Is veganism the future for optimum health? (Or a terrible idea).
Veganism is everywhere. According to a survey in 2021, 1 in 10 of the US population now identifies as a vegan[1]. A vegan diet is one that excludes not just meat but all animal food products including dairy, eggs and even honey, in an attempt to limit the cruelty and exploitation of animals as much as possible. Over the past decade the popularity of this diet and ideology has boomed, and is now a multi million pound industry. Despite its exponential rise within the culture, the vegan diet is stull dividing the opinions of those within the wellness space. In this essay I will look to explore whether this diet trend really is the holy grail of optimum health, or actually a really bad idea. Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”[2] According to Albert, and the vegan community on a whole, it is the healthiest diet in the planet. This way of eating will lower your cholesterol, cure any cancer and give you the most diverse microbiome that ever there was. According to Katherine Wrnitzwer “The first athletes on strict plant-based diets were gladiators,” she says. “Roman scripts report that all fighters adhered to gladiatoriam saginam, which was based on plant foods, including large amounts of legumes, pulses and grains, and contained little or no animal protein”[3] With their aspirational bods and super human strength – this must be the very best diet surely? What I’m sure she doesn’t realise is that gladiators were in fact slaves, literally fighting for their lives with no other food to choose from. Another argument is that the vegan diet will help save our planet. It is said that cattle are killing the Oxone with methane, and therefore cereal grains are the super foods that will reduce water and save the planet. Unfortunately, this “hypothesis” is based on the Industrial factory farming, meat industry of corporate America, which, no matter which side of the vegan debate one sits on, we can all agree is a way that most of us, even the most avid steak eater, morally, ethically and spiritually would deem as a terrible way to create the food we eat. This form of industrial meat farming practice was birthed in the 1950’s. As the “green crop” (aka genetically altered corn grain), with less foliage and more corn, boomed. This crop, compounded with a surplus of cheap oil and gas meant the farming industry was left with an abundance of corn with no-where to sell it. Humans didn’t want it any more, so they decided to feed it to cattle. For the first time in the history of agriculture, farmers pulled livestock from their natural habitat, and put them in industrial city farms and fed them …. corn. In this environment they are indeed huge consumers of water and grain – but with this, they were out of their natural habitat, and this “dependency on grain” a. is not their natural diet and b. is a environmentally devastating practice of mono crop farming that was created. This is still in practice, headed by a small group of corporate businesses who STILL control the majority of the worlds’ food supply. This mono-crop culture, that industrial farming depends on, is hugely negative to the environment, and yet the vegan staple – soy is doing exactly the same thing. In order to produce an abundance of these mono-crops, the farmers effectively create biocide. As farmers clear fields of pre-existing crops, even down to the bacteria, causing chaos for the environment. The cereals and grains that are apparently saving the world are yearly crops. Meaning that every year, this process must be done over and over again, depleting the soil and reducing the nutritional profile of the food we eat. These corporations repeatedly drive down the price of corn and other grains, causing farmers to keep producing more and more in an attempt to gain any profit. This over-production of the crop is compounded by a Ferris wheel of poor farmers, who are struggling to survive, fossil fuel guzzling machines and tractors, big energy needs and an abundance of toxic pesticides to maintain this level of food production. This inappropriate use of agriculture is killing the planet … it isn’t the cows. The reality is that no society in the history of the world has existed on a vegan diet. Low protein, yes – however that was rarely a choice, but a last resort when there was nothing else to eat. Even poor Einstein didn’t elect this diet out of choice, but was plagued by such terrible digestive issues that he was in fact unable to tolerate animal protein. Over the past 6 months as I have been working though my clients, I found that there is a common denominator with those that are struggling the most with their health… They are all vegan. Most are women in their 20’s who have been brain-washed by the propaganda that the vegan diet will save the planet, optimise your health, and get them to their best body ever. It is said in the Nei Jing, that the female body runs in cycles of 7 years. What is interesting to me is that the vegan females in my clinic are all between the ages of 21 and 35. I wonder if during this time the female body becomes hyper focused on one thing, procreation. It’s during this time that the female bodies metabolic base line accelerates exponentially in order to prepare the vessel for the possibility of childbirth, requiring more nutrient density, minerals, and day to day fuel than a vegan diet can appropriately offer. A theory that is compounded by the fact that so many pregnant vegetarian women end up salivating over burgers! Perhaps the most difficult issue for these clients is that any argument against their diet becomes an affront against not only what
Lower Back Pain (LBP)
Lower back pain is easily the most recurring and frequent problem that I see in clinic. I would say that 2 out of 3 people who I treat have lower back pain, it may not be their overriding concern or what they necessarily want treating for, but they are still suffering from it. I see it in all different age ranges, not just older people who have declining kidneys, but I also see it in much younger people as well. It seems that when people reach the age of being around their thirties that it starts to become more common. I also have some friends who had a lot of lower back problems in their early twenties, with some undergoing surgery to try to fix the issue. What is the cause? Why is this such a prevalent issue? I would hypothesise many and varying different reasons; some of which are completely unrelated to the others. Firstly, let’s look at the way we move around today as bipedal mammals. We have a very upright structure that requires very little use of our back, or even requires any bending forward to stretch the muscles and tendons over the hips to help keep them loose. It strikes me that it is probably quite significant that we are one of the very few mammals that walk around as bipedal animals as opposed to quadrupedal animals. If we examined our evolution and how our ancient ancestors would have lived, have we always been bipedal creatures or is this something which has developed relatively recently? If we are truly descended from apes, then it is most likely that we spent the majority of our ancient history as quadrupedal creatures. Making the change to walk on two legs must have had its own evolutionary benefits, or we wouldn’t have made this change, however all the forces of gravity are now bearing down on the body in one linear fashion, constantly pulling it towards the ground from the tip of our head to the soles of our feet. The force of gravity is not broken or shared in any other direction. Which over time will have a compounded effect and squash the vertebrae and disks together in the spine, this could cause them to change their natural position and cause problems in the back. This is evident in that we are supposed to be a little taller in the mornings than in the evenings, as the spine naturally decompresses overnight. The body should be able to withstand the effects of gravity under normal circumstances, however I believe that most people have an underlying issue or deficiency somewhere in their body caused by their lifestyle choices, whether it is diet, stress, lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyle or another external factor. By walking upright, our back muscles are effectively quite inactive when moving around, compared to if we walked on all fours and our back muscles actually had to contend with gravity in order to keep us upright. If our back muscles were a lot stronger and got used more to get the blood pumping through them during normal movement, then I consider they may get injured a lot less. Though in the same way that spreading the weight of your body across four limbs during movement would massively reduce the impact on the spine and surrounding muscles, it would also undoubtedly put much greater stress on the hips and shoulder joints. We see in animals like dogs that the hips are always the first thing to go. If you also consider how a dog would use its hamstring muscles, which is a big full movement when driving forward compared to how a human uses their hamstring muscle taking comparatively much shorter steps. The human hamstring never really gets stretched naturally to its full potential throughout the day, which leads to a tightening and shortening of the muscles, which can easily contribute towards lower back pain. From an energetic and acupuncture point of view it would make sense to walk around as a quadrupedal animal, due to the fact that the Ren meridian, which is the sea of yin and reclusive by nature, is protected from external threat when facing the ground. Now that we are upright it is a big open target to anyone who would wish to attack. However it is on our front and we are able to defend against attacks from the front as it is within our visible eyeline. Similarly the Du channel is on our back, the sea of yang and expansive in nature is there to protect us if we are attacked from behind. The Bladder channel which is the yang fu pairing to the Kidney zang, with the kidney being the root and eminence of all yang in the body, the bladder channel is also placed on the back and runs the entire length of the body, flanking the Du channel as it runs down the side of the spine, with the bladder channel continuing down the back of the legs and into the heel before proceeding down the outside of the foot to the little toe. Life today is very different from life thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago when we will have lived in tribal communities. Where our daily activities would include a lot of roaming and hunting or travelling to the nearest water source covering many miles in a day. Before the invention of agriculture humans would constantly be on the move looking for the next food source, similar to how many animals migrate to different regions throughout the year. Now we live a very sedentary lifestyle with a majority of the population sitting at their desks for the best 8 hours of the day, then they go home and sit on a couch for 8 hours and then lie down and sleep for 8 hours. It is not how we were designed or are supposed to live. Many of our bodily functions including digestion