How a Vegan Diet Affects Intelligence and Brain development?
The vegan diet contains few (and in some cases completely lacks) nutrients that are important for our brain.
Does this affect vegans’ ability to think?
The idea that avoiding meat is bad for our brains is intuitive. Yes, anthropologists for many years continue to argue about exactly how our distant ancestors ate, but many scientists believe that the development of such a unique organ like our brain took a lot of bones to suck.
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One of the reasons their argument is based is that the mind costs us dearly: the brain consumes about 20% of all daily calories, although its weight is only 2% of our body weight.
And where is the easiest place to find that unimaginable variety of fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals that this fastidious organ requires?
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Of course, in the meat of the animals that have already collected this entire set for us!
Statistics of Vegans
According to the latest statistics, there are now about 375 million vegetarians on the planet.
In the West, veganism has removed the stigma of the hippie and has become one of the fastest growing trends of the new millennium (for example, in the United States, the number of vegans grew 600% between 2014 and 2017).
Meanwhile, in India, eating without meat has been quite common since the 6th century BC.
In 2016, experts from the German Nutrition Society categorically stated that a vegan diet is not recommended for children, pregnant or lactating women and adolescents. A 2022 follow-up study confirmed this claim.
In Belgium, you can go to jail for forcing children to be vegan.
Vegan Diet Studying
But on the other hand, if abstaining from meat consumption really affected the human brain, we probably would have already noticed it?
So is veganism really hurting our intellect or are we just afraid of something we don’t know much about?
Ideally, to test the effects of a vegan diet on the brain, one would take a randomly selected group of people and ask half of them to stop eating animal products. And see what happens. But not a single such study has yet been conducted.
The only study that seems even partially perfect was in Kenya, where 555 schoolchildren were fed according to this pattern: one third was given meat soup, the second third was milk, and another third was soup with vegetable oil or no soup at all. And so on for seven school years.
How a Vegan Diet Affects Intelligence and Brain Development?
The subjects were checked before and after the experiment – to compare the intelligence of the representatives of the three groups.
It is worth noting that due to economic difficulties in the country, most of the children were de facto vegetarians before the experiment began…
To the scientists’ surprise, tests showed that children who were given meat soup every day significantly outperformed their peers in intelligence by the end of the study.
In addition, their arithmetic ability was the best among the three groups, but comparable to children who were given vegetable oil soup.
Of course, more research is needed to make sure that this is how it all works. In addition, it is not known if this will be the case for children from developed countries.
Nonetheless, it raises intriguing questions to say the least about whether veganism can hold back children’s development.
Essential brain nutrients
In fact, there are several essential brain nutrients that plants and mushrooms simply do not have.
Creatine, carnosine, taurine, omega-3, iron, and vitamins B12 and D3 are usually found only in foods that are made from animal products (although they can be synthesized in the laboratory or extracted from non-animal foods such as algae , bacteria or lichen, and made into food additives).
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Some others can be found in vegan foods, but in miniscule amounts: for example, to get the minimum daily amount of vitamin B6 (1.3 mg) from one of the richest plant sources such as potatoes, you would need to eat about 750 grams of it.
Important!
On a vegan diet, you need to eat 750 grams of potatoes per day to reach the minimum recommended vitamin B6 intake – unless you get it from other sources as well.
Although our body is able to create some of these essential substances from other ingredients in our food, its capacity is insufficient to fully meet all our needs.
Nutrition Level of Vegans
It turned out that vegans have reduced levels of all the nutrients listed above. And in some cases, such a deficit is not the exception, but the norm.
One of the most well-known problems for vegans is getting enough vitamin B12, which is only found in animal products such as eggs and meat.
How a Vegan Diet Affects Intelligence and Brain Development?
Other species extract it from bacteria that live in their digestive system or in excrement – they either digest it directly or eat their own feces, which, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the point of view), is impossible for humans.
To understand how important vitamin B12 is to the brain, look at what happens when we don’t get enough of it. For children, a B12 deficiency can have serious consequences.
There have been several tragic cases where a child’s brain did not develop properly because the parents were poorly informed vegans.
In one case, the child could not sit, could not smile. In another case, the children simply fell into a coma.
In older age, the amount of B12 in a person’s blood is directly related to their IQ, intelligence quotient.
In old age, one study found that the brains of people with low B12 levels are six times more likely to decrease than those who do not.
And yet, low B12 levels are common among vegans. One British study found that half of the vegans surveyed were deficient.
In some regions of India, this problem is endemic, possibly due to the prevalence of vegetarianism there.
Iron is another rare ingredient in typical vegan diets. Among other things, it plays an important role in mental development and is necessary for maintaining brain health throughout our lives.
It’s surprisingly easy to slip into an iron deficiency. It is estimated that up to 2 billion people have it, making it the most common nutrient deficiency worldwide.
Vegans are especially susceptible to it, since iron, the most easily absorbed by the body, can only be found in animal proteins.
One German study found that 40% of vegans surveyed by scientists consumed less than the recommended daily intake of such iron.
Vegan diet Conclusion
In conclusions, neither vegetables nor mushrooms contain creatine – so this is a problem for vegans and vegetarians: they are known to lack creatine in their bodies.
And some of the nutrients that vegans lack (choline, creatine, taurine and carnosine) need to be taken in fairly large amounts – you can’t do it with one pill.
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Vegan diet Final Words
Scientists wondered if creatine deficiency would slow development in humans.
In one study, they tested how the intellectual abilities of vegetarians and those who eat everything changed five days after starting with supplements.
