Adventist Health Study-2 supports pescetarianism more than veganism

By Elizabeth @ 2023-06-18T03:04 (+28)

This is a crosspost, probably from LessWrong. Try viewing it there.

MathiasKB @ 2023-06-20T09:59 (+9)

Hi Elizabeth, thank you so much for doing a deep dive into this topic. Your posts on the topic are among the few I find myself able to trust.

Inspired by EA I went vegetarian (and vegan for two years) at age 19 without giving much thought to my health. Now at age 25, I've started taking my health much more seriously and found it frustrating how poor vegan/vegetarian communities have been at evaluating the topic of health without bias.

After reading yours and other articles, I added a bi-weekly salmon meal of into my otherwise vegetarian diet. So far it has made no noticeable difference to my energy levels or health.

EDIT: Since this comment got engagement than I thought it would, I want to add that I think the question of meat in your diet is one of the absolute last things to optimize for health. For the vast majority people, I suspect the biggest thing they should look at is how often they exercise.

Rockwell @ 2023-06-20T22:50 (+20)

This comment made me very sad. I've gone back and forth on writing a full response (or standalone post) on why I find Elizabeth's posts so troubling, so thank you for giving me the push I needed to invest the effort into doing so. For now, I'll say: From a health standpoint alone, there are many drawbacks to eating salmons and there are alternative methods to improving whichever health concerns that led you to eat them. From an ethics standpoint, eating aquatic animals is among the most harmful choices you can make. If EA motivated you to stop eating animals to begin with, I hope you reconsider this decision.

Elizabeth @ 2023-06-21T06:30 (+4)

I would love to hear more on the drawbacks, alternatives, and why you believe those alternatives are perfect substitutes. 

On the Faunalytics page the first harm graph refers specifically to farmed fish, and doesn't distinguish elsewhere. Did you mean to refer to farmed fish or all fish?

Linch @ 2023-06-23T01:07 (+4)

tbh I also found that website quite hard to navigate, but I think "Top 10 Impactful Products For Individual Consumers" is probably the most relevant graph on that site for the question of which individual diet choices to make to reduce animal suffering.

Though I don't really understand where salmon fits on that graph either, as it has several different fish options and salmon is not clearly any of them.

Elizabeth @ 2023-06-23T05:21 (+2)

It looks like they're multiplying suffering x abundance, otherwise I'm at a loss for why breaded shrimp would cause more suffering than unbreaded

Linch @ 2023-06-23T05:32 (+2)

Yes I think so. I think "Top 10 Impactful Products For Individual Consumers" section is most relevant (apologies I can't seem to attach a screenshot).

Elizabeth @ 2023-09-12T02:06 (+2)

Is the standalone post finished? I'd love to read it when it is. 

Linch @ 2023-06-18T05:50 (+6)

Calling someone "semi-vegetarian" if they eat meat or month 1-4x a month seems fair to me. Even at 4x/month that's something like 5-10% the amount of meat in the average American's diet, iiuc.

Elizabeth @ 2023-06-18T18:05 (+3)

I agree in conversation, but think wrapping all four categories together and using it to argue for 0 meat consumption is misleading. I think the same thing about combining vegan and lacto-ovo-vegetarian: they're just pretty different nutritionally.

If the paper were being used to argue against Standard American Diet I think the combining of subcategories would be more reasonable, although still object to the label vegetarian.