Happy to answer any questions!
And thank you for looking into this. I recall reading about experiments on the modified bacteria years ago, but then I forgot about it. Until I read your page, I had not realized it died on the vine.
> but the developing company declined to go to market, and instead pivoted to selling once-daily probiotic mouthwash.
sounds like they preferred to sell a recurring subscription vs a one-time sale
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095954
> The product was being developed by Oragenics, but was shelved in 2014, citing regulatory concerns and patent issues.
A few HN commenters seem to think that there's a nefarious explanation where a cavity wonder treatment would be unprofitable to develop; I think that's possible, but also it could just be that the company dropped the ball. Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I'm just mentioning it because people are talking about bacteria being "the deciding factor" to account for differences in outcomes, and there's a flouride elephant in that room.
I mean - you know how there’s pills you only need to take once a week - but they come in sequential packs, to be opened daily? Resulting in one real pull and six placeholder placebos per week? Because it’s easier to get in the habit of taking a pill once daily, than it is to get in the habit of once weekly?
It’s stuff like that. Fluoride in water is a hack to get around humans’ naturally poor performance.
Fluoride is weird. Everyone just assumes some is good so more must be better, and any research into dental fluorosis (over exposure) is shunned. I believe primarily because prior to dumping it into the water and every dental product imaginable fluoride was expensive to dispose of and we produce a ton of it as a byproduct of making fertilizer.
adults: don't swallow your toothpaste.
So does fluoride. (It replaces the hydroxyl group. Your saliva already contains calcium and phosphate.) Enamel remineralized with fluoride yields fluorapatite, which has a critical PH of 4.5 vs 5.5. of hydroxyapatite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorapatite
I'd want to hear a lot more about why this happened before I invested in this. I've been hearing about this bacteria for years and the story gives me strong "miracle carburetor" vibes.
Cavities are a ridiculously huge market without the recurring revenue imo.
At that point, it looks much better on your CV to say "we made this miracle treatment, but the FDA put up hurdles to us getting it to market" rather than "we spent many years but the treatment we made didn't work".
> pivoted to selling once-daily probiotic mouthwash.
Businesses love recurring revenue streams
1) The original strain (BCS3-L1) is a clinically derived isolate with who knows what properties. Why not just take the well characterized ATCC/DSMZ strain and knock out the lactate dehydrogenase? I am sure the FDA would look more kindly on a better characterized strain - especially since you don't need whatever wild type mutations it has to keep it in the dental microbiome (the lantibiotic does that).
2) Who pays for this? Why? Finding the appropriate payer for a pharmaceutical intervention is difficult. Getting this through FDA trial costs (let's say) $200 million dollars. At the point of sale (PCP, dentist) the competitive product will be...toothpaste and a toothbrush. Getting a patient or insurance to purchase this under current models of care is going to be extremely difficult.
I think if there's even a 1% chance that the intervention looks as good as promised, it'd be worth further study for the proposed costs.
I love the idea of Manifund - but I think this may not be the best project for it. This proposal needs some review by a biologist. In its current form, I think this is a much less impactful use of money than other things on Manifund.
We don't accept anthropological arguments for any more human anatomy limitations. We have contacts and glasses to correct our eyes and cars and planes to travel farther and faster then we ever could on our legs alone.
I just think compared to the other recurring hygiene tasks, teeth seem to be the most labor intensive and accumulate damage continuously while most other hygiene tasks can be technically be ignored for days/weeks (like camping with no shower).
How long did they live before becoming remains?
I had written him well over a decade ago, I want to say 2008. He has long since retired, but the gist of the hints in our correspondence was that this was something the FDA just didn't have a conceptual slot for, and that was creating a great deal of impedance. I believe he had gotten as far as Phase IB in testing.
However, there is significant variation of thickness of tooth enamel, seemingly due to genetics.
I stopped going to dentists in my mid 20s. Routine cleanings are not actually shown to improve outcomes, and the lack of cavities leaves me no other reason to go.
I couldn't say why I'm so lucky in this respect, but the bacterial explanation seems plausible.
It's "been in the mouths of fewer than 15 people".
This was in 2003, so I'm guessing they're not all dead.
I'll stake 'em a box of cotton swabs...
-I spent five years at MIRI as Operations Lead. -I produce a video game that's #42 in category on Patreon, with an 11-person team, making six-figures with >1,000,000 downloads. -I run Heist and Geist and Heist: Sunlit Forge; welcometotheheist.com -I'm nominated for the Nebula for fiction, and was published in Asterisk three days ago under the name Jamie Wahls. -I run Aella's media empire.
Well, that is a unique thing to put on your resume.
But you're right, and I'm saying this as a person who'd easily fall for the halo problem after the MIRI mention. Pausing for a moment, all the list you quoted tells me is that the person is most likely clearer-thinking and smarter than average, is likely to be "nerdy" in exactly the way I'd hope people running a biotech project like this, and hangs out with people even smarter and nerdier in the way I like[0] -- alas, it also tells me he has little to offer in terms of relevant scientific, technological, or product qualifications.
Sure, he seems qualified for a leader/manager (and he's definitely not afraid of holding a PR equivalent of a live grenade), but the first step I'd expect of him is, as you say, to "get someone with relevant experience on board". Preferably more than one. Being a certain type of nerd may help to inspire people, but vision is no substitute for actual experience in biotech.
--
[0] - Which I realize may be less of an indicator of domain competence, and more of my bias towards like-minded people.
MIRI hasn't produced or published anything of scientific value. In fact seeing the person this fundraiser is about putting it as a high point in their references is a major red flag.
Is it plausible a company would choose to sell mouth wash instead and that the cure would remain undeveloped for 20 years?
* My routine includes brushing my teeth 3x per day for 3 minutes with an ultrasonic toothbrush, I use an interdental brush at night, I use a tongue scraper in the morning and at night and I do an occasional chx mouthwash and semi-regular salt water rinses.
I appreciate that you may have specific reasons for this routine, but is that a typical routine generally? I've heard 2 minutes twice per day, so 3x3 seems excessive, and might cause gum/tooth damage through abrasion?
Wouldn't there be patent problems with reproducing this? Unless Oragenics is willing to license/give up their patent?
Also how does this compare to bacteria like s. salivarius ?
My guess is this funding will be used to look into the different approaches, and then they will come back with a real project.
In which case you only need to find a person from the original trial and get it from them. You don't need to recreate it?
Is BSL1 even certified or self attested?
We should go to our state legislators and demand they use eminent domain on it. Maybe first after having the AG go to a judge for an injunction against destroying it (out of spite).
I haven't seen any pills exactly like this, though I guess some may exist.
The most famous real world example is "the pill", contraceptive hormonal treatment which is usually prescribed as complete cycles with some "dummy" pills which roughly simulate a 28 day "typical" female ovulation cycle. That choice is somewhat arbitrary, some people do perfectly well just taking the "live" pills every day whereupon their body just suppresses ovulation and they don't experience periods. A sympathetic doctor may be able to prescribe this actual treatment (which avoids discarding the "dummy" pills in a pack) if it suits you, so you just get "live" pills to take daily, typically for a year or so at a time. On the other hand, at the far end of the spectrum my mother was unrecognisable, basically completely psychotic on the pill, whereas it turns out she's fine when pregnant (fortunately for me and my sister) or after solving the problem in a more drastic way†. The choice of 28 days is basically because they had to pick something as most people aren't in either of the prior categories, their bodies will tolerate hormonal intervention to a point, and 28 days felt sort of like the natural ovulation cycle.
[None of this is medical advice. Ask your doctor about what you should do, don't interpret something from some HN poster as advice for your own medical treatment]
† My mother had her uterus removed, so, no more pregnancies.
- Dogs eat fewer carbs and don't really eat acidic foods (no soda, fruit)
- Dogs live a much shorter time and so there is much less time for damage to accumulate to enamel.
So did the tapeworms. Or fleas
If only there was a solution to climate change thats been supressed for 60 years, like nuclear power!
Supressed is not the right term- not developed. Marker settles on a local optimum and does not make the huge investment needed to go to the global optimum. Also all the current market leaders lobby against the transition.
People talk about how the fluoride in tea can help prevent cavities, but on the darker side... just imagine having all your food come from that sort of fluoride-rich soil.
I was curious as to where the fluoride was coming from, and this report: https://sci-hub.ee/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007... seems to indicate that the mines increase fluoride in grounderwater due to exposing carbonates which then can dissolve, kicking off a change in pH and various other reactions that release fluoride from the minerals it's otherwise locked in.
While i doubt its the only factor, diets higher in sugar than what hunter/gathers would have eaten seems plausibly linked to there being more cavities in modern times.
This doesn't make sense. This only explains why people use reading glasses or bifocals over the age of 40.
Most people needing vision correction are near-sighted (myopia), not far-sighted (hyperopia). We have glasses because we need to be able to see things and read signs at distances greater than our arm reach.
There's something else going on causing SO many people to need vision correction.
>Cars are great for modern society
As someone who lives in a walkable city with excellent public transit, I completely disagree. Cars are a disaster and a cancer on society.
>While i doubt its the only factor, diets higher in sugar than what hunter/gathers would have eaten seems plausibly linked to there being more cavities in modern times.
I think this is a big thing, though I think it's more complicated because some people eat plenty of sugar and still don't have cavities, so I think sugar affects different peoples' bacteria differently, or different people have someone acquired or evolved different bacteria that respond differently to sugars. But yeah, sugar seems to be a central issue.
They are the sole reason children can't play ousude like they did 50 years ago and like 2nd biggest cause of climate change.
Absolutely teerible for society.
Would practicing with one eye properly covered, to have low enough lux to prevent the natural feedback mechanism which causes myopia[1], seem impractical?
[1] Extended or frequent exposure to low-contrast input causes lengthening of the eye, and can be irreversible after two weeks[2]. Seems to involve eye and visual cortex, and to not occur if the eye has no connection to the visual cortex. I'm not aware of any similar mechanism to account for far-sightedness.
[2] Consequently, nightlights and other light sources which shine into a sleeping area may be counter-indicated.
And we have toothbrushes…
A lot of inexperienced vegetarians/vegans end up with nutrient deficiencies because they don't ensure that they are properly getting all essential vitamins or amino acids in their meatless diets. I'm not a dietician, but it's pretty safe to say that these people are not going to be the ones with reduced mortality rates. You cannot simply remove an entire food group from your diet without putting in effort into paying attention to the rest of your diet.
Some studies[1] show that pescetarian diets offer the lowest mortality rates. This diet still requires paying close attention to what you eat, but you are far less likely to have nutrient deficiencies.
This is one of the huge issues I have with diet-mortality studies. During the gluten-free trend a while back, there were many that suggested gluten-free diets provided health benefits. However, for the vast majority of people, gluten isn't really that special as far as proteins go. It turned out those "health benefits" were just the result of people with gluten intolerances actually paying attention to their diet.
Just to reiterate, I am not a dietician. Everything above is just my cynicism for studies that constantly fail to take into account that most people just don't care what they're eating. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
While that certainly happens, its not like you have to maintain constant vigilance. Most popular vegetarian diets are nutrionally complete (major exception being vitamin b12 for vegans is something to be very careful about).
Like yes, if you decide to only eat rice and nothing else it will be bad, but its not like you have to meticulously record what you eat every meal. Getting all essential amino acids is pretty easy if you eat like a sane person.
Ag gives more calories per square km, so more people. But also more vulnerability to disease, periodic famine, and in some cases malnutrition from over reliance on cereal crops (e.g. Pellagra). Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families, breast feed longer (so fewer pregnancies), and could sometimes migrate when local wild animal populations were exhausted. If you have a bad crop year you can't migrate to the next valley and find a new field of wheat waiting for you.
However there were likely many millennia of societies that mixed agriculture with hunting/gathering. Eastern woodland native Americans were like that pre-contact; maize agriculture + hunting game + fish etc. Seems like a good overall strategy.
Infant mortality going up is the same thing as life expectancy going down. Neither one tells you much about whether people die before or after you'd expect to start seeing problems in their teeth. After ignoring infant mortality, it's mostly afterward, but "remains" are not a representative selection.
> Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families
This conflicts with the idea that they had lower infant mortality.
> This conflicts with the idea that they had lower infant mortality.
Not necessarily. Smaller family size can be a result of other factors outside of infant mortality.
Aren't there parts of rural China still living in that mixed model today? And Africa too iirc...
It's clear they couldn't raise $10b to fund trials on a timely basis for something that was far from a sure thing - it worked in a couple cases, but imagine if it caused increased heart disease or "no clinical benefit" and you'd poured billions into it.
On the other hand, it wouldn't eliminate oral hygiene, for both the obvious olfactory and comfort reasons, as well as gingivitis and other non-caries oral health issues.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1174940/000156459019...
Relevant portion excerpted:
> Replacement Therapy
>
> Our SMaRT Replacement Therapy is based on the creation of a genetically modified strain of bacteria that colonizes in the oral cavity and replaces native bacteria that cause tooth decay. Our SMaRT Replacement Therapy product candidate is designed to be a painless, one-time, five-minute topical treatment applied to the teeth that has the potential to offer lifelong protection against dental caries, or tooth decay. While we commenced a Phase 1b clinical trial for SMaRT Replacement Therapy during the first quarter of 2011, the very restrictive trial enrollment criteria required by the FDA made the enrollment of candidates meeting the restrictive criteria difficult. This enrollment difficulty was also present in our Phase 1a clinical trial. Due to the enrollment difficulties we encountered with our initial Phase 1a clinical trial and with our Phase 1b clinical trial, we determined to discontinue pursuit of our Phase 1b clinical trial. Our focus for the SMaRT Replacement Therapy technology is on possible partnering opportunities that may exist.
Don't forget about Hanlon's handgun: don't attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice.
There was no single diet of hunter gatherers in the past.
I'd also expect a high fruit diet in certain tropical regions where fruit is available more constantly also shows similar effects.
Then you don’t know if you have cavities. Not all cavities are painful. Good luck.
You don’t know if you have cavities. I was similar. No issues so I stopped going for 15 years. Needed multiple fillings when I finally got a checkup, one of which was quite deep and has caused tonnes of issues since. If I’d gone regularly it would have been caught early. I wish I’d kept going when I had no issues so things would have been caught earlier. Cavity != pain a lot of the time. Typically when you get pain it’s a bad cavity which could have been caught sooner and treated more easily.
I got busy, then pandemic, next thing I know it's been like 7 years since I've seen a dentist. No problems or discomfort whatsoever. It occurred to me that bi annual cleanings are the SaaSification of dentistry, but I've never seen any real evidence.
There is some robust evidence indicating that routine plaque removal does not improve outcomes for cavity prevention or gingivitis [0].
Routine consultation with dentists otherwise may be beneficial, maybe not, but it hasn't really been studied much yet. The studies that exist are insufficient to form any conclusions. [1]
My post was downvoted by those who feel going to the dentist is important. I should state clearly avoiding the dentist should not be considered medical advice from me, and YMMV. I did the research myself and determined that routine dentistry was unlikely to improve my health outcomes, this is a personal decision that people should make on their own.
[0] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
[1] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
The cost of biannual dentist visits for life is huge across the entire population. I would have thought there was strong evidence for this a long time ago. If nothing else, I would have thought insurance companies would stop paying for the bi-annual visits if there wasn't good evidence it works.
Then again, maybe I'm giving insurance companies to much credit since they've been paying for acupuncture for decades.
i didn't go for a couple years and just had one of the worst experiences at a cleaning in quite some time. super painful, a lot of build up.
i haven't changed my brushing/flosing habits at all, but i did switch toothpastes to non-flouride.
now, i'm back on the 6 month schedule and back to flouride. i also switched to a tablet based toothpaste (tidalove). you chew it (don't swallow) and then brush. the pill has a bunch of other good stuff in it too. kind of neat cause it is also zero waste packaging.
I think we can maybe all move on from this awful quote.
But, no I'm specifically referring to cultures like the Efé where men gather honey full time during a season, Yao honey-hunters who work with birds to find honey, or other forest cultures where honey is gathered from especially tall trees as a show of masculinity and bravery.
Plus the fact that in a hunter-gatherer society people choose not too have too many children for the same reason people make that choice in advanced capitalist economies. Children become a resource burden.
In an agrarian economy, your children are extra hands for farm work. In a hunter gatherer society they are mouths to feed in an environment with intrinsically limited resources.
That's a general problem in health care and why governments should be more involved in funding and supporting these kinds of solutions.
I'm pretty sure if they had gone with curing all the world's cavities I would have heard of them. The brand recognition alone would be worth more than a probiotic mouth wash company.
Very unlikely there was a miracle cure that was left on the table because founders wanted to sell mouthwash.
This is an obvious scam
- To lower their costs - by outsourcing a chunk of development and testing to free volunteers; also by improving quality and reducing on-boarding costs of new hires (as you can select for those who already spent significant personal time learning your tech stack);
- For marketing purposes - mostly in terms of marketing to prospective employees, but for companies targeting technical audience, also marketing to customers;
- As a weapon against competition - the code you open-source is code your competitors can't sell; this is useful both in breaking into a legacy market, as well as restricting the kind of competition you'll get from those who started after you;
Where does the money come from then? Usually some combination of venture capital, rent-seeking and advertising. Open source destroyed the viability of the simple, honest model of providing value in exchange for payment. The alternative business models are much worse for end-users and society at large.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
1) milk a dumb problem you've already solved, making very moderate profit, or
2) solve it and move onto more interesting problems, continuing to make money
If you create a startup that after a decade creates an affordable and effective gene theraphy for type II diabetes, and most of people recover, will your startup survive curing only new cases of it? Will it be able to tackle another disease before your coffers dry up?
The question can be viewed as greedy companies wanting to milk diseases forever, or as a sustainability issue. Being able to cure chronic diseases affordably will probably become a new socioeconomic challenge.
This shit should just be taken by the state for the benefit of everyone, because really it's insane not to.
Like usual, the problem isn't whose name is on the box. The problem is the subscription-based business model, which can easily turn into pure rent seeking.
Theres no real reason to reward squatting on world changing tech, is there?
Really....
The government is protecting their discovery via patent law, why is it not allowed to remove this protection.
Patents and copyright are very recent inventions. Not everyone is motivated by profit. People were inventing things before capitalism consumed the world.
Plenty of ways to make a profit.
My bet is that it was never tested and the claim is entirely a prediction.
> major exception being vitamin b12 for vegans is something to be very careful about
Add to that list iodine, omega-3, zinc, iron, calcium, and vitamin D. All of these are essential nutrients that vegetarians need to include in their diet. Sure, they're easier to get than B12, but they can still be pitfalls if you're careless.
> Getting all essential amino acids is pretty easy if you eat like a sane person.
Yes. That's basically the entire point I'm making. Most vegetarians eat 'like a sane person' because if they don't then they will have issues very quickly. Having a diet with meat means you can eat more carelessly because you're less likely to have immediate issues compared to eating carelessly as a vegetarian.
What I'm asking for are studies that take this into account. Studies that aren't just asking people if their diet includes something. Studies that actually take into account the fact that most people that don't care what they are eating tend to eat meat.
Fwiw, I've been vegetarian for like twenty years, don't really track much of anything in terms of vitamin intake, and am doing just fine according to the last time I had blood work done. I eat eggs and beans and rice for protein, and cook on a cast iron for iron... And that's the sum of my thought on vitamin intake. My partner takes b12 supplements, though.
I do think there's a certain over estimation of how hard it is to not eat meat. It's really not.
No, because they find out really quickly what they're deficient in when symptoms show up (or they revert back to their previous diet). I admit I worded that paragraph poorly though, that wasn't my intention.
> Fwiw, I've been vegetarian for like twenty years, don't really track much of anything in terms of vitamin intake, and am doing just fine according to the last time I had blood work done. I eat eggs and beans and rice for protein, and cook on a cast iron for iron... And that's the sum of my thought on vitamin intake. My partner takes b12 supplements, though.
So you get blood work done regularly, ensure you have certain things in your diet, and you intentionally try to make up for a common nutrient deficiency?
You may not see that as a lot of effort, but for people that don't really care about their health, every one of those things can make a significant difference in terms of lifespan.
Common nutrients that even non-vegetarians do not generally get from meat.
Iodine is usually from salt, Omega-3 is often vegetable oil and nuts, zinc is commonly in beans and grains, calcium and D3 is in milk (you said vegetarian not vegan), and more to the point, most people do not get vit D exclusively from diet.
These are all things that non-vegetarians get in sufficient quantity from non-meat sources. So why would someone becoming a vegetarian suddenly stop eating these things.
> Having a diet with meat means you can eat more carelessly because you're less likely to have immediate issues compared to eating carelessly as a vegetarian.
While i agree in general, your definition of "careless" is so ridiculous that I think meat eaters would rapidly be in trouble if they were this level of careless.
> Common nutrients that even non-vegetarians do not generally get from meat.
Other than Vitamin D3, meat is objectively an excellent source of all of those nutrients. Fish is an excellent source of iodine and omega-3, and saying people do not get zinc, iron, or calcium from meat is just incorrect.
> These are all things that non-vegetarians get in sufficient quantity from non-meat sources. So why would someone becoming a vegetarian suddenly stop eating these things.
Maybe because they never started eating those to begin with? I do not know, and I can only speculate on the different reasons. Each person is different, but all we know is that it does happen[1]. Some people just don't have those in their diet.
Anecdotally, I don't think I ever ate beans until I was in my early 20s because my parents just never cooked with them. We also pretty much only had sea salt available, and most of our food was cooked with butter instead of vegetable oil. We weren't unhealthy, but if I immediately dropped meat from my diet at that time without changing anything else, I would have started to have issues.
> While i agree in general, your definition of "careless" is so ridiculous that I think meat eaters would rapidly be in trouble if they were this level of careless.
I'm not going to argue semantics. My argument is about the statistics and how these dietary studies tend to fail to account for extremes in behavior. Vegans, vegetarians, and pescetarians are just less likely to have these extremes.
To reiterate the results from the previous study I linked[2], semi-vegetarians (people who only occasionally had meat) have a fairly worse mortality rate than vegetarians, yet strictly speaking their diet only varies by having meat once or twice a month. The only way this makes sense in my mind is either there's a huge behavior difference in these two groups (less care put into their diet), or that meat is so incredibly unhealthy that just eating it occasionally will knock years off your lifespan. Considering the standard deviation of those results are larger for both non-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians (and that pescetarians have a significantly lower mortality rate than even the vegan group), I would bet on the former.
And if you don't think there's a lot of people that are completely careless about their diets, just remember how much soda the average American drinks in a single day[3], despite half of the population not drinking soda at all. And nearly a quarter of Europeans don't get regular checkups at a doctor[4], despite their access to healthcare. It's safe to say that a lot of people that just flat out don't care if they have a balanced diet (or exercise, regular healthcare, etc), and when you don't care you tend to eat meat.
When we get health studies that don't take this into account, we end up with fad diets because those studies essentially just show that those who pay attention to their diet tend to be healthier. To demonstrate the issues with those studies, this one[5] concludes a meat-only diet has very good health benefits compared to the general population.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8746448/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191896/
[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/156116/nearly-half-americans-dr...
[4] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
They're not remotely what we would call smart, wise nor intellectually curious....
Herpes.
And other viruses, probably, but one incurable STI (KTI?) is all the reason I need to say hell no.
I'm not sure why you're so invested in the idea that eating protein is hard when one doesn't eat meat. It's really not harder to eat other protein sources - eggs, rice, and beans are common foods. It's not a thing I think about, more a consequence of... eating.
Mostly in jest, let's turn this around:
Eating meat, by contrast, seems to require significant mental gymnastics to justify. The impossible cruelty of the industrial meat production system and massive environmental impacts of eating meat create a lot of cognitive dissonance, so people need to fabricate justifications for their decision to eat meat. I'm honestly not sure how you keep up your meat-eating lifestyle when you have to work so hard to create an argument not to be vegetarian, and defend your psyche from all the evidence of the moral bankruptcy of your food choices. It seems like it would create a lot of anxiety, which could be a factor in the reduced lifespan of meat eaters.
I'm not sure why you're so invested in misrepresenting my argument. You're conflating my use of the word "effort" with some specific amount of difficulty. Would it be more accurate to use the word "willpower" instead? I personally do not believe changing any part of your diet is "hard". I have done it myself multiple times, and even now the only meat I eat regularly is fish on occasion.
The point I am making though, is that health studies don't ever seem to take into account that most people who don't put any willpower at all to have a healthy diet also tend to also eat meat. And to demonstrate that point further, here's a study on some amazing health benefits of a meat-only diet[1]. Notice how the reported health benefits are oddly similar to those that are common with vegan or vegetarian diets? My argument is that this is because this study also fails to take into account the type of people who don't put any effort into having a healthy diet (granted, at least this study acknowledges those shortcomings in their methodology as part of their conclusion).
I am not making an argument to not be vegetarian. Just as I am not making an argument to not be a carnivore. And I am certainly not trying to "defend my psyche" from being "morally bankrupt" or whatever that last paragraph of yours was suppose to be about. I honestly don't even know where you pulled that from.