• Rob@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Try watching the documentary “You are what you eat” on Netflix, it’s a good intro that covers the health risks of other animal products as well.

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      I don’t get much time to watch videos these days so I’m not going through the Netflix series. Though it looks like it’s based off this paper, and that I can look through.

      They studied 22 pairs of twins, intervened by changing their diets so that one gets a vegan diet and the other an omnivore diet, then measured a bunch of stuff via blood and stool samples. I don’t see mention of how they correct for multiple hypotheses, but I’ll just give them the benefit of the doubt here.

      They found statistical significance in two places

      • LDL-C: Participants all start out in a healthy range, and they stay in a healthy range. So while the vegans improved on this measure, it also tells us that omnivores are perfectly healthy as well.
      • Fasting insulin levels: Same as LDL-C. Start off healthy, ended up healthy. We see the vegans having lower fasting insulin, but we don’t know if that’s a good thing or not when they’re already starting at 12.7 μIU/mL.

      So basically, the conclusion from the paper is that vegan and omnivore diets are both perfectly healthy, but you might gain slight benefits from going vegan.

      • Rob@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Thanks for looking that up. I’m no dietician or medical expert myself, so I have to go by the more easily digestible media. That does run the risk of being more sensationalised.

        One thing I did take away from the Netflix series was that both the omnivore diet and vegan one were designed to be well-balanced. Everything in moderation works well, I suppose.