I think it's easy to take algal-based omega-3 supplements. They've gotten pretty good in the last couple years with gummies with a high dose and no algae test. And no fish killed!
Schizochytrium oil with DHA and EPA, which is sold as "algal" omega-3, for a lack of a correct word that could be understood by the general population (Schizochytrium is not an alga), is very good and no fish are killed for it.
Nevertheless, it remains at least 3 times more expensive than a fish oil, e.g. cod liver oil (I mean price per content of omega-3 fatty acids, not per volume; when not diluted to fool the customers, "algal" oil has a double concentration in comparison with fish oil, i.e. 5 mL of "algal" oil are equivalent with 10 mL of fish oil).
Taking daily a decent dose of "algal" oil can be more expensive than the daily protein intake required by a human, if that is taken from cheap sources (e.g. legumes and chicken meat). Allocating a major part of the budget for food to a supplement taken in minute quantities seems excessive.
I am not aware of any serious reason for the high cost of "algal" oil. A decade ago, it was much more expensive, e.g. 8 times or more in comparison with cod liver oil. Then the price has dropped to 3 times, and then it has diminished no more, remaining at 3 times for 5 years or more.
I believe that it should be possible to further reduce the cost of "algal" oil to make it an acceptable substitute for fish oil, but it seems that the producers are content with their niche market of rich vegans and they do not make any effort to reduce the cost in order to enlarge their market.
I have taken occasionally "algal" oil, to test it, but as long as it remains a luxury food I cannot use it to replace the cod liver oil that I am taking regularly, despite desiring to do so.
I think that it is a health tax, as many things are. For what it's worth, it costs me 50 cents a day. I'm not sure what semantics about it not being a "true" algae has to do with anything, though. If it's a protist or an algae, I'm not sure what that information does other than muddy the waters for people forming an opinion on non-animal based omegas.
If you consume "algal" oil of 50 cents per day, that must be some kind of capsule with a small amount of oil, e.g. a few hundred mg of DHA+EPA.
This is much better than nothing, but it is far from a daily intake comparable to that of the populations who live in places with access to cheap sea fish, where such fish are a significant fraction of their food (e.g. Japan).
If your target is to match the diet of such populations, that means e.g. 5 mL per day of non-diluted "algal" oil, i.e. a teaspoon of such oil (or 10 mL of fish oil), which contains around 2 grams of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
That would be much more expensive when using "algal" oil, at least judging after the prices seen e.g. on Amazon.
In order to not scare the customers, many sources of "algal" oil have a similar price with fish oil, but only because they contain much less omega-3 fatty acids per capsule. If you read the fine print, then you discover the true price ratio.
That is indeed a good price, but even so, two of those are equivalent with 5 mL of code liver oil, which in Europe costs around $50 per liter, with sales taxes (VAT) and shipping included.
Thus the price of equivalent fish oil is about 25 cents, a ratio of more than 2.6.
If you add to your price sales tax and shipping, it is likely that you arrive to the 3 times higher price that I have mentioned.
Because in most days I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, which is significantly cheaper than industrially-produced food, I can eat very healthy and tasty food for about $5 per day (in Europe).
The food includes the equivalent in fish oil of 4 of your gummies, which might cost around $1.50 with taxes and shipping.
Paying 30% of the daily budget for food only for a supplement taken in a quantity negligible in comparison with the other food, does not seem right.
The main difference is that fish have a subjective experience of living, so if you have the option to not kill them, you should take that option. Fish experience living in a meaningful sense, forming social relationships and relating to and understanding the world around them. That makes unnecessarily killing them wrong.
Where exactly in Europe? In large parts of Europe, fresh food is rather expensive. Especially fatty fish, if not frozen. There are also reasonable concerns about heavy metal/pcb intake and accumulation from fish consumption.
Fish is expensive, so I do not eat frequently fish, which is why I take fish oil.
The reports that I have seen about fish oil have found negligible contamination in comparison with the fish from which it had been extracted. Obviously oil extracted from cultured Schizochytrium would be strongly preferable, if only its price would drop to not much more than fish oil. If it were e.g. +50% or even +80% more expensive than fish oil, instead of being triple, I would immediately switch to it.
In Europe, some vegetables and fruits are expensive, but those are not needed in so great quantities as to make a large fraction of the food budget. Staple food, like maize, wheat, lentils, beans, sunflower, proteins from whey or milk, chicken meat, gelatin etc. is cheap.
The "algal" omega-3 is not extracted from any algae, but it is extracted from certain cultivated strains of a fungus-like organism, Schizochytrium.
The cultivated strains have been selected and/or genetically engineered to have enhanced production of certain long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
The composition of an "algal" oil ("algal" is the adjective derived from "alga", "algae" is the plural of "alga") depends on the particular strain that the vendor has used in production.
The first cultivated strains produced only DHA, but in recent years most vendors use strains that allow them to sell oil that has a mixture 2:1 of DHA and EPA, with minor quantities of other long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
I do not think that growing is difficult, but extracting the oil from it in such a way that it will have a correct composition is likely to be impossible without complex chemical equipment.
For growing it would be difficult to obtain a good strain. The strains used by commercial producers were originally isolated from some mangrove forests or other such places on sea shores, but then they have passed through years of selection and/or gene manipulation. Even when a good strain would be available, a culture that is grown in less controlled conditions could be susceptible to being wiped out by a disease, I have no idea.
In any case, I think the difficulty is in the oil extraction, not in the culture. In industrial conditions the extraction could be made with supercritical carbon dioxide, for maximum cleanness of the extracted oil, but that would not be feasible at home. Using an organic solvent, like hexane, might be possible at home, but that would be dangerous and there is the risk of contamination of the edible oil with solvent residues.
Accurate chemical analysis of the oil would be needed, to determine the fatty acid profile and validate the extraction method.
That's part of my question. ALA is supposed to not convert to DHA easily.
But these results seem to say at higher concentrations ALA lowers risk of EOD. Which tends to refute the belief that only DHA/EPA lower chronic inflammation or that EOD is not just a story about inflammation.
I cannot read the whole article, but the abstract says nothing about ALA.
The abstract only partitions the omega-3 acids in DHA and non-DHA.
While non-DHA includes ALA, without any concrete evidence that ALA has some direct role, it is more likely that the correlation seen with non-DHA refers not to ALA, but to the other long-chain omega-3 fatty acids besides DHA.
Humans can elongate ALA into useful long-chain acids, but the efficiency of this is typically lower in males than in females and lower in old people than in young people. Usually pregnant women have the best conversion efficiency.
Unless you monitor your blood composition, you cannot know if eating ALA (e.g. flax seeds or oil, or walnuts) can be sufficient for you. If you are an older male, it is very likely that eating ALA cannot be enough for avoiding deficiency.
> They've gotten pretty good in the last couple years with gummies with a high dose and no algae test
Gummy supplements are questionable, especially for supplements that can have strong flavors and odors by themselves.
If you’re taking algal based gummies and thinking they taste good, they likely either have very little omega-3 or the ingredients have been so heavily processed that I’d start questioning if the omega-3 survived the processing
Consumerlab is great for this. They test for heavy metal content and accuracy of nutrition labels. They've only tested 4 algae-based ones and they all passed. Carlson, DEVA, and Ovega are the brands they looked at (two from Carlson) with DEVA being their "top pick"
I evolved to eat fish and meat killed. So did all other carnivores. I'm happy to continue eating and shitting and sleeping and having sex, I don't want supplements to replace food and AI to replace intellect and IVF to replace sex. I want to be alive.
Abstaining from killing animals is about the sober realization that we can have perfectly healthy and happy lives without killing animals, who have feelings and a sense of perspective and experience, just like us. Living with my values and actions as one give me a strong sense of life, and I love cooking every day. Plants taste great when cooked well!
> Abstaining from killing animals is about the sober realization that we can have perfectly healthy and happy lives without killing animals,
Maybe, maybe not. If one is lacking a hobby and happy to spend much time learning and obsessing and fiddling with what they eat, while accepting that they may be missing some vital things that we don't yet know about, then sure.
But I have enough hobbies and I don't want to risk missing some things we don't yet know about. I just eat what I evolved to eat.
You could find the time to figure out what to eat on a plant-based diet in the space of a single Youtube video. The science that eating plant-based isn't just fine for you but also better for you is extremely solid. Just because we evolved to do something doesn't make it moral, and needlessly killing animals is clearly not moral. Humans did not evolve with the terrifyingly industrial scale farming we do now providing the unprecedented amount of meat global humans now consume.
Yes, if I want to read mountains of papers and meticulously watch and count what I eat and stay current on research and accept difficulty in deciding what and where to eat and treat the joyful act of eating as if it were a shameful act of desperation, then I could. But like I said, I have enough hobbies and I find no shame in recognising that my lineage evolved from a single cell organism to an apex predator.
And yet despite this self-assessed evolution to apex predator status, you probably accept the difficulty and self-restrain from killing other humans during a fit of road rage if you're cut off while driving.
However, some people have cultivated empathy for non-human beings to the point that killing an animal for an easier meal is morally equivalent to killing a human for an easier time on the road.
Some people have also recognized that a bit more difficulty in finding a place to eat is worth it to decrease the ecological impact of eating beef and cheese.
And some others still have realized that not everything should be hedonistic, and enjoy a plant-based diet that contributes to overall greater health even if it means a bit less (or rather, different - vegan food is delicious) sensory pleasure.
Shame can be a powerful motivator to be sure, but altruism and compassion are preferred, here.
Just because you evolved to do something doesn't provide a moral justification to do that thing. Whether you evolved to or not, animals suffer extraordinarily in the farms of torture we've made for them. It is well accepted that you can eat healthily on a vegan diet, and it would only really take a couple articles to figure out how to have a healthy plant-based diet. You could do it at Walmart.
Who's moral justification? Yours?, My families?, my community?, my government? my god?
I maybe too much of a individualist, so I get a little triggered when I see claims from others about the moral justification of what I should eat, what job I should have, who I should vote for... When these things that I do are not hurting myself or other humans.
Now I'm sure you could take an example of each one of these and "butterfly affect" to some example of hurting another human, but I could do the exact same thing to any one of [your] lifestyle choices.
The moral justification comes from the understanding that the brain is an organ which integrates information to form this profound feeling of presence that you and I share. There is zero evidence to suggest that we don't share this feeling with animals. This is a scientific argument. I'm a professional neuroscientist working in brain simulation, and even the complexity of a ringworm is out of the grasp of the field. The complexity of the brain is unrivaled anywhere else in nature, and it has this wonderful emergent property that I feel like something. Animals feel like something. It feels like something to be a cow, a chicken, and a pig. They understand and relate to the world. That is why it is wrong to kill them unless you have to.
why do you think this? I've lived seven healthy years with zero meat and am in superb physical shape. how many 30+ year olds do you know that can run a five minute mile? can you?
Plenty of things you consume create suffering, in plants, in animals, but also in humans. Therefore, why just focus on killing certain animals?
Other ways can also be more beneficial overall, such as favoring local farms which respect animals. Those exist, although their products are more expensive. In the alpine mountains where I grew up, cows and goats had undoubtedly a better life than most humans on earth.
You can also change the way to work and consume - all of this vegan ethic isn't very coherent if, as a manager, you pressure your subordinates to the maximum, and fire your coworker who you suspect that she just got pregnant.
The focus is on killing because we understand that the brain is the organ which generates sensation and presence. Plants completely lack the machinery to integrate information on the level of even a ringworm. Once you get to the size of the animals we commonly eat for food, there is an immense amount of complexity, much more similar to ourselves than different. The ethics of veganism if very coherent. The brain generates subjective experience, the feeling of being something. To deprive one of that experience is wrong- most people would report preferring to be than not. Of course, to your point about subordinates, vegans should also treat humans with respect. Actually, veganism provides a framework that tells us WHY we should treat other humans with respect- because they feel, just like I do. So, if we can practically avoid causing suffering to those with brains, as most people on this website can easily do, it is best to do so.
Most plants worldwide are grown to feed to animals, by the way, so even if plants suffered, we should prefer a plant-based world which minimizes this suffering. this would also minimize the human exploitation in the food industry and reduce our reliance on the monoculture which broadly produces the bevy of animal feed grown to feed the insatiable global appetite for animal flesh.
One more comment on your alpine animals comment- those animals were slaughtered for their flesh. Could you "humanely" kill a human selectively bred to grow to the size of an adult in two years? How would you do it? Would the average person be ok if you painlessly killed them after two years of roaming through the mountains? I don't think so.
Maybe? But until we get to the point where this is universally true, or I forget how good a prime fillet tastes, I don't see a good reason to stop eating meat.
Our species started out predominantly eating fruits, vegetables, nuts,.. As hunter gatherers, meat eating came later and initially was still not a dominant source of nutrition.
So yes, you eventually evolved for this, but it wasn’t the dominant food source for a loooooong time.
Homo sapiens? I don't think that's necessarily true. Older ancestors maybe. Home sapiens was probably mostly getting calories from fruit, tubers, and other animals, depending on season and what they could find.
And different populations evolutionarily "fine-tuned" in environments with different availabilities of various foodstuffs. While many dietary requirements are common to all humans (e.g. we lost the ability to synthesise vitamin C, making us all susceptible to scurvy), some are specific to individuals and (genetically-related) families.
Diet is one of the very few places where your genetic ancestry actually matters – although your gut microbiome, which evolves faster (https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2014.00587), may not share quite the same ancestry as your human cell tissue.
There are many other intolerances, e.g. coeliac disease and the many different kinds of food allergies.
Besides these cases, which are obvious due to immediate harm, and which are the reason for laws about food labeling that mentions lactose, gluten and various allergens, there is a lot of variability between humans in the efficiency of digesting various foods and in the capacity of absorption for various nutrients.
Some people are able to eat pretty much anything, while others are aware that they do not feel well after eating certain things, so they avoid them.
Yes, but more likely insects as first small “animals”. Hunting animals takes more effort than eating fruits etc.
I know it’s all vague delineation of where our species really started, and at which point you would no longer consider it the homo line, but for a significant part of history we were a small predator that would eat whatever was _easily_ available. Hunting animals is not easy and it’s a risky endeavour.
I’m not saying meat wasn’t part of our diet obviously, but it logically wouldn’t have been as dominant a part of our diet as it is today.
The most likely hypothesis about how humans have become the most efficient hunters of the planet does not pass through catching insects and very small animals, but through eating the remains of the big prey killed by carnivores.
There are various bits of evidence for this, like the higher stomach acidity of humans, which resembles that of carrion eaters, like hyenas.
It is plausible that the ability to throw sticks and stones was used initially for scaring other predators and make them abandon their prey, and only later, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it became accurate enough to be usable for hunting living animals.
The ability to use stones to break the bones and eat the parts inaccessible for the carnivores who had killed the prey, i.e. marrow and brain, which are rich in hard to get nutrients, e.g. omega-3 fatty acids, is also presumed to have played an important role in the development of a bigger and bigger brain.
It is likely that the gangs of humans acted in a very similar way with the packs of hyenas, which acquire much of their food by scaring away from their prey the other predators, e.g. cheetahs, wild dogs, leopards and even lions. Moreover, similarly to humans, the most important ability of hyenas is not speed, but endurance when pursuing a possible prey that is tired or weakened, e.g. by wounds. While hyenas rely on their big teeth to chase the other predators, humans have relied on their ability to throw things at a distance, for the same purpose. While humans are quite bad at running, jumping, climbing or swimming, in comparison with most mammals, their throwing ability is unmatched by any other animal.
They have found spears that are at least 400,000 years old, so we have hunted for food at least that long.
And if you look at our closest relatives chimpanzees, they also hunt without using tools. Humans and their ancestors probably ate whatever they had available, including meat.
“Evolution” is not a sound basis for most choices. We didn’t evolve to wear shoes, live in houses, to use powerful cleaning agents, indoor plumbing, decontaminated water, refrigeration, and pretty much all modern medicine, among about every other thing that is part of modern life.
This is orthogonal to the main point which is that just because we are capable of eating something doesn't provide a moral justification for eating something. It is extremely clear from data and example that it's possible and actually easy to live a happy life on a plant-based diet. This means that eating meat is a choice, and many would say it is an overwhelmingly cruel choice.
Morality is a relative and personal thing. It is also very clear from data that you can live a good life while eating quality animal products.
Some may prefer to do it for personal pleasure, but also ease of life, or cost, which allows them to have time for things that they believe are also moral. Such as taking care of their children, working, and so on.
I evolved to shit outdoors, bathe in cold water, sleep on the ground, and die without having traveled more than at most a couple of hundreds of miles from my birthplace but I refuse to be limited by the capacities of a glorified ape without language, culture, or understanding of the interiority of others, not to mention indoor plumbing.
That would I assume preclude taking a shower for 3-4 months of the year in some climates? Especially since we didn't evolve with indoor heating either. Or indoors at all, for that matter.
This feels like a series of completely disconnected statements. The underlying theme seems to be that "living" is something that can only be realized by isolating behaviors to those that developed under specific niche conditions that applied pressure to our ancestors, and that this is good, and that deviating is bad. The word "living" and "alive" seems to be a proxy word for something like "happy" or "fulfilled"?
So many hoops to jump through to understand what the hell you're talking about, just to land on what could charitably be called the dumbest thing I'll read today if I'm lucky.
