this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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It's not that it's not possible, it's that it's so easy for the layperson to fuck up. Both those claims about low diabetes risks and being able to supplement missing micronutrients are true alone, but mix them together and you get a risky balance that needs careful tracking.
You're basically required to eat a cup of cashews a day and put nutritional yeast in at least one meal. If you deviate from this you're going to be at risk of malnutrition.
Otherwise you're going to be opting for fortified foods like bread, rice, salt, cereal, etc. Which again have all good choices within them but if you deviate from the recommended track (wheat bread, bran cereal, etc) then without close tracking you're most likely either eating too little risking malnutrition or you're eating too many carbs to compensate and spiking your blood sugar
Also there's several concerns of using fortified foods as your main source of micronutrients. Mostly that fortified foods don't fully replace the nutrition of whole foods, and the upper levels of these supplements aren't well controlled leading to a risk of toxicity. Stand-alone supplements are a better alternative, but do have a cost associated with them.
You can totally do vegan, and do it right, but you're never going to recommend it to Debby down the street who packs her kids lunches every day without also recommending she starts her family on a multivitamin. It's just not scalable to the whole population like that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21139125/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066912/
Also from your article:
While the diet supports it, this is just as much a correlation. It does not account for the other lifestyle choices of vegans and vegetarians such as exercising more often than the typical person.