- My first point regarding healthy vegetarians and vegans is this: they cheat. Constantly and unequivocally.
A few years back there were incidents where several prominent vegans, chefs and bloggers and advocates, revealed they
had to go back to eating animal products for their health. They had done everything "right" with supplementation and protein combining and all the things vegetarians and vegans claim support their health in the face of known evidence of humans needing things like B12 that cannot be obtained from plant sources. I can't link to these sites because they have since been taken down from an absolute avalanche of abuse and death threats.
While these sites were up and the humbled vegans were trying to logically deal with the torment their former tribe members were subjecting them to, they also revealed that many other prominent vegans (they kept names out of it because they were ethical people being honest in the first place) told them that they
knew health could not be maintained as vegans. They ate animal products for their health. They just didn't admit it.
Since then, I've realized how many vegetarians (who can eat secondary animal products like milk and cheese and eggs) will tell you to their face that they are vegetarians... even though they cheat. They cheat with seafood, they cheat with eating steaks only in restaurants, they cheat when they eat at their parents or on special occasions like a Fourth of July BBQ.. the list goes on and on. If a discussion occurs, the honest ones will switch to saying they are "mostly vegetarian" because this means they aren't eating meat at every meal, or fish isn't an "animal," or what have you.
So now I'd have to say any vegetarian can, and will, eat eggs and cheese and other animal sources. They don't have to eat it every day to maintain their health. There's a paper out there showing that certain Hindus developed aplastic anemia when they were vegetarians in Great Britain, even though they had long been vegetarians in India. The difference was the food they ate in India had high levels of insect contamination. Without this source of protein and minerals from an animal source... they were dying.
Vegans are either cheaters or they are not well. Mark's Daily Apple is an especially rich anecdotal source of such evidence.
- My second point regarding healthy vegetarians and vegans is this: their body chemistry differs. Maybe quite a lot.
I spent around nine months as a vegetarian. And I tried really hard, only having eggs and cheese when I thought I'd go crazy without these foods, but no meat or fish of any kind. And I got really sick and gained 40 pounds. This was in less than a year. All while I was being tutored by vegetarians of many years standing, eating exactly how they said they ate.
Since then I've read Denise Minger's
Death by Food Pyramid which documents how people can vary widely in their enzyme production patterns. There are specific digestion enzymes which break down plant foods into the body's needed proteins. And I don't seem to have any of them.
This makes it plausible that some people would do fairly well getting a lot of their protein from plant sources. Not optimum, perhaps, but not dangerous, either. While a person like me, forced to try and get their protein from these plant sources, would suffer... and not be believed. Because every time I tried to share my "vegetarian failure" story, every single vegetarian/vegan responds with, "You must not have done it right."
Jiminy Christmas, I didn't eat meat! That's supposed to be all that I need to do in order to be a vegetarian! If there is supplementation and expertise
required to eat that way... it's NOT a healthy way to eat!
- My third point regarding healthy vegetarians and vegans is this: it's not a WOE. It's a religion. And religious people, (quite radically in faith-based religions,) believe what they want to believe.
Earlier in this discussion, someone mentioned how vegetarians and vegans feel incredibly righteous about not eating meat... most of the time, they really aren't doing it for their health, or they can start that way and then feel morally superior about it. So when health problems occur, they ignore them. I've read accounts of raw foodies (formerly Denise Minger -- she almost lost all her teeth) and fruitarians, who are told to regard every single health problem they encounter as proof of "detox." This is a belief system. It's not a prescription for health.
When someone tells me they have been a committed vegan for ten years and they are the picture of health; I do not believe them. Because they are trying to convert me. Veganism is not the only religion that claims it's okay to lie; Mormons and Christans have factions who claim the same.
Just this morning my husband, an lifelong (amateur) medieval historian, brought up the fact that the serfs ate what was essentially a vegan diet. And they worked long hours at hard labor! Except... there were quite a few "feast days" in the Catholic calendar, every month. Where the people got treats like meats and cheese and butter.
The rich people providing the feasts weren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts (though they claimed they were.) They were doing it because harsh experience showed that people couldn't live, and work, on such vegetarian fare. They had to have sources of animal foods.
In conclusion, this forum, and Mark's Daily Apple, and so many other sites, are full of a self-selected population. Health problems drove us here, and lowcarb/Paleo got us out.
Some people can do okay on vegetarianism; IF they have the right enzymes, IF they don't have health challenges, and IF they lie about how much animal food they eat.
I know I'm not one of them. Probably, no one here is that way, either. Because if it ain't broke, nobody feels moved to fix it!