I was a vegetarian for 20 years and a vegan for part of that time. I came to the conclusion, very gradually, that my body couldn't thrive on that diet. I became very anemic, and had difficulty maintaining energy levels in the long term. I still believe that vegetarianism is viable, but I don't believe anymore that veganism is, in the long term. I've known people who have managed it for a few years, but eventually their health goes into decline. I've known several that have descended into serious depression and other mental problems as well as lacking energy. Personally, I believe humans are meant to be omnivores, we need cholesterol, Omega 3s, and other elements from animals. It's how we evolved and what keeps us healthiest. It was really, really hard to come to that conclusion for me, because I am an animal activist.

So what we do now is keep our own chickens for eggs. We buy our milk from a local guy who has several dairy goats. We buy our pork and beef from a woman who raises them humanely and organically. We also garden and try to buy as much stuff locally as possible. I know that our animals and those of people we buy from are treated as well as our pets (well, our chickens *are* pets!), and that's what works best for me.

_The Omnivore's Dilemma_ is a fascinating book about this subject. I just read it recently, but had come to many of the same conclusions from my own experiences.

I think it can be done, but it's certainly not easy with the mindset of this culture, and it's also not as easy for busy athletes who may require double the nutrients of your average adult and who's nutritional sensitivity is much higher. I am pesce-lacto-ovo vegetarian, meaning i eat fish, milk and eggs and I can do the endurance lifestyle and do well on this diet. I used to be vegan and found I could survive on that, but I was also in the midwest at the time and it was much much more difficult to be vegan in that area of the country vs. california. Eating vegan required a lot more attention to everything I ate and I had to plan more in advance to get the foods I needed, but I did it and felt good while doing it. I really like eggs and fish and just decided I didn't want to give them up. The China Study is a great book and talks a lot about long term health along with environmental and socioeconomic impacts of eating certain ways.

For vegetarian athletes (and even for carnivores, its interesting) read Vegetarian Sports Nutrition It's a good sports nutrition book and gives you a lot of information on what your body needs and where you can get it, and for meat eaters it gives you suggestions on other sources of nutrients in case you want something new or to cut back on your meat.

I realize that diet is an intensely personal thing, and you can blow all of this off if so inclined, but here's a couple comments/concerns:

1) Replacing milk and other proteins with soy can be really damaging to your body. Soy is a thyroid inhibitor. Just about a year after I replaced all of my regular milk with soymilk and some of my protein with tofu and other soy products, I ended up with multiple thyroid cysts and having surgery to remove half of my thyroid. I didn't know at the time that soy was a thyroid inhibitor, but now with only half a thyroid gland, my endocrinologist does not want me eating any soy at all. I wish I had known this ahead of time. It is not uncommon for people who consumer higher amounts of soy to have thyroid problems, including cysts and goiters. More info here: http://thyroid.about.com/cs/soyinfo/a/soy.htm

High levels of phytic acid in soy reduce assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. I also ended up deficient in many of these nutrients after becoming vegan.

Soy also mimics estrogen, which causes changes to your body's overall hormone levels. My mom was able to wean herself off of the estrogen patch by consuming moderate levels of soy, so that tells you how strongly it mimics estrogen. Studies have found lower testosterone levels and higher estrogen levels in men who consume large amounts of soy. This can also affect athletic performance.

2) The "wide variety of options" available to us to use as meat and dairy substitutes have to be trucked from all over creation to arrive at our local markets. In a way, I think a vegan diet is largely a modern creation. Vegans need to rely on combining specific foods to get the amino acids, essential fatty acids, etc that their bodies need. Without the hemp seed from here, the flax seed from there, the soy products from over there, the nutritional yeast trucked from there, their diets would not be nutritionally complete. If they were plunked down somewhere in a country without such a huge trucking system, they would be unable to sustain their diet. To me, this seems globally non-sustainable. I think a nutritional system needs to be globally healthy as well as individually healthy.

Well, definitely it's known in the endocrinological world for its role as a thyroid inhibitor and phytoestrogen. I think those things are well-known (doctors prescribe it instead of the estrogen patch, for instance). Opinions do vary as to how much is too much, and how much has an impact on your endocrine system. Myself, I'm just passing this on because if I'd known that eating that much soy would put me into serious surgery on my neck, I would've definitely avoided it! Having been a willing vegetarian for 20 years, I definitely have no anti-vegetarian agenda at all.

Well, first of all, all of the studies linking cow's milk and meat to disease are done on people eating regular, industrially-produced meats. This means cows with rGBH, tons of antibiotics pumped into them, eating corn in a feedlot, in confinement. These are not really animals, they are industrial products And meat animals raised this way eat nothing but grain and corn, which these animals are not in any way evolved to eat! . If you're really interested in the difference, read The Omnivore's Dilemma. Grass-fed cattle, chickens, etc. are a completely different animal entirely than their grain-fed counterparts. Grass-fed meat and milk is high in CLA, a cancer-fighting fat that is most abundant in grassfed products. Grass-fed animals are what humans evolved to eat, and they are completely healthy to eat.

As a vegetarian for 20 years, I'm well-versed in the "evils of meat" theory. But having researched it further in the last two years, I've discovered that there really are no evils of meat (hence the fact that our ancestors thrived on it for tens of thousands of years), but there are definitely evils of industrially produced meat! Here's a brief summary of the difference: http://www.consciouschoice.com/2001/cc1411/grassfed1411.html

As for "higher quality nutrients", I've come to believe that's not true. The Omega6:Omega3 ratios in green plant-based matter are optimum for human growth, health, and development. So it makes sense to me to eat a diet that primarily consists of those plants, as well as meat derived from animals eating those plants. Substituting other things like grains, soy, etc. actually throws your whole Omega6:O3 levels completely out of whack, and that is what I think causes the diseases you mention above. Of course, eating industrial meat does the same thing. Either option is, I believe, not as healthy as eating a diet of plant and grass-fed meats.

Well, let's put it this way. No one in my family has thyroid isses - not mother, grandmother, great-grandmothers, aunts, great-aunts, etc. I had no thyroid problems whatsoever. I switch over to a vegan diet and up my soy consumption, replacing milk with soy milk, and adding soy yogurt and soy protein. Within a year, I have thyroid problems. Within 2 years, I'm undergoing thyroid surgery and end up with half a thyroid. My endocrinologist tells me soy is a thyroid inhibitor, it's not healthy for anyone to consume too much of it, and I should consume none from now on. I've since met other people who have been through the exact same thing. I'm pretty well convinced that soy is the culprit.

I won't argue with you there! But it's not an either-or proposition either. The choice is not simply between vegan and regular american diet. There are many ways to eat very healthily without being vegan. For instance, we raise our own chickens, which are free-ranging and grass and bug-eating. Their eggs are far superior to even the "organic free-range" eggs available in a market. We buy our pork and beef from a local woman who owns an organic farm. The meat is small-scale, grass-pastured, butchered by a local butcher. We buy a 1/4 cow and 1/3 pig annually, and pick up the meat, wrapped in paper, from the butcher, it goes directly into our freezer. The healthiness of eating grass-pastured meat is high, and we're supporting local farmers, with no environmental damage and no trucking of meat or feedlots or antibiotics polluting the environment or any of that stuff.

And so do many omnivores, including me :)

Well, if you didn't eat it, you'd need to supplement with something else that contained B12. Studies have shown that 92% of vegans who did not take B12 supplements were chronically low. Being low in B12 promotes anemia (which was one of my health problems as a vegan) as well as heart disease and other diseases.

Here's an article from a vegan website no less, about the necessity of supplementing with B12 as a vegan: http://www.veganoutreach.org/health/b12letter.html . Basically it says that as a vegan you have to supplement with B12. In my mind, any diet that requires supplementation to stay healthy is, well, missing something.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on where those plants come from. Spinach from California, bananas from Ecuador, and tomatoes from a hothouse in Canada are no more sustainable than meet from a feedlot in Iowa. Can you eat a 100-mile diet as a vegan? That's the true test of a diet with little environmental impact - can you eat everything you need from a 100 mile radius. Most vegans I know eat a lot of foods that come from elsewhere - nuts, fruits, etc. plus the necessary supplements (B12, iron, etc.)

Myself, I could eat almost entirely from my own backyard. We have chickens for eggs (we could also raise them for meat, but we don't). We have 1/3 acre we could pasture a goat on if the city regulations ever permitted it. We have fruit and nut trees, and two vegetable gardens. If push came to shove, I could eat a nutritionally complete diet within less than a mile from my house. I think that would be very, very difficult as a vegan. If supermarkets disappeared and B12 supplements became unavailable (as well as nutritional yeast, shipped from wherever and soy products shipped from wherever), most vegans would be unable to eat a complete and nutritionally sound diet. I have traveled places in Africa and Central America where even eating as a vegetarian was difficult. The foods that I relied on for protein were not available. Being a vegan there would be close to impossible.

In my mind, for a diet to be truly sustainable, it has to be nutritionally complete without being trucked in from hundreds of miles away.

And again, I have absolutely no anti-vegetarian agenda. I was a veg. by choice for 20 years, Vegan for 2. I only stopped very reluctantly because my doctor just about ordered me to for my own health. Once I stepped back, I realized how many health problems sprang from my diet, I started really researching it. What I discovered totally shocked me. Many of the tenets of vegetarianism that I believed in (meat is unhealthy, etc.) are completely unsubstantiated once you remove the component of industrial animal practices. Yet the vegetarian sources still quote studies only done on these industrial meat products. I still believe that one can be a healthy vegetarian, if you are aware of a lot of nutritional theory and pay close attention to getting the right nutrients, and if you avoid most soy. I no longer believe you can be healthy as a vegan without supplementation. And supplementation as a necessity is a proof (to me at least) that the diet is nutritionally lacking and therefore not a sound way to eat.

I know this got really long, but this is something I'm pretty passionate about - both the environmental aspects and the health aspects. I really wish I had read some of this when I was a vegan, that I was told of the health issues of such a diet and the dangers of soy. So I pass on my unfortunately hard-won knowledge for that reason alone, so that other people can at least investigate it and maybe not run into the same health problems that I have. I will be on thyroid medication for the rest of my life, I will never have a functioning thyroid again. As an athlete, that's a pretty big burden, and I would definitely try to spare anyone from going through that!

Well I guess the concensis on this forum is a Vegan diet is not healthy. I can see where you guys are coming from but I don't agree. Over my year and a half or so of researching this topic I feel the best diet for me is a whole foods plant based diet. I could cite studies that show what I am saying is correct and someone else could counter with studies that show I'm wrong and this could go around and around forever. There are people that have tried vegan diets and had problems, but there are also people that have gone on to be some of the greatest athletes in the world on a vegan diet. I'm going with what makes most sense to me which is a whole foods plant based diet.

I love active discussions like this! I think that you should do what works best for you whether it be for moral, health, or taste reasons eat what you want. If you are an athlete then your body will react on a much more sensitive level to what you eat. The key is to realize that you are not only what you eat, but also what you digest and absorb and that is heavily dependent on the nature of the foods that you put in your body but also on making sure you get the appropriate vitamins and minerals to utilize that food and regulate your system. That said, I think a good moto is that of the farmers market bag I have: "Think globally, eat locally."

I was a vegan for a couple years and a vegetarian for a few more. My biking and overall energy suffered, my weight dropped and I was sick more often than not. I'm sure if I was getting the right combination of foods I could have avoided all of that, but an egg a day probably would have solved 1/2 my problems and a piece of chicken a day the other half.

I still don't eat much dairy (2oz a week?), but I'll never give up meat or eggs again.

Additionally, if you eat at restaurants, well, the sous-chefs HATE vegetarian requests and beware the amoebas you consume when eating uncooked veggies unless you grew them yourself.

Well, like I said, I was a vegetarian for 20 years, and an athlete the whole time. The health decline was long and gradual during that time. Scott's only 10 years into it, at 10 years I probably would've said I was doing fine too. My thyroid surgery came at 12 years, diagnosis of severe anemia at 15 years, doctors begging me to stop being vegan at 20 years...

Maybe it works for some people , not for me. For over a year, I tried to get my iron levels up on a vegetarian diet and just couldn't do it. When your doctor tells you he will take a baseball bat to your bicycle if you say you're going to ride it again, it's time to listen to him (he told me if I'd fallen off and skinned my knee, I probably would've bled to death, my hemoglobin was the lowest he'd seen in someone not in a hospital bed, yet I was still racing - what can I say, I'm a bit of a thickheaded mule!).

This reminded me of something I read recently about the lack of nutrition education in medical school: A new study indicating that 60 percent of medical schools in the United States are not meeting minimum recommendations for their students' nutrition education

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=42226

This means you should take even medical advice with a grain of salt. To the defense of Reigstered Dieticians, my Dietician was very open minded about my training and vegan nutrition. So, I think there is definitely a generational thing going on - the younger the doc, the more open to a meat-less diet...

Well, as you pointed out yourself, it depends on the vegan diet. And as kddubb says, and has been mentioned before in this thread, it's not an "either/or" proposition. I doubt you'll find anyone here on these boards advocating for the SAD. Comparing veganism to the SAD is a bit of a straw man.

I guess we'll have to disagree on this one (that you can get the same nutrients as you can get from meat, except in a healthier form). Animal products are much more than just protein. There are essential amino acids, like taurine (essential to vision, brain and nervous system, cardiac function, among others) that don't exist in plants in signifigant quantities. Humans can synthesize taurine, but not at a rate that is sufficient to maintain healthy plasma levels of taurine. Mammals who are obligate carnivores have lost the ability to synthesize taurine completely, animals who are vegetarian are able to completely synthesize taurine. Humans have historically relied on meat consumption to make up the difference. Studies on vegans have shown that they have 50 - 70% lower plasma levels of taurine, which generally puts them into the "below healthy" range for this essential nutrient. There are dozens and dozens of similar nutrients found in meat, dairy, and eggs, that humans have evolved to become dependent on.

Did your 50g of protein include taurine and other essential amino acids? That's the big question with vegan diets. And again, like kddubb says, I'm not saying "don't be vegan", but I am saying there's more to being vegan than just not eating meat. It requires a fair bit of research and some vigilant supplementation in order to not become deficient in critical nutrients. I fully understand that people would want to eat this way from an animal activist standpoint, or an ecological standpoint. However, I don't agree that such a diet is even nutritionally complete (without supplementation) or superior to the omnivorous diet that humans evolved to eat.

Neither would I. But I would listen when my doctor says "Your hemoglobin count is so low that I think you will need a blood transfusion unless we can somehow get it up. Would you consider eating meat?" Especially when this is from a doctor who worked with me for years that I was a vegetarian and was very supportive of that.

That's a bit of a black-and-white statement, and I don't tend to lump things as so black or white as that. My particular family doctor at the time had been practicing medicine for over 60 years. There was hardly such a thing as the big pharm companies we have now back then, and med school was much more straight forward. Regardless, he had been a good old family doctor, delivered babies at home, that sort of thing, but was also very open-minded and always learning new things and very focused on health. I don't know about you, but I tend to pick my doctors very, very carefully and wisely. I won't go for any kind of medical advice to a pharmaceutical-pushing doctor, and indeed my current doctor was chosen partially because I refuse several vaccines for my kids and he had to be okay with that.

And again, I wish you luck in your vegan diet and hope that you are one of the people who are able to make the diet work for you. I think there are people out there who pay scrupulous attention to getting the right nutrients who are able to do so. There are also people for whom it does not work at all, and I think it's worthwhile to keep that possibility in mind. Even with all the B-12, iron, and amino acid supplements, I was not able to assimilate enough vital nutrients to stay healthy. There are lots of good websites that detail the need for various nutrients for vegans, and they're worth researching for anyone considering this diet.

Some interesting viewpoints on the Vega website. If you're not familiar with Vega, it's a meal replacement product "formulated by Brendan Brazier, vegan, professional Ironman triathlete and best-selling author on performance nutrition."

Ironmom - you are my hero. Seriously. You deliver your points neutrally, fairly, respectfully, and with obvious subject-matter expertise. Nothing beats first-hand knowledge and experience. The only thing that comes close is allowing others to experience things first hand and learning from them.

For all those who choose to live on rabbit food, I completely respect that. I don't understand it (animals were placed on this planet for a reason, and anybody who works with cows can attest that they don't make good pets), but I respect it. I'm extremely grateful that we all get to choose for ourselves. That's what makes this world, and more specifically, this country, great.

Now I need some brain food. I'm thinkin' steak. ;)

N