Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanifc | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com