Be Vegan and Healthy

Veganism is a lifestyle which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. While simply eliminating meat and dairy also has some health benefits, there’s nothing about veganism that necessarily equates to health.

It was therefore interesting to read about the EPIC Oxford series of studies. These are longitudinal studies of a sample of people in the UK which includes vegans and vegetarians. The latest reports made headlines all around the world when they communicated correlational findings that vegans and vegetarians experienced more bone fractures than did meat eaters. There have been similar reports about other differences where it is the vegans who have worse health indicators.

I won’t go into all the details that I’ve gleaned from all I’ve read about these studies but there is an important conclusion to draw about veganism and health. The UK vegans were primarily motivated to go vegan for animal rights reasons, according to Dr. Michael Greger, and did not by and large eat a healthy whole food plant-based diet. If you’re vegan, you’re not automatically healthy and spared all possible negative health outcomes. Simply being vegan but eating an incredibly unhealthy diet unsurprisingly won’t yield great health outcomes.

I’m reminded of the book I read decades ago when I first started long-distance running. It was a book by the multi-year Boston Marathon winner James Fixx. He believed that running was a cure all for everything. He used to eat a full package of Oreos before a race. He died at 52 of a heart attack due to his coronary arteries being damaged by arteriosclerosis, mostly due to his horrible diet.

I love that people adopt a vegan lifestyle to exclude all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. However, I would also love it if they would be kind to themselves too by eating a vegan whole food plant-based diet.

Personally Effecting Change

People often debate the most effective ways of effecting change. Some say you need to change laws, some say you need to get corporations to change, some say that protesting and activism is the way to go, and some say inspiring people directly is the way to go. And, they’re all correct. I’ve always used the phrase “you have to get on every train leaving the station” to effect any type of change meaning that it requires a multifaceted approach on many fronts.

Much is written about the methods of effecting change with the exception of inspiring people directly. I worry therefore that this might leave some to question the efficacy of the personal approach. I’d therefore like to share my experiences with the personal approach.

I became vegetarian 37 years ago inspired by the woman I’ve now spent the rest of my life with. I was impressed by her ethnical vegetarianism, including not wearing leather and not buying products from companies that tested products on animals. We then had four children who grew up vegetarian. On a vacation in California in December 2014, our middle son drew our attention to the volume of activist videos showing the evils of the egg and diary industry and asked the question, “why aren’t we vegan?” to which none of us had a good answer other than “we should be!” We lived all those prior years oblivious to the suffering and death we were causing and thinking that veganism was too extreme. When we woke up to the reality, the whole family went vegan. And, that also included the partners of our now adult sons and daughter, a total of nine people. We haven’t looked back. And, it’s a delight to know that the people you care about the most, your family, are ethical vegans.

You also have other people whom you care about, your good friends. I have a number of friends that I get together with periodically. I have some older friends who are just too old to change so I didn’t waste any effort on inspiring them. Don’t get me wrong, I think older people can change. I did, and I’m an older person. Some older people are young at heart which I believe I am. They’re worth spending time with to get them to change. I have younger fiends who I take out to dinner when I’m in town (back when we traveled). Of course, if I’m paying for a meal it has to be vegan. I initially heard complaints like, “Karel, you know I could never go vegan”. In fact, the first good friend that said that to me inspired the name of this website. She has subsequently become a staunch ethical vegan. And she wasn’t the last, many others have either completely gone vegan or are still transitioning with this form of inspiration.

In addition to family and close friends, there are also the other people we connect with on social media, some of whom we’ve met in person and others we’ve only ever known digitally. They’re important too. The profession I’m in and the various parts of my design director role responsible for design leadership and academic programs connects me to many, many people. And, many of those people connect with me digitally on social media. My approach to those wonderful people is to share what I hope will be inspirational material to get them to consider and then become vegan. I make sure not exclusively focus on this topic nor on only one aspect of it. So, I post on a variety of topics, from design to politics, to what I’m doing. My vegan posts try to inspire by showing delicious vegan food including non-animal meat products to show you can eat the same thing you’re eating now but plant-based. I also throw in pics of animals that reinforce how wonderful, beautiful, and sentient they are but I also include the occasional shocking pics of what eating meat inflicts on innocent animals. I throw in the health benefits including the incredible improvement in my blood work due to veganism. And I of course also mention the positive environmental and climate change benefits and even the fact that pandemics are caused by eating animals. Similar to the gratifying news about family members going vegan, my close friends going vegan, I’m also so pleased to hear news of my social media friends and followers going vegan. Many have gone vegan and have let me know that my posts were a significant contributor to their going vegan.

My objective in writing this post is for you to not discount personal inspiration as an effective way of effecting change.

COVID-19 & Veganism

Since its inception this site has reinforced five reasons to go vegan: The ethics of not harming animals, increasing health by avoiding major illnesses, eliminating the major contributor to climate change, and awesome taste. The entire world is also experiencing a sixth reason: preventing pandemics!

COVID-19 was caused by abusing animals. Evidence suggests that COVID-19 originated in bats and then went through what’s called an intermediary host which was the pangolin in a live animal or ‘wet’ market in Wuhan, China. It’s clear that COVID-19 was transmitted from animals to humans. If the whole world had been vegan last Fall like our family and most of our friends, we wouldn’t all be in lockdown, wearing masks, washing our hands incessantly, physical distancing, and we wouldn’t be hearing news reports of the daily horrendous infection and death count. And, we wouldn’t have had to shut down much of the world’s economies.

You may be thinking that this was a one-time occurrence and that was due to live ‘wet” animal markets that are common in China but interestingly also in places like New York City in the US. The Chinese government and even the US government have now banned those markets. Will those closures prevent the next pandemic? Well, an emphatic no! When we look back at previous viruses that had massive impact, we see that virtually all have an animal to human origin and that they weren’t limited to being spread by live ‘wet’ animal markets.

Animal to human transmission of diseases is called zoonotic transmission. Three out of every four infectious diseases are zoonotic. Ebola came from fruit bats, swine flu from pigs, bird flu from chickens, mad cow disease obviously from cows, SARS from bats, MERS from dromedary camels, and the Spanish flu is thought to have avian origins and due to chickens. While some of the animals may be considered more exotic, others like pigs, chickens, and cows are not. Given the rather startling statistical probability that the next pandemic will also be zoonotic, the best way to prevent the next one is by going vegan.

While viral pandemics are clearly a huge problem as we’re experiencing right now, they’re really just a dress rehearsal for the even scarier bacterial pandemics.

Fully 80% of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture which is causing a substantial increase in antibiotic resistant infections in humans. A total of 2.8 million Americans contract antibiotic resistant infections annually and some 35,000 people die directly as a result of it. Antibiotic resistant infections cost the American healthcare system an estimated $35 billion dollars a year. Antibiotic resistant infections have doubled over the past 15 years. This is all leading to a huge worry that we’re about to encounter a ‘superbug’ that will to resistant to any antibiotics.

With 75 percent of viruses coming from the abuse of animals and 80 percent of antibiotics causing antibiotic resistance given to food animals, I think it’s time for the human race to become vegan, and fast.

A perfect time to go vegan is right now while we’re in the middle of an abuse of animals caused pandemic. Remember, we wouldn’t be in this mess if we all had been vegan a few months ago.