Vegan vs Health

All of this advice is really good, especially the bit about phasing out animal products gradually.

I'm a vegeatarian and about to start reading "The 30-Day Vegan Challenge" by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, which I've seen frequently suggested on the boards here.

Your family is completely wrong. The only nutrients that you will naturally tend to come up short in eating a good vegan diet are B-12 and Vitamin D. B-12 is made by bacteria and used to be found more on vegetables and in water, but since we now chlorinate and wash everything much more carefully you'll need to supplement that. Vitamin D even most people who do eat animal products are deficient in during the months of the year when there isn't adequate sunlight to make it naturally.

You do need to be somewhat careful switching to a vegan diet, but that's not so much because it has health problems. Look at it this way... I've never really had the traditional diet of a person who lives in India. There are many people in India who are quite healthy, but if I tried to switch to eating nothing but Indian food overnight, there's a good chance I'd only come up with 2 or 3 meal options that I like initially, and then start eating virtually the same thing every day because I don't know what else I can eat. The lack of variety in my diet would lead to deficiencies and feeling like crap. The problem wouldn't be the type of diet, it would be the fact that I didn't know enough about it to make it work properly.

Also, people who become vegan sometimes just eat the same unhealthy diet they had before, but they substitute fake meats for the meat they used to eat. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with enjoying a Morningstar burger or something from time to time, but if that's the only change you make in your diet you're not really getting healthy.

For what it's worth, research backs the idea that greatly reducing or eliminating the quantity of animal products in your diet is healthier for you. This is not just a matter of 'humans aren't meant to eat meat'. Rather, humans aren't meant to eat the type of meat you can now find in the grocery store. There's a big difference between the health implications of eating say... a bison that was roaming the unpolluted prairie 200 years ago, and eating a cow that's been fed on corn (a very very unhealthy diet for cows), living on a dirty polluted feedlot with industrial pollutants everywhere, and not allowed to move around much at all because moving 'wastes' energy that his body could be using to bulk up.

(Produce available today is also typically less nutritious than what you used to be able to get easily., sadly. The difference isn't huge, but it's there.)

You may enjoy this resource: http://pcrm.org/kickstarthome/ It's a 21-day Vegan kickstart that's supposed to help you transition your diet in a healthy way more easily since they take over a lot of the initial figuring out what to do for you.

Vegans typically choose not to eat things like honey, gelatin, and white sugar (often processed with bone char). I would try not to worry too much about that kind of thing initially. While they are animal products, you'll get a lot more benefit for your effort out of focusing on getting rid of the big sources of animal products in your diet first.

I'm not vegan myself, by the way. I'm just well aware that there's no actual nutritional need for meat, and it really sort of takes up space in the diet that cold be occupied by more nutritious things for those who are so inclined.

If you are looking to make a lifestyle change for your health and not for moral reasons, I wonder why you would choose a vegan diet. I have no idea why anyone would actually believe that eating meat, eggs, and fish is unhealthy. You can read all the vegan propaganda you want, but I really think you should talk to a nutritionist before you make a decision based on what's best for you physically.

Veganism is all about propoganda. It's the "morally" superior diet, it's "better" for the environment, and supposedly better for health, though it ignores all those pesky things like the fact that there is no natural way to get B12 (an essential vitamin, of which a severe deficiency can KILL YOU) except by eating animals.

You can spin it any way that you want, but a diet that requires you to supplement and fortify every food with a processed version of VITAL nutrients, is at it's very core flawed. I've never met more unhealthy, sickly looking people than vegans, except those that love to stave themselves lean as a substitute for eating.