If you personally feel safer eating animals products, fine.
If you don’t want to follow a well-planned diet, also fine to eat omnivorously.
But before encouraging others to feel unsafe about following a well-planned vegan diet, it’s probably a good idea consider that the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics published in 2025 a peer-reviewed position paper that reiterates what they’ve been publishing for decades now, that well-planned vegan diets are healthy, and to explain why and how they would do that if, as you claim, the weight of the evidence pointed to expecting well-planned vegan diets to be a bad idea for health.
How would the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals manage to push through the peer review process, decade after decade, position papers that INCORRECTLY claim well-planned vegan diets are healthy?
“It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that, in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate and can offer long-term health benefits such as improving several health outcomes associated with cardiometabolic diseases.”
If the AND should be expected to be biased in any direction with respect to vegan diets, we should expect it to be biased against veganism. Consider that it’s very likely that most members of the AND are not vegan (just like in the general population), and the AND is partly funded by animal products industries:
American Egg Board’s Egg Nutrition Center
National Dairy Council
As for your opening sentence on the health section, “you need to take medicine to not die—B12”, I don’t think a B12 supplement is medicine. Factory farmed animals are routinely fed B12 supplements and people don’t consider meat medicine. Salt is supplemented with iodine to prevent deficiencies, also not medicine.
Discussing -as you do- what happens to vegans that forgo B12 supplements is besides the point (as would be to discuss what happens to people who go on a fast-food only diet). I can attest to the prevalence of a worrying number of non-rationalist vegans don’t supplement B12 (In my experience something like a third or half of vegans don’t supplement B12). However, everyone here on LessWrong likely agrees that if you are vegan you should follow good nutritional advice. And B12 supplements are inexpensive and convenient.
If you personally feel safer eating animals products, fine.
If you don’t want to follow a well-planned diet, also fine to eat omnivorously.
But before encouraging others to feel unsafe about following a well-planned vegan diet, it’s probably a good idea consider that the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics published in 2025 a peer-reviewed position paper that reiterates what they’ve been publishing for decades now, that well-planned vegan diets are healthy, and to explain why and how they would do that if, as you claim, the weight of the evidence pointed to expecting well-planned vegan diets to be a bad idea for health.
How would the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals manage to push through the peer review process, decade after decade, position papers that INCORRECTLY claim well-planned vegan diets are healthy?
“It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that, in adults, appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate and can offer long-term health benefits such as improving several health outcomes associated with cardiometabolic diseases.”
From https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(25)00042-5/fulltext
If the AND should be expected to be biased in any direction with respect to vegan diets, we should expect it to be biased against veganism. Consider that it’s very likely that most members of the AND are not vegan (just like in the general population), and the AND is partly funded by animal products industries:
American Egg Board’s Egg Nutrition Center
National Dairy Council
As for your opening sentence on the health section, “you need to take medicine to not die—B12”, I don’t think a B12 supplement is medicine. Factory farmed animals are routinely fed B12 supplements and people don’t consider meat medicine. Salt is supplemented with iodine to prevent deficiencies, also not medicine.
Discussing -as you do- what happens to vegans that forgo B12 supplements is besides the point (as would be to discuss what happens to people who go on a fast-food only diet). I can attest to the prevalence of a worrying number of non-rationalist vegans don’t supplement B12 (In my experience something like a third or half of vegans don’t supplement B12). However, everyone here on LessWrong likely agrees that if you are vegan you should follow good nutritional advice. And B12 supplements are inexpensive and convenient.