Introduction
Reducing consumption of animal products is a choice with both moral and practical consequences. Last summer I found myself in contact with many vegans who cared a lot about the moral consequences, but had put little effort into learning about or managing the practical consideration of removing animal products from their diet. I’ve suffered a lot due to bad nutrition, so this made me very concerned. With a grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, I launched small a pilot project to give nutritional tests to 5 vegans and near-vegans from the Lightcone Office, which they could use to choose supplements that would hopefully improve their health.
My long-term goal was for everyone to have accurate information on their personal nutritional costs of veganism and make informed choices about how to handle them, with the first line solution being supplements. My goal for the pilot was to work out practical issues in testing, narrow the confidence interval on potential impact, and improve the nutrition of the handful of people. This report is on phase 1: getting the testing done and supplements started. It is aimed at people who might want to run a similar program at scale; if you are interested in running this for yourself I recommend checking out Tuesday’s post on iron deficiency.
Tl;dr: I found rampant iron deficiencies, validating the overall concern. The procedure I used has a lot of room for improvement.
The Experiment
I gave nutrition tests to 6 people in the Lightcone office.
The ideal subject was completely vegan, had never put any effort or thought into their diet, and was extremely motivated to take a test and implement changes. This person does not volunteer for studies, so I ended up with 4 vegans or near-vegans who had put somewhere between 0 and a lot of thought into their diet, 1 vegetarian, and 1 extremely motivated omnivore I used to test out the process. In addition, one hardcore vegan contributed results from private testing. I did not poll the ~vegans on their exact diets.
Unless otherwise stated the results exclude the omnivore.
I gave each of these six people a Genova Metabolomix+ test, ordered from walkinlabs.com, with the iron add-on. This test was selected for being recommended by doctors I trust (in part because they prefer urine to blood testing), having extremely easy-to-read results, being nearly comprehensive (with the unfortunate absence of vitamin D), and because I hoped urine collection at home would be easier than blood draws at a lab. Foreshadowing: I was wrong about that last part.
I also gave people the option of an add-on to determine what variant of the MTHFR gene they have. MTHFR can affect how one processes certain B vitamins, and certain variants can necessitate a more expensive form of supplements.
Several people (although not everyone) scored with undetectably low iron. I offered them follow-up blood tests, which one person accepted. An additional vegan contributed blood test results without urine results.
As of publication all subjects have received their first round of results and started supplements of their choosing.
The original plan was to retest in 3-6 months after people began supplements, using the same urine tests.
My initial predictions
I expected the big shortages to be B12, iron, and vitamin D, the first of which has very few* natural vegan sources and the latter two of which are scarce, although not absent, in vegan sources. This makes it pretty unfortunate the original test did not include vitamin D.
[*B12 is (maybe?) naturally found in some (but not all) seaweeds and algaes, in at least one kind of mushroom, and in nutritional yeast (but possibly in the wrong format?). It’s also added to many wheat products in the US, so if you eat enough wheat and aren’t going out of your way to get unfortified wheat that’s a strong source]
Relative to the mainstream I wasn’t very concerned about protein consumption. Vegan proteins are a little less abundant, a little harder to digest, and have a less ideal distribution of amino acids, but are basically fine as long as you don’t pile on additional constraints.
One reason I was concerned was that lots of people I polled were piling on additional constraints, like keto or gluten-free, and still not doing anything to manage nutrition. I expected a smattering of deficiencies from these people, and to a lesser extent from everyone, as their restrictions and tastes cut off random nutrients. These could have been in any almost nutrient.
I expected everyone to be fine on vitamin C because it is abundant in both produce and processed food (where it’s used as a preservative).
Results
(including only vegans and near-vegans)
- ¾ vegan testers had severe iron deficiencies in their urine tests.
- The one who didn’t had both a stunning dietary intake of iron, and a parent who 23andMe believes to have a genetic predisposition to excessive absorption of iron.
- An additional vegetarian tester was not deficient.
- One of these retested with a blood test and scored low normal (~30). However this person was already taking iron supplements at the time of the test.
- A bonus blood-only participant tested between 13 and 20, meaning they’d be considered deficient by some standards but not others.
- There were no B12 deficiencies, probably because everyone was already on B12 supplements.
- One tester had a lot of deficiencies, including vitamin C, to the point I suspect it’s a problem with digestion rather than diet.
- Everyone had at least one amino acid deficiency, including the person eating over 100g of protein/day. I don’t know how big a deal this actually is.
- The urine test did not include vitamin D. Of the 2 blood tests, both had low-normal vitamin D.
- Excluding the person with across-the-board deficiencies, there were scattered other deficiencies but nothing else to consistently worry about. People were mostly in their tests’ green zone, with occasional yellow and red.
What does this mean?
Only one near-vegan out of 5 had solidly good ferritin levels. As I discuss here, that’s a very big deal, potentially costing them half a standard deviation on multiple cognitive metrics.
There’s no control group, so I can’t prove that this is a veganism problem. But I’m quite suspicious.
There were no other consistent problems, so broad-spectrum testing is probably overkill for people with no known problems.
Retrospective on the project
What worked
I consider the core loop of the study as vindicated as can it be at this stage.
- Deficiencies were identified, and the primary one was one of the three I predicted.
- And another of the three, B12, was probably absent because people treated it preemptively. Note that people were inconsistent in what they took so I can’t say definitively what they were on during testing.
- In the counterfactual timeline the shortages were probably identified much later if at all. No one who participated had any plans for testing, including people with obvious symptoms and people whose doctors had previously recommended testing.
This will be less impressive if supplementation doesn’t turn out to fix anything, but it’s an extremely solid start.
Other things that went well:
- Having the room in my budget for unplanned additional testing, so I could add in serum iron tests when it became obvious they were necessary.
- Creating a shopping list with links. I was worried this was somehow taking advantage of people (since I used affiliate links), but removing a decision and several steps from the ordering process seems to have been pretty crucial.
- Bypassing the need for doctors’ visits to get a test. Given how long it took people to order tests I think doctors’ appointments would have killed the project entirely.
- The Lightcone ops team was extremely cooperative and got all of the vitamins I suggested into the office.
Difficulties + possible changes
Potential changes are framed as recommendations because I am deeply hoping to hand off this project to animal advocates, who caused the veganism in the first place.
- The test ordering workaround was not as good as I had hoped
- I’d originally hoped to just hand participants a box, but they had to order the tests themselves.
- In order to get iron + genetics tests people had to call rather than order online. This is non-standard for the provider and two people had to call twice to insist on what they wanted.
- Tests took a long time to ship, and a long time to return results after shipping. The lab alleges this is a supply chain issue and there’s nothing to be done about it.
- Those two together turned into a pretty big deal because they made it very hard to plan and people lost momentum.
- In combination with the results showing few problems beyond iron I recommend deemphasizing full spectrum urine tests and focusing on blood tests for iron (and vitamin D), and making those convenient, perhaps by bringing a phlebotomist to the office.
- Another option would be to bring in a medical practitioner, who can order tests for other people, to manage tests so the office can be stocked with them. This of course fails to solve the problem for anyone not in the office.
- There are home tests for vitamin D and iron specifically, but I have no idea if they’re any good.
- Ideal test subjects (completely vegan, never done nutritional testing or interventions, promptly puts in the effort to do these tests and act on them once I suggest it) were even thinner on the ground than anticipated.
- I knew there wouldn’t be many, but I didn’t think it would be so hard to get five people pretty close to that profile.
- I loosened restrictions and still consistently found problems, so recommend lowering the eligibility bar for testing in future rounds, especially since that was always the plan. The strict requirements in this round were an attempt to make the signal as loud as possible.
- Getting everyone tested was like herding cats. Beyond the problems with the test distributor, some participants needed repeated reminders to order, one lost a test, results went missing… it was kind of a nightmare.
- One advantage of focusing on blood tests would be to cut down on this, especially if you bring the phlebotomist to the office.
- At points I was uncomfortable with the deference some participants showed me. I was as clear as I possibly could be that this was a best-effort from a knowledgeable amateur kind of thing; they were responsible for their own health and I was a nonexpert trying to provide some logistics help. I nonetheless got more than one person bringing me problems not even related to the nutrition project, and insisting I tell them what to do.
- Recommendation: bring in a skilled nutritionist. They can both give better advice than me and devote more time to helping people.
- I initially misread the protein results (which are delivered in terms of “how deficient are you?” rather than “what’s your current level?”, making 0 the best possible score). Luckily I knew I was confused from the beginning and no one had taken any actions based on my misinterpretation. More broadly, I’m just a woman who’s had some problems and read some stuff, I expect my suggestions to be better than nothing but far from the maximum good it would be possible to do.
- Recommendation: bring in a skilled nutritionist
- I underestimated the amount of time and especially emotional labor this project would need. I was hoping to bluff my way through that until people got on supplements, at which point the improvements in health would be their own motivation. I think I always overestimated how well that would work, but it was especially wrong because all the problems with the tests drained people’s momentum.
- Recommendation: I still think you should bring in a skilled nutritionist
- Many of the participants were moving frequently and not in the office by the time their results came in (because they took so long…), so they had to buy supplements themselves. Given the option I would have selected people consistently in the office, but as mentioned I was already managing trade-offs around participants.
- Recommendation: ask for more money to give everyone their first month of supplements and a convenient pill planner.
Next Steps
I previously planned to give people the same urine test 3-6 months after they started supplements. That no longer seems worth it, relative to the cheaper and more convenient blood tests.
It’s not actually clear a formal follow-up is that useful at all. I initially planned that because I expected a wide range of shortages such that literature reviews wouldn’t be helpful. But there was only one real problem, and it has a richer literature than almost any micronutrient. So I don’t think another 5 people’s worth of scattered data is going to add much information.
So the next step for this as a project would be mass blood testing for B12, iron, and vitamin D.
Feeling motivated?
If this has inspired you to test your own nutrition, I haven’t done anything you can’t do yourself. Both the urine and blood tests are available at walkinlabs.com, and if you have a doctor they’re quite likely to agree to testing, especially if you’re restricting meat products or fatigued. I have a draft guide of wisdom on supplementation I’ve picked up over the years here, although again, I’m not a doctor and only learned how to digest food last May, so use at your own risk.
Thank you to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for funding this project, Lightcone for hosting, and all the participants for their precious bodily fluids.
Hi Elizabeth! Thanks for reaching out. Excuse my delay in response, and the length of this reply. It felt important to communicate the nuances in my views (and the anecdotal experiences, which in our past exchanges might not have come through.
That's not my position. To the extent the naive transition accounts are representative of what's going on in rat/EA spheres, some intervention that reduces the number of transitions that are naive (while fixing the number of transitions) would be a Pareto-improvement. And an intervention that reduces the number of transitions that are naive, and decreases way less the number of transitions, would also be net-positive.
My worry, though, is that signaling out veganism for this is not the most efficient way to achieve this. I hypothesize that
More on 2. below (On framing), but let me get into 1. first.
I was very surprised to hear those anecdotal stories of naive transitions, because in my anecdotal experience across many different vegan and animalist spaces, serious talk about nutrition, and a constant reminder to put health first, has been an ever-present norm. And, at the same time, a recognition that turning vegan, even with all these nutrition subtleties, is not nearly as difficult as people imagine it (certainly in part due to selection effects).[1]
I hypothesize that the distributional shift is due to properties of the social dynamics and individual mindspace that rat/EA circles inadvertently encourage, especially on wide-eyed newcomers. The same optimizing mindset leading to "burn-out / overwork / too much Huel / exotic unregulated diets / not taking care of your image / dangerous drug practices linked to work" around these spaces seems to me to be one of the central causes of these naive transitions. I think this is also psychologically linked to the rational justification I've heard from some x-riskers: their work is just too important to care about anything else. Obviously that backfires.
Now, even given the above, it is coherent to believe that, despite this common root, veganism in particular is such a prominent example, with so many negative consequences, that a straightforward intervention pushing the motto that veganism presents tradeoffs and can be difficult or not for everyone, is net-positive. After all, this is kind of a quantitative question. I claim that's not the case, and it's related to collective blind spots we shouldn't ignore, which brings me back to 2.
On framing:
One thing that might be happening here, is that we're speaking at different simulacra levels. I'm not claiming you're saying anything untrue, just that the consequences of pushing this line in this way are probably net-negative.
Now, I understand the benefits of adopting the general adoption of the policy "state transparently the true facts you know, and that other people seem not to know". Unfortunately, my impression is this community is not yet in a position in which implementing this policy will be viable or generally beneficial for many topics. And indeed, on some priors it makes sense that a community suddenly receiving an influx of external attention will have to slowly work up to that, if it is at all possible.[2]
I believe one of the topics is veganism, because of the strong intuitive aversion individuals across the board feel towards changing their diet for ethical reasons (and, I claim, this aversion is irrational and should be counteracted and scrutinized accordingly). In my anecdotal experience (of many years discussing veganism with vegans and non-vegans), an almost-total fraction of the justifications for not transitioning to a vegan diet easily fall to "Is that your true rejection?" (even if the best route is not always to mention that explicitly, of course).
I expected to see that change in EA circles. Unfortunately, that has not been my anecdotal experience. The animalist part of EA, so to speak, is very strongly concentrated in a few individuals (or better said, sub-communities), who have taken this issue seriously enough, and many times are even directly working on animal welfare. But when you move slightly away from that space into neighboring sub-communities (say, a randomly sampled alignment researcher), defensive motivated reasoning on the topic seems to go up again.[3]
And there are instances in which I've obtained direct evidence that individuals in decisive positions are not reasoning correctly about the tradeoffs involved. As an example, consider that some offices / programs / retreats don't offer (as the free lunch for their members) a completely vegetarian menu (let alone vegan).
From the outside, I don't understand how this decision can make sense for any rat/EA space. Even if it were true that veganism requires some more efforts, it would be because of the complications related to health tracking or food planning. Those are not present in this case. The food is served, for free. Organizers can put the extra effort to make sure that the offer is nutritionally complete each day, or across the week (as also happens with omnivore menus). But whoever is not vegan need not worry that hard about all that, since they'll be eating omnivore outside the office. And whoever's vegan should worry about that, just because they're vegan. Having meat in this menu doesn't directly improve anyone's health.
And the few times I've seen this "from the inside", that is, I've heard organisers' reasoning about this decision, they really didn't seem to have meaningful arguments, and appealed to a general notion of individual freedom which I think is not a good ethical proxy, and if translated to other domains would lead to bad "not taking side-effects seriously", or "not taking the dangers of social dynamics seriously".
I have, of course, heard the obvious argument (although not from organizers) that x-risk research is so important that, if having a vegan menu might slightly turn off a single valuable researcher, it's not worth it. This of course resonates a lot with the optimizy mindspace referenced above. And here I'll just say that I don't think this is the kind of desperate community we want to build. That this can just the same turn off ethically conscious people, who we do want in our community. And that this mindset is very correlated with the "unconstrained obsession with talent" that has led the community to being partly captured by ML community, weird epistemic areas incentivizing bad elitism and power dynamics, etc. In simpler words, I think this blows past some healthy and necessary deontological fences (more in the next section).
I also cannot help but feel suspicious that these practices are so comfortably presented as the default, and alarmed (in some precautionary sense) that grant money is being used to finance something as horrible, and vast, and openly debated, as animal exploitation (more in the next section).
Let me also note that I don't agree that your posts (and the ensuing comments and conversations) were focused on mitigations within veganism, due to their framing. Even if you truthfully discussed these mitigations, the general tone skeptical of the viability and importance of veganism was very clear, and it is obvious which message most people will get out of this post. I'd love to live in a world were I can trust your readers to Bayesian update and ignore framings, but it'd be self-delusional to think this will be the case in this situation, given the obvious strong pulls everyone has towards motivated ignorance of veganism (and the evidence I've obtained about that also inside this community), and how the framing / headliners / first-order updates from your posts resonate with those repeated one-dimensional rationalizations.
A background ethical disagreement:
One thing that might also be happening is just that we disagree ethically. After all, if I didn't care at all about veganism (or related individual ethical practices), I wouldn't care about how many vegans are lost, as long as naive vegans are decrease (ignoring second-order effects on community epistemics, as discussed above). And indeed, it is popular amongst some rationalists to doubt the possibility that animals can suffer, something I strongly ethically disagree with.[4]
But I'm not sure that's the main driver of our disagreement. If we disagree about how hard to push veganism, or how deeply to consider the negative consequences of having a less vegan community, it might be because of a disagreement about where the utilitarianism / deontology line should be in this topic. (After all, you could very strongly worry about animal suffering, and nonetheless bet absolutely all your efforts on x-risk research, because of being a naive Expected Value Maximizer.) Or equivalently, about how bad the consequences for community dynamics can be, and whether it's better to resort to rule utilitarianism on this one.
As an extreme example, I very strongly feel like financing the worst moral disaster of current times so that "a few more x-risk researchers are not slightly put off from working in our office" is way past the deontological failsafes. As a less extreme example, I strongly feel like sending a message that will predictably be integrated by most people as "I can put even less mental weight on this one ethical issue that sometimes slightly annoyed me" also is. And in both cases, especially because of what they signal, and the kind of community they incentivize.
The right way to discuss these challenges:
As must be clear, I'd be very happy with treating the root causes, related to the internalized optimizy and obsessive mindset, instead of the single symptom of naive vegan transitions. This is an enormously complex issue, but I a prior think available health and wellbeing resources, and their continuous establishment as a resource that should be used by most people (as an easy route to having that part of life under control and not spiraling, similar to how "food on weekdays" is solved for us by our employers), would provide the individualization and nuance that these problems require. Something like "hey, from now on, those of you that follow any slightly unconventional diet, or have this other thing, or suffer that other thing, can go talk to these people, and they will help you do blah" would sound pretty good, and possibly a welfare multiplier for some people. It certainly sounds better to me than just broadcasting the message "veganism is hard, consider the tradeoffs and either search for help, or drop veganism". Additionally, "hard" is very variable, and the nuance of it and your observations will get lost.
Something like running small group analytics on some naive vegans as an excuse for them to start thinking more seriously about their health? Yes, nice! That's individualized, that's immediately useful. But additionally extracting some low-confidence conclusions and using them to broadcast the above message (or a message that will get first-order approximated to that by 75%) seems negative.
It feels weird for me to think about solutions to this community problem, since in my other spheres it hasn't arisen. But thinking about which things that happened in those spheres could have contributed positively, the first things that come to mind are: talks / events / activities about sports and health (or even explicitly nutrition), memes about nutrition (post-ironic B12 slander, etc.), communal environments where this knowledge is likely to be shared (like literal cooking).
I also observe that the more individualized approach might work better for a more close-knit community, and that might be especially unattainable now. Maybe there's some other way to bootstrap this habit. Relatedly, I'd feel safer about some more oversight with regards to some health practices in general (especially drugs, and especially newcomers). But I observe that anything looking like policing is complicated.
In any event, I'm no expert in community health, and my separate point stands that I think broadcasting that message is net-negative right now, because of the obvious bottom-line people would extract from it.
Thanks for reading all of that. Next weeks are busy so I might again take a bit long to reply. Nonetheless, I saw in your last post that you're thinking about vegan epistemics. Just in case you'd find that valuable, I'd be willing to discuss those thoughts as well, or provide opinions on concrete topics, or just talk about my experience. But of course, no problem if you don't.
And, to be fair, I have even observed this health consciousness in the few EAs I know who are very vocal about their veganism and animalism (they are few because inside EA I've been closer to AI safety than animal welfare).
I could also note that this situation is slightly different from a straightforward "these people believe this false fact". More accurately, the truth value of this fact hasn't been brought to their attention, because of a complex web of learned emotional and mental habits. I'm talking here about focusing on those habits, as opposed to the practice of veganism in particular.
It's obviously hard to draw the boundary of motivated reasoning. I have observed pretty clear-cut cases, but let me just leave it at "these intelligent people are not thinking about / taking seriously / maintaining up to their epistemic standards this aspect of their life as much as they should according to some of their own stated preferences or revealed preferences (and as clearly they are able to)".
Due to my views on consciousness and moral antirealism, I think deciding which physical systems count as suffering is an ethical choice (equivalent to saying "I care about this process not happening"), and not a purely descriptive one.