I want to push back a little in that I was fully vegan for a few years with no negative side effects, other than sometimes being hungry because there was nothing I would eat and annoying my friends with requests to accommodate my dietary preferences. I even put on muscle and cut a lot of fat from my body!
I strongly suspect, based on experience with lots of other vegans, that vegans who struggle with nutritional deficiencies are bad at making good choices about macro nutrients.
Broadly speaking, the challenge in a vegan diet is getting enough lysine. Most every other nutrient you need is found in abundance, but lysine is tricky because humans mostly get that amino acid from meat. Getting enough isn’t that hard if you know what to eat, but you have to eat enough of it in enough volume to avoid problems.
What does it take to get enough lysine? Beans, lots of beans! If you’re vegan and not eating beans you are probably lysine deficient and need to eat more beans. How many beans? Way more than you think. Beans have lots of fiber and aren’t nutrient dense like meat.
I met lots of vegans who didn’t eat enough beans. They’d eat mushrooms, but not enough, and lots of other protein sources, but not ones with enough lysine. They’d just eat a random assortment of vegan things without really thinking hard about if they were eating the right things. It’s a strategy that works if you eat a standard diet that’s been evolved by our culture to be relatively complete, but not eating a constructed diet like modern vegans do.
Now, I have met a few people who seem to have individual variation issues that make it hard for them to eat vegan and stay healthy. In fact, I’m now one of those, because I developed some post-COVID food sensitivities that forced me to go vegetarian and then start eating meat when that wasn’t enough. And some people seem to process protein differently in a way that is weird to me but they insist if they don’t eat some meat every 4 hours or so they feel like crap.
So I’m not saying there aren’t some people who do need to eat meat and just reduce the amount and that’s the best they can safely do, but I’m also saying that I think a lot of vegans screw up not because they don’t eat meat but because they don’t think seriously enough about if they are getting enough lysine every day.
If someone has gone so far as to buy supplements, they have already done far more to engineer their nutrition than the vegans who I’ve known who struggle with nutrition.
I want to push back a little in that I was fully vegan for a few years with no negative side effects, other than sometimes being hungry because there was nothing I would eat and annoying my friends with requests to accommodate my dietary preferences. I even put on muscle and cut a lot of fat from my body!
I strongly suspect, based on experience with lots of other vegans, that vegans who struggle with nutritional deficiencies are bad at making good choices about macro nutrients.
Broadly speaking, the challenge in a vegan diet is getting enough lysine. Most every other nutrient you need is found in abundance, but lysine is tricky because humans mostly get that amino acid from meat. Getting enough isn’t that hard if you know what to eat, but you have to eat enough of it in enough volume to avoid problems.
What does it take to get enough lysine? Beans, lots of beans! If you’re vegan and not eating beans you are probably lysine deficient and need to eat more beans. How many beans? Way more than you think. Beans have lots of fiber and aren’t nutrient dense like meat.
I met lots of vegans who didn’t eat enough beans. They’d eat mushrooms, but not enough, and lots of other protein sources, but not ones with enough lysine. They’d just eat a random assortment of vegan things without really thinking hard about if they were eating the right things. It’s a strategy that works if you eat a standard diet that’s been evolved by our culture to be relatively complete, but not eating a constructed diet like modern vegans do.
Now, I have met a few people who seem to have individual variation issues that make it hard for them to eat vegan and stay healthy. In fact, I’m now one of those, because I developed some post-COVID food sensitivities that forced me to go vegetarian and then start eating meat when that wasn’t enough. And some people seem to process protein differently in a way that is weird to me but they insist if they don’t eat some meat every 4 hours or so they feel like crap.
So I’m not saying there aren’t some people who do need to eat meat and just reduce the amount and that’s the best they can safely do, but I’m also saying that I think a lot of vegans screw up not because they don’t eat meat but because they don’t think seriously enough about if they are getting enough lysine every day.
If lysine is your problem but you don’t want to eat beans, you can also buy lysine supplements.
If someone has gone so far as to buy supplements, they have already done far more to engineer their nutrition than the vegans who I’ve known who struggle with nutrition.