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.