The great vegan diet ‘con’
It may be Veganuary, but a plant-based lifestyle isn't better for your health and it certainly won't save the planet
www.telegraph.co.uk
It's too lomg to copy in full but here's a flavour:
Canola oil, yeast, acidity regulator, methylcellulose, corn oil thickener, starch, gelling agent. “Hmm, I don’t like agents in my food,” says Jayne Buxton.
We’re in the refrigerator aisle of a well-known, high-end health-food supermarket in Richmond, London, reading the backs of packets of vegan sausages, burgers et al. As far as vegan products go, we’re dining at the Ritz.
Pastrami-style slices, scrambled tofu, vegan chorizo slices, jackfruit rendang, a canister of No-Egg Egg for £4.99. “That’s more than a carton of eggs,” says Buxton as she scans the ingredients. Gum cellulose dextrose, “That’s sugar. Do you want sugar with your eggs?”
You would expect the quality here to be better than anywhere else, but nutritionally, says Buxton, it’s a wasteland of chemicals and oils where nutritious protein should be.
“Someone’s going to arrest us in a minute,” she jokes. It does feel subversive. Like we’re poking around in veganism’s knicker drawer.
In recent years, we’ve been told by Netflix documentaries, vegan activists and companies selling plant-based products that going vegan is the single best thing you can do to improve your own health, the planet’s and the wellbeing of the animals we share it with.
However, four years ago, Jayne Buxton started to question the received wisdom. What she saw in documentaries and news outlets, she says, was at odds with the very few facts she knew. “When the documentary Cowspiracy came out and said 51 per cent of emissions are from livestock, I knew that was not true. I knew that the official global number was 14.5 per cent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. And even that is an exaggerated number.”
If you have a lingering feeling that meat, eggs and dairy are bad for you, you might be suffering from a hangover from the demonisation of cholesterol in the 1950s. Today, eggs and dairy in moderation are considered part of a healthy diet, yet the reputational damage to red meat remains, despite there being no studies that conclusively prove it is bad for our health.
“Red meat gets lumped in with processed meat, which some studies have proved to be harmful. However, recent studies in the Annals of Internal Medicine [2019], which conducted a meta analysis of the full body of research, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to recommend reduced consumption of red or processed meat,” says Buxton.
There have been several critiques of the WHO report on cancer (2015), which is responsible for the notion that eating processed meat causes cancer, including one from a member of the committee that produced the report, who felt that it was not evidence based.
“The thing about the data for red meat is that, via epidemiological studies, it has been lumped together with other aspects of an unhealthy diet, such as the excess consumption of processed carbohydrates. Is it the meat producing the results or the bun, fries and cola consumed alongside it?” questions Buxton.
When it comes to veganism, she is concerned that a diet requiring additional supplementation (plant-based diets are deficient in nutrients such as preformed vitamin A, B12 and D, iodine, iron, omega-3, several essential amino acids and zinc) can be held up as healthier than a balanced one that doesn’t.
Plant-based milks require fortification with calcium and other vitamins; breastfeeding vegan mothers are encouraged by the Vegan Society to take supplements of B12, iodine, vitamin D and omega-3, and to increase their intake (requirements are 80 per cent higher than for other adults) by eating calcium-fortified foods and calcium-set tofu. When we approached the Vegan Society for comment, a spokesperson said: “From a health point of view, a well-planned vegan diet can support healthy living in people of all ages, including during pregnancy and breastfeeding.”
A single egg, however, contains omega-3 essential fatty acids in DHA form, vitamins A, B6, B12, E, D and K, calcium, iron, zinc and many other healthy minerals. Take that, No-Egg Egg.
Then there is the higher consumption of seed oils, high in omega-6, associated with highly processed foods, such as those we found in the supermarket refrigerator.
“The amount of omega-6 in our adipose tissue has risen from something like nine per cent to 21 per cent in the past two decades,” says Buxton.
Her research led her to conclude that the belief a vegan diet will make you healthier is a myth. “Plant-based diets provide inferior-quality protein and are deficient in important nutrients while being abundant in potentially harmful compounds. However, if a person eats plant-based foods in the sense of lots of plants alongside small amounts of animal foods, the deficiencies will not be there.”
In 2020, the actor Liam Hemsworth had to rethink his vegan diet after an overload of oxalates (a naturally occurring compound in plants) gave him painful kidney stones that required surgery.
It seems even when a vegan diet avoids the pitfalls of processed food, you can have too much of a good thing. As ever, balance and moderation in all things is key.