Is veganism healthy? Ask the ex-vegans (Patreon)

84% of people who start a vegan diet, eventually quit. This comes from a study of current and former vegetarians and vegans. This isn’t data spread by The Meat Industry™, but Faunalytics -  a “nonprofit research organization dedicated to helping animals by providing useful information to advocates to help them increase their impact.”

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In response to the fact that 84% of vegans quit the diet, I’ve seen a couple people say that “people quit diets all the time.” People cheat on carnivore, they get bored of keto, they switch from low carb to the Mediterranean diet and so on. However this is the wrong way to think about it. When we’re analyzing whether veganism is healthy or not, there are two diets:

・A diet that contains animal foods.

・A diet that does not contain any animal foods.

You either eat animal products or you don’t. So, even a vegetarian diet is very different from a vegan diet, because vegetarians can benefit greatly from the dairy and eggs in their diet.

Veganism is radically different from all other diets. (Except fruitarianism I suppose)

The first indicator to me that veganism isn’t always totally about health is that vegans are not allowed even a single bite of cow liver, oysters, fish roe or an egg - the most nutrient dense foods. A mere 10 grams of beef liver would give you 100% your DV of B12.

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The above image is Figure 2 of a 2022 paper in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases

I’m not going to break down the above image now, but I thought it would be interesting to look at what I call “professional vegans” - people whose careers either revolve around being vegan, or their careers are propped up by the fact that they are vegan. Below are 7 influencers big on youtube or instagram and 1 athlete who all eventually quit their vegan diet due to health problems. The influencers all have at least 150,000 followers on either youtube or instagram. The person with the most is Yovana Mendoza with 1M followers on Instagram and 490K on youtube.

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My point in bringing them up is to say that even these people who were profiting from the fact that they were vegan and had 100’s of thousands of people expecting them to be vegan… were unable to keep the diet up because it was simply harming their health. In fact the backlash from the vegan community after they quit was pretty brutal.

[1] Yovana Mendoza - 6 year vegan. lost her period, was anemic and had various digestive issues. (S,S2)

[2] Jon Venus - 6 year vegan. Very popular vegan youtuber and vegan Instagrammer. Experienced rapid tooth decay, gut issues and joint issues. (S) A major factor in getting him to quit the diet was seeing for himself that children in the vegan community were experiencing growth, gut and teeth issues. Jon uploaded a video this past July called Vegan diet & my sons tooth decay

[3] Alyse Parker - 4.5 year vegan, tries meat-only diet and experiences dramatic improvement in mental clarity.(S,S2)

[4] Stella Rae - 7 year vegan. Youtuber. Hormone issues, anxiety, depression on the diet. (S)

[5] Bonny Rebecca - 5 year vegan. Vegan youtuber. Veganism was “everything” to her, it was the motivation of her youtube video. Bonnie had various issues including skin and gut issues. Doctor found her to have high cortisol, bad imbalance of omega 3:omega 6 and high inflammatory markers. She had developed Irritable Bowel Syndrome on the diet and couldn’t process fiber. She ate fish and eggs per her doctor’s recommendation. She noticed immediately that her gut felt far better on fish and eggs. Prior to that, she was alarmed that her boyfriend who always had “perfect” skin suddenly started breaking out on a plant-based diet and that he lost so much weight on the diet that he ended up weighing less than her. Doctor told him that he simply could not absorb the nutrients in his diet, put him on fish and eggs. Within 5 days, all his symptoms cleared. Bonny said “Trying to wrap my head around that was one of the hardest weeks ever.”(S)

[6] Action Jacquelyn - 8 month vegan. Youtuber. “Destroyed” her body. (S)

[7] Megan Moon - 4 year vegan.* IBS. Painful bloating. So painful she couldn’t walk, eventually too painful to sit. “Farting every 5 minutes of the day.” She learned from a doctor that her intestines were bleeding, she was allergic to soy and her doctor told her to eat under 35g of fiber a day. Doctor said you have to eat animal products.(S) TBH I’m not so sure that veganism was a core part of her popularity since her “I’m no longer vegan” video had very few thumbs down. *Not entirely sure if it’s 4 years, a viewer defending her commented that she was.

[8] Tim Shieff - 6 year vegan. An athlete famous for being vegan, called “The Vegan Prince.” Digestive issues, depression, physical injuries wouldn’t heal. (S,S2) Was interviewed on UK television about his quitting the diet.

If you're curious about nonfamous ex-vegan's stories, you can check out reddit.com/r/exvegans 

Maybe you noticed that almost all of them experienced gut issues. I remember a smaller youtuber called “Vegetable Police” talking about his issues with the vegan diet. He said his gut was so irritated by anything he ate that it felt like “glass” was going through him. He was trying to isolate which compound it was in the plant foods that were aggravating his digestive tract - maybe it was the oxalates, maybe it was the FODMAPs, maybe it was the salicylic acid in plants… until he realized even fiber itself was irritating his gut. (Clip of him talking about this from my twitter)

Speaking of extreme diets, I’m doing this 30 eggs a day for 30 days diet to see if this old school body builder Vince Gironda is right about it being as good as a mild steroid cycle for growing muscles. Obviously this is a short term stunt - I’m not trying to get anyone to join my egg cult. But anyways, I needed to get all these eggs down and was blending up tons of egg yolks with frozen mango. Honestly it was super tasty, like a mango ice cream soft serve. Didn’t taste like egg at all. So a couple of days ago I was eating loads of this egg mango "ice cream;" my diet for the day was basically just eggs and tons of mango. That night I woke up at 3AM and couldn’t fall back to sleep until 5AM because I had so much gas. At first I thought “I’m eating 30 eggs, no shit I have tons of gas,” but then I remembered some fruits are high in FODMAPs which are essentially fermentable compounds that can cause bloating and gas in some people. Sure enough, mango was ranked as “high” in FODMAPs. The next day I did no mango and my gas went down by about 75% and had no troubles at night.

Actually, I’ve had trouble with bloating and gas ever since I can remember. Having a stomach ache in high school or college because I was holding in farts like Captain America held onto that helicopter was not uncommon. Keto* helped a lot, but it wasn’t until I tried the carnivore diet that I finally experienced total gastrointestinal peace. (My girlfriend can confirm this) So no, despite what this self.com article says, I don’t think extreme bloating after a big meals is the norm. It’s not going to kill you, but you don’t have to be bloated if you choose the right foods.

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*Note: Not if I included keto “snacks” - keto cookies etc. There are several keto snacks that are the absolute worst for bloating

Lastly, you might wonder why a diet of only plant foods would eventually take its toll on the digestive system. I’m not going to do a breakdown of offending compounds, but consider this: as the brain of our ancestors grew in size, the gut shrank. Humans are actually quite svelte compared to other primates, take a look at this gorilla’s massive gut:

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The expensive tissue hypothesis is the idea that the body had to make some drastic anatomical changes in order to power the massively energy hungry brain. Since the digestive tract is a large energy and blood-flow hog, that needed to shrink to allocate more resources to the brain. What allowed for this was us becoming adept at acquiring a much more efficient source of energy and nutrition: meat. Particularly, fat. Check out this paper Man the Fat Hunter for more on this.

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I remember a plant-based diet advocate saying that you don’t need to eat meat to be strong, look at what a gorilla eats - mostly plants. However, gorillas have massive colons. We do not. The shrinking of our gut meant we lost a trick that primates like the gorilla had: the ability to ferment a ton of plant matter into short chain fatty acids and meet a substantial part of their energy needs from these fats. Quote from this paper on the western lowland gorilla diet: “… potentially 57.3% of metabolizable energy from short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) derived from colonic fermentation of fiber.” Humans can’t do this because we don’t have a gigantic colon.

With all this said, the unfortunate fact about vegan diets is that the human body is actually quite resilient, so it's hard for people to realize the damage the diet is doing. A fully grown adult transitioning from the standard American diet to a whole foods plant based diet will probably feel very light and quite good after starting a vegan diet. In that time they may become staunch advocates for the diet. But eventually… it catches up with them.