RE: Using BeautifulSoup and Pandas to look at vegan mental health
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Show that concerns for the effects of a vegan diet on mental health are justified.
To be honest, I mostly skimmed through some of your post as I am not interested enough in the subject to study it to a great depth. However, I was worrying that you saying there is not evidence for this or that decision meant you were ignoring the need to live in a world where many of our decisions have to be made even while not having enough data/proof to justify our making such a decision.
I would like to see some method of taking into account that if we have a 13 year old son who is vulnerable to certain schools of thought which could be harmful to him (but not proven so) that a curve shows that the information we have (and maybe adding to that our own anecdotal exeriences) show that we would be justified in countering the claims of those who may be trying to harm our child by claiming their rather sketchy information is fact.
In other words, are there political reasons for pushing a certain school of thought or if not political, are there economic reasons, or religious reasons.... those should weigh against their claims, reducing their right to make claims if they do not have exhaustive factual proof.
I don't know if what I was trying to say come through....
However, there is one other point I consider extremely important, and yet no non-vegetarians ever seem to mention it.
We are accused of killing creatures of this Earth....and it is true to tens of millions of cattle, sheep, chickens and so on are killed, but in number of lives lost, they are nowhere close to the number of lives lost thanks to vegetarians.
On a farm of a friend, I see his cattle in the fields, with buck, zebra and so on wandering among them, taking advantage of the safety and the food availability.
On the vegetable farm of another friend, I see the land (crops) being sprayed and thus, even on that tiny plot of land, he is killing millions of insects and small kinds of life, including our precious bees and butterflies.
I would say vegetarians are responsible for at least 100 to 1000 times* the number of lives being lost, so how can they claim following a vegetarian lifestyle is ethical? They are destroying our planet!! - How Dare They!! (*numbers can only be estimated, but the lower number is justified from my above example given, whereas the possibility of the true number being closer to the larger number is horrifying).
I wrote this blog post mostly in response to comments I got on this post, where at #2, I say that the association in time between increased suicide rates among young adults and increased numbers of vegans and vegetarians in that age group should be of concern.
A few people pointed out this was post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc reasoning, and to be fair, up to a point it is. It is however not the only line of evidence pointing at the potential danger of a diet low in animal products on mental health.
So in this post I tried to show another line of evidence pointing to the potential mental health issues with a vegan diet.
When however I found out about the strength of the associations involved I started to get worried people reading my post might draw false certainty from the data. For that reason I wrote the second part of the blog post in order to put the strength of the association into perspective.
I think the crime scene metaphor covers thins quite decently. We know a crime took place. low-meat was the first to flee the crime scene. Vegetarian India was the 8 year old found holding a bloody knife, and low-milk, low-meats big brother, was also on the crime scene turned out to be a more likely suspect than low-meat. Maybe one of them did it. Maybe they did it together, or maybe there are other people still hiding on the crime scene and all three just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One thing is sure though. Until someone explains away the evidence with a solid mechanistically sane causal model that fits the data, you don't want your 13-year-old kid anywhere close to anyone of the three identified suspects.