Remarks on the abelian convexity theorem

This note contains some observations on abelian convexity theorems. Convexity along an orbit is established in a very general setting using Kempf-Ness functions. This is applied to give short proofs of the Atiyah-Guillemin-Sternberg theorem and of abelian convexity for the gradient map in the case of a real analytic submanifold of complex projective space. Finally we give an application to the action on the probability measures.