What's Wrong With Vegan/Vegetarian Diets?

1. What is really wrong with vegan/vegetarian diets? They can't be that terrible, can they?

Vegan/vegetarian diets are not ancestral diets. They are a privilege of modernity. This means that no hunter/gatherer, on the planet, has ever followed these diets and survived. The ones who did are now extinct. But this is irrelevant, since air conditioning is also a privilege of modernity which I'm not giving up. So let's get to the nitty gritty and skip the "back to nature" virtue signaling.

We all know that vegan/vegetarian diets do not look like the photo above. There is a good reason as to why, which we will get to shortly. Instead, vegan/vegetarian diets are chock full of highly processed items from fake beef, cheese, milk, eggs, butter, to cereals and bars. They are the embodiment of the Standard American Diet (SAD), plant style. These items are all full of nutrient poor/high energy junk made of mostly refined carbs and fat.

Of course, junk is found in every diet, so that's not the real problem either. Aside from these diets lacking vitamins and minerals, unless they are strictly supplemented, and not being in accordance with our biology, the real problem with vegan/vegetarianism is more nuanced and it comes in the form of grains.

Even if you throw out the vegan/vegetarian junk and decide to eat a clean plant based diet, while getting routine B12 injections, you can't live off vegetables alone. We all know this. That's why vegan/vegetarian diets do not look like the photo above. These newly cultivated plants are simply too nutrient poor for us to live off of. They are mainly garnishes. But if you forget the nutrients and just consider calories alone, we know that vegetables do not have enough of them to even keep you breathing. You would need to eat a truck load of broccoli to be able to get enough calories to function for the day and that's impossible. Your stomach was not made to consume that amount of useless fiber in order to squeeze out 10 calories just to survive. You are not a gorilla. Vegetables also do not have any significant amount of protein which is the building block of your cells and the most important nutrient.

So how can you get around this? With grains. Grains are the "meat" of vegan/vegetarian diets. Not just any grains but fortified modern grains since grains are also extremely nutrient poor. But grains have the calories in order for you to survive. You can't be vegan/vegetarian without grains or you will starve. This is why these diets are a privilege of modernity as grains were never available, at any other time in our history, like they are now. In fact vegan/vegetarian diets should really be called "Grainetarian" diets.

Grains are a huge problem for metabolism. You will never be able to maintain healthy blood glucose regulation and insulin function eating grains in any amount above starvation levels. Proper blood glucose regulation and the preservation of insulin function is the antidote to overweight/obesity. Basically, it's the "cure" for diabetes. Well you can't obtain that eating the man-made foods concocted from grains. Now if you starve enough you can maintain your blood glucose regulation for longer but eventually it will cave under the strain of starvation and that's why there are so many vegan/vegetarian diabetics with terrible metabolic markers. Starvation also does not allow you to maintain healthy blood glucose regulation. 

Because these diets are so poor in nutrients, primarily protein, you end up having to eat more in order to make up for this. This makes keeping yourself at a starvation level very difficult. You will end up still starved of micronutrients and protein, while going well over your energy macronutrients of carbs and fat. You are what you eat. If you want to be mostly sugar and fat, then....

So stay away from diets that are dependent on glucose. Whether that glucose comes in the form of grains, legumes, starch or maple syrup. You will get much more bang for your caloric buck if you eat a diet that is more in line with our evolution - an animal protein prioritized diet.