Why Health is an Important Part of Veganism

May 11, 2020

"The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
-Thomas Edison

Compassion For All

Veganism is and always will be about the nonhuman animals used and abused by humans, but that doesn't mean that human animals should be exempt from our own compassion. (In fact, there is no distinction made in the official definition of veganism between humans and other animals. We just have perceived that implication.) We should all care about -- or, at least, respect -- ourselves and the other members of our species enough to not want to cause unnecessary harm. Yet, unknowingly, we kill ourselves a little every time we sit down at the dinner table. It's not war or gun violence or opioids that are responsible for most deaths: it's the table fork.

I could go on to discuss how a diet with animal products is unhealthy, but we've heard that all before. (Animal products are the only source of cholesterol, they contain no fiber, they're high in saturated fat, not to mention the pus, blood, and feces contamination that eases the spread of deadly pathogens, and on and on.) Instead, we're going to focus on the ethical stance as to why vegans should be promoting a whole foods, plant-based diet as part of their activism, outreach, and education. Because veganism is also about human rights.

Down With the Sickness

It's frustrating and disheartening to think of how many people at this very moment just had their first heart attack and are now being diagnosed with heart disease; of the families mourning the loss of a parent who battled through years of cancer treatment; of the confusion thousands of people are feeling as their brains wither away from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. We should all feel angry at how 90 percent (or more) of these tragedies could be completely prevented if we simply changed the food on our plates.

And I'm not saying this as a fierce defender of human rights. I'm not a "people person." I never have and never will feel the same love for humans that I feel for nonhumans, nor would I have ever cared about these kinds of human rights issues if it hadn't been for veganism. Maybe that makes me a little speciesist against my own species, but at least I'm not using my preference for nonhuman animals as an excuse to discriminate against humans. You don't need to care about some random person on the other side of the globe that has just been diagnosed with heart disease. All you need to do is recognize that they shouldn't have to suffer and die from a disease that is preventable with a plant-based diet.

Getting Sick as a Vegan

But the thing is that just being vegan doesn't automatically mean you're clear, that you're at no risk of developing lifestyle-related illnesses. I have been the vegan that eats Oreos, potato chips, and soda, and we can universally agree that those foods are not healthy, regardless of them fitting into the "vegan" food category. To be healthy, you actually need to eat healthy, which means cutting out all (or most of) the junk foods. And even just leaving in 10 percent of unhealthy foods in your diet can be harmful, especially if you're already dealing with health issues.[1]

Recently, I was diagnosed with PCOS (a complicated illness that, in essence, makes me susceptible to developing diabetes), and as a vegan of nearly five years, I felt a little frustrated. Even though I had long-since cut out the major dietary contributors to PCOS -- meat, dairy, and eggs -- why was I being affected by it now? Regardless, because of the diagnosis, and especially because of the fact that I was already vegan, I had to make changes to my diet. That meant cutting out oil and refined sugar completely and drastically reducing my intake of fatty plant foods. (So long, peanut butter, my old friend.) And I'll admit that it's not easy, so I can understand how much more difficult it would be for someone following the Standard American Diet to switch to a balanced plant-based diet. However, that just proves how terrible our current dietary practices are. We're like lab rats being fed all sorts of food concoctions, and whatever we get addicted to, the experimenters keep feeding us more and more of it.

Doctor Knows Best?

And the scary part is that even our doctors often don't know what's best for us. When discussing treatment for my PCOS, my doctor told me that I should be following a low-carb diet. I had to then explain that I was vegan and would find that very difficult to do (not to mention that I know that low-carb diets are harmful to your health). Perhaps he thought that "carbs" meant refined carbs, like white rice or white bread, but to me, that means cutting out certain staples in my diet: fruits, vegetables, whole grains and whole wheat pasta. And what he failed to mention (or know) was that a high-protein diet also enables insulin release, despite the fact that my body is already overproducing insulin, which, in turn, causes the release of more androgens that my body is also overproducing.[1]

An interesting fact brought up in Dr. Greger's How Not to Die is that doctors often don't recommend to their patients exactly how they should follow a healthy diet. They don't tell patients to cut out certain foods or enhance other foods in their diets because they don't believe their patients will listen and/or don't want to try to restrict their choices. But that's exactly what doctors are supposed to do! They're the ones we visit to learn about how to treat and prevent sickness. Their job is to provide patients with potentially life-altering information, not to not tell them anything useful because the patients might not use or want to hear that information.

Oil Phobia

Another problem related to the plant-based health conversation I've noticed online is how many people say that if you choose not to eat oil, you're oil-phobic. That we, as vegans, shouldn't be promoting ultra-healthy or oil-free food as a part of veganism because it seems too restrictive. To an extent, I agree, but mostly, I disagree. The absolute last thing I want to do is make veganism seem like it's only about food and it's only about eating certain uber-healthy foods. But on the other hand, don't we want to be educating others on how to care for themselves, how to live intentionally, and eat delicious, wholesome food? Especially since most people "go vegan" for health reasons, we, as compassionate human beings, should seek to give them the best possible information and let them decide how to use it.

To do that, let's take a look at what oil really is and why we shouldn't be eating it. As I discussed in my review of the documentary Diet Fiction, oil is pure fat, whereas all naturally-occurring foods contain fat, carbohydrates, and protein. These are known as the three macronutrients. While fat is an essential macronutrient, it's important to remember that all plants contain fat. (You know how vegans always say that all plants have protein? The same goes for the other two macronutrients.) So, as long as you follow a balanced diet, you'll be getting enough fat from those sources.

Additionally, one gram of fat contains nine calories, whereas one gram of carbs or protein contains four calories. So, just adding a tablespoon of oil to your meal drastically increases your caloric intake, and since there's no fiber (which holds nearly all of a plant's nutrients), you're filling yourself with empty calories. There's virtually no nutrition or substance to oil, making it easy to overconsume, which is where we see health problems arise.[2] Take diabetes, for example. When there's too much fat in your cells, it retards the flow of insulin through your body (called insulin resistance), causing you to produce more while absorbing less, sending your blood sugar levels higher and higher. By consuming less fat, it frees up those passageways in your cells and allows insulin to be absorbed more normally.[1]

Many people say they only use a little bit of oil to enhance flavors, to bring a dish together, but even if that is the case, is it worth compromising your health? Just for taste? (That sounds an awful lot like an excuse many nonvegans use to continue consuming animal products.) Not to mention that it spreads the false belief that oil is a health food, a dangerous precedent to set when so many people seek out vegan recipes to improve their compromised health. So, even if you do use oil for flavor, one of the amazing things about the human body is that we grow new taste buds. As we remove oil from our diet, our tastes will adjust to prefer oil-free foods. While foods prepared without oil at first may seem bland, they will soon come to be quite palatable.

Restrictive Eating

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we all need to be high-carb, low-fat, oil-free all the time. We should all allow ourselves to indulge in some non-dairy Ben & Jerry's or a mayo-free Impossible Whopper every now and again. That's what differentiates being healthy from being restrictive: eating unhealthy foods sometimes (and recognizing that they're unhealthy in the first place) and not feeling guilty or the need to overcompensate afterward -- like taking an extra-long run after eating a doughnut or starving yourself for the rest of the day.

You may have heard stories of how many vegans had eating disorders, which led them to adopting a healthy plant-based diet. But even though we can't all put a label on our bad eating habits, we all have disordered eating in some way. We live in a society that teaches us to eat in ways that are totally antithetical to health, aside from parental decrees to "Eat your veggies!". No one wants to admit that we have detrimental eating habits because then we'd have to do something to change that, and change is hard. But, if we want to create a healthier, kinder world, we need to start making these alterations in our diets that are beneficial for all of us.

But What If I Just Don't Care?

I used to be the kind of person that didn't really care about what I ate, didn't worry about how unhealthy it was or what could happen as a result of my apathy. But there are a few things that made me realize I was wrong to think that way. First, as I've mentioned before, this way of thinking is a result of our perceived self-worth. Many of us don't seek out self-love because we just don't really care about ourselves; we see the bad in us, not the good, and don't believe we're worth it to try to care about our health. Second, after going vegan, I began to see the world differently, and that meant I learned more about how truly awful the way I ate was. Educating myself on all the different ways my diet was killing me made me care about the harm I was inflicting.

Lastly, going vegan also made me care more about other people. Hearing stories of "hopeless cases" being cured through diet change profoundly impacted me. It made me so happy to see other people find hope and joy in the way they ate, and I, in turn, wanted to have that kind of experience. It made me realize that it should be a human right for every person to be educated on proper eating habits and have that essential food available to them. That doesn't mean we can force anyone to choose what's best for them, but we should all have the option to be healthy.

Lesser of Two Evils

Think of all the lives lost every year -- loved ones, coworkers, neighbors -- to preventable diseases like cancer or diabetes or heart disease (and that's not even to mention the thousands of people that have lost their lives this year to COVID-19, which originally transferred to humans from animals). Shouldn't our compassion also extend to those people, those human animals? Shouldn't we do everything in our power to prevent their unnecessary suffering and death?

Now, veganism isn't perfect, and even in a vegan world, there will still be unfortunate, untimely deaths. Going vegan will never cleanse the world of all its problems. But there is clearly something about the way we live now that is killing us with diseases. Even if you don't believe all the science that shows a healthy plant-based diet can prevent and reverse the leading fatal illnesses in our society, I think we can agree that something needs to change. So why not a plant-based diet? There's no way it could possibly be much worse than what we deal with now.

be conscious, be kind, be vegan

Resources

[1] Your Body in Balance: The New Science of Food, Hormones, and Health by Dr. Neal Barnard

[2] Diet Fiction