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Comment by Double_a_92 | Hacker News Reader

Besides that, it just sounds like esoteric nonsense. What's next? Essential oils?

At the risk of missing some intended sarcasm, which part of the vegan diet, regular exercise, and sleep hygiene sounds like esoteric nonsense? I don't see how any of those are comparable to essential oils.

On the contrary, they were so obvious I wondered if the parent's final comment was a tongue-in-cheek joke:

> Thank you, but I'll stick to eating healthy, exercising, and living my life.

None of those actually make you 18 in any appreciable form?

...I do get a fair bit of rhetoric about going vegan from 18-year-olds ;)

The vegan part is nonsense.

Communities with little to no consumption of meat, like Seventh-Day Adventists, have significantly lower rates of prion disease and Alzheimers.

While it may be nonsense if your goal is solely prolonging life, avoiding meat seems like a relatively easy way to reduce your risk of becoming worthless to society and yourself; virtually everyone can agree that dementia is something to avoid.

What is the standard rate of prion disease?

> Prion diseases are rare. About 300 cases are reported each year in the U.S.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

So, vanishingly rare. Enough to be an irrelevance.

I find it hard to believe there's enough of a population of Seventh-Day Adventists to actually say they have lower rates of prion disease.

Prion disease incidence is 1 to 2 cases per million people per year. You'd have to have millions of 7th day adventists submitting to research to be able to assert that with any confidence.

Sounds like confounding bias. Seven-Day Adventists abstain from cigarettes, a main contributor to early death. Also any diet that avoids the standard American diet will probably increase your lifespan, even veganism, though probably less so now with all of the processed vegan foods. That has no bearing on whether veganism is an optimal diet for human longevity, it just implies that the standard American diet is a poor diet. If you look at countries with the highest meat consumption - Hong Kong and Australia - they also have the longest lifespan.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6654568/ “It is concluded that evidence was found for the thesis that abstinence from cigarette smoking is the main factor explaining the low mortality from ischaemic heart diseases among SDAs”

The argument wasn't "avoiding meat prolongs death." It was "avoiding meat reduces the risk of dementia."

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/114/1/175/617...

Vegan is more than avoiding meat. As far as health is concerned, I would put avoiding salmon, eggs, and fermented milk on the "makes your diet less healthy" list. I would be very curious to see a study that said avoiding once a week liver was healthier than having it.

Daily consumption of red meat? Yeah, the jury appears to be tilted against such behavior/habit.

...I mean, they could have stipulated organic fair-trade vegan. That would be nonsense. You can't very well claim veganism isn't a significant dietary choice with knock-on effects to one's health, though (albeit whether those are negative depends on whether and how you deal with the lack of things in your diet that most of us get mainly/entirely from animal products - vitamin B12, iron etc)

You can't claim we know the knock on effects outside of calorie restriction.

If anything calorie restriction seems to dominate all other variables in all contexts but people don't like that answer.

Not claiming anyone knows what any effects might be, positive or negative. Unlike the usual kinds of nonsense woo, though, there might actually be effects. That is my entire thesis.

Presumably in the comment

"Besides that, it just sounds like esoteric nonsense. What's next? Essential oils?"

it refers to the entirety of Bryan Johnson's routine including the tea-tree mouthwashing, the weekly acid peels, the 33,000+ images of his bowels, the laser treatments, the fat injections into his face, etc.

I doubt they meant that a vegan diet, regular exercise, and sleep hygiene is esoteric.

Fun fact, the "essential" in essential oil actually refers to the fact that it emits a scent (essence), not that it is something important for your body to have.

Hmmm... Are there any other examples of a suffix of "ce" transferring to "tial" to mean "about that thing"?

Presence -> Presential

Governance -> Governantial

Fence -> Fential

Evanescence -> Evanesential

The latter is at least the best conceivable name for an Evanescence cover band.

Since you're curious: in the original Latin you'd be looking for words of 3rd declination that have "ent" and, depending on case, end with -ens (contraction of ent+s), -entis, -entia or something like that.

I guess English took (ens -> ence) and (entia + l -> ential).

Reference -> Referential Difference -> Differential Prudence -> Prudential (now I understand the origin of this name)

I think it's pretty common, you're just not reaching for the right set of "-ence" words.

Residence -> residential, Evidence -> evidential...

Jurisprudential, existential, penitential...

The only thing is that about half have become "having characteristics related to the thing" instead of "about the thing". Words like consequential, pestilential, preferential have a common usage in this realm but still can be used in the "discussion about a thing" sense.

Ah yeah these are good.

Regular sleep and intermittent, focused exercise are obviously good things. Balanced vegan diet (assuming you get all your nutrients) is also an obviously (if only slightly less obviously) good thing.

There is no reliable scientific basis to claim that a vegan diet is good from a general health and longevity perspective. No one has ever performed a proper long-term randomized controlled trial. The error bars on the studies we do have are very wide, with multiple uncontrolled confounding variables and low-quality subject reported data.

You can find plenty of vegan junk food packed with sugar.

I tried to phrase my comment precisely to avoid this sort of comment. See my parentheses in the GP.

Say what you will about essential oils but peppermint oil has saved me from needing Tylenol/Advil on many occasions with a headache.

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