Is veganism healthy? Ask the ex-vegans

84% of vegans eventually quit the diet.

84% of people who start a vegan diet, eventually quit. This comes from a study of current and former vegetarians and vegans. This isn’t data spread by The Meat Industry™, but Faunalytics -  a “nonprofit research organization dedicated to helping animals by providing useful information to advocates to help them increase their impact.”

In response to the fact that 84% of vegans quit the diet, I’ve seen a couple people say that “people quit diets all the time.” People cheat on carnivore, they get bored of keto, they switch from low carb to the Mediterranean diet and so on. However this is the wrong way to think about it. When we’re analyzing whether veganism is healthy or not, there are two diets:

・A diet that contains animal foods.

・A diet that does not contain any animal foods.

You either eat animal products or you don’t. So, even a vegetarian diet is very different from a vegan diet, because vegetarians can benefit greatly from the dairy and eggs in their diet.

Veganism is radically different from all other diets. (Except fruitarianism I suppose)

The first indicator to me that veganism isn’t always totally about health is that vegans are not allowed even a single bite of cow liver, oysters, fish roe or an egg - the most nutrient dense foods. A mere 10 grams of beef liver would give you 100% your DV of B12.

The above image is Figure 2 of a 2022 paper in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases

I’m not going to break down the above image now, but I thought it would be interesting to look at what I call “professional vegans” - people whose careers either revolve around being vegan, or their careers are propped up by the fact that they are vegan. Below are 7 influencers big on youtube or instagram and 1 athlete who all eventually quit their vegan diet due to health problems. The influencers all have at least 150,000 followers on either youtube or instagram.