Bleargh. Via Vegansaurus, we learn that Alex Jamieson, as in "Healthy Chef Alex," as in "I tried to leverage my boyfriend's fame after he ate nothing but McDonald's for a month," is no longer vegan.
Suh. Nore.
Here's the thing: Alex tells us she went "vegan" for her health. Tl; dr: me, me, me, me, me. Then she decided that "living her truth" (ew) meant eating dead things. Again: me, me, me, me, me. She's part of a deeply boring trend: people who go "vegan" for their health decide something else would be healthier, and then become "ex-vegans." I keep putting "vegan" in quotation marks because by definition, veganism is not about health. It's about not exploiting animals. It's not about me. It's about them.
I think maybe Alex needs to read her own web site. Maybe the part where she talks about being "a complete slave" to her junk food cravings. Somehow those cravings were bad, but cravings for dead animals are all about "living her truth."
Now me, I'm an addict. And here's what addicts know: feelings are not facts. And your brain can lie to you. If "listening to your body" means listening to your addict brain, then listening to your body can kill you.
I suppose this all sounds easy for me to say, because in my own case, going vegan did make me healthier. I've never tried the perfect, most-health-promoting-possible omnivore diet (assuming there is such a thing), nor am I following the perfect, most-health-promoting-possible vegan diet (again, assuming . . . . ), so I'm not comparing those two hypotheticals, but I can tell you from experience that eliminating animal products from my highly imperfect, junky ovo-lacto-fisho diet immediately improved my health according to a bunch of objective markers, like blood sugar and cholesterol. So yay. No conflict between health and ethics here.
But what if your health and your ethics do seem to be in conflict? I suggest going beyond "your truth" and looking at some science. You know, the truth of a whole bunch of people, validated through replicable experiments. That truth.
People become vegan for a variety of reasons and people stop being vegan for a variety of reasons. For some it's health reasons and for others its animals and for some it's a combination of both. I became a vegan because I believe it is the healthiest way to live. I have stayed a vegan inpart because I care about animals. People should be able make whatever choices that work for them.
ReplyDelete