Mh, I think we need to distinguish two different things here.
Is veganism healthier than all other diets? - Doubt it. While reducing meat consumption has demonstrable benefits, I don’t think you get any particular advantage from removing all animal products entirely to the last tiniest piece, despite the known harms many of them entail. I doubt a little bit of animal products now and then does much harm, plus there are some nutrient forms you get more easily that way to outweigh that. I would not universally recommend going vegan for health reasons.
But can you live a very healthy, long life while vegan, just like an omni? - With rare exceptions (severe food intolerances or food access issues), it seems like the answer is yes; people have been raised vegan from birth, been vegan for decades, and they do perfectly fine. So I do not think I will die earlier, or later, because I am vegan. And that is good enough for me. I care a lot about animal rights, but I would not make myself sick over them. (E.g. I take non-vegan medications, because I actually need those to be healthy. I wish they existed in vegan, and push for it, but until they do, I will take them as is.) But the mere inconvenience of reading food labels or not being able to eat the cake in a traditional restaurant, that I am fine with.
Ironically, I think being vegan was healthier 1,5 decades ago. At the time, there were no fancy fake replacement products, so going vegan effectively entailed quitting practically all chocolate, candy, cake, takeout, etc. and having to cook most everything oneself from whole foods from scratch. Nowadays, I can buy the exact same crap in vegan, and the sugar content is just as bad, and I doubt the vegan options are healthier at all.
But can you live a very healthy, long life while vegan, just like an omni?
I worry the following will sound defensive, but it’s an important question and I couldn’t figure out a better way to ask it.
I agree with what you said here, with some minor quibbles on the margin. I tried very hard to signpost my belief that veganism was not necessarily a big hit to health for most people, and few people eat optimally anyway. Reading your comment and a few others, it sounds like that did not come across in the original post. What could I have done to better convey that belief to you?
To follow up after more pondering: I think it is the title. Veganism having “trade-offs, and one of the axes is health” sounds to me like “veganism will necessarily make most people sick in a significant way they should carefully consider before going vegan to see if this is a sacrifice they are willing to make”, and that, I would not have agreed with at all. I think for near everyone, the problems are fixable, and that I have not sacrificed my health for veganism in any relevant way.
But the specific statements in the text—that a vegan diet can be harmful, if badly done, like any diet; that it isn’t necessarily suited for everyone, if that person has a lot of allergies or severe digestive issues; that being careless about your diet, vegan or not, is not a good idea; that while veganism avoids some health issues from excessive meat consumptions, it comes with risks of deficiencies in turn that need to be countered—I would all agree with. I’m in the camp “For the vast majority of people, veganism can be done without relevant harm to their health, while achieving a lot of ethical good. For most people, this is not as hard as they think. Some may even feel better and get healthier, but I wouldn’t rely on that, and you should put some thought into changing your diet so profoundly, and do regular blood tests to make sure you haven’t dropped something you needed.”
But collectively, I wouldn’t title these statement the way your text was titled. But more as “please get blood tests, folks, nutrition is easy to fuck up and impactful” or “can we please not guilt sick people into going vegan, they have enough shit on their plate without complicating their diet further via restrictions” or “can we please not promote veganism as a panacea, the data does not support this, going vegan doesn’t make french fries suddenly healthy” or “B12 and D3, supplement it, people, seriously, how many times do we need to tell you”.
Edit: I currently have debilitating pain levels due to a spinal injury, and have been distracting myself with this content, resulting in writing comments increasingly stream-of-consciousness style. I fear my comments have long become increasingly incoherent. Apologies.
***
Third: I also think the responses to your text are a bit all over the text, because the overall pragmatic goal/motivation behind the research question remained unclear.
Like, when it comes to veganism, having concluded that eating vegan would be much better for animal rights and the planet, in order to make my own diet choices and advocacy, these were things I needed to settle and needed data for:
Is it possible for me to live vegan, without compromising my health or happiness significantly? (The data I saw made it plausible enough for me to decide to try in 2009. Actually going vegan and checking my values across 14 years confirmed it, and I found it much easier than expected.)
Is it possible for specific person x (say, a friend of mine) to live vegan, without compromising their health or happiness? (Very probably, but depends on the person. Need to listen to them to understand their individual needs and issues to assist them in making a transition to a point they pick for themselves, to e.g. see if we can still find a particular nutrient if they can’t digest a particular class of food. But for the most part, again, I found people overestimated how tricky it would be.)
Is is sensible for humanity on average to significantly reduce meat consumption? (Definitely yes. Whatever positive role meat may play for some people, the quantities currently consumed are definitely unnecessary and harmful for the planet and health, so advocacy in this direction is likely to promote average health. So getting vegan food into my university cafeteria, or reducing tax breaks for meat producers, is a good idea.)
But none of these questions seem to require the kind of data you are looking for, although I’d be very interested in reading the data regardless if it exists. Like, it is possible that if I take an entire city filled with unhealthy omnivores, and force them to become a 100 % vegan without giving them any information or taking any account of existing health issues, their health would worsen slightly on average, because some of the garbage they ate beforehand happened to contain a key nutrient as well and they no longer eat it now. (No idea if this would happen, but I could imagine it.) But… noone is doing that. (Nor should we. I think there are some people who would not do well on such a diet, I object to coercion, and any major campaign would definitely need education and support.) And if we found huge number of clueless omnivores going 100 % vegan without doing any research, and having their health worsen, my conclusion from that would be “understand what is going wrong, and then advocate for the right supplements or educational policies”. Not “accept that veganism is bad for health in general”, because we have so many examples of vegans who are perfectly fine, so I’d want to understand what sets these individuals apart—and I think, often it will be bad implementation.
I once met a dude who told me he used to be vegan, but he got critically clinically protein deprived despite everything he tried, so he no longer is. I said that surprised me, did he have special issues? Well, no. How curious, what had his diet been like, then? He said, well, seeing as mushrooms are the main vegan source of high quality protein (?!?), he tried to eat mushrooms at least twice a week. I waited for him to continue. That was it. Turns out that this man discovered that two handfuls of mushrooms per week do not, in fact, meet human protein needs. Maybe because 100 g of champignons contain a whooping 2,7 g of protein. My conclusion that day was that that man was an idiot, and that our communities need proper nutritional knowledge in schools. Not that vegan diets cannot provide protein. I assume the same man now runs around and says he and his pregnant wife make sure they get all their folate by making sure they eat chicken nuggets twice a week.
I think the impression I got from your text is that it is motivated and overshadowed by a profoundly traumatic personal experience (namely, your body consistently rejecting food, and hence ruining your well-being) and the immense frustration when some vegan people witnessing this degree of suffering went “hey, have you considered, on top of all the existing problems, also introducing an additional complication into your diet by cutting out a huge part of the little that somewhat works for you? It is easy, I did it, it is great for everyone!” This was tone deaf of them. With all the shit you are dealing with, whether it is in theory possible for you to be healthy as a vegan or not, I think it is utterly unreasonable for you to make a situation that is already very, very hard on you even harder. Originally, the definition of “vegan” was “to avoid consuming in a way that harms animals, wherever reasonable.” I like this definition to this day. For you, a reduction in animal product consumption is currently likely not reasonable at all. If you are doing better, and you have the mental and other capacities for it, and want to, I’d be happy to support you in doing so, but getting your health working is clearly more important, and going vegan would entail a significant sacrifice for you that is totally disproportional to the gains.
I think you are aware that your experience is not common, which is why you said so—but the big factor it plays in the text gives a different impression to the reader, because presumably, all the cases you have encountered resonated with you, a lot. Hence all the readers who are stressing that for most people, going vegan does not have to entail any meaningful sacrifice in their health, because most people can be perfectly healthy while vegan. But exceptions like you are valid, and important.
It also sounds like you have heard from a lot of vegans with what I would consider fringe opinions. When this movement started, people kept saying that all the vegans would die within a year. It was incredibly wonderful and satisfying to see that we not only did not die, but were perfectly fine, and even beating some omnis on some health values. For me, the point of this was that we had shown that it could be done. But some people—I think frustrated at having been told over and over that they would starve to death, when they really didn’t, and in fact felt better than prior to going vegan, and had some health values even improve—basically countered by assuming that because veganism helped them, it would help everyone, that it wasn’t just healthy, but somehow massively superior. They clearly wanted to spread something that had helped them, and with good intentions, but I think they are wrong to assume it is superior health wise, or doable for everyone, or safe without any worries (insofar as good nutrition is something everyone should worry about, the more so if they take an existing diet and cut away a chunk of it rather than restarting from the ground up). I angrily correct them when they start spouting that going vegan will fix cancer, or that it is the duty of some disabled kid with massive food issues to go vegan because it is easy for everyone, because that strikes me as actively harmful, and I do remind people of B12 - but then, so does every doctor and vegan advice site. But for the most part, I see them in the context of what is still a majority opinion—all the regular people who go, I couldn’t go vegan, I’d be missing all the things, humans have to eat meat, or they die. That opinion does a lot of harm, and I think it still does more harm than the people who are very excited about veganism.
I mentioned elsewhere in this post that I do not think all animal products are unethical in principle; I don’t have a problem with someone drinking goat milk from a goat that happily hops along some cliffs where we can’t grow shit anyway, or someone eating the eggs from runner ducks they keep in their food forest for slug control. The products most potentially relevant for health are the ones often currently thrown away, not the fancy muscle meat. My major issue is with our current large scale industrial farming ruining animal welfare and the planet, the animals kept in tiny cages, the immense waste of land and water and destruction of rainforests, and production of climate gasses. With people consuming vast quantities of meat that they do not need in any way, that actually make them sick, and that this planet cannot produce. Not with people fulfilling genuine needs in ethically reflected ways. I’m happy for all the ethical products to go to folks like you, because I don’t need them, and I am happy to accept that you do.
Mh, I think we need to distinguish two different things here.
Is veganism healthier than all other diets? - Doubt it. While reducing meat consumption has demonstrable benefits, I don’t think you get any particular advantage from removing all animal products entirely to the last tiniest piece, despite the known harms many of them entail. I doubt a little bit of animal products now and then does much harm, plus there are some nutrient forms you get more easily that way to outweigh that. I would not universally recommend going vegan for health reasons.
But can you live a very healthy, long life while vegan, just like an omni? - With rare exceptions (severe food intolerances or food access issues), it seems like the answer is yes; people have been raised vegan from birth, been vegan for decades, and they do perfectly fine. So I do not think I will die earlier, or later, because I am vegan. And that is good enough for me. I care a lot about animal rights, but I would not make myself sick over them. (E.g. I take non-vegan medications, because I actually need those to be healthy. I wish they existed in vegan, and push for it, but until they do, I will take them as is.) But the mere inconvenience of reading food labels or not being able to eat the cake in a traditional restaurant, that I am fine with.
Ironically, I think being vegan was healthier 1,5 decades ago. At the time, there were no fancy fake replacement products, so going vegan effectively entailed quitting practically all chocolate, candy, cake, takeout, etc. and having to cook most everything oneself from whole foods from scratch. Nowadays, I can buy the exact same crap in vegan, and the sugar content is just as bad, and I doubt the vegan options are healthier at all.
I worry the following will sound defensive, but it’s an important question and I couldn’t figure out a better way to ask it.
I agree with what you said here, with some minor quibbles on the margin. I tried very hard to signpost my belief that veganism was not necessarily a big hit to health for most people, and few people eat optimally anyway. Reading your comment and a few others, it sounds like that did not come across in the original post. What could I have done to better convey that belief to you?
To follow up after more pondering: I think it is the title. Veganism having “trade-offs, and one of the axes is health” sounds to me like “veganism will necessarily make most people sick in a significant way they should carefully consider before going vegan to see if this is a sacrifice they are willing to make”, and that, I would not have agreed with at all. I think for near everyone, the problems are fixable, and that I have not sacrificed my health for veganism in any relevant way.
But the specific statements in the text—that a vegan diet can be harmful, if badly done, like any diet; that it isn’t necessarily suited for everyone, if that person has a lot of allergies or severe digestive issues; that being careless about your diet, vegan or not, is not a good idea; that while veganism avoids some health issues from excessive meat consumptions, it comes with risks of deficiencies in turn that need to be countered—I would all agree with. I’m in the camp “For the vast majority of people, veganism can be done without relevant harm to their health, while achieving a lot of ethical good. For most people, this is not as hard as they think. Some may even feel better and get healthier, but I wouldn’t rely on that, and you should put some thought into changing your diet so profoundly, and do regular blood tests to make sure you haven’t dropped something you needed.”
But collectively, I wouldn’t title these statement the way your text was titled. But more as “please get blood tests, folks, nutrition is easy to fuck up and impactful” or “can we please not guilt sick people into going vegan, they have enough shit on their plate without complicating their diet further via restrictions” or “can we please not promote veganism as a panacea, the data does not support this, going vegan doesn’t make french fries suddenly healthy” or “B12 and D3, supplement it, people, seriously, how many times do we need to tell you”.
Edit: I currently have debilitating pain levels due to a spinal injury, and have been distracting myself with this content, resulting in writing comments increasingly stream-of-consciousness style. I fear my comments have long become increasingly incoherent. Apologies.
***
Third: I also think the responses to your text are a bit all over the text, because the overall pragmatic goal/motivation behind the research question remained unclear.
Like, when it comes to veganism, having concluded that eating vegan would be much better for animal rights and the planet, in order to make my own diet choices and advocacy, these were things I needed to settle and needed data for:
Is it possible for me to live vegan, without compromising my health or happiness significantly? (The data I saw made it plausible enough for me to decide to try in 2009. Actually going vegan and checking my values across 14 years confirmed it, and I found it much easier than expected.)
Is it possible for specific person x (say, a friend of mine) to live vegan, without compromising their health or happiness? (Very probably, but depends on the person. Need to listen to them to understand their individual needs and issues to assist them in making a transition to a point they pick for themselves, to e.g. see if we can still find a particular nutrient if they can’t digest a particular class of food. But for the most part, again, I found people overestimated how tricky it would be.)
Is is sensible for humanity on average to significantly reduce meat consumption? (Definitely yes. Whatever positive role meat may play for some people, the quantities currently consumed are definitely unnecessary and harmful for the planet and health, so advocacy in this direction is likely to promote average health. So getting vegan food into my university cafeteria, or reducing tax breaks for meat producers, is a good idea.)
But none of these questions seem to require the kind of data you are looking for, although I’d be very interested in reading the data regardless if it exists. Like, it is possible that if I take an entire city filled with unhealthy omnivores, and force them to become a 100 % vegan without giving them any information or taking any account of existing health issues, their health would worsen slightly on average, because some of the garbage they ate beforehand happened to contain a key nutrient as well and they no longer eat it now. (No idea if this would happen, but I could imagine it.) But… noone is doing that. (Nor should we. I think there are some people who would not do well on such a diet, I object to coercion, and any major campaign would definitely need education and support.) And if we found huge number of clueless omnivores going 100 % vegan without doing any research, and having their health worsen, my conclusion from that would be “understand what is going wrong, and then advocate for the right supplements or educational policies”. Not “accept that veganism is bad for health in general”, because we have so many examples of vegans who are perfectly fine, so I’d want to understand what sets these individuals apart—and I think, often it will be bad implementation.
I once met a dude who told me he used to be vegan, but he got critically clinically protein deprived despite everything he tried, so he no longer is. I said that surprised me, did he have special issues? Well, no. How curious, what had his diet been like, then? He said, well, seeing as mushrooms are the main vegan source of high quality protein (?!?), he tried to eat mushrooms at least twice a week. I waited for him to continue. That was it. Turns out that this man discovered that two handfuls of mushrooms per week do not, in fact, meet human protein needs. Maybe because 100 g of champignons contain a whooping 2,7 g of protein. My conclusion that day was that that man was an idiot, and that our communities need proper nutritional knowledge in schools. Not that vegan diets cannot provide protein. I assume the same man now runs around and says he and his pregnant wife make sure they get all their folate by making sure they eat chicken nuggets twice a week.
I think the impression I got from your text is that it is motivated and overshadowed by a profoundly traumatic personal experience (namely, your body consistently rejecting food, and hence ruining your well-being) and the immense frustration when some vegan people witnessing this degree of suffering went “hey, have you considered, on top of all the existing problems, also introducing an additional complication into your diet by cutting out a huge part of the little that somewhat works for you? It is easy, I did it, it is great for everyone!” This was tone deaf of them. With all the shit you are dealing with, whether it is in theory possible for you to be healthy as a vegan or not, I think it is utterly unreasonable for you to make a situation that is already very, very hard on you even harder. Originally, the definition of “vegan” was “to avoid consuming in a way that harms animals, wherever reasonable.” I like this definition to this day. For you, a reduction in animal product consumption is currently likely not reasonable at all. If you are doing better, and you have the mental and other capacities for it, and want to, I’d be happy to support you in doing so, but getting your health working is clearly more important, and going vegan would entail a significant sacrifice for you that is totally disproportional to the gains.
I think you are aware that your experience is not common, which is why you said so—but the big factor it plays in the text gives a different impression to the reader, because presumably, all the cases you have encountered resonated with you, a lot. Hence all the readers who are stressing that for most people, going vegan does not have to entail any meaningful sacrifice in their health, because most people can be perfectly healthy while vegan. But exceptions like you are valid, and important.
It also sounds like you have heard from a lot of vegans with what I would consider fringe opinions. When this movement started, people kept saying that all the vegans would die within a year. It was incredibly wonderful and satisfying to see that we not only did not die, but were perfectly fine, and even beating some omnis on some health values. For me, the point of this was that we had shown that it could be done. But some people—I think frustrated at having been told over and over that they would starve to death, when they really didn’t, and in fact felt better than prior to going vegan, and had some health values even improve—basically countered by assuming that because veganism helped them, it would help everyone, that it wasn’t just healthy, but somehow massively superior. They clearly wanted to spread something that had helped them, and with good intentions, but I think they are wrong to assume it is superior health wise, or doable for everyone, or safe without any worries (insofar as good nutrition is something everyone should worry about, the more so if they take an existing diet and cut away a chunk of it rather than restarting from the ground up). I angrily correct them when they start spouting that going vegan will fix cancer, or that it is the duty of some disabled kid with massive food issues to go vegan because it is easy for everyone, because that strikes me as actively harmful, and I do remind people of B12 - but then, so does every doctor and vegan advice site. But for the most part, I see them in the context of what is still a majority opinion—all the regular people who go, I couldn’t go vegan, I’d be missing all the things, humans have to eat meat, or they die. That opinion does a lot of harm, and I think it still does more harm than the people who are very excited about veganism.
I mentioned elsewhere in this post that I do not think all animal products are unethical in principle; I don’t have a problem with someone drinking goat milk from a goat that happily hops along some cliffs where we can’t grow shit anyway, or someone eating the eggs from runner ducks they keep in their food forest for slug control. The products most potentially relevant for health are the ones often currently thrown away, not the fancy muscle meat. My major issue is with our current large scale industrial farming ruining animal welfare and the planet, the animals kept in tiny cages, the immense waste of land and water and destruction of rainforests, and production of climate gasses. With people consuming vast quantities of meat that they do not need in any way, that actually make them sick, and that this planet cannot produce. Not with people fulfilling genuine needs in ethically reflected ways. I’m happy for all the ethical products to go to folks like you, because I don’t need them, and I am happy to accept that you do.