Some of you may remember the 2004 documentary Super Size Me which depicts filmmaker Morgan Spurlock eating three meals from McDonalds every single day for 30 days and always supersizing the meal whenever suggested by a McDonald’s employee.
By the end of the 30 day fast food spree, Spurlock had gained 25 pounds and was suffering from liver dysfunction and depression according to his doctor.
Spurlock’s girlfriend (now ex-wife) during the documentary was Alex Jamieson, author of The Great American Detox Diet and a well known and longtime celebrity vegan.
When ideology trumps scientific facts, however, dietary obsessions die hard. On her blog Delicious Vitality, Jamieson shocked her fans by announcing that she had quit veganism.
A vegan for 13 years, Jamieson said that a whole foods, plant based diet helped her initially resolve some health problems. Â She also said it felt “clean and right” given what she had learned about the industrial food system and how horribly animals are treated in confinement.
Then, she said things began to change a few years ago. Â The burger that used to disgust her made her salivate. Â She had overwhelming urges to order salmon instead of her usual salad with tofu.
She said at first she denied her cravings and figured she was just mineral deficient.
More nuts, more juicing, more sea vegetables. Â For over a year, she tried everything in the vegan playbook to get the cravings to stop.
To her dismay, the cravings for meat and eggs continued and did not abate.
Jamieson writes that about that time she started to notice that most of her clients and readers were not vegan. Â Some of those who were vegan were not thriving and were even sicker and heavier than before they started an all plant based diet.
She noticed that shame was a common emotion experienced by vegans who began to eat meat again. This caused her to hide the secret of her cravings for meat and eggs even more tightly.
Finally, Alex decided that she had to experiment and see how her body responded to animal foods again. With the support of a few trusted friends, she began eating eggs.
Her body welcomed the change and wanted more!
But still she guarded her secret, stealthily buying animal foods and sneaking home to eat them in solitude.
It shocked her to realize that she had developed an eating disorder after 12 years as a vegan! Â The thought then occurred to her that she could help a lot of people by coming out of the closet and admitting her struggle and need for animal foods.
Doing so terrified her, however. Â She recalled the vicious backlash from the vegan community when celebrity vegan Ellen Degeneres admitted that she was eating eggs from her neighbor’s happy chickens.
Not so compassionate after all, are we? Â She thought.
Alex Jamieson describes her new truth with regards to animal foods as follows:
“People can still love animals and care about protecting the environment AND honor their own animal bodies and consume the foods that they need.
I believe you can love and care about animal welfare and still consume them.
I believe humans are animals. And some animals need to eat other animals to be healthy. Some do not.
I believe we should restructure the way animals are raised so that they live in more natural, comfortable, humane surroundings and stop force-feeding them 80% of all antibiotics used in the US.”
I applaud Alex Jamieson for her courage in writing a letter to her fans that will no doubt bring much ridicule and criticism from the vegan community.
Unfortunately, I don’t agree with all of Alex’s new truth. Â She also states that:
“I believe that a vegan, whole-foods diet saved my life and is a delicious, valid, healthy style of eating for many people.
I believe that a vegan diet should be promoted as one of many possible ways to get the body and life that people crave.”
While a vegan diet may prove helpful as a very short term, detoxifying solution for some people, it can never and will never prove to be a valid way to long-term health else there would be at least one traditional culture that practiced it successfully with multiple generations of fertility, healthy children, and degenerative and chronic disease free people demonstrating it’s positive effect.
Such a culture did not and does not exist according to the anthropological studies of Dr. Weston A. Price.
Not a single successful vegan population group could be cited by the science ignoring 2017 vegan documentary What the Health either!
Consider yourself warned, would-be vegans!
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Veganism is unhealthy. Period. We are all the same species, and we need to eat a very similar diet. It’s not a “to each their own” thing. We NEED to let people know about this. Personally, I have suffered PERMANENT damage to my body from being vegan.
Then what would you consider a proper diet? There are so many different cultures who thrive on different type of diets, some which are vegan, which diet would you consider the best?
We’re all the same species, but our individual chemical make up and genes differ and some people can thrive on a vegan diet while others can’t.
It really is “to each their own”.
Nope … NO traditional diets were vegan. And the ones claimed to be vegan by the vegan community are actually tall tales .. these cultures ate meat and/or dairy.
@Ancestral I agree the points weren’t all scientific, but some were. If lacto-vegetarian counts, 30% of people in India are vegetarian. How do we know what people ate for the past 2.6 million years?
@Sarah You ignored my point, so how is it a discussion? Gorillas are almost completely vegan. The other 2-3% is grubs and termites. They don’t have huge canines for ripping flesh apart, they have them for ripping plants apart.
I agree pure vegan is extreme and quite possibly unhealthy, and vegetarian has potential issues too, especially if one fails to mix the right foods to achieve full-spectrum nutrition. I do lacto-vegetarian, myself, with a half-dozen to a dozen eggs/mo and some nutritional yeast on popcorn and in soup. (y)
Eat what you want, don’t eat what you don’t want, stop the judging all around.
Thank you. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
@Elizabeth and Dean just because millions of Asians are currently vegetarian does not mean they are a naturally occurring vegetarian culture, based in a successful history of child rearing and being disease-free. Millions of Indians are vegetarian too. But most Asians and Indians are veg for religious reasons. This is a recent development, there is still no successful vegetarian culture to naturally be vegetarian just because they thrived without meat. Our ancestors were meat eaters. NIH has done a study about the vegetarian Indians, they have higher incidences of CAD than whites, blacks, hispanics, you can find it easily I’m sure. Additionally, because animals have been excavated from that time period with arrows in their ribs. I doubt early humans were just killin’ animals to wear. If you do some research it’s just an inescapable fact.
Wow. Congrats! You’re a racist.
Wait, WHAT? How the heck is what she said racist????
I love this story! More and more people are realizing that meat and saturated fat are GOOD for you!!!
I love my eggs
Millions of people in Asia are vegetarian, if not vegans. Why not just eat what you want and don’t worry about people who don’t eat as you to. This is not an “right-wrong” situation, Sarah. Everyone is entitled to eat, live and be as they choose.
Signed, a die-hard carnivore.
Elizabeth Proctor One person’s vegan lifetime does not a successful diet make. Let your friend marry a vegan, have children (if they even could have children together) and then have their vegan children have children and so forth. This is impossible and has never occurred in human history. Veganism is a fatal diet. It may last for one lifetime, but that is it.
Buddhist monks renounce consumption of animal flesh, and they likewise shun dairy. The next time you open your mouth in public, take a minute to do some research first.
Wow Annoyed, I didn’t realize the Buddhist Monks married other vegans/vegetarians and had children that then also were vegan/vegetarian and married other vegan/vegetarians, etc. Maybe the next time you open your mouth in public you might want to take a minute and read what you are commenting on first.
Going vegan cured my pcos and by Gods doing of course i got pregnant after a few months and my dr told me i may need fertility treatment, im not vegan now im pregnant but its good short term
I have a friend who’s been vegan for 50 years. He’s in his early 70s and his good health, stamina and energy would put a lot of younger people to shame. For people to make blanket statement such as @Christine Ten Eyck Myers did shows complete ignorance. Everyone is different and what works for some people doesn’t for others. Diet is not a “one size fits all” formula.
Dean Wiebe You can rationalize all you want but you have canine teeth sitting in your mouth right now. If we were designed to only eat plant foods, they wouldn’t be there. Traditional cultures that were able to reproduce successfully and have healthy children generation after generation ALWAYS and I say ALWAYS ate some animal foods. There has NEVER been a successful vegan culture. There is no further discussion.