If you want to be vegan but you worry about health effects of no meat, consider being vegan except for mussels/oysters
1) They’re unlikely to be sentient (few neurons, immobile)
2) If they are sentient, the farming practices look likely to be pretty humane
3) They’re extremely nutritionally dense
Buying canned smoked oysters/mussels and eating them plain or on crackers is super easy and cheap.
It’s an acquired taste for some, but I love them.
Thanks. This might just be the nudge to finally try out what I long thought about without ever trying it in practice. Quick questions:
Do we know of any safe upper dose threshold exists (e.g. any excessive accumulated heavy metals from polluted sea or any other imbalances)?
Do we know whether that simple organism is comparably powerful in providing some micro-nutriments that we think we might lack in vegan diet?
To be clear what I mean: It is trivial to get nearly arbitrary “grams of protein” from vegan sources (and I guess most minerals and things too), but in the end, even that doesn’t seem to be equivalent at all to eating plant proteins. So: Rather obvious that mussles do cover just perfectly what we need, or actually not so clear?
Don’t know much about accumulated heavy metals, but they’re really low on the food chain, so they’re a priori going to have less of those than those higher up the food chain.
What’s likely to have PFAS/microplastics/BPA/other toxic compounds is the canned mussels tins. Do your own research, and consider paying for a Million Marker test to check for your levels of BPA/Phthalates after eating them for a while (with a baseline test if possible) to gauge how bad it is.
Personally, I only buy EU-made canned fish (especially Spain, Portugal, and rarely France). Many manufacturers I’ve talked to personally use BPA-NI cans and have more stringent health regulation than other manufacturers elsewhere. But even then, you’re just buying a better lottery ticket.
I expect raw oysters not to have this problem. It’s likely fresh mussels are the same. So just beware if you intend to consume lots of canned fish.
I did a spot check since bivalves are filter feeders and so can accumulate contaminants more than you might expect. Mussels and oysters are both pretty low in mercury, hopefully this extends to other contaminants.
You can see their nutritional profile here. Sky high in B12, great at omega-3s and iron.
I also predict they’ll be good at a wide variety of things we don’t know we need yet, since they’re as close to a “whole food” as you can get. You’re eating almost the whole animal, instead of just a part of it.
Also consider the impact of milk. Directly around 1⁄2 the life of a single cow if you consume dairy over a lifetime. Indirectly the agricultural toll of feeding the cow on additional insects and rodents.
The primary effect of diary on cows life wouldn’t be the cow that’s milked, it’d be on the calves. I suspect it’d be more than 1⁄2 of a calf per human milk lifetime.
Claude guesses 2-3 calves
Some quick-mafs.
Assuming the use of a high milk yield breed like Holstein Friesian cows.
18KL per lactation: https://www.australiaslivestockexporters.com/holstein-fresians-dairy-cattle/
About 217 ml of milk, 23.6g of cheese (equiv to 236ml milk) and 21.4g of yoghurt (about 21.4ml of milk) are consumed per Australian per day: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143391/australia-dairy-mean-daily-grams-per-capita-by-food-subgroup/ = (approx) 474ml = 0.47L
Australians live about 83 years, approx 30k days.
30kDays * 0.47L/Day = 14100L of milk over a lifetime. Or a bit less than one calf.
The average Holstein cattle has parity of < 2.7 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8369829/). So we can estimate something like one third of a dairy cow per person, and a little less than one calf.
Is the question how many calf-equivalents map to current dairy consumption, or to the counterfactual dairy consumption of someone trying to reduce other animal products without going vegan?
EDIT: Nvm, this dataset was of a niche religious group (The seventh day adventists), I should’ve read more throughly before commenting.
Assuming no major dietary differences between vegetarian converts, and lifelong vegetarians, it appears that they consume less dairy by about a half: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4232985/#!po=39.8438
So, assuming that someone moves to the mean lacto-ovo vegetarian diet, you can assume about one half calf less over a lifetime.
Is it possible that there are benefits from eating neurons? It seems likely that organisms with brains have better nutrition when consumed for one’s own brain.
I can’t tell which answer to this question is meant to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the OP’s point, but it sounds like the latter. Even if it’s the case the neurons contain something useful nutritionally (and I’d be surprised but not too surprised if it were), consider that these shellfish have neurons, and unlike other meats, we actually eat the neurons instead of them being part of organs we remove before eating. Also, that we have very good reason to avoid eating the neural tissues of mammals.
True, but I would also think that there are nutritional differences in the other parts of the body, as brains significantly change how the organism functions in their other eating behaviors, and energy consumption
Ah, I see, ok.