Here are a list of reasons of why I think all claims of a vegan lifestyle being unhealthy and unsustainable are incorrect.
Anecdotes and stories from people are not evidence of anything and while the stories may be interesting they are just anecdotes and stories. Most if not all of these people got zero scientific studies to back up their claims.
If you want to find out what is true or not on your own you need to start learning how the body works instead of going after what "he/she said". Going after what other people says puts you into a position of not knowing anything where you just choose to believe, believing is not knowing.
The meat, egg & dairy constantly creates misleading studies and try to muddy the waters by having conflicting data thrown in. This is their way of creating good news about bad habits for people that are ignorant or naive or even both so people will keep up buying the things that harms and kills us in favor of profits. There are some good examples of this on nutritionfacts.org if you want to find them. Here are key pieces: How the Dairy Industry Designs Misleading Studies How the Egg Board Designs Misleading Studies The McGovern Report Big Food Using the Tobacco Industry Playbook
There are 1.4 billion vegetarians worldwide according to a 2010 report. For at least 4500-5000 years there have been vegans/vegetarians living in certain places around the earth but most people are not aware of this and ignore the fact that we do not require meat. There is not a single study claiming that we require meat and yet people tout this idea as if it was established fact when it isn't.
There is only one diet that ever been proven to reverse heart disease that currently is the number one killer in the western world, that diet is a whole food plant based diet and until any other diet can do the same I will simply not take them seriously and neither should you or anyone for that matter.
As always there will be people on the internet that fail going vegan as with everything else and why they fail is often if not always blamed on the lifestyle rather than the real cause. It's like people blaming martial arts because they fail at it, it's nothing wrong with the art, it's the person that practice it incorrectly.
Some people have various food intolerance's meaning that some people can't eat a tomato or nuts but for another it's totally ok. Same is true with pretty much any food out there but that doesn't automatically make the food bad for everyone. Blaming the entire diet because you may have food intolerance's is wrong. Why you have a food intolerance may be because of vaccines or other environmental factors that created gut issues that results in food intolerance's of specific foods.
Our inability to produce our own Vitamin C stretches back 60 million years and we have only eaten some meat for 2.5 million years. So for 57.5 million years we eaten anything but meat and the fact that we still do not produce our own Vitamin C goes to show how extremely connected to fruits and vegetables we really are. The same cannot be said about meat since there is nothing that we require from it in order to sustain ourselves.
In this article of mine I go through a list of reasons of why we are not designed for meat consumption.
There is literally a whole site dedicated for nutritional science and evidence based nutrition which proves that a whole food plant based diet is sustainable short and long term. That site is NutritionFacts.org
Consumption of dairy and eggs is roughly 10.000 years and yet humanity survived without it. Not all people can even consume dairy because of natural biological reasons as nature never intended for adults to drink their mothers milk and especially from another species.
Statements made by these organizations that a vegan diet is healthy:
- The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
- Dietitians of Canada
- The British Nutrition Foundation
- British Dietitians Association
- The Dietitians Association of Australia
I end with a good quote from the sacred texts of Jainism which is a 4500 year old religion to prove a point:
"Unless we live with non-violence and reverence for all living beings in our hearts, all our humaneness and acts of goodness, all our vows, virtues, and knowledge, all our practices to give up greed and acquisitiveness are meaningless and useless." “He who harms animals has not understood or renounced deeds of sin... Those whose minds are at peace and who are free from passions do not desire to live at the expense of others.
All beings are fond of themselves, they like pleasure, they hate pain, they shun destruction, they like life and want to live long. To all, life is dear; hence their life should be protected.
If you kill someone, it is yourself you kill. If you overpower someone, it is yourself you overpower. If you torment some one, it is yourself you torment. If you harm someone, it is yourself you harm."
The idea of veganism is not some recent thing that got invented a few decades ago, it's an ancient idea that got back into society and people have survived and thrived for thousands of years and maybe even longer on that idea which is a testament of the self evident fact that we do not require meat, egg & dairy.
For some Q&A about veganism go to: http://truthseeker.se/questions-answers-veganism/