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Don't know why I'm stumbling on this post from /u/satirizedoor now a year later and nearly two years after the original post that I made. I still call myself vegan, but I do eat oysters now. I have come to find most vegans, including my past self, as annoying as you: there is a lack of real reflection as to what the goals of the movement are, and if the individual actions that vegans advocate are actually effective at accomplishing those goals. Total cessation of animal suffering is as impossible as it would be totalitarian (some vegans advocate for GMOing away all predators). Some amount of meat eating will always be part of human culture, and is frankly, indistinguishable and perhaps better than what goes on in the wild. My problem in reality is with industrial factory farming. It would be far better for these animals and the planet if we merely advocated for reduction in meat consumption, but that position isn't really justifiable outside of utilitarianism. Most people are not utilitarian I think, which makes it difficult to advocate for a position that fails on consequentialist/deontological grounds. The fact is that some people don't think animals have moral worth, while others do. There's very little ability to reason across that line, despite pretty good scientific evidence that most farm animals do have some rudimentary reasoning and emotional abilities equivalent to that of a small child. To vegans like myself, this evidence is helpful but rather superfluous. My beliefs about animal consciousness come from personal interactions I've had with animals. For those who aren't vegan, evidence of reasoning and/emotional reactions isn't sufficient evidence of consciousness or moral worth. Being able to solve puzzles or display emotions isn't very good evidence that there's something going on inside of another creature.
I'm still convinced that veganism isn't harmful for performance, at least in endurance sports. Plenty of endurance athletes at the highest levels are at least mostly vegan. However, I think that performance enhancement is a different question that I don't think has really been settled scientifically. There are without a doubt certain plant-based substances that are performance enhancers (beet juice), but I don't think this says anything about the efficacy of the diet as a whole. A cycling YouTuber that I vaguely follow, Dylan Johnson is vegan for recovery reasons, as plant-based diets are apparently much less pro-inflammatory than meat-based diets. I can't say I'm fully convinced by this: I think the real culprit in inflammation may be macronutrient ratios. Diets high in fat, which many vegans also have, seem to be particularly pro-inflammatory, at least in animal models. There's also good evidence that high protein consumption is linked to decreases in lifespan, but again this isn't exclusive to meat-eating populations.
I am more shocked by how skewed most user's idea of a healthy body weight is. I'm closer to 160 now, but a 150 with a height of 6' put me at a very normal BMI of 20. I recognize that this weight makes it very difficult to be a strongman, but that's not my goal, nor the goal of most Americans. It is an absurd position to tell me that I am a twig or emaciated at that weight when I am well within the bounds of a healthy BMI.
The gourmet vegan diet available to people with time and money (so that all macros are hit and they have a wide variety of plant proteins) is not the typical vegan diet I see among regular people.
I'm 6'2" and was 155 for a long time. I look skeletal in those pictures. I don't look much better in later photographs where I was 170. That's a 20-22 BMI. I'm not going to tell you you're a twig or emaciated, but it was a terrible look for me.
BMI is a flawed metric to begin with, but especially so for tall people. And the medical establishment knows that, too, because it's pretty obvious. If you take any random population and plot their weight vs. their height, you won't get a height^2 parabola as your best fit. It's much closer to height^2.5. Which is entirely unsurprising to me, I never understood why anyone would assume that width/depth of the human body correlate strictly linear with height...
But classic BMI has momentum now, people know it and understand it. Most of them don't carry a lot of muscle, and aren't significantly more than a standard deviations from the mean in height. So I guess it's fine.
Still, using the waist-to-height ratio instead is probably an easy fix, and gives more reliable results, even for tall and/or muscular people.
I find that for most things having a reasonable for normal people and easy to use system is better. I can plug my height and weight into an online calculator and get my BMI. And unless you’re dealing with someone outside the 1σ of height or muscle mass BMI is good enough. And people that BMI doesn’t work for will be high level NCAA D1 athletes, pro athletes, or extremely tall people and they and their health providers can understand where BMI is wrong and do something else or correct for it.
For most people, an excessively complex measurement doesn’t work because they won’t use it.
True, but this was in response to a man who's 6'2" (and as such scratching the 2σ barrier) and questioning his BMI.
Waist-to-height ratio is arguably even easier: easier to measure, easier to calculate, more reliable.
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