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Comment by kadavy | Hacker News Reader

I've never been a vegetarian, but I used to eat very little meat.

The one mineral I rarely hear about when talking about a vegetarian or vegan diet is Zinc. It is nearly impossible to get enough Zinc without eating animal products. You can either eat nearly 3 pounds of peas, or little more than .5 ounces of canned oysters to get enough Zinc in your diet. Being low on Zinc weakens your immune system, and your libido, so yeah - it's important.

YMMV, but I am feeling much better now that I've made it a point to eat more (local, organically-raised) meat.

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Oysters are actually a weird case for some vegans, in that a lot of the arguments made for veganism don't really apply. They don't have brains, so there's not really a chance for suffering, and they can be farmed in an eco-friendly way. Peter Singer, the animal rights philosopher that vegans are always quoting, has at points said that he doesn't object to eating oysters. http://www.slate.com/id/2248998/

Unfertilized chicken eggs don't have brains either, right? They are still "unclean".

I eat eggs sometimes, but I'm not proud of it. The moral considerations are very different from oysters because of how they're produced. Producing a lot of eggs requires a lot of hens. Having a lot of hens (and not roosters) involves killing a lot of male chicks. Producing any volume of eggs economically requires having a lot of hens in not that much space, which typically involves things like clipping beaks. This also produces a lot of concentrated waste which can often cause environmental damage. Keeping a lot of hens fed requires that you give them a lot of feed, which requires agricultural resources which might otherwise have produced food to be eaten by people. So eating eggs entails killing and torturing birds, producing toxic waste and using agricultural resources inefficiently.

I think that has to do with the manner in which the layers are cared for. Chickens and cows don't produce eggs or milk at the same rate throughout their lives. So farmers cull them once their production drops below the economical point. Also the majority of the males are culled since they're not producers. My grandfather thought it might be worth while to breed dairy cows with a meat producing aspect due to the 25% yearly cull rate.

The issue with them for most vegans is probably that hens are usually kept in inhumane conditions.

Oysters are an outlier in terms of zinc.

http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Zinc-HealthProfessional/

From NIH "Oysters contain more zinc per serving than any other food, but red meat and poultry provide the majority of zinc in the American diet. Other good food sources include beans, nuts, certain types of seafood (such as crab and lobster), whole grains, fortified breakfast cereals, and dairy products"

You can get a lot of Zinc from plant based sources:

http://food.vegtalk.org/minerals/spices-fats-fruits-vegetabl...

Pumpkin seeds have a load of zinc in. A handful on salad does the job.

You would have to eat nearly 1.5 cups of pumpkin seeds to get 100% DRV http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/nut-and-seed-products/30...

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