Vegans typically identify as progressives, but there’s one issue that often divides them from other left-wingers: health care.

Most vegans don’t want a strictly single-payer system, because they think their diet spares them from the worst chronic diseases. Vegans are skeptical of health professionals anyway, since most doctors refuse to acknowledge the supremacy of a diet free of animal products. Doctors are the bastards who often convince pregnant vegans to start eating meat. Screw ‘em. But more importantly, why should vegans be taxed to pay for the heart and colon surgeries of those who eat fried pork lard?

The only progressive defense I’ve found of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s WSJ column - and I haven’t looked that hard, but left-wingers do seem to fanatically hate Mackey’s column - was on Vegan.com:

Mackey’s position on health care is much more comprehensive than he describes in his article. As somebody who runs a company that offers his employees a much better-than-average health care plan, I think Mackey’s earned the right to be heard on this issue. While I doubt he’s right on every point — and who is? — I think his voice is moving the dialog in a positive direction.

Vegan.com even links favorably to libertarian Radley Balko’s rant against the Whole Foods Boycott, which Balko calls moronic. Balko says, “Whole Foods treats employees a hell of a lot better than most liberal activist groups do,” which would have most liberal activist groups crying tears of blood, but Vegan.com says, “From what I can see, Radley Balko has written the smartest piece defending Mackey’s position.”

The stand-out section of Mackey’s column for any vegan reader is this:

We need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

Unfortunately, many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases…

This kind of “personal responsibility” talk is a red flag for most progressives, but vegans like calls to personal responsibility, at least in the context of food.

Vegans will particularly appreciate the claim that “a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases.” To most, this is vague “eat healthy” advice, but every vegan can easily decode what Mackey is saying here - be vegan, and you won’t need to go to a hospital anyway.

The Vegan.com entry addresses that point specifically:

The fact that he’s advocating responsible eating as a cornerstone of improving the public health is, by itself, an important contribution to the dialog.

“Responsible eating” of course means a vegan diet, since vegans don’t consider any other kind of diet to be responsible. Vegan.com continues:

Here we’ve got a prominent vegan trying to make sensible food policy a key part of the health care reform debate. I wish we had a world where progressives could say they agree with Mackey 60 percent, or even 20 percent, rather than take the knee-jerk boycott response.

The “20 percent” being the part where Mackey advocates veganism.

Even the caveats in this Vegan.com entry are telling:

I suspect that Mackey and I disagree on the role government should play in providing a safety net for people needing surgery for congenital conditions. I think, for instance, that nobody with a defective hip or heart valve should face bankruptcy in order to have surgery. I’d also like to see a world with universally great cheap preventative care, funded in part by appropriate taxes on the most unhealthful foods.

“Preventative care” = encouraging a vegan lifestyle. “Taxes on the most unhealthful foods” = taxes on non-vegan foods.

Vegans do believe in congenital conditions that can kill people early, no matter how healthy they might otherwise be. That explains why certain vegans die young, like Jay Dinshah, founder of The American Vegan Society, who died of a heart attack at 66.

If a health problem has nothing at all to do with diet, liberal vegans don’t have a problem with government intervention. But they can’t stomach paying for the bypass surgeries of gluttonous meat eaters.

Update: The Vegetarian Star blog also has an entry on the Mackey debate. He doesn’t say how he feels about it either way, but he only quotes the section where Mackey talks about individual dietary responsibility. He even bolds “plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat” in the quote, giving us a pretty good idea where Vegetarian Star stands.

Second update: Ecorazzi discusses the Mackey column (“Whole Foods CEO John Mackey Offers Healthy, Veggie Advice”), and also only mentions the part where Mackey advocates a vegan diet. Their commentary is “Mackey is vegetarian and almost vegan (he eats eggs from the chickens he keeps on property) and believes the key to good heath is lots of plant-based foods. That’s funny…so do we!”