The heme iron in meat is absorbed better than the non-heme iron in iron supplements, but Impossible Burger has heme iron. It's very frustrating that this biotech advance of in vitro heme production is so far only used for this specific brand of meat substitutes but that's the situation. I'm not sure why iron supplements didn't work for you, as that same paper shows that even non-heme iron is absorbed well when blood iron is low, but maybe it depends on the individual? In any case, and I promise the company isn't paying me to say this, I recommend Impossible burgers to vegans. It has to be this specific brand, they have the patent. There was another company with a heme production patent but they recently shut down.
Why do you care about how effectively the iron in iron supplements gets absorbed? The iron that's not absorbed just gets flashed out. Can't you just supplement more to get what you need?
I'm replying to a post that said they lacked energy despite iron supplementation. Maybe it wasn't iron deficiency, or maybe it could have been solved by raising the supplement dose, I don't know, but if it was iron deficiency and the supplements weren't helping then it's good to know you can get iron in the same form as in meat from Impossible burgers.
Eat 7 days in a row a large amount of meat. E.g. 1kg of chicken every day.
On most axes except cost (i.e. ethicality, health, antibiotics exposure) replacing chicken here with beef is better.
The reason I mention chicken is that last time I ran this experiment with beef my body started to hurt really bad such that I woke up in the middle of the night. I am pretty sure that the beef was the reason. Maybe something weird was going on in my body at the same time. However, when I tried the same one week later with chicken I didn't have this issue.
1Or try to buy lab grown meat paste? I am given to understand that they are expensive but available
edit: upon further research it seem you can only get them in Singapore and with a very limitted selection [?one]
After a very very cursory google search I wasn't able to find any (except in some places in Singapore), I'd be interested if this is available at all in the US
I maybe mistaken as to the availability of the lab grown meat to the general public. apparently they are no longer on sale
https://www.wired.com/story/upside-foods-good-meat-cultivated-lab-grown-sale-stopped-singapore-california-crenn/
seem like my information are out of date
they said that they were no longer asexual (they never were),
I'm somewhat skeptical of the claim in parentheses. It certainly sounds like there is a state where they demonstrated enough traits to think they were asexual, and that information tends to be worth tracking, even if only for self-diagnostics.
It seems quite plausible for someone to falsely belive they were asexual in this situation.
I understand that if you are starving or nutrient deficient (zinc, vitamin D, vitamin B12, and iron) your sex drive can be at zero. If it's like that for long enough you may think that it is because it's inherent to who you are. You are wrong, but have no way of knowing that.
I don't really understand. Why wouldn't you just test to see if you are deficient in things?
I did that, and I wasn't deficient in anything.
I've also (somewhat involuntarily) done the thing you suggest, and I unsurprisingly didn't notice any difference. If anything, I feel a lot better on a vegan diet.
If you want to do the thing hes suggesting here, I'd recommend eating bivalves, like blue mussels or oysters. They are very unlikely to be sentient, they are usually quite cheap, they contain the nutrients you'd be at risk of becoming deficient in as a vegan, and other beneficient things like DHA.
:) I mentioned already clams in my comment.
It's impossible to read all the comments before commenting when they become so long.
I agree that blood tests etc. is a very good idea, and it may require less commitment.
I still think the gist of his post, that it's worth worrying about nutrition, is correct, and his personal stories can be valuable to some people.
I think his idea may work for some people. If you try eating bivalves (as you suggest), and vaguely note the effects, it may be easier than going to the doctor and asking for a blood test.
I'm a vegetarian and my last blood test was good, but I'm still considering this experiment just to see its effect (yes, with bivalves). I have a gag reflex towards meat (including clam chowder?) so I'm probably going to procrastinate on this for a while.
Does it have to be a highly sentient animal or does clam chowder count? :)
Edit: I posted without thinking. I just noticed this sounds sorta inappropriate given your serious personal stories (I should have read them before posting). Sorry, social media is a bad influence on me, and social skills are not my thing. But earnestly asking, do you think clam chowder etc. would work?
1Haven't thought about, nor experimented with that. If you think clams would be ok to eat, you could perform the experiment yourself.
1Thanks for the honesty.
Speaking of honesty I'm not actually vegan. I'm vegetarian. I tried going vegan for a week or so but turned back due to sheer uncertainty about the nutrition, and right now I'm still taking supplements like creatine omega-3.
I really like your mindset of self questioning and like, "are my methods/plans stupid? Am I sorta in denial of this?" Haha.
I read your biography page and you are shockingly similar to myself haha. I'm almost afraid to list all the similarities. You are way ahead in progress, giving me hope in me.
Hello!
I'm really curious about you, and would love some advice from you (or just know what you think of me).
I'm currently working on a few projects like "A better Statement on AI Risk?" I thought everyone would agree with it and it would save the world lol but in the end very few people liked it. I spent $2000 donating to various organizations hoping they would reply to my emails haha.
I'm also trying to invent other stuff like Multi-Agent Framing and I posted it on LessWrong etc. but got very little interaction and I have no idea if that means it's a bad idea or if I have too much Asperger's to write engagingly.
I'm working on two more ideas I "invented" which I haven't posted yet, because the drafts are still extremely messy (you can take a quick skim: Multistage CoT Alignment and this weird idea).
Honestly speaking, do you think what I'm doing is the best use of my time? Am I in denial of certain things? Feel free to tell me :)
Your LinkedIn says "I've been funded by LTFF." How did you succeed in getting that?
This generates a lot of data on how much of a positive impact [on cognition] eating meat has.
Is there really no data on this already?
Are we not at the point where any effects can be reduced to nutritional content which can also be intaken in vegan ways? After all, things are fundamentally made of things much smaller than the level of analysis of "meat" or "not meat".
This post is unfortunately not useful to me as the suggestion seems based on the anecdote of someone who was iron deficient, so approximately no evidence in either direction for me, as I already knew of that class of people, and it's not infeasible to intake iron; for me, a useful version of the post would focus on the above two questions.
note the psychological cost to me would be similar to that of eating a part of a human corpse, so while i agree doing personal experiments is generally worth it and doesn't require existing studies, it is not so obvious for me in this case. the cost may well be a part of, or at least a change to, my metaphorical soul.
will check the linked thread
I'd be willing to eat animals if I thought that could help me help others more effectively.[1] So I appreciate the post where you try to provide some relevant evidence, and I really appreciate your commitment to do what's expedient for helping you save me, the people I love, and countless others from disaster—because that's clearly where you're coming from.
Otoh, my health seems unusually peak, despite the (somewhat unusual) vegan[2] diet I eat, so it seems unlikely I'm suffering from a crippling deficiency atm. This could be because either me or my body has somehow managed to compensate (psychologically or homeostatically) for whatever's lacking in our diet, but it seems more likely that the peak-health thing is something that requires an adequate diet, so my guess is that I can't un-inadequate it by eating animals?
My crux is just that I don't have the self-experimentation setup to be able to detect the delta benefit/cost of eating animals, and that the range of plausible deltas there seems insufficient for me to invest in the experiment.
Sorry for confusementedly writing. I'm mainly just trying to reflect here, and wanted to write a comment to stabilize my commitment to go to extremes (like eating animals) in order to pursue altruism. I'd be happy if somebody convinced me it was worth the experiment, but this post didn't bop me over the threshold. Thanks!
- ^
(I'd also be willing to murder random people and cook them for the same reason, if I thought that could help me help others more effectively. That seems less likely, however, for nutritional, practical, and psychological reasons. I just mention it because I think some morality-declarations are helpfwl.)
- ^
If people want to add to their anecdata, my details are:
- vegan for 12 years.
- major history with major depression (started before).
- deep depressions stopped (afaict, so far) when I started taking ADHD-meds (first LDX, and now DEX) 2.5 years ago.
- this is confounded by other simultaneous major life changes, like starting coworking on EA Gather Town (and meeting person I respected & Liked, who told me I wasn't insane for thinking different, and taught me to trust in myself ^^), so take the anecdata with grains of salt.
I want to push back a little in that I was fully vegan for a few years with no negative side effects, other than sometimes being hungry because there was nothing I would eat and annoying my friends with requests to accommodate my dietary preferences. I even put on muscle and cut a lot of fat from my body!
I strongly suspect, based on experience with lots of other vegans, that vegans who struggle with nutritional deficiencies are bad at making good choices about macro nutrients.
Broadly speaking, the challenge in a vegan diet is getting enough lysine. Most every other nutrient you need is found in abundance, but lysine is tricky because humans mostly get that amino acid from meat. Getting enough isn't that hard if you know what to eat, but you have to eat enough of it in enough volume to avoid problems.
What does it take to get enough lysine? Beans, lots of beans! If you're vegan and not eating beans you are probably lysine deficient and need to eat more beans. How many beans? Way more than you think. Beans have lots of fiber and aren't nutrient dense like meat.
I met lots of vegans who didn't eat enough beans. They'd eat mushrooms, but not enough, and lots of other protein sources, but not ones with enough lysine. They'd just eat a random assortment of vegan things without really thinking hard about if they were eating the right things. It's a strategy that works if you eat a standard diet that's been evolved by our culture to be relatively complete, but not eating a constructed diet like modern vegans do.
Now, I have met a few people who seem to have individual variation issues that make it hard for them to eat vegan and stay healthy. In fact, I'm now one of those, because I developed some post-COVID food sensitivities that forced me to go vegetarian and then start eating meat when that wasn't enough. And some people seem to process protein differently in a way that is weird to me but they insist if they don't eat some meat every 4 hours or so they feel like crap.
So I'm not saying there aren't some people who do need to eat meat and just reduce the amount and that's the best they can safely do, but I'm also saying that I think a lot of vegans screw up not because they don't eat meat but because they don't think seriously enough about if they are getting enough lysine every day.
2
1I ate tons of beluga lentils. Sometimes 1kg (cooked) a day. That wasn't enough. However, now I switched to eating 600g (cooked) soybeans every day, and that was a very significant improvement (like solving the problem to 75% or so). Soy is a complete protein. Soy beans are also very cheap.
Just to verify, you were also eating rice with those lentils? I'd expect to be differently protein deficient if you only eat lentils. The right combo is beans and rice (or another grain).
I probably did it badly. I would eat hole grain bread pretty regularly, but not consistently. I might not eat it for 1 week in a row sometimes. That was before I knew that amino acids are important.
Would you personally answer Should we be concerned about eating too much soy? with "Nope, definitely not", or do you just find it's a reasonable gamble to take to eat the very large qty of soy you describe?
Btw, thanks a lot for the post; MANY parallels with my past as more-serious-but-uncareful-vegan until body showed clear signs of issues that I realized only late as I'd have never believed anyone that healthy vegan diet is that tricky.
I watched this video, and I semi trust this guy (more than anybody else) about not getting it completely wrong. So you can eat too much soy. But eating a bit is actually healthy, is my current model.
Here is also a calculation I did that it is possible to get all amino acids from soy without eating too much.
You mention seeing iron deficiency on a blood test and I wonder what your test results were/are for ferritin and the other components for measuring iron deficiency. I also wonder if they are higher after you eat meat for a while versus when you are abstaining. That sort of detail would make this anecdote easier to learn from. As is, I can't tell if it's applicable to me.
I'm supplementing creatine based on some tentative studies that may not replicate but also based on my n=1 experience that I feel a bit smarter with it. But hard to tell if it's placebo or not.
It was ferritin. However the levels where actually barely within acceptable levels. I hypothesise that because I started to eat steamed blood for perhaps 2 weaks prior every day, and that blood contains a lot of heme iron, that I was deficient before.
Once I talked to a person who said they were asexual. They were also heavily depressed and thought about committing suicide. I repeatedly told them to eat some meat, as they were vegan for many years. I myself had experienced veganism-induced depression. Finally, after many weeks they ate some chicken, and the next time we spoke, they said that they were no longer asexual (they never were), nor depressed.
I was vegan or vegetarian for many consecutive years. Vegetarianism was manageable, perhaps because of cheese. I never hit the extreme low points that I did with veganism. I remember once after not eating meat for a long time there was a period of maybe a weak, where I got extremely fatigued. I took 200mg of modafinil[1], without having any build-up resistance. Usually, this would give me a lot of energy. But then I was barely able to enter some terminal commands to transcribe some of Rob Miles' videos with a whisper such that he could add better captions. Another day I took 30mg of lisdexamfetamine[1:1] which would usually last the entire day and have a pretty strong effect, but this time I got so tired after 3 or 4 hours that I had to lay down and take a nap.
But then I ate some tuna. And felt a lot better the next day. Some time later I did a blood test that indicated iron deficiency as a probable cause.
But even when I take a lot of iron supplements and eat my soybeans (which contain a lot of iron) with bell peppers (which contain Vitamin C, which boosts iron absorption) I still notice a big difference when I eat meat after a long period of abstinence.
So here is my proposition. If you are working on AI alignment then what you think with your brain is very important. If don't usually eat meat you might be missing some important nutrients that would help you think significantly better. As somebody who didn't eat meat until my body screamed into my ear from 5 inches away, I think I understand why you don't want to eat meat. But if you do the expected utility computation is it actually worth it?
What if it makes you only 5% worse at thinking? Is whatever animal suffering you prevent worth the tradeoff in reduced probability of saving the world? What about 10%? What about 50%? Don't answer this question in the abstract. Instead, I recommend the following experiment:
Eat 7 days in a row a large amount of meat. E.g. 1kg of chicken every day. (Start with a lower quantity on the first day. My body sometimes does weird things when starting to eat meat after long abstinence.) The goal: Gather data. You want to eat too much meat (more than you likely end up needing) to make sure that if you are missing any nutrients, you'll definitely get them by the end of the week, such that you can notice an as large as possible difference. While doing this experiment write a journal (ideally starting at least a couple of days before you start to eat meat) in which you precisely document:
For each point give a 0-9 score, plus prose comments where appropriate.
This generates a lot of data on how much of a positive impact eating meat has.
If meat didn't have a positive impact: Congratulations, you can continue not eating meat. And now you know that this is actually the correct thing to do, because you are not missing out cognitively.
If meat had a positive consider the following options:
Important: Consider that you can minimize animal suffering by eating less meat. I'd guess usually people eat more than the optimal amount of meat (which I think is can even be unhealthy). If you eat 20% (this is a random guess) of what people eat on average it might be sufficient to avoid any negative nutritional side effects, while still reducing animal suffering.
It's much easier to be fundamentalist about not eating meat. It makes things simple. Saying "Never eat meat, it's evil" is quite simple, and an easy rule to follow. Saying "Animal farming is terrible, and how we treat "food animals" is one of the greatest moral failures of our time. But AI is gonna destroy the universe. You are trying to prevent this, and possibly not eating meat negatively effects how well you can utilize your brain. So you need to eat meat now first to figure out if there is a nutritional problem, and second to fix that nutritional problem if required. Because that is actually what maximizes the expected utility of getting a good future. But because animal farming is actually terrible you want to minimize the amount of meat that you eat." This is much harder to act upon. It boils down to "Hey, you don't know what's best! You'd better run a bunch of experiments to find out."
I have/had a prescription. ↩︎ ↩︎