Veganism: The Healthiest Way to Live? Not quite.

A spectre is haunting the world; the spectre of veganism.

My girlfriend and I currently live and work in Australia. She’s Italian, I’m British. She’s vegan, I’m not (and yes, we’re very happy together, and no, she doesn’t try and convert me). We recently went back to our see our families for Christmas and then over New Year she came to visit me in Manchester. Had she come maybe 10 or 15 years ago, we would have struggled to find a restaurant whose vegan option was anything more inspired than a bone-dry nut roast or a bowl of limp salad leaves. This year we had the opposite problem; we almost had too many options to choose from.

Veganism has exploded in popularity across the Western World in the last few years. Supermarkets now have whole shelves dedicated to dairy-free cheese & butter, and various meat alternatives. Restaurants proudly boast of their range of vegan options. Every cafe offers you a cappuccino with soy, almond, rice, oat or coconut milk. How is it that a diet that was once the butt of so many jokes and eye-rolls is now considered cool?

For people like my girlfriend, it’s an issue of animal rights. It is her deeply-held belief that the exploitation of animals in any way is immoral, whether it is medical or cosmetic testing, or forcing cows into a cycle of reproduction to provide milk. She can explain this eloquently and passionately without ever being didactic, and I have enormous respect for her for that.

However, it seems that the main reason for many people I know going vegan, at least during “Veganuary”, is down to the supposed health benefits. Netflix is now awash with documentaries extolling the benefits of a plant-based diet, the most famous being ‘What the Health’, which I have to say makes some health claims that even I, a non-scientist, found laughable. Top of the list: eating eggs and smoking cigarettes are equally dangerous. Such claims are easily debunked, and many objective and fair-minded doctors have dissected the film to show how it is more a piece of Michael Moore-type propaganda than a balanced examination of the health benefits of avoiding animal products. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly true that the so-called Western diet, with its high levels of salt, sugar and fat, has been a disaster for our health and our healthcare systems, and that a drastic reduction in our consumption of meat and dairy would benefit all of us.

But is veganism the ultimate elixir of health and the key to longevity? One of the problems with this claim is the word ‘veganism’ itself. As Dr. Michael Greger (a physician and high-profile vegan proponent whose work I admire in many ways) has put it, if you tell someone you’re vegan, all that tells them is what you won’t eat, not what you will eat. It certainly doesn’t axiomatically entail a healthy diet. Oreos, Pringles, beer and cigarettes are vegan, but that doesn’t mean you should make them the basis of your diet. More useful, Dr. Greger says, is to say that you eat a ‘whole food’ or ‘plant-based diet’. But even this way of life isn’t necessarily the best way to ensure a long and healthy life. For that, we have to travel to the mysteriously-named ‘Blue Zones’ of our world.

The Blue Zones are the areas of our planet where people live the longest. The term was introduced to the general public by Dan Buettner, an explorer and contributor for National Geographic, and was based on research published in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology on the longevity of the people of Nuoro, Sardinia. Sardinia stands out as having one of the highest concentrations of centenarians on Earth, and has one of the five healthiest, longest-lived populations anywhere on the planet, along with the island of Okinawa (Japan), the island of Icaria (Greece), the Nicoya region of Costa Rica, and the Seventh-day Adventist Christians of Loma Linda, California (the Seventh-day Adventists are a minor Christian denomination who believe the Bible mandates a vegetarian diet and abstinence from smoking and alcohol).

All of the regions benefit from a range of shared life-style factors, such as not smoking, a strong family dynamic, keeping moving and not sitting around all day, a high degree of social engagement and a diet where the majority of food is derived from plants. And there’s the thing: a majority of the food, not all of it. The people in these regions are not strict vegans. We know, for example, that the Mediterranean Diet of the people of Greece and Sardinia is rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts and whole grains, but also includes fish, cheese, yoghurt, honey, eggs and some meat, but in smaller quantities than we might be used to. The people of Okinawa in Japan are known to consume every bit of the pig “except the hooves and its oink” to quote one local saying, as well as fish. And yet, as mentioned above, these are by several measures among the healthiest, longest-lived and also some of the happiest people on Earth.

So could we say that, at least as far as health benefits go, the answer lies not in veganism, but somewhere in the middle, what we can call ‘semi-vegetarianism’?

Those who have chosen to adopt a plant-based diet for ethical reasons will never be persuaded by this argument, and I wouldn’t presume to try. They have adopted a strong moral and philosophical position and I respect them for it. But for those considering going vegan because you want to be healthier and live longer, take a look at the best examples of such a life-style we have, and give it a try before you throw the baby out with the bath water.

As the writer and activist Michael Pollan so simply and brilliantly puts it:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.