Any 3rd or 4th generation vegans?

[brimstoneSalad]

This isn't how science works, there isn't a "default conclusion".

It's how life works; we're always called upon to make decisions and evaluate probability with incomplete information.

The default is skepticism, that is, you withhold judgement until there is sufficient evidence to support a given hypothesis.

You think the default is to continue to eat meat and reject the notion of going vegan, and further to exert effort fear mongering about supposed health risks of going vegan on the internet.
That's not skepticism. Skepticism would be "I don't know about health so I'm not going to factor that in, but we do know about environmental effects of animal agriculture and the ethical ramifications so I'm going to work on switching to vegan/reducing my animal product consumption because I'm not a bad person".

Throughout history many beliefs people thought were "obvious" have been shown wrong when they were studied rigorously.

Liek omg they used to think the Earth was flat! Therefore ignore all arguments for doing anything and do whatever you feel like instead.

We don't have complete information on anything, but we still make reasoned decisions.

Yes, if there was an "obvious problem" it would likely have been already identified but "obvious problems" aren't the only issues that occur. For example just take drug trials, "obvious problems" are usually detected quickly but subtle problems can take decades to discover and many drugs have been pulled from the market despite looking fine from early trials.

Veganism isn't a drug; Vegans are eating the same basic things that meat eaters are eating in slightly different ratios. We're not suddenly going to discover that beans are toxic if you eat them for more than ten years.

The "risks" of veganism are only from poorly planned diets and manifest in the short term. If the vegan diet being followed is nutritionally adequate, there's no reason to believe long term effects are suddenly going to pop up.

But in this case you're not even referring to preliminary research but instead anecdotes.

You're just dismissing all of the research. I've addressed this supposed "selection bias".

But you mentioned breast milk and formula earlier and I think that is a perfect example to illustrate the issues here. On paper formula contains all the nutrients infants require and infants do typically survive while consuming it.....yet they aren't as healthy as breast-fed infants. They suffer more health issues, they appear to have lower IQs, they suffer higher rates of SIDS and a variety of other issues.

Now you're fear mongering against infant formula too?.
Do you have any idea how harmful that is? You just don't care about struggling mothers or childhood nutrition, do you? You're blinded by ideology and spreading fear mongering that HURTS PEOPLE.

Formula is perfectly fine, there's no reason to believe it's any worse than breast milk except for the immune boost breast milk provides (saving a few minor infections, potentially).

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/heal ... ll-us.html

Essentially, all the studies ever done on this topic fail to account for other factors that may lead to those outcomes (health and IQ). For example, a mother’s high IQ predicts that her children will likely have higher IQ, but also that she will nurse them. Parents who use formula tend to be poorer and live in environments in which children have a tendency to experience more illness. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. This problem could be prevented if randomized studies were done on this topic, but, understandably, those are considered unethical.

Luckily, there are a few studies that help shed light on this problem. Emily Oster, PhD, an associate professor of economics at Brown University, discusses them in this article. One such study, is the PROBIT trial. Here, groups were randomized into two: one group received breastfeeding support while the other did not.

The support received is described as: “Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative [BFHI]…which emphasizes health care worker assistance with initiating and maintaining breastfeeding and lactation and postnatal breastfeeding support.” Infants were followed for one and a half years after birth and then had a one year follow-up check after that. The results were as follows:

1. At three months 43 percent of those who received BFHI support were still breastfed exclusively vs. only 6 percent in the other group (that’s a very large difference!)

2. Nine percent of breastfed infants had at least one illness with diarrhea vs. 13 percent in formula fed infants

3. Three percent of breastfed infants had eczema vs. 6 percent formula fed

4. There were no differences in the number of common colds

This tells us that breastfed babies do suffer less often from diarrhea and eczema, but by a relatively small difference. And…that’s it.

There’s another way to work around the problem that randomized trials can’t be ethically conducted in breastfeeding: sibling comparisons. In this method, you look at the same family, but compare siblings to each other, when one was breastfed and the other formula fed. The beauty here is that, more or less, all the other factors are kept the same such as the parents, environment, and foods.

In “Is Breast Truly Best?” the researchers set out to remove the effects of confounders on the data. They used a very large study which followed about 12,000 children from all walks of life from birth until age 14. This study was particularly helpful not only because it was large, but also because it followed very diverse groups of families. Then, they focused on sibling data in situations where each child was fed differently and, the results were stunning. When they looked at “between-families”, the data showed that breastfeeding was “associated with beneficial long-term child outcomes. This trend was evident for 10 out of the 11 outcomes examined here.” These outcomes included differences in IQ. But when they flipped the statistical “sibling switch” on and accounted for all the confounders they reported that those associations disappeared and they were “forced to reconsider the notion that breastfeeding unequivocally results in improved childhood health and wellbeing.”

There may also be some benefit for premature infants who have worse digestion and benefit more from the immune boost.

The point is that differences between formula and breast fed infants are extremely small and are due to socioeconomic and health biases since healthy well off mothers are more able to spend the time with full time care breast feeding.

There are also significant risks with breast feeding, from disease and drug transmission to under-feeding because it's very difficult to measure consumption, to nutritional risks. Breast milk isn't perfect, it lacks adequate iron for instance, and if the mother isn't taking large dose supplements the breast milk isn't going to have enough vitamin D either (and by no means should babies be put in the sun).

The suitability of formula is just more evidence (along with TPN) that we understand nutrition pretty damn well and it's not that complicated to achieve adequacy. And your unreasonable fear mongering against formula is just another parallel to your tirades against the nutritional adequacy of well planned veganism.

Of course anecdotes of "healthy formula fed infants" doesn't tell us about any of this, you have to do comparative studies.

No matter what, you'll always demand more studies despite them being impossible or unethical to do.
You're not a skeptic by any sane or reasonable definition. Maybe you can claim to be one along the lines of the youtube "skeptics" like Sargon, but that's a perversion of the term.

And you really think someone that starts a vegan diet for ethical reasons is likely to continue the diet after they start having health issues? That is probably the most compelling reason they would stop and we know many of them do, in fact, stop.

Some of them do, the less committed, but not all. There are enough vegans, and enough committed vegans, that we would have data of those failures as we do with B-12.
There are still many reported cases of non-supplementing long term vegans staying with it so long despite health problems that they suffer nerve damage from B-12 deficiency. Nobody is going to feel good with such a severe and long lasting B-12 deficiency.
You vastly underestimate the determination of people who are committed for ethical or even religious reasons.

Likewise, we have plenty of cases not necessarily related to veganism of hunger strikes to the point of organ failure, or even fringe diets like low fat diets or very low calorie diets that people follow until the point of hospitalization. We would have records of these things, people do keep with things despite health problems if they are committed.

Veganism may be a relatively small group, but not so small that we wouldn't have ample data on this if it represented any meaningful contribution to recidivism. In some areas (like the UK) surveys suggest the numbers near 5% of the population.

Again, believing there's some group that just doesn't do well as vegans and this has never been recorded in the medical literature is ridiculous, it's like thinking there's a thriving population of bigfoot out there and they just haven't left any evidence.

Except I haven't referred to any conspiracy theories

Holding up the belief in bigfoot as you're doing is essentially that. The only way this data could be hiding when it should be so prevalent is suppression. You're essentially alleging vegans are hiding this information, and people in the Academy are in on it too and both promoting it and turning a blind eye to it.

and you're holding up the view of one group and discounting the other despite the fact that the two groups have similar "authority".

The DGE doesn't say it's impossible, despite your claims they give advice on how to fill nutritional needs. They apparently just think the population they're speaking to are incompetent and there's inadequate availability/popularity of fortified foods there. Their cautions are much more modest than you represent them as.

I'm going by the MAJORITY of such organizations, and the ones most applicable to English speakers.
It's very likely that there are areas where due to food availability or culture it is legitimately harder to be vegan and wouldn't be advisable for at risk groups.

But just "adding another margin" isn't so simple, some nutrients are hard to source on vegan diets so doing that will start to require supplementation but supplementation can come with health risks. Even B-12 supplementation, despite being a water soluble vitamin, has some associated health issues for some people (e.g., promoting acne in a sub-population).

Only very large (unnecessarily large) supplementary doses of the relevant vitamins and minerals pose health-risks. I'm not surprised that you're anti-supplement too.

Mild acne-like symptoms from large doses of B-12 which go away when the dose is reduced aren't really a health risk, but it's pretty well known and often mentioned in vegan nutrition guides.
Even something that minor and rare is widely reported.

Why would the mere act of eating meat result in a powerful bias against the feasibility of vegan diets?

Because if it's feasible then you lose your go-to excuse for not following it, and you'll have to come up with another rationalization.

Agreeing that vegan diets are feasible doesn't obligate one to adhere to the diet.

Nothing can force a person to behave ethically, but cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable and most people like to see themselves as good people. If you knew there was no credible health reason for you not to avoid animal products, you'd have to grapple more seriously with the ethical ramifications of your choices rather than blowing them off as you do.