“The Vegan Dietitian,” Virgina Messina, has commented on the growing legion of ex-vegans. The gist? They should have stayed vegan.

These are her main points about vegan apostates:

1. They were never fully committed as vegans. 

2. They thought veganism required too much sacrifice.

3. They believed a mythological conception of nutrition that deems protein and fat to be especially important. They always thought veganism was unhealthy, and so they felt unhealthy (mind over vegetable matter). They expect animal products to make them feel better, so when they eat them again, it works. The placebo effect has fooled ‘em.  

4. They desperately want a steak, and they confuse this meaningless craving with a signal from their body that they need the steak for nutritional reasons.

5. They feel unhealthy and mistakenly attribute this to veganism. A recent study of lacto-ovo vegetarian Adventists shows that their moods are fine, so the low levels of DHA in a vegan diet cannot explain why a vegan is depressed or has foggy thinking. Also, the body has no need for dietary saturated fat, so it can’t be that either.

6. It can seem like long-term veganism is causing depression, but really you’re just getting older. Hang on until your late 80s and your mood will improve again.

7. Vegans might be more depressed than omnivores because they are more empathetic. Thinking about all the murdered animals could explain why some vegans feel so sad.

8. Vegans who become ex-vegans probably didn’t follow Jack Norris’ B12 recommendations.

Since Messina calls me out by name, I thought I might respond to her points:

1. Ex-vegans never really believed in veganism.

Here is everything she said on that:

If you poke around the internet and read stories of ex-vegans, it becomes pretty clear that at least some of them never wholeheartedly embraced the principles of vegan lifestyle to begin with. In one interview, Rhys Southan, an ex-vegan who blogs about veganism, said, “I’ve come to appreciate ethics as one possible ingredient in a meal, but not a mandatory one.”

Now that’s not fair. She’s using my post-vegan views to make assumptions about what I believed as a vegan. I never fully embraced vegan principles because as an ex-vegan I came to see ethics as an optional component of a meal?

When people leave veganism, they are forced to revise their ethics, unless they’re cool with intense sensations of guilt at every meal. There was a period near the end of my veganism when I thought I needed animal products for my health, but still felt that eating animal products would be wrong. I had to force myself to stop believing in animal rights in order to be able to eat animals again; these beliefs didn’t easily crumble away.

So sure, now I don’t believe in the principles of the vegan lifestyle, but that wasn’t the case while I was vegan.

Messina is flirting with the argument that leaving veganism is automatic proof that you never really believed in it, which is based on the idea that beliefs cannot change. According to this, as much as I thought I believed in veganism and acted on those supposed beliefs, that was all an illusion. My real feelings — that it’s okay to eat animals — were temporarily hidden for all those years.

One problem with viewing ex-vegans this way is that it becomes impossible to take any vegan seriously, since we can’t see into their futures. If they eventually give up veganism, that means they never believed in it, but we can never know who will eventually betray the animals and who is truly vegan 4 lyfe. So it is only when someone dies while still vegan that we can say “Yep, they believed in it.”

But even then we can’t because maybe if they’d lived one more day they would have renounced the whole thing. (Might vegan hero Donald Watson have become a nihilistic udder sucker if he’d lived to 96?) To be safe we would have to assume that nobody really believes in veganism.

Messina probably isn’t arguing this because she said “some” ex-vegans never believed in vegan principles. And maybe that’s true for people who try veganism off and on for a few months. But you can’t pull that one on anyone who was vegan for ethical reasons for any significant period of time.

2. Ex-vegans were vegans who thought veganism failed a cost-benefit analysis for themselves.

Again, this is a belief of ex-vegans, not a belief of vegans who are destined to become ex-vegans. She references Pamela’s interview for that one, but Pamela said the reason she caught onto the sacrificial nature of veganism so quickly was because she was a philosopher in training. For most ex-vegans, it is only when they start eating animal products again that they fully appreciate what a sacrifice veganism was.

This is because long-term vegans come to see animal products, even in trace amounts, as repulsive. Non-vegan food loses its appeal — you just don’t want to eat it, so it doesn’t feel like you’ve given anything up. Also, for ethical vegans, veganism is a moral requirement. Abstaining from murdering humans isn’t considered a sacrifice, so why should not murdering animals be seen as one?

Well, veganism is a sacrifice, but most vegans don’t realize this until their health fails or they lose their faith in the arguments and they start eating animals again. 

3. Vegans who become ex-vegans never believed that veganism was healthy. They always had low-carb aspirations and feel better when they eat animal products because that’s what they expect to happen.

It’s possible someone would be so against participating in animal suffering and death that they would knowingly sacrifice their well-being for the cause, but these vegans will either drop out very quickly or they will decide that veganism is at least tolerably healthful. I have never heard of someone who stayed vegan for multiple years despite thinking it was terrible for them that entire time.

There are plenty of vegans who, like Messina, reject the John Robbins style argument that veganism is the healthiest possible diet for humans. But these vegans console themselves by saying that veganism can be about as healthy as an omnivorous diet.

If anyone is going into veganism thinking they are going to be worse off because of it, they’re probably imagining minor problems, like getting sick more often or losing some muscle mass. I really can’t see anyone going vegan with the expectation that they will aggravate thyroid or anemia problems or develop brain fog, excessive cavities, depression or constant tiredness. 

Once vegans start thinking “this diet is harming me,” it’s not long before they choose self-preservation over compassion.

Messina says that vegans who become ex-vegans often believed in “myths” about the importance of fat and protein. This is again projecting what ex-vegans believe backwards onto their a former vegan beliefs. Some ex-vegans become paleo or low-carb after veganism wears them out, but that’s not because they were always carb-phobic. Rather, the failure of veganism, which tends to be higher-carb, is a good reason for these ex-vegans to think they might do better on a high fat and high protein diet.

It’s true that some vegans see merit to a lower-carb diet (Joel Fuhrman-style vegans, for example), and that could be a road out of veganism. But Eco Atkins didn’t take off; veganism and low-carb are such an unnatural fit that combining them long-term is a strained affair. For the most part, thinking low-carb is healthy comes toward the end of veganism; very few people go vegan while idolizing cavemen.

By playing the placebo card to explain why ex-vegans feel healthier, Messina is claiming that how we feel is almost entirely a product of our thinking, not physical reality. She thinks I felt unhealthy as a vegan and then healthy as a meat eater because that’s what I thought would happen. But I thought veganism was healthy well into feeling terrible every single day. It took me a long time to see any connection between my veganism and my depression and lack of energy.

On the other hand, I did assume eating meat would make me feel better, so when that’s what happened, was it the placebo effect in action?

I think that’s a poor explanation. A placebo pill is an inert substance that should have no effect on its own. Foods, however, affect the body in significant ways, whether you expect them to or not. To say that feeling good or bad in response to the foods you eat is all psychology would imply that you feel sick after going on a candy binge only because you think you’re supposed to — eating a box and a half of chocolates is just the same as eating a starch pill that you’re told is a mild poison. I doubt Messina honestly believes that.

But somehow she knows that eating animal products simply can’t provide any physical improvement, so it has to be mental. The assumption here is that there is no difference between vegan food and animal foods. Eating a steak is the same as eating seitan with a pill that you’re told will make you feel better. But if there is no significant difference between animal products and plant products, why is Messina so strident in her advocacy of veganism?

Messina would likely say that vegan food comes from non-sentient plants, so it’s moral to eat them, while animal foods come from sentient beings that feel pain, so it’s immoral to eat them. But other than that, the properties of these foods are exactly the same and thus there should be no difference in human functioning on one or the other? I find that implausible.

Peanut butter and soy beans make me gassy, but meat and veggies don’t. Is that all because of expectations? Or might there be a real difference between a plate of brown rice and black beans with a B12 pill versus a plate of sashimi? If the mind were that powerful, a bowl of oats mixed with spirulina and ground flax seeds every morning would have kept me feeling healthy forever. Unfortunately, in my experience, the physical properties of food count more than what I think the food will do.

4. Vegans who become ex-vegans because they think their body is demanding animal foods were really just satisfying a meaningless craving.

In other words, ex-vegans think they need animal products, but really they just want them. A little presumptuous, no? But I suppose it makes sense from Messina’s position that there is no notable nutritional difference between a vegan diet and an omnivorous one. If that’s true, then yes, it wouldn’t make sense for the body to demand animal food for nutritional reasons — it could only be a craving for the sake of it. But since most vegans come to find animal products disgusting, why does any vegan eventually crave meat? Is it a brain glitch, a random mental flashback to when they used to like steak? 

Here’s what former vegetarian Harvey Diamond said about his own experience with cravings in Fit For Life, Not Fat For Life:

I was vegetarian for over a quarter of a century, but hey, things change. I’ve always told my readers that if they crave something for a long time, it must be something the body wants or needs, so have it and see how you feel. One day out of the clear blue sky, after not having meat for twenty-five years, I started to crave a charbroiled steak the way a lion craves a wildebeest. I couldn’t get it out of my head no matter how much I tried to ignore the craving or convince myself that it was some kind of aberrant desire. So finally I decided to eat the steak, throw it up and move on. The only thing was, I enjoyed it, and I felt great. Now about twice a week I have some kind of animal product like steak, salmon or chicken—whatever I want.

Why would a career advocate of a near-vegan diet suddenly, after 25 years, get a craving for meat that was so strong he had to give in? Just because? Vegans often accuse ex-vegans of giving into cravings that they could have ignored, but I wish they would explain what these cravings do signify, if not a nutritional need.

5. Ex-vegans were depressed and had brain fog and pinned the blame on veganism. But research on Seventh-Day Adventists has exonerated veganism as a potential culprit in these problems. Also, humans have no need for dietary saturated fat because the body makes it, so that isn’t a factor either.

I posted my take on that Adventist mood survey here. In short, the study is worse than useless, and I’m surprised Messina thinks otherwise. It was a survey of lacto-ovo vegetarian Adventists (not vegans) and meat-eating Adventists, which found that vegetarian Adventists were in a better mood that particular week even though they don’t eat fish.

What propels this survey below the merely useless is that Adventist dietitians and study subjects have good reason to be biased in favor of vegetarianism — their prophet told them it was the correct diet for humans; when vegetarianism is vindicated, so are their beliefs. Even the authors noted this as a potential problem. They also said:

In exclusively surveying the [Seventh-Day Adventist] community, we were able to identify vegetarian participants and analyze a relatively homogenous population of vegetarians and omnivores, thus minimizing potentially confounding lifestyle differences. These results, however, may not be generalizable to non-SDA populations.

But Messina thinks ex-vegans should trust the claims of potentially biased strangers over themselves because there were scientists involved, even though the authors admit their research might only apply to Adventists? She’ll have to dig up a far more persuasive study before I’m willing to disregard my own experiences.

Messina is or was an adjunct professor at Loma Linda University, the main Adventist college. She is not Adventist herself, but there’s no way she hasn’t noticed the obvious bias Adventists have in promoting vegetarianism. When animal lives are at stake, secular moralists are more than happy to join forces with religious vegetarians in the fight to legitimize meat-free diets. Both groups have reasons to defend a plant-based diet that have nothing to do with nutrition.

As for her point that our bodies manufacture saturated fat so we don’t need to eat any, that contradicts one of the premises of her stance against low-fat vegan diets, which is that food is more than mere building blocks; it’s more complicated than figuring out what our body doesn’t manufacture and then feeding ourselves that:

Low fat diets are associated with a drop in HDL cholesterol, which is the “good” cholesterol. If HDL drops as much as LDL (the bad) cholesterol, there is actually no net gain as far as heart disease is concerned. … Reducing all fats in the diet and replacing them with carbohydrates can also boost triglyceride levels. … Very low-fat diets also produce a type of LDL-cholesterol that is very small and dense and more easily incorporated into artery-blocking plaque. Because of these effects on HDL levels, triglycerides, and LDL size, many researchers question whether very low-fat diets are a wise choice for people at risk for heart disease.

Yeah, but our bodies make fat, so why eat it?

6. It’s not veganism causing your depression, you’re just getting old.

This is what I believed when I was really depressed as a vegan. I thought I was sad and that my thinking wasn’t as sharp anymore because time was ticking away. I didn’t connect it to diet because I didn’t see how anything could be wrong with a junk-food-free veganism. Then I started eating animal products again and stopped being depressed. Messina would interject “placebo effect!” here. But if she’s right that depression is a natural result of aging, could my mind really overcome it so easily? According to the study Messina mentioned, “[O]verall happiness declines as we head toward middle age and then starts climbing again well into our eighties.”

So aging, not veganism, is the culprit in brain fog and depression. But I was chronically depressed at the end of my veganism and now I’m not, even though I’m older. Despite what that study says, the depression wasn’t fate — there was actually something I could do about it. But I should be depressed until my late eighties because if I feel better when I eat animal products, that’s just psychological?

In the comments of her entry, Messina offers two possibilities for why someone might feel improvements after switching from veganism to a paleo diet: “[Q]uite a few seem to gravitate toward a Paleolithic diet, which is gluten-free, and then claim that they feel much better. Whether this means they were really gluten intolerant (which I doubt since I don’t think gluten intolerance is very common) or just feel better because they believe they were gluten intolerant, I don’t know.”

So either we are gluten intolerant (which is unlikely) or we think we are. That’s it. It just can’t have anything to do with the nutrients we’re getting from animal products, or the sugars and processed foods we’re avoiding. This seems strange coming from someone who is critical of low-fat vegan diets; food choices obviously matter to an extent if she thinks that fat-avoidance might be harmful. She admits that she doesn’t believe veganism is necessarily the healthiest diet. And in an entry called Supplements for Sad Vegans, she wrote:

Maybe we can’t change our genes or control all of the things in the world that make us unhappy. But lifestyle, including diet and exercise, can make a big difference. For example, vegans can be at higher risk for certain nutrient deficiencies that might affect mood. … For most people, taking supplements isn’t likely to cure depression. But a diet that is deficient in nutrients can definitely sabotage efforts to feel better.

So why is she so adamant now that only self-delusion could explain why someone feels better by eating animal products? Is it because animal products and plant products are exactly the same?

7. It’s possible vegans are more depressed, but that might be because they are more empathetic and get sad thinking about suffering animals.

For me, veganism was a justification to think about animal suffering less, not more. I wasn’t responsible for it, so I didn’t have to feel bad about it. When I would see footage of animal suffering and slaughter, I would be upset, but I would also feel proud that I wasn’t part of that.

And I’m pretty sure this is the case for most vegans who don’t spend a ton of time on vegan message boards and blogs reminding themselves about animal suffering. When I interviewed Jed Gillen, famed vegan pet advocate, I emailed him this question (which I didn’t include in the edited interview):

Once I had made a habit out of veganism, I remember thinking sometimes that I was just as detached from food production as everyone else and probably didn’t think much more about the animals than meat eaters. Every once in a while, though, I would watch slaughterhouse footage or read a book about animal rights, and then think, “Oh, right, it’s good that I’m vegan.” How often do you actually think about “the animals”?

His response was:

Rarely, and I don’t really understand the motivation of vegans who want to immerse themselves in this kind of thing— it just seems sort of masochistic after a while.  I do what I can not to hurt animals but, at the same time, I have personal goals unrelated to animal rights and I’m also trying to enjoy my own life.

Just like anyone else, vegans think about their own lives more than the lives of other people or other creatures. The lack of vegan options is a more direct and pressing daily concern than the relatively abstract travails of animals they’ll never meet. But I guess being vegan while on the meal plan of a typical college dorm is pretty depressing too.

At the end of my veganism, when I was at my most depressed, it wasn’t because I was particularly upset about “the animals.” Instead, my depression made me care about animals even less — if my own life didn’t matter, animal lives certainly didn’t. So when it got to the point where I felt it was either me or the cows, the choice was easy.

(Maybe this goes back to number one, and I was never a real vegan.)

8. If you follow Jack Norris’ nutritional recommendations, particularly for B12, you can’t go wrong.

This is what a lot of vegans are saying now. Macrobiotics, raw foodism, junk-food veganism and low-fat veganism, those are all doomed to failure. But if you follow Jack Norris’ nutritional guidelines, you’re set. 

There was a point when I was lazy about B12 pills and relied on supplemented nutritional yeast and soy milk (the vegan health argument at that time downplayed the need for B12, which convinced me this was adequate), but I got into taking B12 more regularly after enduring Restless Legs Syndrome for a few months.

Still, I didn’t follow Norris’ exact recommendations. For one thing, I didn’t know who the hell he was. And even if I had, Norris is constantly revising his recommendations in response to new research, and the B12 dosage Norris now stands behind was posted in March of this year, so that wouldn’t have helped anyway. 

I have to admit, I’m intrigued to see if vegans who religiously abide every twist and turn in Norris’ nutritional findings will manage to stay vegan longer. I’m eager to interview my first Jack-Norris-style ex-vegan… but will that day ever come?