Is being a vegan harmful for our health?!

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Not if you eat properly, just the same as being a vegetarian or meat head is not harmful if you eat properly.

vegan biologist

You should not eat only meat. Most medical professionals will tell you a balanced diet is best for you. Some meat, some veggies, some fruit, cut back on sugar and processed carbs. But I do think being a vegan can be harmful to health. Whether you choose to eat meat or not, you're an omnivore. Your body has evolved over thousands of years to get certain nutrients from meat/animal products.

Some examples: Protein is made of of amnio acids. Meat contains all of the amino acids for the complete protein your body can use. Most veggies only contain some (or weak versions) of those amino acids. You must eat a variety of veggies every day to get all the amino acids necessary for your body to combine them for a complete protein it can use. One of the most important amino acids is only found in legumes. So if you neglect a serving of those, you just won't get your protein for the day. Our body doesn't store protein so you can't fall back on those.

Iron in meat is heme iron and much better used by your body than the non-heme iron in veggies. Yes, you can get iron from veggies, but you better eat a lot of them. An iron deficiency can be serious to your health.

For a growing youngster, adequate calcium is a must. The bones you're growing now will sustain you for your entire life. If they don't have the calcium to grow strong, you will pay for it in your old age. Many of the calcium rich veggies also contain oxalate. Oxalate inhibits your body's ability to absorb calcium. You'll hear all kinds of half truths and outright lies from anti-milk people. But think. Humans have been drinking milk for tens of thousands of years. It is obviously not bad for us or we would have stopped drinking it generations ago.

Then there's vitamin B12. B12 is not available from any plant source. To get it you must get shots, take pills, or eat highly processed foods that have had manufactured B12 added. Hardly natural, is it? What does B12 do? From Dr. Jack Norris, VEGAN:

"Overt B12 Deficiency

B12 protects the nervous system. Without it, permanent damage can result (e.g., blindness, deafness, dementia). Fatigue, and tingling in the hands or feet, can be early signs of deficiency.

Vitamin B12, like folate (aka folic acid), is needed to help red blood cells divide. In some cases, vegans may get so much folate that even with B12 deficiency, their blood cells continue to divide properly. In other cases, their blood cells will fail to divide properly and they will become fatigued and suffer from macrocytic (aka megaloblastic) anemia.

Mild B12 Deficiency

Homocysteine is a byproduct of protein metabolism. Elevated homocysteine levels are linked with increased risks of heart disease and stroke. From 1999 to 2003, there were many studies comparing the homocysteine levels of vegans and vegetarians who do not supplement their diet with vitamin B12 to those of non-vegetarians (more info). In every study, the vegans or vegetarians had higher homocysteine levels than the meat-eaters and in the range associated with heart disease and stroke."

http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/vita…

So you see that a B12 shortage puts veg*ns at greater risk for heart diease and stroke than meat eaters!

Here's a link to a young woman's blog about her health issues after being vegan for several years. Thankfully, she made the transition back to some meat in her diet and seems to be recovering. But I'll use it as a basis for my claim that being vegan can be physically harmful:

http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/19/a-ve…

your question is either trolling, but I don't think so, or rreally poorly researched.

Plant foods- all of them, have a HUGE amount of nutrition.
They all have vitamins and minerals . Mostly, you have to eat vegan food fresh, not like meat which you can stew for ten hours ( it loses up to 90% of it's nutirition that way).
Cooked meat is actually pretty poor in nutrition.
You've heard that fresh food has more vitamins? Well the longer you cook food, the more it loses viamins, and meat is the same. Also, when you cook meat, the protein in it, becomes hard and rubbery and forms into lumps, and your body cannot leech the protein out, because it's changed its form. No wild animal on earth is designed to eat cooked flesh.
Think about it.

You get 100X more nutirents, protein, healthy oils ( no animal fats like butter and cheese are designed for humans to eat- they give us cholesterol ad we have out own DNA to make our own- when we eat animal fat we get sick and die) in plant foods.

Rice, beans, grains, pasta, bread, fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, flours from nuts, seeds, soybeans. Cheesed from nuts and soybean, herbs, spices, the natural stuff inside plant foods are the healtheist thing to eat.
One cannot live on meat alone.

One CAN live and thrive much better on plant food.

Your colon is not designed to digest meat, it rots inside you. There is no chemicals in the body that absorb the salt and fat from meat- that is a job for meat eating animals which have a short smooth intestine ( lions, panthers etc). Humans have a long twisting, knobbly intestine, like all plant eaters, and it's designed to absorb vitamins , water and the nutrients from plant food, as well as the food providing fibre, to "sweep" the colon clean.

Meat, and all animal protein has no fibre in it al all. And once cooked, the protein can't even be sucked out by a human intestine. Any wild animals out there eating cooked meat?

Vegan food is the same food you eat now. Don't tell me you ONLY eat meat, right?
You eat pasta, bread, chips, vegetables sweetcorn, etc etc, peanut butter and all that.
THAT is food. It's also what some people call "vegan".

I think you might want to get off the labelling of food as "vegan", because it might be confusing.
I eat food that's normal to me, but others call it vegan. That is dumb, to me, I just eat good food.
HEre's a link to at least some good recipes, pizza, muffins, soups, cinnamon rolls, burritos etc
http://vegweb.com/index.php

Of course not. As long as the vegan diet is healthy and VARIED!
My uncle is a 89yr old committed vegan. He's fitter than the average person his age, I saw him carry his 7yr old grandson on his back last year lol
Remember alot of people are deficient in essential vitamins and take pills. They could get most of these vitamins from vegetables which vegans get lots off :)

I know a ton of vegans.

Being Vegan is good for you...Eating only meat isn't vegan -_-

Well, if you eat meat and nothing else, that's not good for you. You miss out on many nutrients from plant-based foods.

Conversely, if you eat no animal products at all, you miss out on crucial nutrients that way too, like vitamin B12 and vitamin D.

Read the articles that the vegetarians and vegans on here don't want you to see:
chetday.com/vegandietdangers.htm
http://www.listen2yourgut.com/blog/dange…

yes, that's absolutely true.
eating only meat is bad for your health.
but not eating any meat is also bad.
you need protein in your body.
especially if your on the growing stage.
proteins that veggies give is very insufficient.
eve if you eat tons of them.
go green! eat healthy!
good luck! :))

It is not harmful but you also need protein in your diet.