The Brain Needs Animal Fat

This article is written by a crusader for meat with a clear agenda of being vehemently pro-meat.<p>She supports the keto-diet, which has no real basis in history or science, the person she cites actively disagrees with her dietary suggestions. She cites inflammation and healing as side effects, but doesn&#x27;t describe what gets inflamed, where it gets inflamed, or how.<p>She also makes a claim that vegans and vegetarianism will lead to mental disorder because of this lower DHA claim. Well where&#x27;s the data that vegans&#x2F;vegetarians have higher instances of this? Should be easy to produce right?<p>She even makes the claim that vegetables have no science to prove that they are healthy.<p>How did this even get onto HN, it&#x27;s obviously garbage?<p>Sources:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.2ketodudes.com&#x2F;show.aspx?episode=156" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.2ketodudes.com&#x2F;show.aspx?episode=156</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.judytsafrirmd.com&#x2F;myth-buster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.judytsafrirmd.com&#x2F;myth-buster&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.diagnosisdiet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.diagnosisdiet.com&#x2F;</a>

As a former vegetarian (now a pesco-pollo-tarian?) the important of eggs can&#x27;t be understated. Arguably the one source of animal protein and fats that can be ethically sourced without harming the animal [<i>1</i>].<p>[<i>1</i>] vegans disagree on this point, but that&#x27;s a different debate

&gt; It is difficult to be sure precisely how much DHA we need, as DHA conversion rates and availability can vary significantly depending on age, gender, genetics, and dietary composition<p>Vegetarianism&#x2F;veganism has the same problems with calcium and B12, as those are typically gotten through animals in omnivore diets. It doesn&#x27;t mean that vegetarianism&#x2F;veganism is bad, just that you have to be conscious of your diet. We have a phrase in our house: &quot;You need to eat all the colors.&quot; We include a wide variety of foods in our diet, and milk replacement products with calcium.<p>As a critical thinker, it bothers me when something says &quot;Well, we don&#x27;t understand what this relationship is or its importance; therefore, you should conclude..&quot; Seems like a hit piece on vegetarianism&#x2F;veganism more than anything else. Nevertheless, recognizing the importance of certain fats in your body is a good thing.

&gt; The Brain Needs Animal Fat<p>&gt; Thankfully, vegetarian and vegan-friendly DHA supplements [..] are available.<p>Both from the same article

The article is okay. The headline is clickbait nonsense.<p>The headline implies that vegans should all be dead now, assuming we interpret &quot;need&quot; as necessary to survival.<p>A more accurate title might be &quot;The Brain Benefits From Animal Fat&quot;. But who would click that, right?

This article appears to have a clear agenda and does a poor job of hiding it. The conclusions, which might be summarized &quot;animal fats are good and plant fats are bad&quot; also seem pretty feebly supported by the evidence offered. I am not a scientist, but to my eye this shows the marks of industry supported junks science.

This is nonsense. As the article itself states, if you&#x27;re really paranoid about this then just take an algae supplement, which contains plenty of DHA. That&#x27;s where fish get it. They don&#x27;t make it themselves. And it doesn&#x27;t come with all the pollutants you get from fish these days either.<p>The amount of these fatty acids needed by the brain is quite small and even at low conversion rates can easily be met by conversion from other plant sources too.<p>Summary of research on the subject:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XMA5ij-bsKc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XMA5ij-bsKc</a>

It&#x27;s too bad that the reactions to this article are so quickly approached as if it&#x27;s a wholesale indictment of plant-based diets. Maybe it doesn&#x27;t mean that veganism should be immediately stopped worldwide. Maybe it means there&#x27;s opportunities to optimize what is already a mostly good thing.<p>The fact that an individual poster is vegan and, in his opinion, &quot;is fine&quot; is obviously not useful.<p>The fact that hundreds of millions of people in India are to some extent mostly plant based and are are &quot;Ok&quot; is not useful because a) they are not necessarily 100% plant based and b) what is the definition of &quot;Ok&quot;? They continue to live obviously but who&#x27;s to say they can&#x27;t be better? There are plenty of negative characteristics of Indian health - as there are for any population - that could be correlated. If there is a causal link found, maybe it would prolong life and&#x2F;or life quality.<p>The assertion that the writer is funded by big meat is not useful. If someone says the sky is blue, the first thing to do is look at the sky to see if it&#x27;s blue - not question whether or not the speaker is paid by the pro-blue sky lobby.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate to see cultural movements smother science. I&#x27;m not saying that this article is science or is even correct science. But until a rational discussion is allowed that even allows such an evaluation we can&#x27;t know.

ARA has been found to be produced by a lichen, iirc, and so is now available as a vegetarian supplement. (It may or not be vegan, depending on whether you consider lichen animals.)<p>EDIT: I remember imprecisely. For more information, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6052662&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6052662&#x2F;</a> (2018)

Be careful. This article&#x27;s sole purpose is to help sell decades&#x27; worth of toxic fish oil supply that&#x27;s become worthless in light of more in-depth research. DHA accumulates in the brain with age and dementia as esters of cholesterol.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;raypeat.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;articles&#x2F;fishoil.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;raypeat.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;articles&#x2F;fishoil.shtml</a>

Talks given by this person includes &quot;Attention: Is your diet causing your ADHD?&quot; and &quot;Beyond Medication: How to Improve Mood, Attention and Memory Through Diet.&quot; I hope you caught her talk at the &quot;Boulder Carnivore Conference&quot; last month!

This is nonsense. I’ve been a vegan for years and do not supplement DHA or EPA. My body converts everything from ALA. My blood levels are great.<p>There is no such thing as clinical DHA defiency established in the literature. What regulates ALA metabolism is poorly understood, but it seems when you don’t get DHA and EPA your body does fine, as evidenced by every vegan alive.<p>Also there isn’t much DHA or EPA in a diet that includes fish. You can’t get the 1.5g a day that’s recommended by eating fish or eggs in your diet. Yet humans were doing just fine before fish oil supplements.

There&#x27;s a phenomenon known as &quot;rabbit starvation&quot; that is related to this. Rabbit is an incredibly lean meat and apparently you can eat and eat and eat and still be hungry.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protein_poisoning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protein_poisoning</a>

Ramanujan was vegetarian, many other geniuses, too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.care2.com&#x2F;greenliving&#x2F;10-genius-vegetarians.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.care2.com&#x2F;greenliving&#x2F;10-genius-vegetarians.html</a>

There are plenty of life long vegetarians in India so this article seems nonsense. I would agree that people should watch their diet and make adjustments but categorically declaring that we need animal fat doesn’t make sense.

Here is the author&#x27;s personal website if you&#x27;re interested in more information on the subject.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.diagnosisdiet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.diagnosisdiet.com&#x2F;</a>

The article mentions coconut oil which seems to be a big mystery. Some people say it&#x27;s long chain saturated fat which is bad, but others say it&#x27;s actually medium chain and good for you.

I am a vegetarian, and consume very little animal fat. My brains works just fine. Generally this article goes against massive amount of evidence that vegetable fats just healthier than animal fats.

i&#x27;m not sure which side has the better balance of evidence, but, FWIW, one argument i&#x27;ve seen on the other side of this discussion is: DHA&#x2F;EPA are highly polyunsaturated and, at human body temperatures, oxidize more easily than they do at cold water fish body temperatures.<p>so, by consuming pre-formed DHA&#x2F;EPA on a regular basis, the argument goes, a human body must bear the burden of dealing with a fat that oxidizes readily and damages other bodily cells.

Any anthropologist or scientist worth their salt knew this for years. Cooking meat is one of the main reasons fire was controlled, and anyone who didn&#x27;t eat meat was usually for religious reasons or during a famine.<p>I&#x27;m just as appalled as anyone else when it comes to the ethical treatment of animals, but to deny that we didn&#x27;t evolve to be omnivores despite overwhelming evidence is... well it&#x27;s silly.

[deleted]

I love pork chops, steak, lamb and eggs. Nothing wrong eating any meat products. Now I do have issue on how they are raised because I believe it affects the quality of the meat. But you have to be honest with yourselves. These animals have been modified for human consumption. They are not what nature intended them to be. Cows are almost completely different to what they were originally. Chickens are like 3 times bigger than what they used to be. These animals have been made to be eaten.