Erim Bilgin was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Unhappy with being overweight at 14, he developed an eating disorder. He fought anorexia for a year before deciding to learn more about health and optimal nutrition, which led him to raw veganism and 30 Bananas a Day — a site for vegans following the low fat raw vegan (LFRV) lifestyle that Dr. Douglas Graham proselytizes. Graham says the optimal macronutrient ratio for humans is 80/10/10: 80 percent of calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat and 10 percent from protein. This means a diet of raw fruits and vegetables, but mostly fruits, a program that Erim obediently followed for three years.

Posting under the alias “Apple-Man,” Erim was a frequent and welcome contributor to the 30 Bananas a Day message board, until he recently quit veganism at the age of 19. Now they don’t much like him in low fat raw vegan land.

What happened between you being a true-believing 80/10/10 low fat raw vegan and you eating animal products again?

Sickness happened, and as a result, a whole lot of questioning. I really was a true believer in the low fat raw vegan lifestyle. I totally got the message. I believed in it fully. I followed it perfectly for three years, during which my health didn’t really get any better, but for the first two years, it didn’t get any worse either.

About a year and a half into it, I started to get weak, mentally, though this didn’t become apparent to me for years. I was extremely susceptible to stress. Anything would get to me, and I had to learn about self-mastery and breathing techniques and all that shit. It’s funny, because I was saying I was eating a raw vegan diet because it was “natural”, but here I was depending upon all these “unnatural” techniques. It never occurred to me that mental strength should come naturally. I just thought today’s world was too hectic.

I would skip school a lot, because just the thought of getting out of bed made me anxious some days. Speaking of the bed, I also had some difficulty sleeping once in a while around my second year of LFRV. Not only was my sleep too light, I also had difficulty falling asleep, since I had to shift my legs all the time. I would later learn that this is a medical condition called Restless Legs Syndrome, a neurological problem. (I’m looking at you, B-12! Why weren’t you formed in my gut as promised?)

My mood depended entirely on outside conditions. Talk about ups and downs. Cloudy sky meant bad mood. Cold weather meant bad mood. I became addicted to my mp3 player, because I just didn’t have the zest to go through the day without some stimulating rhythm. All this, even though I knew pretty much everything necessary to remain calm and centered. But, like I said, I didn’t acknowledge this as a problem with me, I just thought today’s world was too harsh.

The problems started to become more physical sometime around the first quarter of 2010. My teeth started getting incredibly sensitive, and there were clear signs of heavy acid erosion. I thought the tips of my teeth were always this transparent and that the darkened spots near my gum line were just stains from all the colorful food I was eating. My gums started to recede, I broke a molar by biting a tiny piece of a hazelnut shell by mistake, and a few months later my dentist would find six cavities in my raw vegan mouth. Jokingly, she told me I had “basically every dental problem that we have a name for”. But I was taking batter care of my teeth than ever! I even avoided those acidic animal products! You know, the ones that leech calcium from your bones? I wondered how I remained cavity free before when I didn’t even brush, let alone floss, let alone brush and floss thrice a day. And clean my tongue.

I chalked it up to bad genetics.

I started to get more and more fatigued. I would come home from school (if I ever DID manage to go to school that day), and I’d wonder how people manage to still do things after school. Sure, I exercised regularly, but even that was strange. For the life of me, I couldn’t increase the intensity no matter how hard I tried. It was mostly endurance running, the vegan favorite. And it wasn’t TRAINING, it was only maintenance work. I just couldn’t improve my performance.

Speaking of performance, I also had no sex drive. Now, believe me when I say that there is a difference between LOW sex drive and NO sex drive. Because I had NONE. And it wasn’t just because all girls were evil, smelly, meat-eating murderers either. I was even indifferent to Jenna Dewan Tatum’s PETA ad, so that says something. But it didn’t bother me much. After all, getting rid of those nasty animalistic desires was a bonus!

So all in all, this healthiest lifestyle ever gave me the shining gifts of health: Low energy, pale skin, anxiety and a mouth that looked like battlefield ruins. But I could definitely brag about how my poop didn’t smell, or that my urine was crystal clear! Raw vegan ftw!

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Do you think animal products have a useful contribution to make toward human health? If so, you clearly haven’t read Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s “The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health.” The “startling implications” eluded to in the title come down to this: any and every form of animal product consumed in any amount whatsoever is bad for us. Veganism, it turns out, is the optimal human diet. 

Along with the American Dietetic Association’s position papers on a vegetarian diet, studies on Adventists and the anecdotal cases of successful vegan athletes and body builders, “The China Study” is key to the argument that veganism is not only a healthy way to live, but may in fact be the healthiest. Vegan authorities swear by this book. People go vegan because of it. If “The China Study” were discredited, it would be a significant setback for veganism.

And that’s why some vegans don’t appreciate that Denise Minger, a 23-year-old former raw vegan, seems to have done just that.

This summer, Denise applied her interest in statistics and research to either a good or evil cause — depending on where you stand — by thoroughly dismantling Campbell’s bid at scientific immortality. In a series of entries on her blog Raw Food SOS, Denise demonstrated that Campbell’s anti-animal-product conclusions in his 2005 book did not match the data from his own research.

Always eager to defend his life’s work from uppity pro-meat subversives, Campbell posted a short rebuttal via a vegan blogger. Denise spent her next turn on “The China Study: My Response to Campbell”. Campbell then penned a lengthier second response, which inspired Denise’s “The China Study: A Formal Analysis and Response”. So far Campbell has kept any further protestations to himself.

Campbell critics say that his responses didn’t address most of Denise’s key points. Vegans tended to side with Campbell, however, sometimes for reasons as basic as ‘I am a vegan and Campbell defends veganism.’ As one vegan wrote: “So, whilst [Denise’s] work is impressive for the amount of time and effort she’s put in, as a vegan I am, not surprisingly, very firmly sat in Dr Colin Campbell’s camp. I just believe Dr Campbell.”

But some vegans found Denise’s critique harder dismiss. Tynan, the blogger who posted Campbell’s first response, was one of them — he abandoned veganism two weeks after reading her initial China Study entries. Denise Minger may not be the worst calamity ever to befall veganism (that honor goes to Gary L. Francione), but vegans who rely on the health argument to drum up new converts have cause for concern.

When Denise isn’t tap dancing all over everything T. Colin Campbell has done with the past two or three decades of his life, she is a freelance editor, tutor, writer and web/graphic designer who likes art, hiking and Scrabble.

But let’s see how the tap dancing is going. 

You gave up meat at the age of seven because it repulsed you. Did you ever have ethical reasons, or was it always pure disgust?

As I got older, I definitely cozied up with the ethical reasons. Once you start associating with other veg people and watching the “Meet your Meat” PETA videos, it’s kind of hard not to jump on the ethical vegan bandwagon. I always loved animals anyway. And I still vehemently oppose factory farming.

Plus, vegetarianism and veganism totally have their own gravitational force. Once you put a meatless philosophy at the core of your life, you start reeling in everything possible to support that — health arguments, ethical arguments, environmental arguments, sustainability arguments, etc. — until you convince yourself that avoiding animal foods is the only “right” way to live life. I think it’s really hard to be a vegan solely for health reasons or solely for ethical reasons, because eventually, all the pro-vegan arguments smoosh together into one giant ball of virtuous delusion. That was my experience, at least.

How did you talk yourself out of the ethics of veganism when you started eating raw dairy and then eventually meat?

The dairy wasn’t too hard because I sourced it from small farms where I could investigate how the animals were treated. But with fish/meat, it wasn’t really a matter of talking myself out of anything — I was really unhealthy and probably on the verge of some total breakdown anyway. I had no conscious plans of ever eating meat again, but during an end-of-the-semester potluck in college, someone brought a platter of sushi and sashimi — and in a strange fit of compulsion, I shoved a bunch of salmon into my mouth. It was amazing. I was buzzing afterward and was physically satisfied in I way I hadn’t felt for many years.

So it wasn’t a matter of deliberately revising my ethical stance. It was more like ethics vs. biology jumped into a boxing ring together, and biology clobbered my vegan tunnel vision into smithereens.

I know there are vegans who’ll read that and think I was just weak/evil/etc., but when you spend a long time feeling crummy and then find a missing piece that makes the crummy go away — well, that’s a persuasive moment.

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