Ask:

Wouldn’t eating a balance diet (food pyramid) be healthier?

Answers:

Answer 1:

Remember, the Food Pyramid is just an invention of someone. The food chart we were given in school was, we found out later, was created and provided by the meat and dairy foundations.

Anyway, illness has all sorts of different causes, from stress to diet, to environmental factors. Now, that said, I grew up like everyone else, colds, coughs, puking up my guts every now and again, fevers, seasonal cold etc. etc. Just like everyone else. Well, when I switched to a healthy animal product free diet, focusing on whole foods etc., suddenly I didn’t get ‘sick’ anymore. The worst thing that I had was a drooly nose which usually went away in a couple days. I thought it must be my new lifestyle, but it could just have been coincidence. But once I hit the 10 year mark of never getting ‘sick’ and focusing on improving my health via my diet etc., it’s no coincidence, plain and simple. Sure, I could have done the exact same thing but included quality fresh organic meats etc. in small quantities to the same effect, but there was no need to include animal products for me, as I am not psychologically attached to them and there is really no nutritional requirement for them either.

So, you can reduce the chances of illness just by exercising more, getting more rest… there are many things that can be done, but it is my conclusion that humans do not need animal products. Sure, at one time, humans were opportunistic do-anything-to-survive beings, but we’ve overcome that long long ago and merely hold onto certain eating habits as tradition and superstition, much in the same way some hold onto other traditions and superstitions. Okay okay… end of rant.

Answer 2:

In terms of the current scientific evidence, you do reduce the chances of some illnesses on a vegan diet, but increase the risks of others. However this is not from a vegan diet per se, rather it is related to the limitations in the research available up until this point. For example, they have never compared high fat to low fat vegan diets or the variations in processed food intake. By properly analysing the variations within vegan diets, I believe similar patterns of increasing disease risk in higher intakes of healthy foods compared to higher intakes of processed foods will resemble those seen in meat eaters.

Most of the dietary related illnesses in developed countries (diabetes, cancer, heat disease etc, also possibly alzheimer’s) are not because a given food group is bad. It is because we eat too much processed foods too often, we consume more protein fat and sugar than we need, and at the same time expose ourselves to other environmental risks from air pollution to not enough exercise. So a balanced diet reduces the risk of illness, getting enough exercise reduces the risk of illness, living somewhere with clean air, water and good health care systems reduce the risk of illness etc.

But if we are to take an abstract approach to your question, it is possible that meat consumption will greatly increase the risk of some illnesses in future decades (or at least contribute to them) through the increasing loss of biodiversity. Recent studies show how pathogenicity increases when biodiversity is reduced, and the use of animals as food sources is one of the major contributors to habitat loss resulting in biodiversity loss around the world.

“The unprecedented loss of biological diversity from anthropogenic causes has profound impacts on human health. One way that biodiversity loss threatens human health is by exacerbating risk and incidence of infectious diseases.” – Ostfield, R.S. (2009). Biodiversity loss and the rise of zoonotic pathogens.Clin Microbiol Infect. 15 Suppl 1:40-3.

“[M]ounting evidence indicates that biodiversity loss frequently increases disease transmission…current evidence indicates that preserving intact ecosystems and their endemic biodiversity should generally reduce the prevalence of infectious diseases.” Kessing et al. (2010). Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases. Nature 468, 647–652