There are Reasons Vegans Aren't Healthy
By Don Bennett, DAS

If I had a dollar for every vegan who found that their vegan diet didn't work, I'd have a lot of dollars. It is possible for a vegan diet to not "work" (for it to allow ill health to develop). This is because there are a range of vegan diets, from the least healthy to the most healthy. There is not just one vegan diet. And many ethical vegans are eating one of the least healthy diets, so it's no wonder they don't do well over time.

The people who eat a vegan diet for health reasons tend to eat a healthier version of the diet, but even they can bump up against issues if they didn't do enough due diligence. For example, raw vegans who've bought into the notion that if they eat a diet of fruit and greens, they don't have to be concerned about nutrition, have discovered that this admittedly lovely notion is not true in the real world.

Three reasons why a vegan diet can be unhealthy

* Unlike many of the foods of the Typical Western Diet, a vegan diet contains foods that are not fortified with the "problematic" nutrients that are hard to come by in our modern lifestyle for many people (D, B12, iodine), and if people aren't diligent to make sure to get enough of these, their health will go downhill (fact not conjecture).

* Many vegans eat a lot of cooked food. Cooking damages nutrients making them unavailable, and it damages things in away that makes those things appear to the body as foreign invaders, which elicits a reaction by the body known as an autoimmune reaction, which also attacks healthy tissue (i.e. "autoimmune disease").

* As I mentioned above, some vegans don't really care about their own health, just the health of the other animals. I've met staunch vegans who smoke, drink booze, don't exercise, don't get enough sunshine or enough sleep, and don't care what they eat as long as it's vegan. I call this to their attention and they don't care. I would have thought they'd want to care about how all animals are treated, even humans, and if they understood how they are being taken advantage of, for the sake of profit (medical/pharma and vegan junk food industries), they'd want to address that too.

By-the-way, some foods in the above photo are not part of the healthiest vegan diet, but many people assume they are. So there is a huge disconnect between what is healthy and what isn't when it comes to diet. But that applies to all diets, not just the vegan diet.