Animal protein seems to be good for wellbeing, and there's a lot of overlap between veganism, wellness awareness, and alternative food choices.
Given that and the already-existing ability to create collagen/gelatin in a lab that's suitable for vegans, I've always wondered why nobody has managed to get it to market as a food.
There's already a growing group of wellness-focused people who don't want typical non-gelatin jelling ingredients like carrageenan and various gums in their foods; these provide only the jelling property and none of the nutrition of actual gelatin, and they are associated with inflammation.
Edit: Maybe all of the funding is going toward grail projects like synthetic beef patties that have an element of technical novelty, rather than the comparatively boring process of creating collagen at scale and getting FDA approval?
I've actually noticed this effect on myself too. It's very pronounced in fact.
I have a bad habit of biting my cuticles. I also happen to observe lent, effectively going vegan for 50 days every year.
Typically my cuticles heal the next day, or two at most. But every single time I enter lent, suddenly my cuticles take more than a week to heal the same amount. The difference is very obvious, to me at least.
> This study suggests that a vegan diet may negatively influence the outcome of surgical scars.
This is unusually damning to veganism-as-it-is-practiced if not to veganism itself. It would be interesting to see these results across a wide range of diets.
What's the point of having a better looking scar if you're more likely to get colon cancer?
Also, given that study itself measured Iron and B12, supplementing Iron and B12 may help scar healing w/o the (red) meat eating downside.
> Conclusion: This study suggests that a vegan diet may negatively influence the outcome of surgical scars.
> Twenty-one omnivore and 21 vegan patients who underwent surgical excision of a nonmelanoma skin cancer
Interesting, but its a small group and stats are on the low end?
This journal isn’t open access is it?
I wanted so see the effect sizes not just p values which are unhelpful. But if the vegans are all vitamin b12 deficient, it’s not a surprise their health has consequences.
And my other question is, is there self selection going on. People who go to hospitals have worse outcomes than people who don’t, so the best thing to do is to avoid hospitals. P < 0.001. Right? No, wrong. Did they become vegans due to digestive problems or other health issue?
I’d really like to read the article to see if they considered these things.
Strange way to word the two patient types: vegans as opposed to omnivores. Vegans are still omnivores, they just stopped eating animal products because of beliefs.
I also smelled once a vegan cake. It's a medical miracle they can survive on such a diet.
As much as the results of this study confirm what I would expect, keep in mind it was an observational study and not a controlled experiment. There might be some other factor at play in the vegan group, say, other than just their diet.
Unfortunately I imagine an experiment to further investigate this would be hard to get past an ethics board. I.e. wounding the participants to see the effect on scar formation...
I would like to see a comparison between the top 10% vegan and omnivores. Most vegans are clueless when it comes to making up deficiencies in typical vegan diets.
Glycine is one of the relevant aminos that is very suboptimal or even scarce in vegetarian and vegan diets. It is also going to be one of the important (and likely most common) limiting factors in tissue repair.
Proline is also needed for collagen production, but not as deficient in Glycine as far as vegetarian diets. Glycine is also highly water soluble and a small molecule; it is constantly lost in urine. The need for glycine goes way beyond collagen production. It is essential for so many biological functions.
Glycine is not considered an "essential amino" because the body produces glycine itself, hence it is overlooked by many. It turns out the body produces only enough to usually barely scrape by. My guess is if another group of vegans were given Glycine (at around 4 to 5 grams/day) supplementation the disadvantage relative to omnivores would be erased.
I am not giving up my vegetarian diet due to one study (n = 21) of a potential negative affect (surgical scars). Meat-based standard American diet has negatives as well. Given that the iron and B12 levels were low for the vegans in the study it would be interesting if they supplemented that and check for an improvement.
edit: corrected study participants number
I'm curious if there are good, informative studies about mental health and veganism.
Arguably mental health is more important when considering a choice like veganism.
Related: the surgical scars of fasting mouse heal better (various publications report the same results)
The same seems to apply in human, with various individual anecdotal report: https://www.quora.com/Did-long-term-water-fasting-improve-an...
> Wound diastasis was more frequent in vegans (p = .008).
To me this is the bad part. Wound diastasis means that your incision opens up again. That is IMO a bigger complication than a scar since it likely requires medical intervention and puts you at risk for infection.
is effect size mentioned in the full text?
Take an iron and B12 supplement. Done.
Has anyone managed to actually get hold of the paper?
it would be interesting to see what the potential causality would be for this (vitamins/minerals? hormones from the meat? fats?)
Not a surprise. Collagen is important for healing skin wounds, and vegans get none from their diet. (Collagen is just a protein, so it can be generated by the body, but it's easier for the body to simply take collagen from dietary sources.)
When I was younger and training very heavily in some sports, I experimented a bit with different diets. Bottom-line the more meat heavy my diet, the faster I would heal from injuries -- radically so. For a while I went on a low-carb diet and ate a very heavy animal protein diet. I shed pounds, had absolutely unstoppable stamina, had far fewer injuries, stretching improved, basically never bruised, and healed from sports injuries that would have taken weeks in days. I felt like Wolverine.
I also felt like a grease grenade all the time and got tired of the diet which is why I stopped, but it was definitely superhuman for me.
I felt the worst in this sports context was when I experimented with a vegan/vegetarian diets. The effects were virtually the exact opposite. I'm sure with a nutritionist and more dedication I could have overcome many of these issues, but I found building a decent diet harder and required more effort.