac and donate the money he would have spent to an animal welfare org. And when he roughed up the math, sure enough, taking the mac and donating was somewhat significantly the better option.
But he didn’t do it, nor do I think he changed how he acted in the future. Why? I think it’s really hard to draw a line in the sand that isn’t veganism that stays stable over time. For those who’ve reverted, I’ve seen time and again a slow path back, one where it starts with the less bad items, cheese is quite frequent, and then naturally over time one thing after another is added to the point that most wind up in some sort of reduceitarian state where they’re maybe 80% back to normal (I also want to note here, I’m so glad for any change, and I cast no stones at anyone trying their best to change). And I guess maybe at some point it stops being a moral thing, or becomes some really watered down moral thing like how much people consider the environment when booking a plane ticket.
I don’t know if this helps make it clear, but it’s like how most people feel about harm to younger kids. When it comes to just about any serious harm to younger kids, people are generally against it, like super against it, a feeling of deep caring that to me seems to be one of the strongest sentiments shared by humans universally. People will give you some reasons for this i.e. “they are helpless and we are in a position of responsibility to help them” but really it seems to ground pretty quickly in a sentiment of “it’s just bad”.
To have this sort of love, this commitment to preventing suffering, with animals to me means pretty much just drawing the line at sentient beings and trying to cultivate a basic sense that they matter and that “it’s just bad” to eat them. Sure, I’m not sure what to do about insects, and wild animal welfare is tricky, so it’s not nearly as easy as I’m making it seem. And it’s not that I don’t want to have any idea of some of the numbers and research behind it all, I know I need to stay up to date on debates on sentience, and I know that I reference relative measures of harm often when I’m trying to guide non-veg people away from the worst harms. But what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale.
And to try to return to earlier, I guess I see taking this sort of position as likely to extend people’s time spent doing veg-related diets, and I think it’s just a lot trickier to have this sort of relationship when you are doing some sort of utilitarian calculus of what is and isn’t above the bar for you (again, much love to these people, something is always so much better than nothing). This is largely just a theory, I don’t have much to back it up, and it would seem to explain some cases of reversion I’ve seen but certainly not all, and I also feel like this is a bit sloppy because I’d really need a post to get at this hard to describe feeling I have. But hopefully this helps explain the viewpoint a bit better, happy to answer any questions 🙂
It’s true that this comment doesn’t use citations or really many objective facts. But what it does have is:
A clear description of what the author believes
Clear identifiers of the author’s cruxes for those beliefs
It doesn’t spell out every possible argument but does leave hooks, so if I’m confused it’s easy to ask clarifying questions
Disclaimers against common potential misinterpretations.
Forthright description of its own limits
Proper hedging and sourcing on the factual claims it does make
This is one form of peak epistemic cooperation. Obviously it’s not the only form, sometimes I want facts with citations and such, but usually only after philosophical issues like this one have been resolved. Sometimes peak truthseeking looks like sincerely sharing your beliefs in ways that invite other people to understand them, which is different than justifying them. And I’d like to see more of that, everywhere.
PS. I know I said the next post would be talking about epistemics in the broader effective altruism community. Even as I wrote that sentence I thought “Are you sure? That’s been your next post for three or four posts now, writing this feels risky”, and I thought “well I really want the next post out before EAG Boston and that doesn’t leave time for any more diversions, we’re already halfway done and caveating “next” would be such a distraction…”. Unsurprisingly I realized the post was less than halfway done and I can’t get the best version done in time for EAG Boston, at which point I might as well write it at a leisurely pace
PPS. Tristan saw a draft of this post before publishing and had some power to veto or edit it. Normally I’d worry that doing so would introduce some bias, but given the circumstances it felt like the best option. I don’t think anyone can accuse me of being unwilling to criticize EA vegan advocacy epistemics, and I was worried that hearing “hey I want to quote your pro-veganism comment in full in a post, don’t worry it will be complimentary, no I can’t show you the post you might bias it” would be stressful.
Effective altruism prides itself on truthseeking. That pride is justified in the sense that EA is better at truthseeking than most members of its reference category, and unjustified in that it is far from meeting its own standards. We’ve already seen dire consequences of the inability to detect bad actors who deflect investigation into potential problems, but by its nature you can never be sure you’ve found all the damage done by epistemic obfuscation because the point is to be self-cloaking.
My concern here is for the underlying dynamics of EA’s weak epistemic immune system, not any one instance. But we can’t analyze the problem without real examples, so individual instances need to be talked about. Worse, the examples that are easiest to understand are almost by definition the smallest problems, which makes any scapegoating extra unfair. So don’t.
This post focuses on a single example: vegan advocacy, especially around nutrition. I believe vegan advocacy as a cause has both actively lied and raised the cost for truthseeking, because they were afraid of the consequences of honest investigations. Occasionally there’s a consciously bad actor I can just point to, but mostly this is an emergent phenomenon from people who mean well, and have done good work in other areas. That’s why scapegoating won’t solve the problem: we need something systemic.
In the next post I’ll do a wider but shallower review of other instances of EA being hurt by a lack of epistemic immune system. I already have a long list, but it’s not too late for you to share your examples.
Definitions
I picked the words “vegan advocacy” really specifically. “Vegan” sometimes refers to advocacy and sometimes to just a plant-exclusive diet, so I added “advocacy” to make it clear.
I chose “advocacy” over “advocates” for most statements because this is a problem with the system. Some vegan advocates are net truthseeking and I hate to impugn them. Others would like to be epistemically virtuous but end up doing harm due to being embedded in an epistemically uncooperative system. Very few people are sitting on a throne of plant-based imitation skulls twirling their mustache thinking about how they’ll fuck up the epistemic commons today.
When I call for actions I say “advocates” and not “advocacy” because actions are taken by people, even if none of them bear much individual responsibility for the problem.
I specify “EA vegan advocacy” and not just “vegan advocacy” not because I think mainstream vegan advocacy is better, but because 1. I don’t have time to go after every wrong advocacy group in the world. 2. Advocates within Effective Altruism opted into a higher standard. EA has a right and responsibility to maintain the standards of truth it advocates, even if the rest of the world is too far gone to worry about.
Audience
If you’re entirely uninvolved in effective altruism you can skip this, it’s inside baseball and there’s a lot of context I don’t get into.
How EA vegan advocacy has hindered truthseeking
EA vegan advocacy has both pushed falsehoods and punished people for investigating questions it doesn’t like. It manages this even for positions that 90%+ of effective altruism and the rest of the world agree with, like “veganism is a constraint”. I don’t believe its arguments convince anyone directly, but end up having a big impact by making inconvenient beliefs too costly to discuss. This means new entrants to EA are denied half of the argument, and harm themselves due to ignorance.
This section outlines the techniques I’m best able to name and demonstrate. For each technique I’ve included examples. Comments on my own posts are heavily overrepresented because they’re the easiest to find; “go searching through posts on veganism to find the worst examples” didn’t feel like good practice. I did my best to quote and summarize accurately, although I made no attempt to use a representative sample. I think this is fair because a lot of the problem lies in the fact that good comments don’t cancel out bad, especially when the good comments are made in parallel rather than directly arguing with the bad. I’ve linked to the source of every quote and screen shot, so you can (and should) decide for yourself. I’ve also created a list of all of my own posts I’m drawing from, so you can get a holistic view.
I should note I quote some commenters and even a few individual comments in more than one section, because they exhibit more than one problem. But if I refer to the same comment multiple times in a row I usually only link to it once, to avoid implying more sources than I have.
My posts were posted on my blog, LessWrong, and EAForum. In practice the comments I drew from came from LessWrong (white background) and EAForum (black background). I tried to go through those posts and remove all my votes on comments (except the automatic vote for my own comments) so that you could get an honest view of how the community voted without my thumb on the scale, but I’ve probably missed some, especially on older posts. On the main posts, which received a lot of traffic, I stuck to well-upvoted comments, but I included some low (but still positive) karma comments from unpopular posts.
The goal here is to make these anti-truthseeking techniques legible for discussion, not develop complicated ways to say “I don’t like this”, so when available I’ve included counter examples. These are comments that look similar to the ones I’m complaining about, but are fine or at least not suffering from the particular flaw in that section. In doing this I hope to keep the techniques’ definitions narrow.
Active suppression of inconvenient questions
A small but loud subset of vegan advocacy will say outright you shouldn’t say true things, because it leads to outcomes they dislike. This accusation is even harsher than “not truthseeking”, and would normally be very hard to prove. If I say “you’re saying that because you care more about creating vegans than the health of those you create”, and they say “no I’m not”, I don’t really have a come back. I can demonstrate that they’re wrong, but not their motivation. Luckily, a few people said the quiet part out loud.
Commenter Martin Soto pushed back very hard on my first nutrition testing study. Finally I asked him outright if he thought it was okay to share true information about vegan nutrition. His response was quite thoughtful and long, so you should really go read the whole thing, but let me share two quotes
He goes on to say:
And in a later comment
EDIT 2023-10-03: Martin disputes my summary of his comments. I think it’s good practice to link to disputes like this, even though I stand by my summary. I also want to give a heads-up that I see his comments in the dispute thread as continuing the patterns I describe (which makes that thread a tax on the reader). If you want to dig into this, I strongly suggest you first read his original comments and come up with your own summary, so you can compare that to each of ours.
The charitable explanation here is that my post focuses on naive veganism, and Soto thinks that’s a made-up problem. He believes this because all of the vegans he knows (through vegan advocacy networks) are well-educated on nutrition. There are a few problems here, but the most fundamental is that enacting his desired policy of suppressing public discussion of nutrition issues with plant-exclusive diets will prevent us from getting the information to know if problems are widespread. My post and a commenter’s report on their college group are apparently the first time he’s heard of vegans who didn’t live and breathe B12.
I have a lot of respect for Soto for doing the math and so clearly stating his position that “the damage to people who implement veganism badly is less important to me than the damage to animals caused by eating them”. Most people flinch away from explicit trade-offs like that, and I appreciate that he did them and own the conclusion. But I can’t trust his math because he’s cut himself off from half the information necessary to do the calculations. How can he estimate the number of vegans harmed or lost due to nutritional issues if he doesn’t let people talk about them in public?
In fact the best data I found on this was from Faunalytics, which found that ~20% of veg*ns drop out due to health reasons. This suggests to me a high chance his math is wrong and will lead him to do harm by his own standards.
EDIT 2023-10-04: . Using Faunalytics numbers for self-reported health issues and improvements after quitting veg*nism, I calculated that 20% of veg*ns develop health issues. This number is sensitive to your assumptions; I consider 20% conservative but it could be an overestimate. I encourage you to read the whole post and play with my model, and of course read the original work.
Most people aren’t nearly this upfront. They will go through the motions of calling an idea incorrect before emphasizing how it will lead to outcomes they dislike. But the net effect is a suppression of the exploration of ideas they find inconvenient.
This post on Facebook is a good example. Normally I would consider facebook posts out of bounds, especially ones this old (over five years). Facebook is a casual space and I want people to be able to explore ideas without being worried that they’re creating a permanent record that will be used against them. In this case I felt that because the post was permissioned to public and a considered statement (rather than an off the cuff reply), the truth value outweighed the chilling effect. But because it’s so old and I don’t know how the author’s current opinion, I’m leaving out their name and not linking to the post.
The author is midlist EA- I’d heard of them for other reasons, but they’re certainly not EA-famous.
There are posts very similar to this one I would have been fine with, maybe even joyful about. You could present evidence against the claims that X is harmful, or push people to verify things before repeating them, or suggest we reserve the word poison for actual kill-you-dead molecules and not complicated compound constructions with many good parts and only weak evidence of mild long-term negative effects. But what they actually did was name-check the idea that X is fine before focusing on the harm to animals caused by repeating the claim- which is exactly what you’d expect if the health claims were true but inconvenient. I don’t know what this author actually believes, but I do know focusing on the consequences when the facts are in question is not truthseeking.
A subtler version comes from the AHS-2 post. At the time of this comment the author, Rockwell, described herself as the leader of EA NYC and an advisor to philanthropists on animal suffering, so this isn’t some rando having a feeling. This person has some authority.
This comment more strongly emphasizes the claim that my beliefs are wrong, not just inconvenient. And if they’d written that counter-argument they promised I’d be putting this in the counter-examples section. But it’s been three months and they have not written anything where I can find it, nor responded to my inquiries. So even if literal claim were correct, she’s using a technique whose efficacy is independent of truth.
Over on the Change My Mind post the top comment says that vegan advocacy is fine because it’s no worse than fast food or breakfast cereal ads
I’m surprised someone would make this comment. But what really shocks me is the complete lack of pushback from other vegan advocates. If I heard an ally described our shared movement as no worse than McDonalds, I would injure myself in my haste to repudiate them.
Counter-Examples
This post on EAForum came out while I was finishing this post. The author asks if they should abstain from giving bad reviews to vegan restaurants, because it might lead to more animal consumption- which would be a central example of my complaint. But the comments are overwhelmingly “no, there’s not even a good consequentialist argument for that”, and the author appears to be taking that to heart. So from my perspective this is a success story.
Ignore the arguments people are actually making
I’ve experienced this pattern way too often.
Me: goes out of my way to say not-X in a post Comment: how dare you say X! X is so wrong! Me: here’s where I explicitly say not-X. *crickets*
This is by no means unique to posts about veganism. “They’re yelling at me for an argument I didn’t make” is a common complaint of mine. But it happens so often, and so explicitly, in the vegan nutrition posts. Let me give some examples.
My post:
Commenter:
My post:
Commenters:
My post:
Commenter:
My post:
Commenter:
My post:
Commenter:
You might be thinking “well those posts were very long and honestly kind of boring, it would be unreasonable to expect people to read everything”. But the length and precision are themselves a response to people arguing with positions I don’t hold (and failing to update when I clarify). The only things I can do are spell out all of my beliefs or not spell out all of my beliefs, and either way ends with comments arguing against views I don’t have.
Frame control/strong implications not defended/fuzziness
This is the hardest one to describe. Sometimes people say things, and I disagree, and we can hope to clarify that disagreement. But sometimes people say things and responding is like nailing jello to a wall. Their claims aren’t explicit, or they’re individually explicit but aren’t internally consistent, or play games with definitions. They “counter” statements in ways that might score a point in debate club but don’t address the actual concern in context.
One example is the top-voted comment on LW on Change My Mind
Over a very long exchange I attempt to nail down his position:
Does he think micronutrient deficiencies don’t exist? No, he agrees they do.
Does he think that they can’t cause health issues? No, he agrees they do.
Does he think this just doesn’t happen very often, or is always caught? No, if anything he thinks the Faunalytics underestimates the veg*n attrition due to medical issues.
So what exactly does he disagree with me on?
He also had a very interesting exchange with another commenter. That thread got quite long, and fuzziness by its nature doesn’t lend itself to excerpts, so you should read the whole thing, but I will share highlights.
Before the screenshot: Wilkox acknowledges that B12 and iron deficiencies can cause fatigue, and veganism can cause these deficiencies, but it’s fine because if people get tired they can go to a doctor.
That reply doesn’t contain any false statements, and would be perfectly reasonable if we were talking about ER triage protocols. But it’s irrelevant when the conversation is “can we count on veganism-induced fatigue being caught?”. (The answer is no, and only some of the reasons have been brought up here)
You can see how the rest of this conversation worked out in the Sound and Fury section.
A much, much milder example can be seen in What vegan food resources have you found useful?. This was my attempt to create something uncontroversially useful, and I’d call it a modest success. The post had 20-something karma on LW and EAForum, and there were several useful-looking resources shared on EAForum. But it also got the following comment on LW:
I picked this example because it only takes a little bit of thought to see the jujitsu, so little it barely counts. He disagreed with my implicit claim that… well okay here’s the problem. I’m still not quite sure where he disagrees. Does he think everyone automatically eats well as a vegan? That no one will benefit from resources like veganhealth.org? That no one will benefit from a cheat sheet for vegan party spreads? That there is no one for whom veganism is challenging? He can’t mean that last one because he acknowledges exceptions in his later comment, but only because I pushed back. Maybe he thinks that the only vegans who don’t follow his steps are those with medical issues, and that no-processed-food diets are too unpopular to consider?
I don’t think this was deliberately anti-truthseeking, because if it was he would have stopped at “nothing special” instead of immediately outlining the special things his partner does. That was fairly epistemically cooperative. But it is still an example of strong claims made only implicitly.
Counter-Examples
I think this comment makes a claim (“vegans moving to naive omnivorism will hurt themselves”) clearly, and backs it up with a lot of details.
The tone is kind of obnoxious and he’s arguing with something I never claimed, but his beliefs are quite clear. I can immediately understand which beliefs of his I agree with (“vegans moving to naive omnivorism will hurt themselves” and “that would be bad”) and make good guesses at implicit claims I disagree with (“and therefore we should let people hurt themselves with naive veganism”? “I [Elizabeth] wouldn’t treat naive mass conversion to omnivorism seriously as a problem”?). That’s enough to count as epistemically cooperative.
Sound and fury, signifying no substantial disagreement
Sometimes someone comments with an intense, strongly worded, perhaps actively hostile, disagreement. After a laborious back and forth, the problem dissolves: they acknowledge I never held the position they were arguing with, or they don’t actually disagree with my specific claims.
Originally I felt happy about these, because “mostly agreeing” is an unusually positive outcome for that opening. But these discussions are grueling. It is hard to express kindness and curiosity towards someone yelling at you for a position you explicitly disclaimed. Any one of these stories would be a success but en masse they amount to a huge tax on saying anything about veganism, which is already quite labor intensive.
The discussions could still be worth it if it changed the arguer’s mind, or at least how they approached the next argument. But I don’t get the sense that’s what happens. Neither of us have changed our minds about anything, and I think they’re just as likely to start a similar fight the next week.
I do feel like vegan advocates are entitled to a certain amount of defensiveness. They encounter large amounts of concern trolling and outright hostility, and it makes sense that that colors their interactions. But that allowance covers one comment, maybe two, not three to eight (Wilkox, depending on which ones you count).
For example, I’ve already quoted Wilkox’s very fuzzy comment (reminder: this was the top voted comment on that post on LW). That was followed by a 13+ comment exchange in which we eventually found he had little disagreement with any of my claims about vegan nutrition, only the importance of these facts. There really isn’t a way for me to screenshot this: the length and lack of specifics is the point.
You could say that the confusion stemmed from poor writing on my part, but:
I really appreciate the meta-honesty here, but since the exchange appears to have eaten hours of both of our time just to dig ourselves out of a hole, I can’t get that excited about it.
Counter-Examples
I want to explicitly note that Sound and Fury isn’t the same as asking questions or not understanding a post. E.g. here Ben West identifies a confusion, asks me, and accepts both my answer and an explanation of why answering is difficult.
Or in that same post, someone asked me to define nutritionally dense. It took a bit for me to answer and we still disagreed afterward, but it was a great question and the exchange felt highly truthseeking.
Bad sources, badly handled
Citations should be something of a bet: if the citation (the source itself or your summary of it) is high quality and supports your point, that should move people closer to your views. But if they identify serious relevant flaws, that should move both you and your audience closer to their point of view. Of course our beliefs are based on a lot of sources and it’s not feasible or desirable to really dig into all of them for every disagreement, so the bet may be very small. But if you’re not willing to defend a citation, you shouldn’t make it.
What I see in EA vegan advocacy is deeply terrible citations, thrown out casually, and abandoned when inconvenient. I’ve made something of a name for myself checking citations and otherwise investigating factual claims from works of nonfiction. Of everything I’ve investigated, I think citations from EA vegan advocacy have the worst effort:truth ratio. Not outright more falsehoods, I read some pretty woo stuff, but those can be dismissed quickly. Citations in vegan advocacy are often revealed to be terrible only after great effort.
And having put in that effort, my reward is usually either crickets, or a new terrible citation. Sometimes we will eventually drill into “I just believe it”, which is honestly fine. We don’t live our lives to the standard of academic papers. But if that’s your reason, you need to state it from the beginning.
For example, in the top voted comment on Change My Mind post on EAF, Rockwell (head of EA NYC) has five links in her post. Only links 1 and 4 are problems, but I’ll describe them in order to avoid confusion.
Of the five links:
Wilkox’s comment on the LW version of the post, where he eventually agrees that veganism requires testing and supplementation for many people (although most of that exchange hadn’t happened at the time of linking).
cites my past work, if anything too generously.
an estimation of nutrient deficiency in the US. I don’t love that this uses dietary intake as opposed to testing values (people’s needs vary so wildly), but at least it used EAR and not RDA. I’d want more from a post but for a comment this is fine.
an absolutely atrocious article, which the comment further misrepresents. We don’t have time to get all the flaws in that article, so I’ve put my first hour of criticisms in the appendix. What really gets me here is that I would have agreed the standard American diet sucks without asking for a source. I thought I had conceded that point preemptively, albeit not naming Standard American Diet explicitly.
And if she did feel a need go the extra mile on rigor for this comment, it’s really not that hard to find decent-looking research about the harms of the Standard Shitty American Diet. I found this paper on heart disease in 30 seconds, and most of that time was spent waiting for Elicit to load. I don’t know if it’s actually good, but it is not so obviously farcical as the cited paper.
The fifth link goes to a description of the Standard American Diet.
Rockwell did not respond to my initial reply (that fixing vegan issues is easier than fixing SSAD), or my asking if that paper on the risks of meat eating was her favorite.
A much more time-consuming version of this happened with Adventist Health Study-2. Several people cited the AHS-2 as a pseudo-RCT that supported veganism (EDIT 2023-10-03: as superior to low meat omnivorism). There’s one commenter on LessWrong and two on EAForum (one of whom had previously co-authored a blog post on the study and offered to answer questions). As I discussed here, that study is one of the best we have on nutrition and I’m very glad people brought it to my attention. But calling it a pseudo-RCT that supports veganism is deeply misleading. It is nowhere near randomized, and doesn’t cleanly support veganism even if you pretend it is.
(EDIT 2023-10-03: To be clear, the noise in the study overwhelms most differences in outcomes, even ignoring the self-sorting. My complaint is that the study was presented as strong evidence in one direction, when it’s both very weak and, if you treat it as strong, points in a different direction than reported. One commenter has said she only meant it as evidence that a vegan diet can work for some people, which I agree with, as stated in the post she was responding to. She disagrees with other parts of my summary as well, you can read more here)
It’s been three months, and none of the recommenders have responded to my analysis of the main AHS-2 paper, despite repeated requests.
But finding a paper is of lower quality and supports an entirely different conclusion is still not the worst-case scenario. The worst outcome is citation whack-a-mole.
[Note that I didn’t zero out my votes on this post’s comments, because it seemed less important for posts I didn’t write]
Karthik cites a lot of sources in that post. I picked what looked like his strongest source and investigated. It was terrible. It was a review article, so checking it required reading multiple studies. Of the cited studies, only 4 (with a total of 39 combined subjects) use blood tests rather than owner reports, and more than half of those were given vegetarian diets, not vegan (even though the table header says vegan). The only RCT didn’t include carnivorous diets.
Karthik agrees that paper (that he cited) is not making its case “strong nor clear”, and cites another one (which AFAICT was not in the original post).
I dismiss the new citation on the basis of “motivated [study] population and minimal reporting”.
He retreats to “[My] argument isn’t solely based on the survey data. It’s supported by fundamentals of biochemistry, metabolism, and digestion too […] Mammals such as cats will digest food matter into constituent molecules. Those molecules are chemically converted to other molecules–collectively, metabolism–, and energy and biomass (muscles, bones) are built from those precursors. For cats to truly be obligate carnivores, there would have to be something exceptional about meat: (A) There would have to be essential molecules–nutrients–that cannot be sourced anywhere else OR (B) the meat would have to be digestible in a way that’s not possible with plant matter. […So any plant-based food that passes AAFCO guidelines is nutritionally complete for cats. Ami does, for example.]
I point out that AAFCO doesn’t think meeting their guidelines is necessarily sufficient. I expected him to dismiss this as corporate ass-covering, and there’s a good chance he’d be right. But he didn’t.
Which would have been a fine aspirational statement, but then why include so many papers he wasn’t willing to stand behind?
On that same post someone else says that they think my concerns are a big deal, and Karthik probably can’t convince them without convincing me. Karthik responds:
So he’s conceded that his study didn’t show what he claimed. And he’s not really defending the AAFCO standards. But he’s really sure this will work anyway? And I’m the one who won’t update their beliefs.
In a different comment the same someone else notes a weird incongruity in the paper. Karthik doesn’t respond.
This is the real risk of the bad sources: hours of deep intellectual work to discover that his argument boils down to a theoretical claim the author could have stated at the beginning. “I believe vegan cat food meets these numbers and meeting these numbers is sufficient” honestly isn’t a terrible argument, and I’d have respected it plainly stated, especially since he explicitly calls for RCTs. Or I would, if he didn’t view those RCTs primarily as a means to prove what he already knows.
Counter-Examples
This commenter starts out pretty similarly to the others, with a very limited paper implied to have very big implications. But when I push back on the serious limitations of the study, he owns the issues and says he only ever meant the paper to support a more modest claim (while still believing the big claim he did make?).
Taxing Facebook
When I joined EA Facebook in 2014, it was absolutely hopping. Every week I met new people and had great discussions with them where we both walked away smarter. I’m unclear when this trailed off because I was drifting away from EA at the same time, but let’s say the golden age was definitively over by 2018. Facebook was where I first noticed the pattern with EA vegan advocacy.
Back in 2014 or 2015, Seattle EA watched some horrifying factory farming documentaries, and we were each considering how we should change our diets in light of that new information. We tried to continue the discussion on Facebook, only to have Jacy Reese Anthis (who was not a member of the local group and AFAIK had never been to Seattle) repeatedly insist that the only acceptable compromise was vegetarianism, humane meat doesn’t exist, and he hadn’t heard of health conditions benefiting from animal products so my doctor was wrong (or maybe I made it up?).
I wish I could share screenshots on this, but the comments are gone (I think because the account has been deleted). I’ve included shots of the post and some of my comments (one of which refers to Jacy obstructing an earlier conversation, which I’d forgotten about). A third commenter has been cropped out, but I promise it doesn’t change the context.
(his answer was no, and that either I or my doctor were wrong because Jacy had never heard of any medical issue requiring consumption of animal products)
That conversation went okay. Seattle EA discussed suffering math on different vertebrates, someone brought up eating bugs, Brian Tomasik argued against eating bugs. It was everything an EA conversation should be.
But it never happened again.
Because this kind of thing happened every time animal products, diet, and health came up anywhere on EA Facebook. The commenters weren’t always as aggressive as Jacy, but they added a tremendous amount of cumulative friction. An omnivore would ask if lacto-vegetarianism worked, and the discussion would get derailed by animal advocates insisting you didn’t need milk. Conversations about feeling hungry at EAG inevitably got a bunch of commenters saying they were fine, as if that was a rebuttal.
Jeff Kaufman mirrors his FB posts onto his actual blog, which makes me feel more okay linking to it. In this post he makes a pretty clear point- that veganism can be any of cheaper, or healthier, or tastier, but not all at once. He gets a lot of arguments. One person argues that no one thinks that, they just care about animals more.
One vegetarian says they’d like to go vegan but just can’t beat eggs for their mix of convenience, price, macronutrients, and micronutrients. She gets a lot of suggestions for substitutes, all of which flunk on at least one criterion. Jacy Reese Anthis has a deleted comment, which from the reply looks like he asserted the existence of a substitute without listing one.
After a year or two of this, people just stopped talking about anything except the vegan party line on public FB. We’d bitch to each other in private, but that was it. And that’s why, when a new generation of people joined EA and were exposed to the moral argument for veganism, there was no discussion of the practicalities visible to them.
[TBF they probably wouldn’t have seen the conversations on FB anyway, I’m told that’s an old-person thing now. But the silence has extended itself]
Ignoring known falsehoods until they’re a PR problem
This is old news, but: for many years ACE said leafletting was great. Lots of people (including me and some friends, in 2015) criticized their numbers. This did not seem to have much effect; they’d agree their eval was imperfect and they intended to put up a disclaimer, but it never happened.
In late 2016 a scathing anti-animal-EA piece was published on Medium, making many incendiary accusations, including that the leafleting numbers are made up. I wouldn’t call that post very epistemically virtuous; it was clearly hoping to inflame more than inform. But within a few weeks (months?), ACE put up a disavowal of the leafletting numbers.
I unfortunately can’t look up the original correction or when they put it up; archive.org behaves very weirdly around animalcharityevaluators.org. As I remember it made the page less obviously false, but the disavowal was tepid and not a real fix. Here’s the 2022 version:
There are two options here: ACE was right about leafleting, and caved to public pressure rather than defend their beliefs. Or ACE was wrong about leafleting (and knew they were wrong, because they conceded in private when challenged) but continued to publicly endorse it.
Why I Care
I’ve thought vegan advocates were advocating falsehoods and stifling truthseeking for years. I never bothered to write it up, and generally avoided public discussion, because that sounded like a lot of work for absolutely no benefit. Obviously I wasn’t going to convince the advocates of anything, because finding the truth wasn’t their goal, and everyone else knew it so what did it matter? I was annoyed at them on principle for being wrong and controlling public discussion with unfair means, but there are so many wrong people in the world and I had a lot on my plate.
I should have cared more about the principle.
I’ve talked before about the young Effective Altruists who converted to veganism with no thought for nutrition, some of whom suffered for it. They trusted effective altruism to have properly screened arguments and tell them what they needed to know. After my posts went up I started getting emails from older EAs who weren’t getting the proper testing either; I didn’t know because I didn’t talk to them in private, and we couldn’t discuss it in public.
Which is the default story of not fighting for truth. You think the consequences are minimal, but you can’t know because the entire problem is that information is being suppressed.
What do EA vegan advocates need to do?
Acknowledge that nutrition is a multidimensional problem, that veganism is a constraint, and that adding constraints usually makes problems harder, especially if you’re already under several.
Take responsibility for the nutritional education of vegans you create. This is not just an obligation, it’s an opportunity to improve the lives of people who are on your side. If you genuinely believe veganism can be nutritionally whole, then every person doing it poorly is suffering for your shared cause for no reason.
You don’t even have to single out veganism. For purposes of this point I’ll accept “All diet switches have transition costs and veganism is no different, and the long term benefits more than compensate”. I don’t think your certainty is merited, and I’ll respect you more if you express uncertainty, but I understand that some situations require short messaging and am willing to allow this compression.
Be epistemically cooperative, at least within EA spaces. I realize this is a big ask because in the larger world people are often epistemically uncooperative towards you. But obfuscation is a symmetric weapon and anger is not a reason to believe someone. Let’s deescalate this arms race and have both sides be more truthseeking.
What does epistemic cooperation mean?
Epistemic legibility. Make your claims and cruxes clear. E.g. “I don’t believe iron deficiency is a problem because everyone knows to take supplements and they always work” instead of “Why are you bothering about iron supplements?”
Respond to the arguments people actually make, or say why you’re not. Don’t project arguments from one context onto someone else. I realize this one is a big ask, and you have my blessing to go meta and ask work from the other party to make this viable, as long as it’s done explicitly.
Stop categorically dismissing omnivores’ self-reports. I’m sure many people do overestimate the difficulties of veganism, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy or even possible for everyone.
A scientific study, no matter how good, does not override a specific person telling you they felt hungry at a specific time.
If someone makes a good argument or disproves your source, update accordingly.
Police your own. If someone makes a false claim or bad citation while advocating veganism, point it out. If someone dismisses a detailed self-report of a failed attempt at veganism, push back.
All Effective Altruists need to stand up for our epistemic commons
Effective Altruism is supposed to mean using evidence and reason to do the most good. A necessary component of that is accurate evidence. All the spreadsheets and moral math in the world mean nothing if the input is corrupted. There can be no consequentialist argument for lying to yourself or allies1 because without truth you can’t make accurate utility calculations2. Garbage in, garbage out.
One of EA’s biggest assets is an environment that rewards truthseeking more than average. Without uniquely strong truthseeking, EA is just another movement of people who are sure they’re right. But high truthseeking environments are fragile, exploiting them is rewarding, and the costs of violating them are distributed and hard to measure. The only way EA’s has a chance of persisting is if the community makes preserving it a priority. Even when it’s hard, even when it makes people unhappy, and even when the short term rewards of defection are high.
How do we do that? I wish I had a good answer. The problem is complicated and hard to reason about, and I don’t think we understand it enough to fix it. Thus far I’ve focused on vegan advocacy as a case study in destruction of the epistemic commons because its operations are relatively unsophisticated and easy to understand. Next post I’ll be giving more examples from across EA, but those will still have a bias towards legibility and visibility. The real challenge is creating an epistemic immune system that can fight threats we can’t even detect yet.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the many people I’ve discussed this with over the past few months.
Thanks to Patrick LaVictoire and Aric Floyd for beta reading this post.
Thanks to Lightspeed Grants for funding this work. Note: a previous post referred to my work on nutrition and epistemics as unpaid after a certain point. That was true at the time and I had no reason to believe it wouldn’t stay true, but Lightspeed launched a week after that post and was an unusually good fit so I applied. I haven’t received a check yet but they have committed to the grant so I think it’s fair to count this as paid.
Appendix
Terrible anti-meat article
The body of the paper is an argument between two people, but the abstract only includes the anti-animal-product side.
The “saturated fat” and “cholesterol” sections take as a given that any amount of these is bad, without quantifying or saying why.
The “heme iron” section does explain why excess iron is bad, but ignores the risks of too little. Maybe he also forgot women exist?
The lactose section does cite two papers, one of which does not support his claim, and the other of which is focused on mice who received transplants. It probably has a bunch of problems but it was too much work to check, and even if it doesn’t, it’s about a niche group of mice.
The next section claims milk contains estrogen and thus raises circulating estrogen, which increases cancer risk.
It cites one paper supporting a link with breast cancer. That paper found a correlation with high fat but not low fat dairy, and the correlation was not statistically significant.
It cites another paper saying dairy impairs sperm quality. This study was done at a fertility clinic, so will miss men with healthy sperm counts and is thus worthless. Ignoring that, it found a correlation of dairy fat with low sperm count, but low-fat dairy was associated with higher sperm count. Again, among men with impaired fertility.
The “feces” section says that raw meat contains harmful bacteria (true), but nothing about how that translates to the risks of cooked meat.
That’s the first five subsections. The next set maybe look better sourced, but I can’t imagine them being good enough to redeem the paper. I am less convinced of the link between excess meat and health issues than I was before I read it, because surely if the claim was easy to prove the paper would have better supporting evidence, or the EA Forum commenter would have picked a better source.
[Note: I didn’t bother reading the pro-meat section. It may also be terrible, but this does not affect my position.]
”Are you saying I can’t lie to Nazis about the contents of my attic?” No more so than you’re banned from murdering them or slashing their tires. Like, you should probably think hard about how it fits into your strategy, but I assumed “yourself or allies” excluded Nazis for everyone reading this.
“Doesn’t that make the definition of enemies extremely morally load bearing?” It reflects that fact, yes.
“So vegan advocates can morally lie as long as it’s to people they consider enemies?” I think this is, at a minimum, defensible and morally consistent. In some cases I think it’s admirable, such as lying to get access to a slaughterhouse in order to take horrifying videos. It’s a declaration of war, but I assume vegan advocates are proud to declare the meat industry their enemy. ↩︎
I’ll allow that it’s conceptually possible to make deontological or virtue ethics arguments for lying to yourself or allies, but it’s difficult, and the arguments are narrow and/or wrong. Accurate beliefs turn out to be critical to getting good outcomes in all kinds of situations. ↩︎
Edits
You will notice a few edits in this post, which are marked with the edit date. The original text is struck through.
When I initially published this post on 2023-09-28, several images failed to copy over from the google doc to the shitty WordPress editor. These were fixed within a few hours.
I tried to link to sources for every screenshot (except the Facebook ones). On 2023-10-05 I realized that a lot of the links were missing (but not all, which is weird) and manually added them back in. In the process I found two screenshots that never had links, even in the google doc, and fixed those. Halfway through this process the already shitty editor flat out refused to add links to any more images. This post is apparently already too big for WordPress to handle, so every attempted action took at least 60 seconds, and I was constantly afraid I was going to make things worse, so for some images the link is in the surrounding text.
If anyone knows of a blogging website that will gracefully accept cut and paste from google docs, please let me know. That is literally all an editor takes to be a success in my book and last time I checked I could not find a single site that managed it.
Or: how the Adventist Health Study-2 had a pretty good study design but was oversold in popular description, and then misrepresented its own results.
When I laid out my existing beliefs on veganism and nutrition I asked people for evidence to the contrary. By far the most promising thing people shared was the 7th Day Adventist Health Studies. I got very excited because the project promised something of a miracle in nutrition science: an approximate RCT. I read the paper that included vegan results, and while it’s still very good as far as nutrition studies go it’s well below what I was promised, and the summaries I read were misleading. It’s not a pseudo-RCT, and even if you take the data at face value (which you shouldn’t) it doesn’t show a vegan diet is superior to all others (as measured by lifespan). Vegan is at best tied with pescetarianism, and in certain niche cases (e.g. being a woman) it’s the worst choice besides unconstrained meat consumption.
I’m going to try not to be too sarcastic about this, the study really is very good data by nutrition science standards, but I have a sour spot for medical papers that say “people” when they mean “men”, so probably something will leak out. Also, please consider what the state of nutrition science must be to make me call something that made this mistake “very good”.
Background
The 7th Day Adventists are a fairly large Christian sect. For decades scientists have been recruiting huge cohorts to study their diet, and publishing a lot of papers.
The Adventists are a promising group to use to study nutrition for lots of reasons, but primarily because the Church discourages meat, smoking, and drinking. So you lose the worst confounders for health, and get a population of lifelong, culturally competent vegetarians, which is a pretty good deal. Total abstinence from meat isn’t technically required – you’re allowed to eat kosher meat – but it’s heavily discouraged. 7DA colleges only serve vegetarian meals, and church meals will typically be vegetarian.
Some popular descriptions say that rules vary between individual churches, which could give you an almost RCT effect. AFAICT this isn’t true, and the paper I read never claimed it was. Both the internet and my ex-Adventist friend say that individual churches within the US (where the study took place) vary a little in recommendations, but most of the variety in diet is based on individual choice, not local church rules.
I was really hoping this project could shed light on what happened to people who had medical difficulties with plant-exclusive diets in plant-exclusive food cultures, but they didn’t try, and from the abundance of meat eaters within 7DA I’d guess the answer is that they eat animal products. Nor is the study very informative about naively switching to a plant-exclusive diet, since most members grow up in the culture and will have been taught a reasonable plan-based diet without necessarily needing to consciously think about it.
The Adventist Health Studies program has produced a lot of papers over the years. I focused on Vegetarian Dietary Patterns and Mortality in Adventist Health Study 2, because someone commented on my last post and pointed to that paper as addressing veganism in particular (other papers look like they only consider vegetarianism, although they might be using it as an umbrella term). I also read the AHS-2 cohort profile, but not any of the other papers, due to time constraints. It’s possible I will raise questions those papers would have answered, but there are at least 15 papers and, as I’ll talk about later, I wasn’t feeling hopeful.
So let’s talk about that one paper. It breaks people down into 2 main categories, one of which has 4 subtypes. The big category is “nonvegetarian”, which they defined as eating meat more than once per week (48% of the sample). If you eat meat less than or equal to once a week you qualify for some category of vegetarian. More specifically:
Vegan (8%): consumes any animal product <1/month.
Lacto-ovo-vegetarian (29%): unlimited consumption of eggs and milk, meat < 1/month.
Pesco-vegetarian (10%): unlimited fish, eggs, and milk, other meat < 1/month
Semi-vegetarian (6%): unlimited eggs and milk, meat+fish combined > 1/month but no more than 1/week.
I’m already a little 🤨 at lumping all four of those into one category, much less calling it vegetarian, but it will get worse.
I wish we knew more about the specific diets of the nonvegetarians (although not enough to trawl through 20 papers hoping to find that data). Do they eat pork or shellfish, which violates Church requirements and would thus be a great marker for low conscientiousness? Are they eating Standard Shitty American Diet, or similar to the lacto-ovo-vegetarians but with meat 5x/month?
Statistics
In this sample, eating lots of meat is clearly correlated with multiple activities known to impair health, like smoking and drinking. The paper attempts to back out those effects, but that’s impossible to do fully. You can back out 100 things and still miss the effect of traits that makes doing all those things more or less likely. That’s how you get results like “theater attendance reduces the risk of death even after controlling for a laundry list of confounders”.
The mortality results in this paper are controlled for: age, smoking, exercise, income, education level, marital status, alcohol consumption, and sleep. In women they also adjusted for menopausal status and hormone therapy (vegans were ½ to ⅓ less likely to be on hormone therapy, compared to other groups).
What kinds of things does this leave out? Conscientiousness, religiosity (which has social implications), and overall concern for health (anything with enough of a cultural “health halo” will eventually show a correlation with long life, because it will be done more by people who care the most about health, and they’re likely also doing other things that help). It will also be confounded if poor health is the thing that causes people to consume more animal products.
My statistician described their methods of backing out the confounding effects as “This isn’t what I would have done but it doesn’t seem unreasonable”, which easily puts this in the top 10% of medical papers I’ve asked him to evaluate. He didn’t scream in pain even a little bit. I can’t check their actual math without the raw data, but for purposes of this post I feel comfortable assuming they correctly adjusted for everything they listed.
Claims of vegetarianism’s benefits are greatly exaggerated
Note: most of these results don’t reach the level of statistical significance, but let’s ignore that for now. I’m also going to ignore concerns they failed to fully back out health effects with non-dietary causes, because even if they did, the data doesn’t support their own conclusions, much less the idea veganism is superior.
The abstract says “Significant associations with vegetarian diets were detected for cardiovascular mortality, noncardiovascular noncancer mortality, renal mortality, and endocrine mortality. Associations in men were larger and more often significant than were those in women.”
Sure, if you count “unlimited fish” as vegetarian.
But it’s much worse than that. If you look at men, you see veganism’s hazard ratio is tied with pescetarianism, followed by other forms of vegetarianism, and then nonvegetarian. Seems unfair to quote this as total vindication for veganism, although it is definitely a blow against unrestricted meat eating.
But then we get to that niche group, women. This data is a little noisy because women only made up ⅔ of the sample, but you can nonetheless get a faint hint that veganism is barely distinguishable from unrestricted omnivorism, and the diet correlated with the lowest death rate is pescetarianism, with lacto-ovo-vegetarianism and semi-vegetarianism somewhere in the middle.
And again, that’s treating the confidence intervals as minimal, when in reality they heavily overlap with each other and with the nonvegetarian death rate.
The extra weird thing here is that in men veganism was most helpful against cardiac issues, whereas in women it appears to be actively harmful to cardiac health. Any benefit veganism has in women comes from the “other death” category, whereas in men the “other death” category is where it loses ground against pescetarianism.
The paper describes this as “Effects were generally stronger and more significant in men than women”, which is a weird way to say “women and men had very different results”.
Why the gender gap?
Could be any number of things. Maybe nonvegetarian women had healthier diets than men in the same category (they cite another paper that checked and said there were no “striking differences” between the sexes within a given category, but I’m not feeling very trusting right now). Maybe nutritional intake has a bigger impact on women due to menstruation and pregnancy. Maybe women were more likely to use veganism as cover for an eating disorder. Maybe they did the math wrong.
Fish seem pretty good though
If you’re going to conclude anything from these papers, it’s that fish are great. At least as good as veganism in men, and better in women. I’m more inclined to trust that result than I otherwise would be, because pescetarianism has less of a health halo around it, as witnessed by seafood eaters having roughly the same prevalence of bad habits like smoking and drinking, relative to lacto-ovo-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians. My ex-Adventist friend confirms that veganism is viewed more favorably than pescetarian or semi-vegetarian in the community, although not compared to vegetarianism, which surprised me.
So the benefits of pescetarianism are less likely to be downstream of being the choice of people who care a lot about health, or are highly consceintious. I briefly got motivated to eat more fish until I remembered I count as semi-vegetarian by their standards (and I’m female), so the gains are small even if you take the results at face value.
Nutrition is still really complicated, the study still has a bunch of flaws, I wouldn’t update too much on this even if it didn’t agree with my existing beliefs. But this clearly undercuts veganism as the healthiest choice for women, and doesn’t really support it for men either.
To me, it is obvious that veganism introduces challenges to most people. Solving the challenges is possible for most but not all people, and often requires trade-offs that may or may not be worth it. I’ve seen effective altruist vegan advocates deny outright that trade-offs exist, or more often imply it while making technically true statements. This got to the point that a generation of EAs went vegan without health research, some of whom are already paying health costs for it, and I tentatively believe it’s harming animals as well.
Discussions about the challenges of veganism and ensuing trade-offs tend to go poorly, but I think it’s too important to ignore. I’ve created this post so I can lay out my views as legibly as possible, and invite people to present evidence I’m wrong.
One reason discussions about this tend to go so poorly is that the topic is so deeply emotionally and morally charged. Actually, it’s worse than that: it’s deeply emotionally and morally charged for one side in a conversation, and often a vague irritant to the other. Having your deepest moral convictions treated as an annoyance to others is an awful feeling, maybe worse than them having opposing but strong feelings.So I want to be clear that I respect both the belief that animals can suffer and the work advocates put into reducing that suffering. I don’t prioritize it as highly as you do, but I am glad you are doing (parts of) it.
But it’s entirely possible for it to be simultaneously true that animal suffering is morally relevant, and veganism has trade-offs for most people. You can argue that the trade-offs don’t matter, that no cost would justify the consumption of animals, and I have a section discussing that, but even that wouldn’t mean the trade-offs don’t exist.
This post covers a lot of ground, and is targeted at a fairly small audience. If you already agree with me I expect you can skip most of this, maybe check out the comments if you want the counter-evidence. I have a section addressing potential counter-arguments, and probably most people don’t need to read my response to arguments they didn’t plan on making. Because I expect modular reading, some pieces of information show up in more than one section. Anyone reading the piece end to end has my apologies for that.
However, I expect the best arguments to come from people who have read the entire thing, and at a minimum the “my cruxes” and “evidence I’m looking for” sections. I also ask you to check the preemptive response section for your argument, and engage with my response if it relates to your point. I realize that’s a long read, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours on this, including providing nutritional services to veg*ns directly, so I feel like this is a reasonable request.
My cruxes
Below are all of the cruxes I could identify for my conclusion that veganism has trade-offs, and they include health:
People are extremely variable. This includes variation in digestion, tastes, time, money, cooking ability…
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. Averting animal suffering is a better reason to eat suboptimally than most.
Average vegans and omnivores vary in multiple ways, so it’s complicated to compare diets. I think the relevant comparison healthwise is “the same person, eating vegan or omnivore” or “veganism vs. omnivorism, holding all trade-offs but one constant”.
For most omnivores who grew up in an omnivorous culture, going vegan requires a sacrifice in at least one of: cost, taste (including variety), health, time/effort.
This is a mix of capital investments and ongoing costs – you may need to learn a bunch of new recipes, but if they work for you that’s a one time cost.
Arguments often get bogged down around the fact that people rarely need to sacrifice on all fronts at once. There are cheap ways for (most) people to eat vegan, but they either take effort and knowledge, or they’re bad for you (Oreos are vegan). There are vegan ways for most people to be close to nutritionally optimal, but they require a lot of planning or dietary monotony.
Some of the financial advantage for omnivores is due to meat subsidies that make meat artificially cheap, but not all of it, and I don’t know how that compares to grain subsidies.
There are vegan sources of every nutrient (including B12, if you include fortified products). There may even be dense sources in every or almost every nutrient. But there isn’t a satisfying plant product that is as rich in as many things as meat, dairy, and especially eggs. Every “what about X?” has an answer, but if you add up all the foods you would need to meet every need, for people who aren’t gifted at digestion, it’s far too many calories and still fairly restrictive.
“Satisfying” matters. There are vegan protein shakes and cereals containing ~everything, but in practice most people don’t seem to find these satisfying.
There isn’t a rich vegan source of every vitamin for every person. If there are three vegan sources and you’re allergic to all of them, you need animal products.
The gap between veganism and omnivorism is shrinking over time, as fortified fake meats and fake milks get better and cheaper. But these aren’t a cure-all.
Some people don’t process the fortified micronutrients as well as they process meat (and vice-versa, but that’s irrelevant on an individual level).
Avoiding processed foods or just not liking them is pretty common, especially among the kind of people who become vegan.
Brands vary pretty widely, so you still need to know enough to pick the right fortified foods.
Fake meats are quite expensive, although less so every year.
I want to give the people behind fake meat a lot of credit. Making meat easier to give up was a good strategy for animal protection advocates.
Veganism isn’t weird for having these trade-offs. Every diet has trade-offs. I can name many diets I rank as having worse average trade-offs than veganism or a lower ceiling on health.
Carnivore diet, any monotrophic diet, ultralow calorie diets under most circumstances, “breathetarian”, liquid diets under most circumstances, most things with “cleanse” or “detox” in the name, raw foodism…
And even then, several of these have someone for whom they’re the best option.
The trade-offs vary widely by person. Some people have the digestive ability and palate of a goat and will be basically fine no matter what. Some people are already eating monotonous, highly planned diets and removing animal products doesn’t make it any harder. Some people are already struggling to feed themselves on an omnivore diet, and have nothing to replace meat if you take it away.
Vegan athletes are often held up as proof veganism can be healthy, with the implication that feeding athletes is hard mode so if it works for them it must work for everyone. But being a serious athlete requires a lot of the same trade-offs as veganism: you’re already planning diets meticulously, optimized for health over taste, with little variety, and taking a lot of supplements. If there are plant foods that work for you, swapping them in may be barely a sacrifice. Also, athletes have a larger calorie budget to work with.
Lots of people switch to vegan diets and see immediate health improvements.
Some improve because veganism is genuinely their optimal diet.
Others improve because even though their hypothetical optimal diet includes meat, the omnivore diet they were actually eating was bad for them and removing meat entirely is easier than eating good forms in moderation.
Others improve because they are putting more effort into their vegan diet, and they would be doing even better if they put that much effort into their omnivore diet.
Others see short-term improvement because animal products have both good points and bad points, and for some people the bad parts decay faster than the good parts. If your cholesterol goes down in a month and your B12 takes years to become a problem, it is simultaneously true that going vegan produced an immediate improvement, and that it will take a health toll.
Vegetarianism is nutritionally much closer to omnivorism than it is to veganism.
There exist large clusters of vegans who do not talk about nutrition and are operating naively. As in, no research into nutrition, no supplements, no testing, no conscious thought applied to their diet.
One of these clusters is young effective altruists whose top priority is not animal welfare (but nonetheless feel compelled to go vegan).
Those are my premises. Below are a few conclusions I draw from them. I originally didn’t plan on including a conclusion, but an early reader suggested my conclusions were milder than they expected and it might be good to share them. So:
People recruiting for veganism should take care to onboard people in a responsible way. This could be as simple as referring people to veganhealth.org frequently enough that they actually use it.
Recruiting means both organized efforts and informal encouragement of friends.
Diet issues are a live hypothesis suggested to vegans with health problems, especially vague, diagnosis-resistant ones.
This one isn’t vegan specific, although I do think it’s more relevant to them.
False claims about vegan nutrition should be proactively rejected by the vegan community, in both formal and informal settings, including implicit claims. This includes:
Explicit or implicit claims veganism is healthy for everyone, and that there is no one for whom it is not healthy.
Explicit or implicit claims veganism doesn’t involve trade-offs for many people.
Motte and baileys of “there is nothing magic about animal products, we can use technology to perfectly replace them” and “animal products have already been perfectly replaced and rendered unnecessary”.
My evidence
One is first principles. Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense. You can get a bit of all known nutrients from plants and fortified products, and you can find a vegan food that’s at least pretty good for every nutrient, but getting enough of all of them is a serious logic puzzle unless you have good genes. Short of medical issues it can be done, but for most people it will take some combination of more money, more planning, more work, and less joy from food.
“Short of medical issues” is burying the lede. Food allergies and digestion issues mean lots of people struggle to feed themselves even with animal products; giving up a valuable chunk of their remaining options comes at a huge cost.
[Of course some people have issues such that animal products are bad for them and giving them up is an improvement. Those raise veganism’s average health score but don’t cancel out the people who would suffer]
More empirically, there is this study from Faunalytics, which found 29% of ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians in their sample had nutritional issues, and 80% got better within three months of quitting. Their recorded attrition rate was 84%, so if you assume no current veg*ns have issues that implies a 24% of all current and former veg*ns develop health issues from the diet (19% if you only include issues meat products cured quickly). I’m really sad to only be giving you this one study, but most of the literature is terrible (see below).
The Faunalytics study has a fair number of limitations, which I went into more detail on here. My guess is that their number is a moderate underestimate of the real rate, and a severe underestimate of the value for naive vegans in particular, but 24% is high enough that I don’t think the difference matters so I’ll use that for the rest of the post.
Evidence I’m looking for
The ideal study is a longitudinal RCT where diet is randomly assigned, cost (across all dimensions, not just money) is held constant, and participants are studied over multiple years to track cumulative effects. I assume that doesn’t exist, but the closer we can get the better.
I’ve spent several hours looking for good studies on vegan nutrition, of which the only one that was even passable was the Faunalytics study. My search was by no means complete, but enough to spot some persistent flaws among multiple studies. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time checking citations made in support of vegan claims, only to find the study is either atrocious or doesn’t support the claim made (examples in the “This is a strawman…” section). There is also some history of goalpost moving, where an advocate cites a study, I criticize it, and they say it doesn’t matter and cite a new study. This is exhausting.
I ask that you only cite evidence you, personally, find compelling and are willing to stand by, and note its flaws in your initial citation. That doesn’t mean the study has to be perfect, that’s impossible, but you should know the flaws and be ready to explain why you still believe the study. If your belief rests on many studies instead of just one (a perfectly reasonable, nee admirable, state), please cite all of them. I am going to be pretty hard on people who link to seriously flawed studies without disclosing the flaws, or who retract citations without updating their own beliefs.
A non-exhaustive list of common flaws:
Studies rarely control for supplements. I’m tentatively on board with supplements being enough to get people back to at least the health level they had as an omnivore, but you can’t know their effect with recording usage and examining the impact.
I’ve yet to see a study that controlled for effort and money put into diet. If vegans are equally healthy but are spending twice as much time and money on food, that’s important to know.
Diet is self-selected rather than assigned. People who try veganism and stick with it are disproportionately likely to find it easy.
I don’t expect to find a study randomly assigning a long term vegan diet, but I will apply a discount factor to account for that.
Studies are snapshots rather than long-term, and so lose all of the information from people who tried veganism, found it too hard, and quit.
Finding a way around this is what earned Faunalytics my eternal gratitude.
Studies don’t mention including people with additional dietary challenges, which I think are a very big deal.
Veganism status is based on self-identification. Other studies show that self-identified vegans often eat enough meat to be nutritionally relevant.
Studies often combine veganism and vegetarianism, or only include vegetarians, but are cited as if they are about veganism alone. I think vegetarianism is nutritionally much closer to omnivorism than veganism, so this isn’t helpful.
All the usual problems: tiny samples, motivated researchers, bad statistics.
Some studies monitor dietary intake levels rather than internal levels of nutrients (as measured by tests on blood or other fluids). There are two problems with this:
Since RDA levels run quite high relative to average need, this is unfairly hard on vegan diets.
Nutrition labels aren’t always corrected for average bioavailability, and can’t be corrected for individual variation in digestion. Plant nutrients are on average less bioavailable (although I think there are broad exceptions, and certainly individuals vary on this), so that’s perhaps too easy on plant-based diets.
Most studies are done by motivated parties, and it’s too easy to manipulate those. I wouldn’t have trusted the Faunalytics study if it had come from a pro-meat source.
A non-exhaustive list of evidence I hope for:
Quantifying the costs (across all dimensions) of dietary changes, even if the study doesn’ control for them
AFAICT there is no large vegan culture- the closest is lacto-vegetarian with individuals choosing to aim higher, and cultures that can’t afford meat often. Evidence of cultures with true, lifelong veganism (excluding mother’s milk) would be very interesting.
Studies that in some way tracking people who quit veganism, such that it could detect health issues driving people to quit.
What happens to health when a very poor community earns enough to have access to occasional meat?
What happens when people from a lacto-vegetarian or meat-sparse culture move to a meat-loving one?
Studies on the impact of vegan nutritional education- how much if any does it improve outcomes?
What happens to people who are forced to give up animal products suddenly, for non-ethical reasons? I’m thinking of things like Alpha-gal Syndrome creating an immune response to red meat, adult onset lactose intolerance, or moving to a country that deemphasizes meat.
Ditto for the reverse.
I’m especially interested in people with dietary difficulties.
Studies comparing veganism and vegetarianism, especially in the same person.
Preemptive responses to counter-arguments
There are a few counter-arguments I’ve already gotten or expect to get shortly, so let me address them ahead of time.
“You’re singling out veganism”
Multiple people have suggested it’s wrong for me to focus on veganism. If I build enough trust and rapport with them they will often admit that veganism obviously involves some trade-offs, if only because any dietary change has trade-offs, but they think I’m unfairly singling veganism out.
First off, I’ve been writing about nutrition under this name since 2014. Earlier, if you count the pseudonymous livejournal. Italkaboutnon-vegannutritionallthetime. I wrote a short unrelated nutrition post while this one was in editing. I understand the mistake if you’re unfamiliar with my work, but I assure you this is not a hobby I picked up to annoy you.
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.
“The costs of misinformation are small relative to the benefits of animals”
One possible argument for downplaying or dismissing the costs of veganism is that factory farming is so bad anything is justified in stopping it. I’m open to that argument in the abstract, but empirically I think this isn’t working and animals would be better off if people were given proper information.
First, it’s not clear to me the costs of acknowledging vegan nutrition issues are that high. I’ve gotten a few dozen comments/emails/etc on my vegan nutrition project of the form “This inspired me to get tested, here are my supplements, here are my results”. No one has told me they’ve restarted consuming meat or even milk. It is possible people are less likely to volunteer diet changes, although I do note I’m not vegan.
But even if education causes many people to bounce off, the alternative may be worse.
That Faunalytics study says 24% of people leave veg*nism due to health reasons. If you use really naive math, that suggests that ignoring nutrition issues would need to increase recruitment by 33%, just to break even. But people who quit veganism due to health issues tend to do so with a vitriol not seen in people leaving for other reasons. I don’t have numbers for this, but r/exvegans is mostly people who left for health reasons (with a smattering of people compelled by parents), as are the ex-vegansangryenough to startblogs. Even if they don’t make a lifestyle out of it, people who feel harmed are less likely to retry veganism, and more likely to discourage their friends.
I made a toy model comparing the trade off of education (which may lead people to bounce off) vs. lack of education (which leads people to quit and discourage others). The result is very sensitive to assumptions, especially “how many counterfactual vegans do angry ex-vegans prevent?”. If you put the attrition rate as low as I do, education is clearly the best decision from an animal suffering perspective. If you put it higher it becomes very sensitive to other assumptions. It is fairly hard to make a slam-dunk case against nutritional awareness, but then, (points at years of nutrition blogging) I would say that.
“The human health gains are small relative to the harms to animals”
I think this is a fair argument to make, and the answer comes down to complicated math. To their credit, vegan EAs have done an enormous amount of math on the exact numeric suffering of farmed animals. But honest accounting requires looking at the costs as well.
“The health costs don’t matter, no benefit justifies the horror of farming animals”
This is a fair argument for veganism. But it’s not grounds to declare the health costs to be zero.
It’s also not grounds to ignore nutrition within a plant-based diet. Even if veganism is healthy for everyone and no harder a switch than other diets, it is very normal for dietary changes to entail trade-offs and have some upfront costs. The push to deny trade-offs and punish those who investigate them (see below) is hurting your own people.
“This is a strawman, vegans already address nutrition”
I fully acknowledge that there are a lot of resources on vegannutrition, and that a lot of the outreach literature at least name-checks dietary planning. But I talk to a lot of people (primarily young EAs focused on non-animal projects) with stories like this one, of people going vegan as a group without remembering a single mention of B12 or iron. I would consider that a serious problem even if I couldn’t point to anything the movement was doing to cause it.
But I absolutely can point to things within the movement that create the problem. There are some outright lies, and a lot more well-crafted sentences that are technically correct but in aggregate leave people with deeply misleading impressions.
While reading, please keep in mind that these are formal statements by respected vegans and animal protection organizationss (to the best of my ability to determine). All movements have idiots saying horrible things on reddit, and it’s not fair to judge the whole movement by them. But please keep that context in mind while reading: these were not off-the-cuff statements or quick tweets, but things a movement leader thought about and wrote down.
There are numerous sources talking about the health benefits of veganism. Very few of them explicitly say “and this will definitely happen with no additional work from you, without any costs or trade-offs”, but some do, and many imply it.
Magnus Vindling, who has published 9 books and co-founded the Center for Reducing Suffering, says :”Beyond the environmental effects, there are also significant health risks associated with the direct consumption of animal products, including redmeat, chickenmeat, fishmeat, eggs and dairy. Conversely, significant health benefits are associated with alternative sources of protein, such as beans, nuts, and seeds. This is relevant both collectively, for the sake of not supporting industries that activelypromote poor human nutrition in general, as well as individually, to maximize one’s own health so one can be more effectively altruistic.”
This Facebook post from Jacy Reese Anthis, saying vegan dogs and cats can be perfectly healthy. Jacy was a leader among animal EAs until he left for unrelated reasons in 2019. He cites two sources, one of which supports only a subset of his claims, and the other of which actively contradicts them.
Apologies for the tiny image, WordPress is awful. If you right-click>open in new tab it will load a larger version.
His first source does say veganism can work, in dogs, but says nothing about cats.
His second source cites one person who says her cat is fine on a vegan diet but she doesn’t tell vets about it. The veterinarians quoted say dogs can be vegetarian and even vegan with some work. The statement on cats is ambiguous: it might be condemning only vegan diets, or both vegan and vegetarian. It rules out even vegetarian diets for young or breeding animals.
The piece ends with “When people tell me they want to feed [their pet] a vegan diet, I say, ‘Get a goat, get a rabbit”.
Normally I would consider a 7 year old Facebook off-limits, but Jacy has a blue check and spent years doing very aggressive vegan advocacy on other peoples’ walls, most of which he has since deleted, so I think this is fair game.
There is a related problem of motte-and-baileying “one day we will be able to have no-trade-off vegan diets, thanks to emerging technologies” and “it’s currently possible with no trade offs right this second”, e.g.: “Repudiating what “obligate carnivore” means – Kindly, but stridently, we have to correct folks that obligate carnivore stems from observation, not a diet requirement. This outdated thinking ignores the fundamental understanding of biochemistry, nutrition, and metabolism, which has only developed since the initial carnivore classification.”
In Doing Good Better, EA leader Will MacAskill advocates for a vegan diet to alleviate animal suffering, without mentioning any trade-offs. In isolation I don’t think that would necessarily be the wrong choice; the book is clearly about moral philosophy and not a how-to guide. But it is pushing individuals to change their personal diet (as opposed to donating to vegan recruitment programs), so I think it should at least mention trade-offs.
Apologies for the tiny image, WordPress is awful. If you right-click>open in new tab it will load a larger version.
Animal-ethics.org name-checks “a balanced diet” but the vibe is strongly “veganism is extra health with no effort”:
“According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a well-planned vegan diet is nutritionally adequate and appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.1 Everyone should have a balanced diet to be healthy, not only vegans. In fact non-vegans may well have unbalanced diets which are not good for their health. In order to be healthy we don’t need to consume certain products, but certain nutrients. Vegans can ingest those nutrients without having to eat animal products.”
“Being vegan is easier than you may think. Finding vegan food and other alternative products and services that do not involve animal exploitation is increasingly easier. It is true that some people may experience a lack of support from their family or friends or may find it extra challenging to stop eating certain animal products. However, other people can help you with that, especially today, given that internet and social networks have made it possible to get information and help from many other people. It is important to identify the factors that may be hindering your transition to veganism and look for assistance and encouragement from other people.”
“Do I need to consult a doctor or nutritionist before becoming vegan? While this can be useful, as in the case of a planned non-vegan diet, it is not necessary. A vegan diet is suitable for people of all ages and conditions. A vegan nutritionist may help plan custom menus to meet specific requirements – for instance, if you are an athlete or if you want to gain or lose a lot of weight as a vegan. It is always advised to consult a nutritionist regularly for a check-up. However, it is important to note that some nutritionists are biased and don’t know a lot about vegan nutrition. Note also that medical doctors are often not experts on nutrition.”
EA-Foundation says veganism requires “appropriate planning”, but that this is easy
That Faunalytics vegan study, which I mostly loved, contains the following: “Former vegetarians/vegans were asked if they began to experience any of the following when they were eating a vegetarian/vegan diet: depression/anxiety, digestive problems, food allergies, low cholesterol, an eating disorder, thyroid problems, protein deficiency, B12 deficiency, calcium deficiency, iron deficiency, iodine deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, zinc deficiency. The findings show that: – 71% of former vegetarians/vegans experienced none of the above. It is quite noteworthy that such a small proportion of individuals experienced ill health.”
29% isn’t small. You can argue that’s an overestimate, but they’re accepting the 29% number, and are saying it doesn’t matter.
Why is this so hard to talk about?
This is probably the least important section. I’m including it mostly in the hope it lowers friction in the object-level conversation.
The stakes are so high
Hardcore vegan advocates believe we are surrounded by mass torture and slaughter facilities killing thousands of beings every day. That’s the kind of crisis that makes it hard to do really nuanced math people may use to justify ignoring you.
People who find veganism easier are disproportionately likely to become and stay vegan. That’s what the word “easy” means. Then some of them assume their experiences are more representative than they are, and that people who report more difficulty are lying.
E.g. this comment on an earlier post (not even by a vegan- he was a vegan’s partner) said “there is nothing special one needs to do to stay healthy [while eating vegan]” because “most processed products like oat milk, soy milk, impossible meat, beyond meat, daiya cheese are enriched with whatever supplements are needed”. Which I would describe as “all you need to do to stay healthy while vegan is eat fortified products”. That’s indeed pretty easy, and some people will do it without thinking. But it’s not nothing, especially when “no processed foods” is such a common restriction. Sure enough, Faunalytics found that veg*ns who quit were less likely (relative to current veg*ns) to eat fortified foods.
That same person later left another comment, conceding this point and also that there were people the fortified foods didn’t work for. Which is great, but it belonged in the first comment.
Or this commenter, who couldn’t imagine a naive vegan until an ex-vegan described the total ignorance they and their entire college EA group operated under.
Lies we tell omnivores
Ozy Brennan has a post “Lies to cis people”. They posit that trans advocates, faced with a hostile public, give a story of gender that is simplified (because most people won’t hear the nuance anyway), and prioritizes being treated well over conveying the most possible truth. The intention is that an actual trans person or deeply invested ally will go deeper into the culture and get a more nuanced view. This can lead to some conflict when a person tries to explore gender with only the official literature as their guide.
Similarly, “veganism requires no sacrifice on any front, for anyone” is a lie vegans tell current omnivores. I suspect the expectation, perhaps subconscious, is that once they convert to veganism they’ll hang around other vegans and pick up some recipes, know what tests to get, and hear recommendations for vegan vitamins without doing anything deliberately. The longer sentence would be “for most people veganism requires no sacrifice beyond occasional tests and vitamins, which is really not much work at all”.
But this screws over new vegans who don’t end up in those subcultures. It’s especially bad if they’re surrounded by enough other vegans that it feels like they should get the knowledge, but the transmission was somehow cut off. I think this has happened with x-risk focused EA vegans, and two friends described a similar phenomenon in the straight-edge punk scene.
Failure to hear distinctions, on both sides
I imagine many people do overestimate the sacrifice involved in becoming vegan. The tradeoff is often less than they think, especially once they get over the initial hump. If omnivores are literally unable to hear “well yes, but for most people only a bit”, it’s very tempting to tell them “not at all”. But this can lead even the average person to do less work than they should, and leaves vegans unable to recognize people for whom plant based diets are genuinely very difficult, if not impossible.
Conclusion
I think veganism comes with trade-offs, health is one of the axes, and that the health issues are often but not always solvable. This is orthogonal to the moral issue of animal suffering. If I’m right, animal EAs need to change their messaging around vegan diets, and start self-policing misinformation. If I’m wrong, I need to write some retractions and/or shut the hell up.
Discussions like this are really hard, and have gone poorly in the past. But I’m still hopeful, because animal EAs have exemplified some of the best parts of effective altruism, like taking weird ideas seriously, moral math, and checking to see if a program actually worked. I want that same epistemic rigor applied to nutrition, and I’m hopeful about what will happen if it is.
Thanks to Patrick La Victoire and Raymond Arnold for long discussions and beta-reading, and Sam Cotrell for research assistance.
I’ve been looking for data on nutrition-related health problems in vegans, and it has been hard going. By far the best I’ve found has been this 2014 survey from Faunalytics (a data science org focused on animal protection), which finds 29% of ex-vegans + vegetarians had health issues plausibly traced to veganism, but that study is still missing several factors I care about. I made up a model to see how those factors might affect the answer, and found the answer was “moderately, but not enough to change anyone’s plans”.
This is mostly intended for me to reference later, I expect most people to skip it.
I want to give Faunalytics a lot of credit here. They used a professional survey provider to poll a large number of people (11,399, although most of them wasted as they had never been veg*n), and AFAICT the survey was well designed for their goals. They were extremely forthcoming in sharing their raw data and provided some assistance in interpretation (although ultimately not enough to make it usable for me 😞 ).
But even though they are the best I’ve found, the data is still pretty limited (~1100 ex-veg*ns), and the questions weren’t optimized for my inquiry. I dislike that they combined vegans and vegetarians into a single category (which I label veg*nism here), but I think that was a very understandable combination of sample size issues and the fact that very few vegans don’t pass through vegetarianism. I can’t pull data out of thin air, but I can at least use guesstimate to get a range of how those factors might affect the answer. So I made a model that linearly applied a number of factors I think are important. This is really crude, and some of the factors shouldn’t be linear, but it was a place to start.
This is pretty informal. You could easily argue I missed important factors, or assigned the ones I made up the wrong value. I encourage you to make that argument in comments, or play with the model yourself.
We’ll start with Faunalytics’ (page 6) raw number, which showed 29% of ex-veg*ns reported coming down with a problem plausibly attributed to their diet.
But I care about all veg*ns, not just those who quit. In this sample, 16% of people who had ever tried veg*nism were still at it. You could assume that set have never had health problems, or they would eventually hit the same 30%, or somewhere in between. Faunalytics showed current veg*ns tend to have been on the diet longer than the average time-to-quit of ex-veg*ns, and have better nutrition and supplementation, so “the same amount” seems much too high. I set it to 0 to 20% (log-normal distribution – so biased towards the low end).
[This still focuses on the number of self-identified vegans, not vegan-months or total animal products consumed over time, but that’s an even bigger can of worms]
How do we know diet was to blame for health issues? One easy way is to look at the percentage of people who got better when they resumed eating meat, which Faunalytics reports to be 80% improved within 3 months: I assume all of those were caused by veg*n diet. What about people still impaired after 3 months of resuming consumption of animal products? Probably some will get better later, some will never improve but the problem was still caused by veg*n diet, some have a problem veg*nism didn’t cause but will make worse (e.g. they developed a nut allergy and it made veg*nism too hard) and some have a completely unrelated problem that they are misattributing to veg*n diet. I guessed the diet-related proportion was 5-50% (of the 20% not responding in three months), with a normal distribution (so biased towards the average of that range).
Health is the most sympathetic reason to quit veg*nism, so we should expect people to overreport it. Except that the percentage of people who described themselves as quitting over health reasons (26%) was smaller than the percent who reported at least one health issue easily caused by veg*nism (29%), although higher than percent of people who developed those issues and then recovered within 3 months of resuming meat consumption (23%). I estimated the percentage of reported-health issues that were fake as 0-50%, with log-normal distribution.
Survey organizers tend to get the results they want, and Faunalytics is an animal protection org. They outsourced the actual survey administration, which is helpful but not a total fix. I guessed that they biased results 0-50% too low, with a log-normal distribution.
I am most interested in people practicing a veg*n diet naively (meaning: they did zero research and thought into nutrition), but that 29% includes all knowledge and effort levels (although in practice current veg*ns were more likely to be eating well). I added a factor for “if naive”, and guessed the size of the impact if *everyone* was naive was between 0 and 100% (meaning, no-effect to double effect – 100% isn’t the top of the scale here), with a log-normal distribution.
People often identify as veg*n while consuming animal products, which improves their nutrition. The first study I found said 50% of vegetarians admitted to eating meat while identifying as vegetarian – but that included people who ate meat even once, which isn’t necessarily enough to matter nutritionally. On the other hand, this is the kind of thing people are likely to underreport. I added a multiplier for that and guessed it to be an additional 10%-50%, with a log-normal distribution.
Not all issues caused by veg*nsim get diagnosed or properly traced to diet. I added a multiplier for that, +10% to 40%, with a log-normal distribution.
If you combine all my wild-ass guesses, you get…. 37% (0%-56%) of veg*ns eventually developing health issues from their diet. That’s already higher than Faunalytics’ 29%, but remember my denominator includes current veg*ns and theirs doesn’t. The comparable number, looking only at people who quit and assuming everyone who develops health issues quit over them, is 44%,which is 65% higher than Faunanalytic’s estimate.
I’m especially interested in vegans (but not vegetarians) who enter the diet naively. I made up numbers for these as well, and ultimately got 95% (17%-100%) of naive vegans developing health issues. I know too many healthy (so far) naive vegans for that to seem right, so I changed my assumptions and got it down to 56% (3%-88%), which seems plausible if you use a strict definition of naive.
What does this mean? Primarily that I feel better about my intuition that Faunalytics is underestimating the extent of the problem, but because I already considered 30% a big deal there’s no qualitative shift in how I think about it. If you have different intuitions, you test out them out in guesstimate.
I’ve talked previously about my concerns with nutritional deficiencies in effective altruists who go vegan for ethical reasons, especially those who don’t have a lot of contact with the broader vegan culture. No one else seemed very concerned, so I launched a tiny project to test people in this group and see if they were in fact deficient. This is a report on the latest phase of the project.
To cut to the chase:
It was very easy to find lots of deficiencies, although due to a severely heterogenous sample and lack of a control group this doesn’t provide useful information about if veganism is at fault.
Finding these deficiencies probably leads to useful treatment, but not as much as I’d hoped.
There are still a lot of operational issues to work out. My guess is that the ideal would require more work (to encourage participants to act on their results) or less (by focusing on education but not providing testing).
I am currently looking for a co-founder to properly investigate the impact of veganism on nutrition.
My main question here was “is there low-hanging fruit in treating nutritional deficiencies in this group, and if so how do we pluck it?” An important part of that is “how prevalent are deficiencies?”, but I had substantially more uncertainty around “do people treat deficiencies you find?” and “does the treatment lead to improvements in anything we actually care about?” That prioritization (and budget issues) led the experimental design to focus on operational issues and outcomes, and deprioritized getting the kind of clean data that would let me compare vegan and non-vegan outcomes. Similarly this write-up is mostly focused on showing the problem exists at all and building metis of investigation and treatment, rather than estimating prevalence.
Which is to say to to everyone planning on @ing me to complain about the sample size, heterogeneity, or mediocre statistics: you are right that this sample is not very informative about base rates of deficiencies in vegans or anyone else. If someone claimed it was, they would be committing an epistemic sin. However, this particular post is focused on “how much effort is it to get nutritional issues addressed, and is that effort worth it?”. Given that, any complaints about the terrible sampling will be considered to be offers of assistance in running the much larger study that could answer the prevalence question.
Background
(if you’ve read the previousposts, this will be review)
Last year I worked in a co-working space focused on existential risks, which is anything that might really end everything. Because x-risk is a popular topic within the effective altruism movement, many participants in the space were EAs. Another big topic within effective altruism is animal suffering, especially farmed animal suffering. This has led many EAs in the office to go vegan or at least vegetarian for ethical reasons, without making animals the focus of their lives. And when I asked them, many had put no thought into how to give up animal products in a healthy way.
Which of course would have been fine if they were eating well. My personal opinion is that most people’s optimal diet contains small amounts of animal products, but lots of people are eating suboptimally for lots of reasons and I don’t consider it my problem. But the number of fatigue and concentration issues were… I don’t actually know if they were high. I don’t know what baseline to compare them to. But it wasn’t low enough to reassure me. Neither did the way the vegans talked about nutrition, and in particular the fact that more than one person was doing keto vegan and still wasn’t investigating nutrition.
None of this meant there was necessarily a problem, but I was suspicious. So I got a small grant to solve this with numbers.
First I tried broad spectrum testing, which led me to identify iron deficiency as the main concern.
Then I did a short investigation into the actual costs of iron deficiency, which motivated a number of people to get tested, some of whom got in touch after the fact.
In my last post I implied I was stopping the project, and wrote next steps as if someone else would be doing them. I ended up getting a follow on grant so pushed forward with round two on my own, which is what this post is about.
Round 2 concrete steps
I followed the steps laid out in my previous post almost exactly.
I brought in a company to draw blood from participants in the Lightcone office. This was expensive, probably 2-4x having people buy lab orders online, which is still more expensive than doctor-ordered tests with insurance.
I say I brought them in – I in fact hired someone to handle the company and interface with participants. Aaron Silverbook was great, pretty much best case scenario for hiring a subcontractor, although still not as good as an invested co-founder.
Based on previous results and nutritional folk wisdom my test priorities were ferritin (the best proxy for iron), B12, and Vitamin D. I threw in some other iron tests because they were very cheap.
We had applicants fill out a form detailing their diet and any fatigue issues.
Aaron picked 20 participants and made a schedule for testing them. Prioritization was: Fatigue issues > vegan > vegetarian > whoever happened to be in the office that day.
This was my favorite part of having a contractor because scheduling involved some very intense math around prioritization and availability and from my perspective it was no work at all.
Prioritizing people with fatigue issues probably made the immediate impact higher, and was useful for estimating the upper bound of possible impact, but ruined the sample for calculating base rates. It means I can’t really compare vegans vs. omnivores, because both were selected for having potentially-nutrition-caused problems. I had hoped to maybe compare vegans with fatigue to omnivores with fatigue, because the tired vegans had more nutritional issues that would be pretty suggestive, but ultimately didn’t have enough data to bother.
I flat out didn’t have enough money to do a good study capable of establishing high confidence prevalence rates, even if that had been my primary goal. Putting aside sample size, good sampling requires getting representative participants, many of whom have no reason to get tested. They’re not intrinsically motivated, so you have to pay them to get tested.
The company comes into the office. There are a bunch of day-of headaches that Aaron handles beautifully and I am completely uninvolved with because he is good at his job.
Results go out. Some participants received results over email, some were told to go to the company’s portal, some may never have gotten a notification at all. More on this in the Difficulties section.
I ask Aaron to get results from participants to me, for analysis. This goes less well- I wasn’t sufficiently clear on what information I wanted in the form, and he’s gotten busy with other stuff and had less time to devote to my project, which has already gone longer than anticipated due to issues with the lab. Response rate is poor- we eventually get 13 people out of 20.
I send out a second form asking for more information, and a bunch of emails harassing people to do both forms. Response rate continues to be poor, only 8 people this time.
3 months after testing I followed up with the people with the worst scores to see if they had gotten treatment.
Project Difficulties
Other People’s Fault
I cannot say enough bad things about BayAreaPLS, the company we hired to come into the office and do testing.
First and most importantly, they just forgot to run the ferritin test for half the participants. They did the other tests, there was no reason to not do that one in particular, they just… didn’t. Their initial attempt to make up for this was an offer to not charge me for tests they didn’t do. I pushed back fairly hard and they agreed to some actual discounting. It’s been 2.5 months and they have yet to send me that follow-up invoice, which I guess is technically good for me but makes me feel worse overall.
Second, the results were hard to retrieve. Some participants never got results at all even after following the instructions, and I have no way to debug whose fault that is. Others didn’t bother to retrieve results because it was too hard. The happiest people were the ones who got their results over email, which is a HIPAA violation the company claims to have done by accident. Much like the lack of the second invoice, the emailed results are technically good for me but leave me more concerned about the company.
Even for people who did get results it took almost two weeks, which was not great for momentum.
Lastly the company used different deficiency thresholds for different people. They say this was based on sex and age, but they didn’t get that information from everyone (sounds like incompetence on their part), so some people got a list of thresholds. It ended up creating a moderate amount of confusion and friction, especially because I couldn’t tell what variation came from age/sex (which I mostly want to ignore) vs. the norms of a particular test (which I very much don’t). People are slow to act on results in general so the additional friction was quite costly.
My Fault or Inherent Difficulties
Not all of these were literally caused by me, but they all fall under “my responsibility to anticipate and handle”.
I mentioned in my last post that some participants were kind of insistent on getting a lot of help from me, even after I explicitly told them something was outside my bailiwick and needed a doctor. I tried to fix that this time by hiring Aaron. That worked on that one issue, but made it harder to catch new problems. If the plan had been for people to directly show me their results and receive coaching I would have caught the missing test values much earlier. I’m not sure there is a way to have someone available enough to get all the relevant questions from participants without also having to deal with a bunch of irrelevant ones, including inappropriately persistent ones. The difference between the two just isn’t obvious with the knowledge most participants have, and emotions run so high around health stuff.
It’s hard to estimate the rate of acting on results because the people who don’t act are less likely to fill out the follow-up surveys, but my sense is it’s not good, and probably <50%. I also strongly suspect the rate of acting on results would have been higher if there had been in-person follow-up.
The guidelines I sent participants emphasized vitamin D and ferritin because it didn’t occur to me anyone could see an anemia result on the page and not rush to treat it, but at least two people scored as anemic and, as of three months later, had not treated it.
The lab obeyed HIPAA enough to only send results to participants, not directly to me, so I needed participants to forward them. Of 20 participants, 13 did so. Only 8 participated in the separate follow-up questionnaire (arguably my fault for asking for two separate forms, but there was good reason to ask for results quickly and do the follow-up a little later). 20 people with varying motivations for testing was never going to be strong evidence for anything systemic, but the low response rate makes it even harder to draw conclusions.
My emails to participants sometimes went to spam, possibly due to use of BCC, which was necessary to meet the privacy commitments I made in the application.
What were the total costs?
As a ballpark:
~$270 per participant (if they had done all the tests for everyone).
0.5 hours per participant, including follow-up and the disruption to their schedule. If you want to be really conservative you could call this an hour to account for the disruption from transitions.
~10 hours of Aaron’s time
~20 hours of my time
$30 per deficient person for supplements (not covered by the study)
If you value everyone’s time roughly the same, that means that to break even we need to save one person 30 hours + ~$5700 (ignoring the information gained).
If you want to complicate that math you can add any of: discount rate on time or money, exchange rate between ops time/my time/participant time, cost of unnecessary or counterproductive treatment, knowledge gained from this round can make the next round cheaper, the fact that most of my time went to a write-up that shouldn’t really be billed to participants, but a better program would have spent more time with participants.
Results and Benefits
Test Results
I should remind you here that the sample was a mix of 20 ethical EA vegans, vegetarians, people with fatigue issues, and people who happened to be in the office. Even a very large sample wouldn’t be perfectly predictive unless you had the exact same mix of participant types, and this sample was tiny. So the right way to look at these results is “is this enough to think there’s a problem?” and “did people do helpful things with the information?” not “at what exact rate does this population develop ferritin issues?”
With those caveats, here is the data from participants that reported back. I have ferritin results for 8 people and all other results for 13.
85% reported energy problems
15% were honest-to-god anemic
65% had low ferritin (30% clinically deficient) (none of the anemic people had ferritin tests done, so there is no overlap between this group and the anemics. There were non-anemic people without ferritin tests, so I assume this is a coincidence)
60% had low vitamin D (15% clinically deficient)
A total of 80% had low scores in at least one of hemoglobin, ferritin, or vitamin D
0% had low B12 (many were on supplements, but I haven’t correlated that with serum B12 levels because at this sample size and heterogeneity there is no point)
Some of the non-reporting was random due to the lab’s incompetence, but it’s not impossible unhealthy participants were more likely to report back. If you want to be extremely conservative and assume every missing value was A+ healthy, the results are still quite concerning:
10% anemic
25% low-in-my-opinion ferritin, 10% clinically deficient (still no overlap with the anemics)
I Lead This Horse To Water – You Won’t Believe What Happened Next
But finding results isn’t very meaningful if no one acts on them. Of the 8 people who filled out the follow-up survey, 75% changed either diet or supplements, and 1 additional person kept going with supplements they would otherwise have dropped. I assume this is overreporting because people who changed things are more likely to respond, but if you assume none of the nonresponders did anything that’s still 30% of people changing something.
Of the 5 who changed something and answered the relevant question, 40% said they thought they saw an improvement (~1 month after they received results). I don’t consider that particularly strong evidence in either direction- it can take time for deficiencies to heal, but it’s also easy to placebo yourself into seeing an improvement that isn’t there. The real test will be the six-month follow-up.
Three months after testing I followed up with the two identified anemics to make sure they were getting treatment. Neither was, despite having health issues plausibly caused by anemia. They’ve both indicated vague plans to follow up now that I’ve pushed them on it.
Is in-office testing worth it?
I believe this round of testing was better than not doing in-office testing, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
My absolute wild-ass-guess is that this saved between one and ten people (out of twenty participants) from anemia or a moderate iron deficiency, and this improved their life and productivity by 10% to 100% (mean around 20%). I acknowledge these are large ranges, but some problems are bigger than other problems. I’m ignoring vitamin D entirely here because I haven’t even attempted to quantify its value and its ardent fanclub has poisoned the literature.
Even in the worst case, a 5% chance at a 10% improvement is a big deal, so I think this was obviously worth it from a participant perspective. I think it’s a toss-up if it would be worth it for apparently healthy omnivores: my expected value for them is much lower, but people don’t always realize they’re operating at a deficit and catching them requires testing actually-healthy people as well.
I said above that we needed to save someone 30 hours + $6000 for the project to break even. Even one successfully treated anemic will blow that out of the water, so I don’t feel the need to do the more complicated math with discount rates and relative value of time, especially because any future round should either be less work or have a higher response rate.
Of course “break even” isn’t a very high bar. To go even further out on a limb: the median case of mild anemia easily costs someone two hours/day (source: had anemia one time). This testing easily caught the anemia at least six months before it would otherwise have been caught (because everyone who was going to get tested on their own did so when I published my iron post). That is, at a bare minimum, 360 hours someone otherwise wouldn’t have had. That’s a pretty great return rate for 40 hours (my time + Aaron’s time + participant time) +$6000.
Was the project overall worth it?
I would bet on yes, although a lot of information has yet to come in.
I expect this project to have 6 lasting impacts:
The treated health problems of participants.
The secondary impact via participants’ work.
Public blog posts I write. My iron deficiency post, which motivated many people to get tested themselves, quite possibly more than received tests directly.
Knowledge of how to do this more in the future.
Influence on Effective Altruism vegan culture.
Animal suffering averted by making veganism more sustainable for participants.
#1 is what I calculated above, and think was already a sound success although not resounding.
#2 and #3 require making assessments of all individuals who received testing from the project or due to blog posts I wrote. That’s a combination of “vast amounts of missing information” and “judging individual merit” that makes it really uncomfortable to talk about in a public post.
To be totally honest I’m on an “everything is bullshit” kick right now so deep in my soul I don’t think this paid off, but intellectually I think my standards are too high and this was a better project than average project in the space of existential risk.
#4 and #5 depend on other people following up on this project. I absolutely believe they should, for all the other reasons but also because the return via #6 seems pretty good- health reasons are a common reason vegans go back to eating meat [It was hard to find a good source, but this shitty source says 26%. I’ll acknowledge that’s probably an overestimate, since health is the most virtuous reason to go back to eating meat.]
I can’t estimate #6 myself. I’m not familiar enough with vegan literature to sort good from bad here, and it wasn’t my main goal.
Then there are costs. The total grant was for a little less than $25k. I didn’t track my time very closely to avoid depressing myself, but my compensation is going to work out to a fraction of my normal hourly rate. If you count foregone client work you could argue the true cost was as high as $50k.
My gut feeling is the project was straightforwardly worth it if you don’t track the foregone work. If you do, impact is dependent on having at least one of:
At least one of the impaired and successfully treated participants goes on to do high-impact work.
The iron post inspires at least 40 tests total, with a similar rate of finding and treating problems.
Follow-up projects exist and do good work.
This work leads to more veganism, and you value that a lot.
So can we blame veganism for the deficiencies?
This study doesn’t say anything one way or the other, which means I still think yes but you shouldn’t change your opinion based on the results. The sample is too small and skewed to compare deficiency rates in vegans and nonvegans. There were energetic omnivores with deficiencies and tired vegans with perfect scores so it’s clearly not deterministic.
Next steps
I see three possible follow ups to this project:
Nutrition blogging
This is my default, although I don’t plan on writing many of these because there is only so much low hanging fruit and people have a very limited attention budget. I have to be very judicious in what I suggest.
Mass testing to investigate deficiencies in effective altruism populations
Get the money to test a large enough representative sample, and run the tests with a proper control to actually estimate the cost of nutritional veganism.
This is most useful if there are EA vegan leaders who won’t act on nutritional concerns now but would if the study demonstrated a problem. If this is you, I would love to talk to you about what you would consider sufficient to act on.
Assuming the demand for this information is there, I still don’t think I want to run this project alone. First, it is a lot of work. Second…I know I said “assuming demand is there”, but I can’t picture a scenario where demand exists but no animal EAs consider this project worth working on. A collaborator would be both proof of investment and much better positioned than I am to get the information acted on.
To that end, here is an ad for a co-founder. I will post it on this blog in a few days.
In office testing with real nutritional counseling
This can work, but only in a limited number of situations. You need a reason (uninformed veganism, high fatigue rates) to suspect nutritional issues in lots of people sharing a space. There needs to be a reason people aren’t getting tested themselves that won’t also inhibit follow up (probably lack of money and existing relationship with a doctor). And even then it’s more of a hits-based model than a sure thing.
My decision is easy because the office I was working out of closed, and in general I think most of the people in the bay area I would want to help have already been reached. The market is saturated for at least a year. There are other offices elsewhere in the world, and if you want to run this yourself I’m happy to act in an advisory capacity (especially if you share data), but it can’t really be an ongoing project in any one city.
Conclusion
I finished most of this post planning on it being the end of my part of the project. I had hopes I would convince someone else to pick up the torch, and maybe even act as an advisor, but it seemed like the biggest problem was participant motivation, which I don’t feel equipped to solve. It was while I was writing this that I realized I wasn’t ready to let the broader issue of vegan nutrition go. I still believe the problem that offended my morals and epistemics is there and worth acting on.
But doing so is still very annoying, which is why I’m looking for someone to partner with on this. Someone who can handle the parts I’m bad at, point out where I’m wrong, and interface with the vegan EA community to get the results acted upon. If you’re interested, please reach out to elizabeth@acesounderglass.com.
Thank you to the Survival and Flourishg Fund for funding this research, and Lightcone Infrastructure for hosting the grant and testing. I inflicted this draft on a number of people but want to especially thank Gavin Bishop. Daniel Filan didn’t beta read this post but he did vegan-check my co-founder ad and suggest the title “I Lead This Horse To Water – You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”.
Reducing consumption of animal products is a choice with both moral and practical consequences. Last summer I found myself in contact with many vegans who cared a lot about the moral consequences, but had put little effort into learning about or managing the practical consideration of removing animal products from their diet. I’ve suffered a lot due to bad nutrition, so this made me very concerned. With a grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, I launched small a pilot project to give nutritional tests to 5 vegans and near-vegans from the Lightcone Office, which they could use to choose supplements that would hopefully improve their health.
My long-term goal was for everyone to have accurate information on their personal nutritional costs of veganism and make informed choices about how to handle them, with the first line solution being supplements. My goal for the pilot was to work out practical issues in testing, narrow the confidence interval on potential impact, and improve the nutrition of the handful of people. This report is on phase 1: getting the testing done and supplements started. It is aimed at people who might want to run a similar program at scale; if you are interested in running this for yourself I recommend checking out Tuesday’s post on iron deficiency.
Tl;dr: I found rampant iron deficiencies, validating the overall concern. The procedure I used has a lot of room for improvement.
The Experiment
I gave nutrition tests to 6 people in the Lightcone office.
The ideal subject was completely vegan, had never put any effort or thought into their diet, and was extremely motivated to take a test and implement changes. This person does not volunteer for studies, so I ended up with 4 vegans or near-vegans who had put somewhere between 0 and a lot of thought into their diet, 1 vegetarian, and 1 extremely motivated omnivore I used to test out the process. In addition, one hardcore vegan contributed results from private testing. I did not poll the ~vegans on their exact diets.
Unless otherwise stated the results exclude the omnivore.
I gave each of these six people a Genova Metabolomix+ test, ordered from walkinlabs.com, with the iron add-on. This test was selected for being recommended by doctors I trust (in part because they prefer urine to blood testing), having extremely easy-to-read results, being nearly comprehensive (with the unfortunate absence of vitamin D), and because I hoped urine collection at home would be easier than blood draws at a lab. Foreshadowing: I was wrong about that last part.
I also gave people the option of an add-on to determine what variant of the MTHFR gene they have. MTHFR can affect how one processes certain B vitamins, and certain variants can necessitate a more expensive form of supplements.
Several people (although not everyone) scored with undetectably low iron. I offered them follow-up blood tests, which one person accepted. An additional vegan contributed blood test results without urine results.
As of publication all subjects have received their first round of results and started supplements of their choosing.
The original plan was to retest in 3-6 months after people began supplements, using the same urine tests.
My initial predictions
I expected the big shortages to be B12, iron, and vitamin D, the first of which has very few* natural vegan sources and the latter two of which are scarce, although not absent, in vegan sources. This makes it pretty unfortunate the original test did not include vitamin D.
[*B12 is naturally found in some (but not all) seaweeds and algaes, in at least one kind of mushroom, and in nutritional yeast. It’s also added to many wheat products in the US, so if you eat enough wheat and aren’t going out of your way to get unfortified wheat that’s a strong source]
Relative to the mainstream I wasn’t very concerned about protein consumption. Vegan proteins are a little less abundant, a little harder to digest, and have a less ideal distribution of amino acids, but are basically fine as long as you don’t pile on additional constraints.
One reason I was concerned was that lots of people I polled were piling on additional constraints, like keto or gluten-free, and still not doing anything to manage nutrition. I expected a smattering of deficiencies from these people, and to a lesser extent from everyone, as their restrictions and tastes cut off random nutrients. These could have been in any almost nutrient.
I expected everyone to be fine on vitamin C because it is abundant in both produce and processed food (where it’s used as a preservative).
Results
(including only vegans and near-vegans)
¾ vegan testers had severe iron deficiencies in their urine tests.
The one who didn’t had both a stunning dietary intake of iron, and a parent who 23andMe believes to have a genetic predisposition to excessive absorption of iron.
An additional vegetarian tester was not deficient.
One of these retested with a blood test and scored low normal (~30). However this person was already taking iron supplements at the time of the test.
A bonus blood-only participant tested between 13 and 20, meaning they’d be considered deficient by some standards but not others.
There were no B12 deficiencies, probably because everyone was already on B12 supplements.
One tester had a lot of deficiencies, including vitamin C, to the point I suspect it’s a problem with digestion rather than diet.
Everyone had at least one amino acid deficiency, including the person eating over 100g of protein/day. I don’t know how big a deal this actually is.
The urine test did not include vitamin D. Of the 2 blood tests, both had low-normal vitamin D.
Excluding the person with across-the-board deficiencies, there were scattered other deficiencies but nothing else to consistently worry about. People were mostly in their tests’ green zone, with occasional yellow and red.
What does this mean?
Only one near-vegan out of 5 had solidly good ferritin levels. As I discuss here, that’s a very big deal, potentially costing them half a standard deviation on multiple cognitive metrics.
There’s no control group, so I can’t prove that this is a veganism problem. But I’m quite suspicious.
There were no other consistent problems, so broad-spectrum testing is probably overkill for people with no known problems.
Retrospective on the project
What worked
I consider the core loop of the study as vindicated as can it be at this stage.
Deficiencies were identified, and the primary one was one of the three I predicted.
And another of the three, B12, was probably absent because people treated it preemptively. Note that people were inconsistent in what they took so I can’t say definitively what they were on during testing.
In the counterfactual timeline the shortages were probably identified much later if at all. No one who participated had any plans for testing, including people with obvious symptoms and people whose doctors had previously recommended testing.
This will be less impressive if supplementation doesn’t turn out to fix anything, but it’s an extremely solid start.
Other things that went well:
Having the room in my budget for unplanned additional testing, so I could add in serum iron tests when it became obvious they were necessary.
Creating a shopping list with links. I was worried this was somehow taking advantage of people (since I used affiliate links), but removing a decision and several steps from the ordering process seems to have been pretty crucial.
Bypassing the need for doctors’ visits to get a test. Given how long it took people to order tests I think doctors’ appointments would have killed the project entirely.
The Lightcone ops team was extremely cooperative and got all of the vitamins I suggested into the office.
Difficulties + possible changes
Potential changes are framed as recommendations because I am deeply hoping to hand off this project to animal advocates, who caused the veganism in the first place.
The test ordering workaround was not as good as I had hoped
I’d originally hoped to just hand participants a box, but they had to order the tests themselves.
In order to get iron + genetics tests people had to call rather than order online. This is non-standard for the provider and two people had to call twice to insist on what they wanted.
Tests took a long time to ship, and a long time to return results after shipping. The lab alleges this is a supply chain issue and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Those two together turned into a pretty big deal because they made it very hard to plan and people lost momentum.
In combination with the results showing few problems beyond iron I recommend deemphasizing full spectrum urine tests and focusing on blood tests for iron (and vitamin D), and making those convenient, perhaps by bringing a phlebotomist to the office.
Another option would be to bring in a medical practitioner, who can order tests for other people, to manage tests so the office can be stocked with them. This of course fails to solve the problem for anyone not in the office.
There are home tests for vitamin D and iron specifically, but I have no idea if they’re any good.
Ideal test subjects (completely vegan, never done nutritional testing or interventions, promptly puts in the effort to do these tests and act on them once I suggest it) were even thinner on the ground than anticipated.
I knew there wouldn’t be many, but I didn’t think it would be so hard to get five people pretty close to that profile.
I loosened restrictions and still consistently found problems, so recommend lowering the eligibility bar for testing in future rounds, especially since that was always the plan. The strict requirements in this round were an attempt to make the signal as loud as possible.
Getting everyone tested was like herding cats. Beyond the problems with the test distributor, some participants needed repeated reminders to order, one lost a test, results went missing… it was kind of a nightmare.
One advantage of focusing on blood tests would be to cut down on this, especially if you bring the phlebotomist to the office.
At points I was uncomfortable with the deference some participants showed me. I was as clear as I possibly could be that this was a best-effort from a knowledgeable amateur kind of thing; they were responsible for their own health and I was a nonexpert trying to provide some logistics help. I nonetheless got more than one person bringing me problems not even related to the nutrition project, and insisting I tell them what to do.
Recommendation: bring in a skilled nutritionist. They can both give better advice than me and devote more time to helping people.
I initially misread the protein results (which are delivered in terms of “how deficient are you?” rather than “what’s your current level?”, making 0 the best possible score). Luckily I knew I was confused from the beginning and no one had taken any actions based on my misinterpretation. More broadly, I’m just a woman who’s had some problems and read some stuff, I expect my suggestions to be better than nothing but far from the maximum good it would be possible to do.
Recommendation: bring in a skilled nutritionist
I underestimated the amount of time and especially emotional labor this project would need. I was hoping to bluff my way through that until people got on supplements, at which point the improvements in health would be their own motivation. I think I always overestimated how well that would work, but it was especially wrong because all the problems with the tests drained people’s momentum.
Recommendation: I still think you should bring in a skilled nutritionist
Many of the participants were moving frequently and not in the office by the time their results came in (because they took so long…), so they had to buy supplements themselves. Given the option I would have selected people consistently in the office, but as mentioned I was already managing trade-offs around participants.
Recommendation: ask for more money to give everyone their first month of supplements and a convenient pill planner.
Next Steps
I previously planned to give people the same urine test 3-6 months after they started supplements. That no longer seems worth it, relative to the cheaper and more convenient blood tests.
It’s not actually clear a formal follow-up is that useful at all. I initially planned that because I expected a wide range of shortages such that literature reviews wouldn’t be helpful. But there was only one real problem, and it has a richer literature than almost any micronutrient. So I don’t think another 5 people’s worth of scattered data is going to add much information.
So the next step for this as a project would be mass blood testing for B12, iron, and vitamin D.
Feeling motivated?
If this has inspired you to test your own nutrition, I haven’t done anything you can’t do yourself. Both the urine and blood tests are available at walkinlabs.com, and if you have a doctor they’re quite likely to agree to testing, especially if you’re restricting meat products or fatigued. I have a draft guide of wisdom on supplementation I’ve picked up over the years here, although again, I’m not a doctor and only learned how to digest food last May, so use at your own risk.
Thank you to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for funding this project, Lightcone for hosting, and all the participants for their precious bodily fluids.
Recently I became interested in what kind of costs were inflicted by iron deficiency, so I looked up studies until I got tired. This was not an exhaustive search, but the results are so striking that even with wide error bars I found them compelling. So compelling I wrote up a post with an algorithm for treating iron deficiency while minimizing the chance of poisoning yourself. I’ve put the algorithm and a summary of potential gains first to get your attention, but if you’re considering acting on this I strongly encourage you to continue reading to the rest of the post where I provide the evidence for my beliefs.
Tl;dr: If you are vegan or menstruate regularly, there’s a 10-50% chance you are iron deficient. Excess iron is dangerous so you shouldn’t supplement blindly, but deficiency is easy and cheap to diagnose with a common blood test. If you are deficient, iron supplementation is also easy and cheap and could give you a half standard deviation boost on multiple cognitive metrics (plus any exercise will be more effective). Due to the many uses of iron in the body, I expect moderate improvements in many areas, although how much and where will vary by person.
Note that I’m not a doctor and even if I was there isn’t good data on this, so it’s all pretty fuzzy. The following is an algorithm for treating iron deficiency that I’ve kludged together from various doctors. I strongly believe it is a lot better than nothing on average, but individuals vary a lot and you might be unlucky.
Take a serum ferritin test. If you have a doctor they will almost certainly say yes to a request, or you can order for yourself at walkinlab.com
If your results show a deficiency (<20ug/L), increase iron intake through diet or supplements such as Ferrochel, taking the default dose once per day, with a meal.
The definition of deficiency can vary by study, lab and goal. I picked <20ug/L because it’s the highest level I have concrete evidence is insufficient, but personally believe people are likely to benefit from iron beyond that and am taking pills accordingly.
If you experience negative effects after taking the pills, stop immediately. Give yourself a week to recover, then you can try other brands, be more careful to eat with a full meal, etc.
If you are experiencing the symptoms of iron poisoning (listed below), stop pills and see a doctor now. Iron poisoning is a very big deal, which is why step 1 of this algorithm is “get tested” not “gobble pills”. Unfortunately several of these are pretty generic, but I’m never going to feel bad about telling people with seizures to seak medical attention:
Nausea
Vomiting
Abdominal pain
Dizziness
Low blood pressure and a fast or weak pulse
Headache
Fever
Shortness of breath and fluid in the lungs
Grayish or bluish color in the skin
Jaundice (yellowing of the skin due to liver damage)
Seizures
Black or bloody stools
Retest at 8-12 weeks, ideally at the same lab as before.
Continue to retest every 8-12 weeks.
If you increase by 20ug from your starting value without noticing any improvements to your cognition or overall energy levels; low ferritin is probably not your bottleneck.
If you believe it’s not a problem at all, quit.
If you believe it is a problem but another problem is limiting your gains, stay on a maintenance dosage but don’t put more time into managing this. Verrrrry roughly, divide your current dosage by your currently monthly gains (so If you take one RDA/day and gain 10ug/month, your result is 0.1), and take that much. This hopefully keeps you from losing ground, without gaining so quickly it could become a problem.
If you’re getting improvements, keep going until those taper off. I personally would exercise caution and investigate the downsides of iron once I reached 80ug/L, but I’ve never gotten close to that so it hasn’t come up.
Continue to retest and adjust until you’ve found a dose on which your values are stable and healthy.
[Note: I provided links to supplements because I found people follow through more when I do, and because it’s easy to buy worthless supplements. There are other good supplements out there and if you have a reason to prefer one, take that instead. Links are affiliate.]
Research summary
Iron’s most famous use in the body is in hemoglobin, which your blood uses to transport oxygen. Oxygen is extremely important [citation needed], so it makes sense that low hemoglobin (aka anemia) gets a lot of attention, and everyone agrees anemia is very bad. But what the studies I read found was that even among people who started with adequate hemoglobin, a low ferritin score still predicted they would benefit from supplementation. And it’s not because of a bad definition of “adequate”; people saw benefits even when their hemoglobin didn’t change. So what else does iron do?
Iron is one of a small number of elements that can safely accept electrons in reduction-oxidation reactions. Free electrons are quite damaging, so iron’s ability to safely contain them is important. Some specific usages:
The enzyme catalase, which converts caustic H2O2 to harmless water.
Fun fact: Catalase is the least important enzyme whose name and purpose I can recall offhand. Other enzymes achieved that status by being very important (DNA polymerase), or having self explanatory names (carbohydrase), but catalase achieved this by sounding kind of similar to a song I was into the summer I took microbiology, and I made up alternate lyrics about the enzyme.
Please enjoy this list of 80 enzymes that use iron as a cofactor.
I’d say “that’s a lot” but honestly it’s not, everything in the body is like this, it was not built to be understood.
Standard tests for anemia only look at hemoglobin. Ferritin tests are considered to be a much better measurement of cellular iron levels. There’s suspicion, although not proof, that your body prioritizes hemoglobin production above other uses of iron, so it will undersupply these other uses in order to maintain hemoglobin levels. This suggests that if you have normal hemoglobin but low ferritin, additional iron will find many uses. Unfortunately, those uses and their effects are so varied I can’t really predict what any particular person will experience.
There are any number of studies showing correlations between low ferritin and low functioning, but I don’t find those very useful. The people in those studies might have any number of deficiencies for multiple reasons, or low ferritin levels could just be a proxy for poverty. In my research I stuck to actual experiments, with controls, that gave iron to subjects and checked for an improvement in function, not just test scores. Unfortunately, there were not that many of them.
The only study I liked on the cognitive effects found an absolutely enormous effect. Successful iron supplementation led to improvements averaging >0.5 standard deviations in attention, learning, and memory. I have qualms about this study and expect the results are cherrypicked, but it’s also not necessarily the full size of the effect, because they stopped after a set amount of time rather than waiting for effects to plateau.
There were multiple studies on iron supplementation and exercise. In a nutshell: everyone’s endurance improves when they exercise. Giving people with iron deficiency but not anemia (IDNA) iron supplements increases that effect. In the strongest study, people treated for iron deficiency for 6 weeks improved their 15km time by 10%, compared to 5% in the control group. Another study (which didn’t involve exercise training) showed no improvement in time to complete a given distance, but did find the treatment group used about 5% less energy while doing so.
Iron deficiency rates vary a lot by population, but with the patterns you’d expect. Vegans are more deficient than vegetarians, who are more deficient than omnivores. People who regularly menstruate (or give blood) are more likely to be deficient. I found the baseline rate of omnivorous men in rich countries to be somewhere between 0-11%. For a female omnivore it’s 9-22% (these numbers include people already taking supplements; it’s presumably higher if you don’t). Young female vegans who were not already supplementing were at least 50% deficient, plausibly more. Data for non-supplementing male vegans was not available, but let’s ballpark it at 5-25%, based on the ratio between men and women in the general public.
People in poor countries are much more likely to be iron deficient and anemic, due to poor diet and more physical exertion.
Caveats
I am not a doctor, my most relevant credential is a BA in a different part of biology, the fact that I couldn’t find a decent resource and had to make it myself is a sign of civilizational inadequacy.
Normally not being a doctor inhibits me from giving medical advice, but I am going to go ahead and say that iron poisoning is extremely bad and not that hard to induce with pills, don’t do that. Iron poisoning is why you need to be careful your kid only gets one multivitamin a day, and why men can’t use women’s multivitamins (which should actually be “menstruator’s multivitamins”, since the relevant issue is monthly blood loss).
The papers are very finicky and boring and this was really important, so I’ve tried to frontload my conclusion. This is a delicate balancing act of readability and accuracy. I did my best but some trade-offs are unavoidable.
This lit review was done with a focus on people with low iron intake, especially vegans. None of the studies I looked at filtered on dietary intake versus absorption issues. This means they probably underestimate the impact of supplementing for healthy people.
Do not take the dosages in the studies literally, especially if you don’t menstruate. The right dosage depends on the form and your personal needs. I suggest operating based on RDA percentages rather than raw chemical weights.
Details
Definitions
There are a lot of ways to measure iron and iron-related levels in the body. The two most important are hemoglobin (the protein red blood cells use to carry oxygen) and ferritin (the protein your cells use to store oxygen, but also present in blood). There are some other numbers I’m going to ignore.
Hemoglobin and ferritin are both testable via blood sample, and the tests have something called “reference ranges”, which are supposed to be the healthy range of values. Whether the ranges actually capture that is a matter of great controversy, with various people alleging the minimum is what you need to avoid hardcore deficiency diseases, but won’t get you optimum functioning, to people claiming low scores are fine and anyone who says otherwise is a psyop from Big Vitamin. And then there’s individual variation.
Hemoglobin’s reference range is 120g/L-170g/L. Ferritin’s reference range starts between 10 and 20 ug/L, and ends at 150-200ug/L, depending on who you ask. It’s possible to have low hemoglobin (aka anemia) without an iron deficiency or vice versa. Low hemoglobin with adequate iron typically means you’re having trouble manufacturing hemoglobin and is beyond the scope of this post. Low iron with adequate hemoglobin is more controversial. Top explanations include “the tests aren’t that good”, “you’re deficient but your body is prioritizing hemoglobin production”, “you’re about to develop anemia” and “low iron is fine, actually”.
Impact Data
When looking at studies I used the following selection criteria:
Examining iron deficiency without anemia. We can assume that anemic cases will benefit more from iron, unless the anemia is unrelated to the iron deficiency.
No co-morbidities.
On adult humans (in practice this almost always means women).
In the developed world.
RCTs only, no correlational studies.
This didn’t leave a lot of studies, and I had to accept some other flaws.
This study was by far the best study of cognitive function, maybe the only one that tested an intervention rather than merely looking at correlations. I don’t love it. The data presentation is obviously leaving a lot of information out, I assume to dramatize results. But those results are very dramatic.
This study allowed for mild anemia (hb < 120 but >105), but separated anemic and non-anemic subjects. The paper, uh, doesn’t mention its threshold for iron deficiency; another paper from the same authors set it at serum ferritin <=12ug/L, which is in line with the aggregated averages.
The study included a double control group that started with sufficient iron and hemoglobin. Each group (no deficiency (n=42), iron deficiency without anemia (n=73), and iron deficiency with anemia (n=34)) was split into treatment and placebo groups.
Iron supplementation increased ferritin levels in everyone. People with iron deficiency without anemia (IDNA) increased serum ferritin (sFt in the table) 2.5x more than their placebo group; people with iron deficiency and anemia (IDA) improved ferritin levels almost 4x more than their placebos. Neither group got anywhere close to the ferritin levels of the no-deficiencies group. The treatment group was given 160 mg of ferrous iron daily.
In baseline cognitive testing, IDNA women scored about the same or slightly worse as healthy women, and IDA women scored much worse than both. This is probably an underestimate of the effect, because the study was heavily recruited from students at a single university, who can be expected to be selected for the same range of competence.
The study separately evaluated treatment-group women who had increased ferritin levels from those who didn’t. The former group had large improvements in their cognitive test results, the latter very modest ones. I think separating out non-responders is fair: if there’s a problem interfering with iron absorption that doesn’t tell you anything about the effect of increasing ferritin levels, and I am studying this mostly for the benefit of people with insufficient dietary intake.
Among ferritin responders, attention, memory, and learning increased from .5 to .75 standard deviations (although somehow that .75 is at p<0.07). That effect size is the equivalent of 7.5-12.5 IQ points or 1.1-1.6 inches in height. Of course the test could be bullshit, but it’s not out of line with anecdotes I hear. Additionally, the treatment groups did not reach the ferritin levels of the healthy group, indicating potentially more gains to be had.
Hemoglobin responders also saw more improvement than non-responders, but the effect size was smaller than with ferritin, indicating an effect of iron beyond increasing hemoglobin.
(Note that the axis has changed from performance to time required, making negatives good. Yes, I am suspicious that they presented total score for one metric and time to completion for another).
20 women with normal hemoglobin (Hb >120 g/l) but low ferritin (serum ferritin <= 16 ug/l) were given 135 mg ferrous iron supplements for eight weeks and instructed to take with citrus juice. 17 women were given placebos as a control (random assignment, double-blinded). They were given both blood and athletic tests before and after treatment.
Treatment group hemoglobin and iron binding capacity were unchanged. Serum ferritin was up 250% for the treatment group (compared to 30% for the control). Their athletic test results did not improve any faster than the controls, however they needed less energy (2.0kj/min) and oxygen (5%) to get those same results.
22 women with normal hemoglobin (Hb >12 g/dl) but low ferritin (serum ferritin <= 16 ug/l) were given 100mg ferrous iron supplements for six weeks. 20 women were given placebos as a control (random assignment, double-blinded). They were given both blood and athletic tests before and after treatment.
Iron supplementation did not change hemoglobin or iron binding capacity levels, but did increase serum ferritin by about 50%, and transferrin saturation by 70%. Note that their ending ferritin levels (19.4) were still barely above the bottom of the reference range, indicating there was probably much more room for growth.
The control group went marginally up on some measurements and marginally down on others, I’ve treated their changes as noise.
Both treatment and placebo groups were given 4 weeks of exercise treatment; the treatment group showed about double the athletic improvement. Endurance saw a bigger improvement than initial performance.
~20 women, with serum ferritin concentration < 16 ug/L and a hemoglobin concentration > 120 g/L were given 100mg ferrous iron/day for 6 weeks. Of that, 4 weeks also included exercise training.
Once again we see an improvement in ferritin but not hemoglobin or binding capacity.
The treatment group experienced ~30% more improvement in their trial times than the control, or 800% if they started with elevated ferritin. I’m suspicious of this posthoc subgroup analysis, but on the other hand, the bar in this graph is very big.
The good news: this study has men! I did not think I was going to find any of those!
The bad news: this study has 20 people, total.
No meaningful change in hemoglobin or binding capacity, near doubling of serum ferritin in the treatment group, 15% drop in ferritin in the control group.
Results are basically identical for the control and placebo groups.
Prevalence Data
Estimates for the prevalence of iron deficiency vary a lot by study and population.
In the first paper I found, the estimate was 9-22% among menstruating women in the general public, and 1-2% among adult men (non-menstruating women were not included but I expect “do you lose 2-4 tablespoons of blood every month?” and “do you occasionally host demanding parasites?” to be more important than hormones or gender identification). Note that this number includes both anemic and non-anemic iron deficiency.
Vegans are at much more risk. One German study of vegan women found a median serum ferritin level of 14 ug/L, a level that is above their reference range and LabCorp’s but below the cut-off in several of the studies cited above. They found 40% of young women fell below their threshold for deficiency (12ng/ml) and 11% of older women (presumably mostly post-menopausal) did so. Women taking iron supplements were excluded from this study.
A second German study (why are they all from Germany?) that allowed supplements and had an even gender split found rates of iron deficiency slightly lower in vegans than omnivores, but both had higher means than anyone in any of the impact studies I found. Nonetheless, 10% of vegans were iron deficient.
My own study (data forthcoming) had 3-4 male vegans and a deficiency rate of 25%-75%, depending on how you count.
[EAGlobal was a wonderful experience that I haven’t written much about because my brain was too stuffed full of wonderfulness to produce anything useful. I dislike that the first thing I’m writing about it is a controversy/complaint]
There’s a utilitarian thought experiment: would you rather have one person tortured for their entire life, or a googolplex of people experience a single dust mote in their eye? I always viewed it as too theoretical to be anything but an ideological purity test, but I think I’m seeing a version of it in action right now, in the debate around serving animal products at EA Global.
You have a small number of animal rights activists saying “this is torturing and consuming a sentient being and that’s morally abhorent”, and a much larger number of omnivores going “but seriously, they’re delicious”. The ARAs don’t understand why aesthetic preferences are overriding morality (and either don’t believe that animal products are ever medically necessary or don’t believe that outweighs the cost to the animal), and the omnivores don’t see why such a small group is getting to override their preferences because of a principle they don’t believe in.
I think the moral weight of the ARA’s concerns may actually be working against them here. I don’t think many people would object if the organizers said “the local cuisine is vegan and shipping in meat is just too expensive, bring some in your luggage if you must.” But the fact that the morality arguments exist and tend to resonate with people even if they don’t agree makes people defensive, and then aggressive. Allowing the organizers to drop meat for morality reasons is an implicit endorsement of the idea that meat is indeed immoral, which has unpleasant implications for omnivore’s moral standing the rest of the week. By the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, better to deny that there is a problem than participate in an incomplete solution.
My original position, based mostly on the fact that I am simultaneously really bothered by and completely immune to ARA’s disgust-based arguments, was that EA Global had made the right call: vegan or at least vegetarian options in the main line, a small amount of meat hidden off to the side. But now that I think the insistence on meat is strongly Copenhagen-driven, I’ve changed my mind. Admitting unpleasant things about ourselves and making incremental progress is supposed to be one of our things.
[By that same token I think ARA’s should be a little happier about how much meat consumption was reduced that weekend, even if it didn’t go to zero. But then, I’m an incrementalist]
At the same time, some people need animal products. The definition of need is tricky here- my doctor has told me to eat small amounts of meat, but going three days without any will be fine, but in practice what was served at EA Global was too hard on my stomach and I wouldn’t have been able to eat enough calories from that alone. Some people are on paleo and even if that wasn’t the healthiest choice, a sudden drop off in meat will be physically hard on them. Some people have a lot of things they can’t eat such that meat is the easiest way to get them a nutritionally complete meal- especially when you have a lot of different people with a lot of different exclusions. But even if meat were served, it’s impossible to fulfill 600 people’s dietary requirements with a reasonable amount of effort and money. The best solution may have been to announce the menu ahead of time so people could plan, and then let the chips fall where they may.
But I think we can do one better. My new favorite solution is to offer both meat and whatever vegans nominate as the best fake meat and offer both without a way to distinguish between the two at the time. Omnivores would be given one at random with a code that they could later use to register 1. how much they liked what they were served and 2. whether they think it was real meat or not. If they really don’t like what they got they could go to a back room somewhere with their code and ask for the other one (still not telling them which they got). The same back room could serve people who medically need meat and people who want the definitively vegan option.
This gives people who want but don’t need meat (and are able to eat !meat) a way to get it, and vegans a way to advance the cause of veganism, possibly further than they would get by banning it (by showing people how good !meat tastes). In most circles neither side would find this adequate, but Experimenting and Using Data are What Effective Altruists Do, and I think that could convince/pressure enough people (on both sides) into it that it would be worth trying.
So if the current studies on leafleting effectiveness are unhelpful, what would be better?
First, we need a better way to determine what people are eating. People are notoriously terrible at remembering exactly how often they did a common thing over a prolonged time period, even if there’s no social pressure to answer a particular way. Possible solutions:
Ask people what they ate yesterday.
Monitor food consumption directly.
Bring people into the lab and observe what they eat.
Track dietary choices at individual level via dining cards (probably requires more detail than those cards currently provide)
Track dietary choices at population level by measuring total consumption in the cafeteria.
Give surveys asking people would like to eat, out of N specific options. Make all answers equally appetizing. Frame as cafeteria planning to avoid social pressure towards veg*n answers.
Another difficulty with the leafleting studies is that it is very difficult to asses who was in the treatment group 2-3 months later. Possible solutions:
Track individuals who received your pamphlet (and a control group).
At a college where you can track purchases by dining card: deliver pamphlets by mail to a randomly chosen half of your sample.
Use control and treatment colleges or dorms, rather than individuals. Will require finagling to avoid other confounds.
Hand out pamphlets in front of cafeteria or restaurant, see how consumption patterns change that night.
Have pamphlets be a call to action to something trackable, such as visiting a website, requesting a free veganism kit, or attending an on-campus event. Number who visit or call is an upper bound on number of people influenced by pamphlet.
Humane League is apparently trying this with facebook ads: I predict I will find that data much more compelling.
While we are at it, here are some interventions I think would work better than leafleting at reducing total meat consumption (although not necessarily the number of self-identified vegans or vegetarians):
Pay-per-click ads. To the extent “it’s super cheap and it has to convince someone” applies, it has to apply here too, and this way you’re not paying for pamphlets that go straight in the trash. Also I expect vegans to care a little more about paper waste.
Host discussion groups where brainstorm how to reduce meat consumption. In WW2 this worked much better than lectures on increasing consumption of organ meat. This could focus on vegan meals, or even Asian-style cooking where meat is a supplement rather than the focus.
Lobby colleges to provide attractive no-animal-product options. This reduces meat consumption even among people with no ideological commitment to doing so. It also helps college students build a palate for vegan options that may continue into adulthood.
Host low meat/veg*n meals yourself. College students love free food. At a minimum, that’s one meal’s worth of animal you’ve saved. Plus the palate building benefits of the cafeteria option.
Talk to the food science people and steal their secrets for making food appetizing.
Aceso Under Glass 