Veganism: A First-World Luxury
Synthesized, Ultra-Processed, and Global
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic looks straight into the diet of Veganism and finds some uncomfortable truths. We’ll look at how natural it is, whether it can be achieved without first-world technology, and what it means globally. Buckle in for an adventure!
Intro
Veganism is pretty simple. You eat nothing that has animal protein of any nature. (some even include honey in that mix) It’s a diet that also attracts a lot of very opinionated and passionate people. It’s one that quickly falls into the psychology of religion in a great many conversations.1 That said, I don’t intend to debunk the diet or convince anyone to get off it. My goal for today’s investigation is to contextualize it.
To that end, three things are required for veganism:
You cannot be vegan off of whole foods alone.
You must rely on globalization, as regional plants do not have the nutritional variety to support veganism.
You require advanced chemistry, industrial laboratories, and ultra-processing to get all of the required nutrients.
As such, you couldn’t have been a vegan except in the last fifty years of human history. Simply put, it’s not how our bodies evolved to ingest and process nutrients. This isn’t a deal-breaker for veganism; it’s just a contextualization since most people aren’t aware of these three facts. Let’s break them down one by one.
#1: Whole Foods.
Plant life is not nutritionally dense. This is true in general, but even our most nutritionally dense whole foods have often been bred over thousands of years to achieve that density. Moreover, plants lack the concentration of fats and protein we need as humans. This is why vegans must supplement their diets with highly concentrated pea protein and exotic plant fats like coconut and avocado oil.
Most critically, there’s an essential vitamin, B12, that humans need, which you cannot get from plants or fungi. It has to be synthetically produced and fortified into a vegan diet. An issue is that synthetic B12 isn’t taken up by the body as well as B12 from animal protein.2 How essential is B12 for your health?3 Well, just about everything from your brain to nerves, to energy production, to DNA requires it. The National Institutes for Health describes it like this:
Vitamin B12 is a nutrient that helps keep your body’s blood and nerve cells healthy and helps make DNA, the genetic material in all of your cells. Vitamin B12 also helps prevent megaloblastic anemia, a blood condition that makes people tired and weak.4
A counterargument is that there are many animals, like cows, koalas, and gorillas, that eat only plants. However, they eat constantly, around 18 hours a day, and their bodies have a metabolism to process it. The koala, for example, is sluggish because eucalyptus leaves are full of toxins, and they’ve evolved to process them. Cows are more interesting: They’re actually chemical plants, fermenting grass with bacteria and then digesting the dead bacteria into the necessary fats, protein, and nutrients and not from the grass.5 Lastly, that gorilla eats over 40 pounds of food daily and has a vast gut track with bacteria that ferment cellulose into short-chain fatty acids.
Simply put, humans cannot ingest enough nutrients, amongst the rest of the calories, from whole food plant material to maintain a healthy diet without supplements.
#2: Globalized Food Chain
Compounding the whole foods issue is that, without our highly advanced global food chain, even the number of whole food materials available would be greatly diminished. Remember those coconuts and avocados? They’ve only recently become available in the quantities needed for a vegan diet. Fifty years ago, they were a novelty; even thirty years ago, they were hard to find fresh.6
The issue is that plant life is highly regional and specified. Prior to the Columbian Exchange, staples like potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, and more wouldn’t have been known to Europeans. Likewise, soybeans and their subsequent fermented derivatives, like tofu, were limited to Asia. Native Americans didn’t have legumes, like peas, which comprise much of the protein and fats in vegan diets.
Considering the global variety of foods required to balance a vegan diet, it was impossible to achieve enough nutritional diversity even fifty years ago, let alone for it to be a natural alternative for human evolution. Regional food is not diverse enough for a healthy vegan diet and requires a global supply chain.
#3: Ultra Processing
This last issue is the solution to the first two. Because we lack the nutritional density within whole foods and need to process and collect plant material worldwide, we rely on advanced processing technologies, extraction techniques, and laboratories to synthesize supplements.
Even natural foods and plants often contain toxins that require processing. Cassava is a great example that can cause malnutrition and paralysis if not rendered properly.7 Corn (maize) is another example where the failure to nixtamalize corn results in pellagra, a crippling disease.8 Even the ubiquitous cucumber has been bred to remove the toxins from their skins over the centuries.
The next step of processing is often through concentration. Seed oils come to mind here, where plants like corn, rapeseed, grape seeds, and others are processed into concentrations that you couldn’t physically ingest consuming the whole seed. Rapeseed (Canola Oil) is especially egregious with solvent extraction processes using hexane, then refining, bleaching, and deodorizing steps to produce the final product.9
Sometimes, the processing of vegan food is straight out of a laboratory where they’re creating something that just doesn’t exist in nature. Let’s look at the Impossible Burger. I think it gets the name ‘Impossible’ as a function of how hard it is to find out how they make it. I started on their website and was presented with a lot of nice hand-waving about the process. They do admit to ultra-processing and using genetically modified ingredients, but this is all cloaked in the obfuscation of reality.
The ingredient list starts off innocuously enough: Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, and 2% or less of many vitamins and starches. Their main laboratory breakthrough is deriving heme from soybeans to mimic the “blood feel” of a real burger; this is where it gets more complicated.
Impossible Foods produces heme via fermentation in large batches. After fermentation, the protein is separated from the yeast and fermentation. This separation requires clean water to isolate target heme before being used as the key ingredient in the Impossible Burger. The Impossible Burger also uses genetically engineered soy to produce its heme.10
Let’s look a bit more closely at the production of heme:
Extract DNA from the root nodules of soy plants, where heme is produced.11
Insert the DNA into genetically engineered yeast cells.12
Ferment the yeast to grow the volume for harvest13
Isolate the soy leghemoglobin from the yeast.14
Then, add the soy leghemoglobin to give them a meaty flavor.15
I’m not trying to scare you with the idea of ‘chemicals.’ I’ve seen enough fear-mongering around misunderstandings that everything is a chemical and, yes, everything is processed to a point. I’m sure we all remember the Dihydrogen Monoxide parody over the years. My point is merely to show that Vegan food specifically requires exceptionally high-tech and precise laboratory conditions to ensure the majority of the nutrients vegans eat.
Even if vegans don’t spend all their time trying to make their vegetables taste like meat and cheese, their diet still requires ultra-processing to achieve the required nutrition balance. The regular use of nutritional yeast requires advanced processing equal to the Impossible Burger to fortify the proper nutrients
Wrapping it Together,
My main complaint about veganism is that it is not how we evolved. We also could not have eaten a healthy vegan diet just 100 years ago as we didn’t have the global supply chain and industrial processing capabilities that we have today. The other challenge is that, unless you live in an advanced technology culture like we enjoy in the First World, your ability to source a vegan diet is severely limited. To think about this another way, if you live in a third-world country or a tribal culture, you literally cannot be vegan for the very reasons we’ve explored:16 17
You cannot be vegan off of whole foods alone
You must rely on globalization, as regional plants do not have the nutritional variety to support veganism.
You require advanced chemistry, industrial laboratories, and ultra-processing to get all of the required nutrients.
However, if you’re willing to accept these points and feel that the vegan diet is a step in the right direction for humans, that’s still a viable decision. The challenge remains that it’s a difficult diet to sustain, and we haven’t developed the advanced genetic engineering, processing, and synthesis to make it healthy. Our bodies also haven’t adapted to consuming concentrated plant material in the quantities required.
Another thing to consider is that I haven’t been able to find a healthy vegan who has been on the diet for over 20 years. It’s a common question I ask vegans, and it’s never been answered. Adding to this issue are two quick examples:
A woman I know on the vegan diet was so anemic she had to go to the hospital for regular blood infusions. Ironically, donated by healthy humans who ate meat.
Fellow Substacker
recently shared how growing up on a vegan diet likely caused lifetime pain and emergency surgery this past year. He writes about his experience in “Healthy Living Can Be Deadly.”
Perhaps we can refine our nutritional processing to outperform whole plant and meat nutrition, but we aren’t there yet. It’s something to pay attention to as we advance and adapt. Still, we must also consider that evolution has developed humans to use our resources efficiently. In fact, our exceptionally large brains likely developed because we started to consume highly energy-dense animal protein.18 So, let’s continue to use that big brain of ours and look hard at how veganism is a first-world luxury supported by advanced processing and globalization.
What are your experiences with veganism? Drop a comment below!
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Dr. Berg |Blog|, Vitamin B12: Methylcobalamin vs. Cyanocobalamin, 08/26/2024
It’s so essential that the body stores 2-5 years worth just in case. This is why many vegans don’t notice health issues immediatly and why there’s a major drop of practicing vegans after 5 years when the nuerological health issues from B12 deficiency start to kick in. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamin-b12-or-folate-deficiency-anaemia/causes/
NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, Vitamin B12 Fact Sheet, Accessed 1/4/2025
Moran, John, 2005, Tropical Dairy Farming: Feeding Management for Small Dairy Farmers in the Humid Tropics, p 312 Landlinks Press
This is one reason why Millenials are known for Avacado Toast. It’s a luxury good that wasn’t available when they were kids and was a novelty as a young adult.
Bokundabi G, Haskins L, Horwood C, Kuwa C, Mutombo PB, John VM, Mapatano MA, Banea JP. When knowledge is not enough: barriers to recommended cassava processing in resource-constrained Kwango, Democratic Republic of Congo. J Public Health Afr. 2023 Apr 28;14(5):2052. doi: 10.4081/jphia.2023.2052. PMID: 37404334; PMCID: PMC10316701.
Saleem M, Ahmad N. Characterization of canola oil extracted by different methods using fluorescence spectroscopy. PLoS One. 2018 Dec 17;13(12):e0208640.
Design Life-Cycle Website, Impossible Burger, Accyessed 1/4/2025
John A. Cutting, H.M. Schulman, The site of heme synthesis in soybean root nodules, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - General Subjects, Volume 192, Issue 3, 1969, Pages 486-493, ISSN 0304-4165, https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-4165(69)90398-5.
American Society for Microbiology, The Microbial Reasons Why the Impossible Burger Tastes So Good, May 16, 2019, Accessed 1/4/2025
Center for Food Safety, Our Beef with the GMO Impossible Burger, June 20, 2019
Impossible Burger FAQ, How Do You Make Heme, Accessed 1/4/2025
Some have suggested Jainism as an example of a Vegan culture, but they’re actually mostly vegetarian, and even the vegans eat milk products during religious ceremonies.
(They're lacto-vegitaeians) Charukesi Ramadurai, Are Jains the original vegans? BBC, 4 January 2024
Corydon Ireland, Eating meat led to smaller stomachs, bigger brains, The Harvard Gazette, April 3, 2008
15 years a vegan - and a professional athlete. I appreciate reading your perspectives - however I wouldn’t say using personal examples of who you know and your objective view of healthy as scientific example. It’s like me saying I know a guy who ate red meat every day and then he got cancer - I cannot say for sure it’s a causal relationship but it’s an attention grabbing statement. As others have mentioned there are many cultures who thrive off a mostly vegan diet, and the supplement industry doesn’t rely only on vegans to stay afloat, that’s for sure. In fact the luxury of the first world is that we have access to factory farmed meat at every single meal every single day. We have access to milk of other animals in almost every meal. So if what is “natural” is an argument then the standard American diet is far from natural. I accept that I live in a country where I have choice and access to whatever food I want. So if I have that privilege why not then CHOOSE foods that do not equate animal cruelty, suffering, unsustainable farming practices and health consequences. If ominvores also eat the same processed shit I do, is it at least not worth striving for less harm? You will find most ethical vegans also embrace other sustainable practices, “dieting” vegans will probably not remain vegan, and move onto the next fad diet. I’d rather take a processed b12 pill than know that I need to rely on someone else slaughtering a frightened animal, which is ironically also filled with artificial processed feed, and medicines. . It comes down to what is humane and sustainable. Feed the soy to the humans. Use lab grown shit for nutrients for all I care, evolve away from cruelty and excess. If we lived In a society where we all owned one cow and we could sustainably share that cow amongst our close family (some cultures do live like this) then perhaps my diet choice would look different. But we don’t live like that, especially in the West, so let’s adapt, ethically.
We have to be skeptical of observational studies because of confounding variables, but some of the most interesting and high-quality studies in this space come from decades of Adventist health studies, which neutralize many of those variables by looking at members of a shared faith culture that receive the same health-focused message from their faith and church leaders.
The average Adventist lives years longer than the average Californian.
And among the Adventists:
The adjusted hazard ratio (HR) for all-cause mortality in all vegetarians combined vs nonvegetarians was 0.88 (95% CI, 0.80-0.97).
The adjusted HR for all-cause mortality in vegans was 0.85 (95% CI, 0.73-1.01);
in lacto-ovo–vegetarians, 0.91 (95% CI, 0.82-1.00);
in pesco-vegetarians, 0.81 (95% CI, 0.69-0.94); and in semi-vegetarians, 0.92 (95% CI, 0.75-1.13)
I think all this is tentative. And some confounding variables are hard to correct for. But there's very reason to think that directionally, this sort of whole foods-focused vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, or vegan diet is just fine, if not completely optimal.
Compared to most fad diets, it's a massive step up. I'd argue that anyone claiming definitively what exactly must be consumed, in what ratio, is going more more on dogma than precise science.
I'm not a vegan because I don't hold the ideology, and you know from my writing how I feel about self-labeling making us stupid.
But I have severe autoimmune issues and allergies and avoid meat and dairy because it keeps my colitis in remission while avoiding several other problems. And even though I can eat eggs and honey, I rarely do this, and perhaps consume them twice a year on average. I take a B12 pill. I get most of my protein from whole legumes, but have no problem taking a scoop of pea protein powder on days where it's required to reach my .80 to .90 g / pound protein target. Outside of this, I eat very little of the processed foods you spend a lot time talking about in this article as if its an inextricable element of a plant-based diet. If I go visit family I'll probably be served a beyond burger and will eat it, but it's not really a thing for me. Most of that stuff didn't even exist when i started twenty years ago. I do like eating some tofu perhaps once a week, but the health benefits are well established and rather lindy after centuries of tofu eating in China and Japan.
Despite this, my health is excellent after 20 years on variations of this regime, and I perform very well athletically in all my pursuits.
I'm all for calling out the problems of processed food, but I'm not sure there's a strong body of evidence pointing out the downsides of a well-planned vegan diet. Compared to the dietary idiocy of the American public, whatever marginal benefit that might accrue from adding small amounts of animal products seems so statistically small that I'm not sure it's worth getting worked up about.
I agree that most vegans don't eat well. But then most omnivorous Americans make even poorer food choices, statistically speaking.
There's a whole series of good Adventist studies, but here's one to start with:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1710093?utm_source=chatgpt.com