Vegan is certainly harder but still completely feasible, especially after the initial learning period. I’ve been vegan for 20 years and it’s only ever really annoying when travelling abroad.

I watched the Stanford twin study that was made into a Netflix documentary and it was really interesting.

It seemed like the sheer volume of food that vegans had to eat in order to avoid losing healthy muscle was very high. Participants really struggled with it.

Just use pea or soy protein powder.

> It seemed like the sheer volume of food

30 ml of olive oil is about 300 calories. 50 grams of peanut butter is 250 calories. Edamame / tofu (soy) has about 18 g of proteins per 100g. Beans have about 17 g per 100g. Peanut butter has 25 g of proteins.

Protein daily needs is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.

I dunno boss, doesn't seem like a very high volume of food.

Just relaying what participants in the study were saying.

Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of health benefits as well but just about everybody lost muscle mass for that reason.

I remember reading a blog a long time ago by sometime who was vegan talking about the long term (something like 9 years) effects of eating a vegan diet without properly supplementing the nutrients you'd get with red meat.

Apparently you can easily get long term brain damage if you don't supplement with certain b vitamins. There were also other deficiencies like iron and zinc that would effect you as well.

Of course this won't effect people who only do it for a year or 2 so most probably don't ever run into issues.

Vegan for 20 years: I check my blood every other year or so and there hasn’t been an issue. I take a multivitamin, like everybody should, but maybe that counts as “properly supplementing”? AFAIK the only vitamin that’s easily deficient in a healthy vegan diet is B12, and that’s supplemented in most soy milks

Well, I think drinking b12 enriched soy milk counts. I don't think it's a given that just because you're vegan you'd drink soy milk either. I don't drink any milk and try to avoid soy and also don't take multivitamins. So in my case it's really pertinent to understand about these deficiencies in case I decide to go vegan.

What’s hard to get on a vegan diet? The only nutrients I know of that vegans tend to lack are B12 and iron, which are easily supplemented if needed.

Plants do not contain vitamins B12, D3 and K2.

Humans can transform some of the vitamin K1 from plants into K2 (like they can transform beta-carotene from plants into vitamin A), but it seems that the quantity produced thus is not sufficient. The intestinal bacteria can also produce some K2, but it is unpredictable whether that is sufficient. The vitamin K2 is required by humans for purposes in which it cannot be substituted by K1.

Plants do not use iodine and selenium. They may contain some quantities of them, especially of selenium, only when the soil where they have been cultivated happens to be rich in these elements, but it is unpredictable whether they contain enough.

Most humans, especially most males, cannot produce enough DHA and EPA fatty acids from the fatty acids available in plants.

Besides iron, plants do not contain enough calcium and they frequently contain most of their phosphorus in phytic acid that cannot be digested by humans. The vegans who do not take supplements are prone to osteoporosis.

Most humans cannot produce internally enough creatine, choline and taurine to satisfy their needs, so they also need external sources and plants are not among those.

A healthy vegan diet must include about a dozen supplements, which is not really a problem, because they are cheap and easily available, except for the fact that many vegans believe myths like "the only nutrients I know of that vegans tend to lack are B12 and iron", so they eventually tend to have health problems, which make many of them to give up on the vegan diet, instead of taking the right supplements.

Cool, thanks for the research fodder. I wouldn't say I "believed the myth", those were just the only two I was aware of, that's why I asked.