So much of the time when we meet someone who is vegetarian or vegan we immediately feel almost ‘inadequate,’ either in their eyes or our own. The reality is that being vegan does not necessarily mean that you will also become healthier. I have known plenty of ‘junk-food’ or ‘faux’food’ vegans, surviving on vegan cookies, twinkies, pancakes, and other things you would not consider healthy if you were eat a non-vegan version. Granted, you can make ‘healthified’ versions of certain foods like desserts made with flax seeds instead of eggs and almond milk instead of buttermilk, but it also has to do with other things not pertaining to animal content – is the flour a whole grain flour? Is the sweetener a raw/mineral rich sweetener as opposed to white sugar? Is the frosting made with trans-fat filled shortening?
There is so much more to health than whether or not you include animal products in your diet – soy actually happens to be a very mucus-forming food in the body. What causes mucus? The body identifying something it doesn’t want and creating a gooey substance to take it out of your body so it doesn’t go anywhere else – this means that soy is something that is not wanted in the body, and most vegetarians/vegans basically live on it. Edamame, the whole soy bean, is a different case – it is unprocessed and can be eaten as you would any other bean, but would you really want it at EVERY meal like many vegans who survive on soy-meats? Hardly. Many vegans wouldn’t know WHAT to do if they didn’t have their soy substitutes.
Going vegan requires a lot more thought than just replacing one meat for another (usually extremely processed) one. Faux meats do not have the nutrition that animal meats do (this is NOT debatable, vegans – meat does contain certain nutrients that are useful to the body, this IS a fact, whereas faux meats are NOT whole foods), and therefore are not adequate replacements. If you are young, or have always been healthy, you may not notice much of a change in your body and health going vegan at first, but that chances are you will, unless you do it right.
Gabriel Cousens M.D., one of the most prominent raw vegan diet researchers and promoters in the world, writing several (extremely long) books on vegan raw food diets from a physiological, spiritual and mental standpoint, and has gone so far to say that raw vegans most definitely need B-12 supplementation, as most plant food sources are ‘anologs,’ or actually compete with bioavailable B-12, causing your stores to become depleted.
If you do choose to go vegan, eat plenty of raw plant fats and proteins, please do not rely on faux-ANYTHING foods or bars, and do supplement with B-12, but consider this – by eating very well-sourced human animal foods, you are supporting the small (and usually struggling) non-factory-farming people who have made a decision to treat their animals better and need people to support them against the big slaughterhouses and warehouses that treat their animals badly. These people also rotate their animals and crops so that they don’t have to use petrol-based nutrients in the soil, as the nutrients come from the animals creating a very effective crop-animal rotation system that is self-sustaining AND humane.
The Enlighten Principle 