I read a similar thing on Reddit repeating something the author's trainer said once. I have almost zero confidence in this explanation and it's also the best I've found
They're looking for byproducts, but it indeed didn't work very well and that's why I've refocused on blood testing.
There was one very high up guy who ran around vegan ea for years yelling at anyone who suggested veganism required the slight bit more effort, thought, or money. He left in 2018 or 2019 for unrelated reasons but I think he may have done serious long term damage to ea vegan culture in particular.
It sounds like you're really passionate about vegan nutrition. Can I suggest channeling that into sharing resources that help naive vegans? Even if you don't think they're representative they clearly exist, and if the problem can be solved by linking to existing resources that seems incredibly high return.
thank you. I had only glanced at non-animal B12 and was trying to be fair to vegans, if my sources were bad that's extremely useful to know. And if VeganHealth.org is being rigorous about this that increases my respect for them.
I say that because (and sorry for maybe being blunt) the sample size is so small compared to the rich existing literature on this topic
I agree 100% that the sample size is too low to compete with existing literature, and the error bars are too wide to make it very useful on prevalence. Luckily...
My goal for the pilot was to work out practical issues in testing, narrow the confidence interval on potential impact, and improve the nutrition of the handful of people.
As a bonus, the results let me make an informed guess on which part of the existing literature to engage with, which I published last week.
I do take issue with calling the existing literature "rich". It's scarce and mostly extremely low quality. The 5 person study doesn't fix that and the upcoming 20 person one won't either, but nutrition literature is bad even by medical standards.
I'm surprised to see you quoting that literally? I don't see how we can take their word for that and there's no other evidence source.
The Red Cross tests hemoglobin but not ferritin, which is insufficient.
I haven't quantified these, but the classic vegan deficiencies are Vitamin D and B12. Examine.com has a decent guide to veganism, although I find them less than totally thorough.
This was a big driver behind my vegan nutrition project: I could not believe people were strongly pushing drastic diet changes without any concern for nutrition, when the mitigations were costless morally and almost so resource-wise.