Veganism: How Healthy Is It Really?

Posted by Brandon Harshe on January 5, 2008

Obviously, there’s a lot of talk around here about going all raw and/or vegan. For goodness sakes, there’s been all sorts of talk about that stuff in our household, too. I feel like it’s everywhere. That’s good, though. I like being surrounded by people and topics that force us all to look at our health and how to constantly improve it.

However, I do have one monkey wrench to throw into the whole vegan thing. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think going vegan is bad. I think it’s actually a great thing… if you do it a certain way.

What do I mean by a certain way?

Whenever I hear a vegan talking about his/her diet, it seems to me as if he/she is trying to substitute everything they would normally eat in a non-vegan diet. Things such as bacon, sausage links, hot dogs, turkey, chicken, beef, ice cream, etc. When someone goes vegan, to me, that means you concentrate on sticking to whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, etc. When I think vegan, that’s just what pops into my head.

But, many, many vegans choose to substitute their meat products for processed vegan products. This is where my "beef" lies. Take Tofurky, for example. I looked at the list of ingredients for the "Foot Long" Veggie Dog off of the Tofurky website. This product’s first questionable ingredient is isolated soy protein, which very often contains monosodium glutamate (MSG). Then you get to natural vegetarian flavors and natural smoke flavor. These two ingredients can very often be umbrellas for a concoction of up to 300 different ingredients, of which can contain excitotoxins like MSG. Next up is yeast extract. This is a sludge-type concoction that almost always contains MSG.

If you don’t already know, MSG is a salty food additive used to make foods more flavorful. MSG is an excitotoxic ingredient that can penetrate the blood brain barrier and destroy brain cells in a chain-reaction-type effect. Considering vegan or vegetarian items can taste terrible sometimes, the reasoning is understandable. But the methods are questionable at best.

Next, I looked at the Chipotle Franks. Some of the same stuff, except now this contains autolyzed yeast extract. This is similar to yeast extract, except that it is more processed and is guaranteed to contain MSG.

Next, I looked at the Beer Brats. These contained textured wheat protein. Any protein that gets a "textured" in front of it, always contains MSG.

In all fairness, a lot of the Tofurky products look okay, but the fact that they use these ingredients in some of their items definitely raises my suspicion.

I also checked out StarLite Cuisine, which makes some meatless chicken taquitos that are actually quite good. I ate these once, before looking at the ingredients and was disappointed at what I saw. They contained the dreaded yeast extract. Darn it! I liked these things, too.

You’re probably wondering how all these ingredients can actually contain MSG. Well, the FDA made it legal for food companies to omit MSG from their ingredients if the substance that contains it contains less then 90% MSG. So if a preservative contains 89% MSG, according to the FDA, you don’t need to know. If you want to know more about MSG and other excitotoxins, I recommend Russell Blaylock’s book Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills. You can actually buy it from our website if you look over to the right of this post.

My point is this. I think being vegan is cool, but if all you’re doing is substituting meat products for meatless products, the food companies have to make you want to eat them again somehow. Whereas sticking to a whole foods diet really is the best bet.

I, personally, am not vegan. I can live with vegetarian, but I don’t really have the desire to label myself one or the other at this point in my life. I love to eat 2 organic eggs every morning cooked in coconut oil. And although I haven’t had it in a while, I’m still eating fish. Especially since you can only get the important Omega-3 oils, EPA and DHA, from fish, unless you can find a spirulina or algae supplement that actually contains EPA and DHA. Oils like flax seed oil only contain ALA, which is good, but doesn’t nourish your brain cells like EPA and DHA. Besides that, I eat mostly raw fruits, veggies, nuts and/or seeds throughout the rest of the day.

If you’re a vegan who’s not a raw foodist, I’m curious to see if you eat these items or not. If you do, does this kind of information bother you at all?