If you’ve ever talked to a non-vegan you might have been tricked into thinking they were some sort of health expert. This is because non-vegans instantly turn into a “health expert” whenever the subject of plant-based diets comes up. They will do this even if they’ve never in their life studied nutrition. I just saw an example of this the other day. A non-vegan was talking to a health expert who had dedicated his life to studying nutrition. The health expert had studied nutrition for over 20 years but the non-vegan with no knowledge in nutrition was trying to educate the expert about how he needed meat to be healthy. I was trying to hold back laughter when I saw how confidently the non-vegan was stating his opinions as if they were facts while the expert was patiently listening. A funny thing you’ll notice is that the non-vegan with the least knowledge tend to be the ones who are the most confident with their nutrition advice. The psychology behind this behavior will be explained later. For now, let’s just be clear that just because someone loves meat and wants it to be healthy doesn’t make it so.
Non-vegans always like to say that vegans need all kinds of supplements to try to show that a vegan diet is unhealthy. The reality is almost everyone is deficient in various nutrients. The one thing that most people are deficient in is fiber. This deficiency is seen in about 95% of Americans. This is a huge deal because getting enough fiber is one of the most important things you can do for your health. Your immune system depends on it. It’s no secret that the average person eats like crap. But the thing is, they pay for it later in life. At some point most people will end up on medications for heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Supplements are a huge industry. But this isn’t because of vegans. So do vegans need supplements? There’s one that always comes up in conversations and that is B12. All the experts recommend that vegans take it. Some people think that eating meat is a more natural way to get your B12. That is until they find out that the B12 they are getting is from the supplements we feed to livestock. In other words, both groups are essentially getting it from supplements.
Journalists are partly to blame for some of the delusions that non-vegans have. There’s an old saying. People like to hear good news about their bad habits. Journalists are the first to take advantage of this weakness by telling people what they want to hear. In the world of online articles, it’s all about getting the most clicks. If you write an article claiming that bacon is healthy, non-vegans will eat that shit right up. Articles like that come out all the time. You’ll see some headline saying something like “butter’s back” with some weak study that was designed to make butter seem healthy. And then all the non-vegans start saying “see I told you.” The cigarette industry used to do this as well.
I’ve found that for every unhealthy food, you can design a study that will show that food in a positive light. Have you ever heard of the twinkie guy? He made the news when he lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks by eating mostly Twinkies, Doritos and Oreos. So does that mean twinkies and all that other crap are healthy? Sometimes people think that anything that makes you lose weight must be healthy. But even smoking crack can make you lose weight. It doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
The egg industry has designed misleading studies to try to show eggs are healthy. It’s been known for decades that eggs raise people’s cholesterol. But the egg industry designed a study to try to dispute this. Or at least to confuse the issue. So they designed a study where they took a group of people who already had high cholesterol from a crappy diet. They gave these people an extra egg or 2 on top of what they were already eating. And they found that this didn’t greatly affect their cholesterol. They were taking advantage of the fact that if your cholesterol is already high, eating more crappy food isn’t going to affect it that much. They used this study to claim that eggs don’t raise your cholesterol. Since most people just read the headlines, all they saw was “New study shows eggs don’t raise cholesterol.”
You could imagine if the cigarette industry did this. Take a bunch of people who already smoke 2 packs a day. Give them 1 or 2 extra cigarettes per day. Since that’s hardly a difference, it’s not likely to make a difference in a heavy smoker’s health. But it would be dishonest to use this study to say that cigarettes do not harm your health.
So does the egg industry hope everyone will believe their study and ignore all the studies that prove the opposite? Actually, their goal is more realistic. It’s also more insidious. Have you ever heard someone say the following? “Wow there’s so many contradicting studies, I just don’t know who to believe.” I hear people say this almost every time the subject of nutrition comes up. And that’s exactly what the meat industries want. When people are confused about who to believe, what do they do? They give up on trying to learn and just keep doing what they’ve always done. Keeping people confused about health always works in favor of the status quo. And nothing helps the meat industries more than keeping the status quo.
One thing that non-vegans like to talk about is the estrogen in soy. It’s important to understand that whenever someone talks about the estrogen in soy, they’re just trying to confuse you. Chicken and beef are loaded with more estrogen than soy. And animal meats don’t even have the good estrogen. They have the type of estrogen like what humans have. That’s the kind you don’t want too much of if you’re a guy. What soy has is actually called phytoestrogen. This doesn’t have the negative effects that you have to worry about with mammalian estrogen. In fact, soy is one of the healthiest foods out there. People seem to forget that soy is just a bean. Can you imagine being afraid of beans? It’s crazy because beans are one of the foods most associated with longevity.
One thing non-vegans don’t understand is that nutrition science is very nuanced. They try to make it an “us versus them” thing. My advice would be to not fall into this trap. Don’t sink to their level. When it comes to health, there are all kinds of ideologues with their own agendas. There’s non-vegan ideologues who say you need meat to be healthy. There’s even vegan ideologues who think that going vegan automatically makes you healthier. The truth is somewhere in between. The science does show that the more plant-based someone is, the better their odds will be that they will live a long healthy life. People eating a whole foods plant-based diet usually have less clogged arteries. They are least likely to get things like cancer, heart disease and diabetes. But you could easily screw it up if you eat too much of the junk food that is marketed to vegans.
