Sun 8 Jul 2007
Why We Are Not Made for Veganism
Posted by Jeremiah under Nutrition
A couple of my friends started a vegetarian diet to my surprise a few months ago. This was part of the inspiration for this blog. I was then equally surprised when they quit recently. I thought this would be a permanent thing for sure. And why did they quit? One of them got very sick and she believes it’s from not eating meat. I wouldn’t discourage someone from trying vegetarianism or veganism. I think experimenting with dieting is excellent, but of course it sucks when that ends in you getting sick. There is one thing that I can’t encourage and that is choosing a diet for the wrong reasons.
I think choosing veganism for ethical reasons is fine if that’s what you believe. That is mainly why my friends chose vegetarianism. However, I also think that it is incredibly misguided to label these diets as “natural.” By that I mean, we are simply not made to be vegan. Now there are certainly a lot of myths floating around about veganism, so I don’t wish to continue them. However, there is one bold fact that has stood the test of time: a vegan diet does not natural supply adequate amounts of the vitamin B12. Early symptoms from lack of B12 will include lack of energy and blurred vision, but will eventually lead to anemia and irreversible nervous system damage. Here is a quote from a vegan/vegetarian website; this is especially important if you are considering veganism:
Very low B12 intakes can cause anaemia and nervous system damage.
The only reliable vegan sources of B12 are foods fortified with B12 (including some plant milks, some soy products and some breakfast cereals) and B12 supplements. Vitamin B12, whether in supplements, fortified foods, or animal products, comes from micro-organisms.
Most vegans consume enough B12 to avoid anaemia and nervous system damage, but many do not get enough to minimise potential risk of heart disease or pregnancy complications.
To get the full benefit of a vegan diet, vegans should do one of the following:
1. eat fortified foods two or three times a day to get at least three micrograms (mcg or mg) of B12 a day or
2. take one B12 supplement daily providing at least 10 micrograms or
3. take a weekly B12 supplement providing at least 2000 micrograms.
Well, there you have it. You could just eat fortified foods or take supplements and never have to worry about B12 again. There’s just one problem that I see. You can’t live on supplements alone. That’s why they are called supplements. Foods are not simply the sum of their parts. I don’t think I could decide to stop eating fruits and vegetables and take a supplement instead, but vegans do the same thing with animal products.
I’m not saying that you absolutely should not be vegan. You might have good reasons to be vegan. My point is that veganism can’t be the ideal diet. The optimal diet is the one we are adapted to eat. I don’t think we have evolved to rely on supplements and fortified foods. That’s like proposing that our bodies have been waiting for millions of years for supplements to come along. Evolution doesn’t work like that. A species either adapts to its environment or it does poorly and dies out. I encourage you to try new things, but don’t expect to find the ideal diet in veganism.
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:57 pm
i went about doing it in the worst way. i went cold “turkey” and didn’t take any supplements. i thought by eating lots of nuts and protein bars, i was doing something right. but that was only at school, where food like that was easily accessible. when i came home from school, i had to eat what was in my house. which…didn’t include nuts or protein bars. so i just ate lots of veggies and fruits, thinking that would be fine. DO NOT DO THAT. i don’t even want to know what my body was lacking, but it ended up feeling like everything.
everyone kept asking me WHY i went veg. When it all boiled down, i really couldn’t give a significant answer. it WAS really for ethical purposes, but when it came to health reasons…i really didn’t FEEL healthy at all. i felt like shit, to be quite frank. no energy, dizziness, complete, pure weakness in my muscles and mental abilities. my body felt like it was shutting down, in essence.
so i stopped.
i started eating meat, and it took a very long time for my body to get back to “normal” — in all honesty, it’ll probably take a lot longer to repair the damage i did.
September 24th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
For every person who says they got sick from being veg*n (the abbreviation for “either vegan or vegetarian” in case someone reading doesn’t know), there is a person whose health improved immensely from going veg. If you are used to eating meat at least once a day and then stop eating it all of a sudden, of course your body is going to react…the same thing happens when you begin to eat foods you haven’t eaten in a while. And getting sick from eating vegan also depends immensely on what you decide to eat. If you eat vegan but your diet consists of french fries and soda, of course it’s not healthy. There are many more factors to consider than just B-12.
I know people who have been vegan for 40 years or more who have survived just fine without supplements. None of the vegans I know take any supplements, and after asking around at various clinics with general practice doctors as well as dieticians and nutritionists, not a single professional I spoke to recommended a supplement of any kind. Most of the “research” regarding B-12 in veg*ns is in some way biased (because of who funded the study, for example, or where the scientist wanted to be published) and there is no conclusive, solid evidence one way or the other on the issue.
Additionally, something you may wish to research is our ability to process lactose–it is not something we are naturally supposed to do after the age of about 5, but because of the huge amount of dairy products we eat, our body is forced to continue making the enzymes to process milk. The B-12 argument is one that is worth mentioning, but you may also wish to consider that veganism, for several reasons, is more natural than some other diets out there (drinking another animal’s mammary secretions meant for their young? Doesn’t seem too “natural” to me).
Perhaps veganism is not the “optimal” diet if going by evolution alone, but then again, the human diet is drastically different among cultures and regions, so who is to say an optimal diet for all humans even exists? The diets of the agrarian cultures in Africa surely work for them, but would do poorly for an Inuit person. No, veganism is not the best diet for everyone, but I don’t see a reason it is unnatural or a poorer choice than certain other diets.
I guess my thoughts on the “natural” aspect of veganism could be summed up with something a vegan friend of mine said: “Even if veganism were unnatural (which it isn’t), how much more unnatural are the things we are doing to the animals? How natural is it to feed antibiotics and growth hormones to the cattle we eat? How natural is it to concentrate thousands of creatures in a tiny space? To genetically manipulate them and decrease their biodiversity? What about THEIR natural evolution…why don’t we care about that?”
September 24th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Thanks for joining the discussion, Sarah! I know this is a controversial topic and I really was trying to stir things up a bit, so I guess it worked.
The first thing I will say is that this entire site started because I was curious about cutting dairy out of my diet, so I don’t think we are in disagreement about milk (take a glance at my diet page if you are interested in my experiments with that). I pretty much agree with what you said here:
The website title revolves around the idea that it’s possible to cut out dairy (which many people can see isn’t healthy) without having to be vegan. Most people don’t realize they even have that option.
You’re totally right. Some of the things we do to animals are screwing us up pretty bad. I really am all for things that are more natural in any area.
Your thoughts and anecdotes on B12 are contradicting to everything I looked up about it (even on vegetarian websites), but I’m open to the possibility that the research could be incorrect. In all honesty, I am on a quest for the ideal diet and if I either a) find an easily available and natural vegan source of B12 or b) find some research concluding that B12 isn’t needed, I will try veganism. I’m very serious about this. However, I haven’t found any research to suggest this and I have heard many, many reports that deficiency causes irreversible nervous system damage, which doesn’t sound like something I want to experiment with.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:34 am
Hi Jeremiah:
Love your blog
I wonder what your take is on hte various raw food diets and “instincto” diets where people add raw meat (!). Some of the instincto ideas are good as far as using the sense of smell to tell what the body needs…
But the enzyme theory does not pan out. Also they argue that we have not adapted to any cooked food at all and that all cooked food is poison and addictive.
Yet indiginous people eat healthy mostly veggie diets with bits of meat and cooked and do very well. There is no record of a totally pristine vegan primate diet as far as we have been able to discern.
I think people go on these absolute 100 percent this or that diets because we are perfectionists and idealists. People love to argue about some elegant theory that looks good on paper, but when you come down to actuality I found that a 100 percent raw vegan diet did not fit the context of my life. Every time I ate it was so different from everyone else that it was like judging them or making them wrong just by doing my eating thing.
Sorry to get long worded. I do have passion for food! just love the stuff.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:09 am
Zoe,
Thanks for the comment; long comments are the best! I was just reading up a little on the earliest use of fire and I think some conservative estimates put it at 200,000 years. The idea of this blog is that 10,000 years hasn’t been long enough to adapt to grains and dairy(many cultures have had even less time). But 200,000 years is a considerably longer era. I think it’s very possible that we could have adapted to cooked food in that time, but I can’t say for sure. Could you give me some more info on the enzyme issue? I’m not too familiar with it, honestly.
As far as the use of smell, I think that’s brilliant. My feeling is that our senses are there for a reason. I say that we listen to our bodies instead of ignore them.
I’d also like to hear more about your experience with raw veganism. It’s something that intrigues me, that I think probably won’t work (as suggested in this post), but that I would like to try sometime even so. I’ve been following Steve Pavlina’s raw vegan 30-day trial. I’m impressed with his discipline. He says this is one the most challenging things he’s ever done. But I have to wonder: if this is such an ideal diet, why is he feeling so emotionally down? Why does he feel like food is “empty”? I really don’t think detox lasts 20 days, but I am watching patiently to see how this thing ends. And I’m trying to keep an open mind too!
Thanks,
Jeremiah