I can tell you exactly why some vegans who go on a paleo diet have improved blood profiles. Most vegans, rely on grains. And most of those grains, tend to be processed. And this leads to massive amounts of problems. I know many people (including the author of the books “Christ in Egypt” and “Suns of God”) who were harmed by a vegan/vegetarian diet based on processed grains. They got off the grains and started consuming more and more animal foods and did better and better.
Same thing with the author of “The Vegetarian Myth,” Lierre Kieth. She makes the same claims. And I agree with her. Not ALL vegan diets are healthy. This is why I hate to call myself a vegan. I’m not. Because my main focus isn’t avoiding animal foods. My main focus is avoiding any unhealthy foods, and grains are part of that category.
But with introducing meat, you run into other problems. You might have your b12 numbers go up, and your iron go up, but now you risk other issues. Gout, kidney stones, arthritis, decreased immunity, lack of vitamin C, too much oxidized fat, etc etc.
As far as “seem to be in fantastic health,” yes it’s true. They seem to be. But here’s what we KNOW about animal food based diets:
They promote early onset puberty.
They promote cancer growth.
They promote shorter lifespans.
They promote acidity in the body.
These are things we absolutely know without question.
There are an entire class of compounds called phytonutrients found only in plant foods which have numerous beneficial effects for us including:
cancer fighting effects
blood pressure lowering effects
antioxidant effects
hormonal regulatory effects
immune system boosting effects
and so on.
We miss out on these when we consume animal foods for the majority of the diet.
What people do is they look at the fact that “no human culture is a pure vegan culture” and then they conclude from this that they should eat lots of animal foods. That’s not science. That’s not even logical, especially when you consider that there is a corresponding graph that shows that societies with the MOST animal food intake have the most disease, and those with the least animal food intake have the least disease. Yes they all eat SOME animal foods, it’s true. But, read the book Blue Zone and you can see pretty clearly what the trends are for the healthiest and longest lived people: Mostly vegan diet, community-based living, purpose driven life, calm/relaxed ways of dealing with stress. Those are the common denominators.
Another thing. Go look at people who promote meat eating. Just take a general look at them. You will notice something in general: Many if not almost all of them are bald, and they have to deal with infections and they don’t have any answers for things like cancer and heart disease. If you think animal foods don’t cause heart disease, then perhaps you can cure heart disease with animal foods? I would love to see this evidence.
Dr. Dean Ornish showed how even a sub-optimal cooked vegan diet can literally reverse atherosclerosis in the arteries. He published this. It’s a scientific fact. You can reverse heart disease with your food choices
I would love to see the same be done by a paleo person.
The failure on the paleo perspective is that they are assuming many things which simply aren’t true: Namely, that there was a period in time when humans were mostly hunters. In truth we were gatherer/hunters, not hunter/gatherers. And even when we did eat animal foods, it was not a huge percentage of our total calorie intake. At low levels animal foods can be relatively benign and even help with topping off ones calorie needs. But to take from that the idea that we need mostly animal foods is to commit a terrible error.
The fact is this: Eating healthy on a truly beneficial vegan diet is hard. Because you are not eating those calorie-dense foods that are so tasty. When you do this, you go through cravings and withdrawals. So it’s very easy to leave science behind and just make whatever argument you want that suits your purpose. Humans will lie to themselves about anything.
Small amounts of animal foods are neither necessary, but they are also not harmful to us. And there are many societies that consume small amounts of animal foods and they do OK.
As far as why the paleo diet got so popular… well, it has fewer restrictions on what you should eat than a healthy vegan diet. That’s why. And many people need the calories. I understand this. My solution isn’t animal foods. Instead it is to use some cooking. But not the methods of cooking that severely damage the foods and create cancer-promoting compounds. Rather, soups, stews, steamed veggies and so on. And I do quite well eating those things, along with a predominantly raw whole-foods based vegan diet.
