by Anai Rhoads

Notorious for being one of the most outspoken and controversial former vegans, author of The Vegetarian Myth, Lierre Keith, has not skirted in her belief that the vegan diet is detrimental to our health and to the environment.

As many of my readers know, it’s not often that I provide an alternative perspective to plant-based diets.  In fact, it has never been done.

As a vegetarian for the first 29 years of my life and a vegan for the last decade, the following may come as a surprise to many of my readers. However, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to interview the author, who has ignited a fierce storm within the community.

The following is my conversation with Keith.

In your book, The Vegetarian Myth, you share your two-decade long journey with veganism. What initially sparked your interest in plant-based diets?

I was 16 when I went vegan. My mother was living in Brookline, MA, which was the home of the Kushi Institute. So there were lots of macrobiotic people in the area. My sister, who was 14, became friends with a girl at her high school whose family had moved to Brookline specifically to be near the KI. That was my introduction to the whole world of natural foods and specialized diets. Macrobiotics was too arcane for me—I didn’t understand a lot of it—but I was taken with the basic idea that animal products were bad and whole grains and vegetables were good. As destructive as veganism ended up being, one thing I learned from the macrobiotics that I appreciate was the rejection of white sugar and other processed foods.  I was not a junk food vegan, ever. I got a good grounding in the rejection of industrial foods. Of course in the end, sugar is just sugar, whether you call it “complex carbohydrate” or a potato or a Snicker’s bar. But I didn’t know that then.  I also didn’t realize that the soon-to-be-ubiquitous soy foods were industrial waste products manufactured by Dupont, or how canola, corn, and soy oil are made. All of those are industrial products, and all are substances that humans have never eaten before. Still, if I had been eating white flour and white sugar all those years, the damage could have been worse. 

I also learned in health class in school that dietary fat was the root of all nutritional evils—the low-fat paradigm was just getting off the ground. That was really the beginning of an eating disorder—I would have sworn I could feel my arteries clogging while the teacher talked about it. Suddenly the idea of dietary fat made me feel physically disgusting. This intense, immediate body dysmorphia.

And then I found all the political literature, Diet for a Small Planet and the like. That was the final convincing. Factory-farming is dreadful, horrible, torturous, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I also believed the myth that American grain could cure starvation, if we would simply stop feeding it to cows.

So veganism was a complete package. I think most of us who have tried it are taken by the simplicity and the beauty of it, that with this one act we can supposedly cure so many injustices. It’s not true, of course, but I had no counter-information and no reason to question.

What caused you to turn against veganism and why do you now consider the vegan community as a cult?

My health failed catastrophically. I have severe, permanent damage to my body from veganism. It’s hard not to be bitter when I will live I pain for the rest of my life.

I would not say that the vegan community is a cult. That’s too strong. I would say that it has cult-like elements. Being a vegan means overriding the profound animal impulse to be fed, day after day after day. I speak from experience: only the truly fanatic can keep that up over years. And I say that with great affection—the world only changes because of fanatics, because of people who have that kind of passion and single-minded focus. But we’re not the most pleasant people to be around.

When a vegan’s health starts to fail, it’s rare that she gives up veganism without serious trauma and struggle. And she will most likely lose friends as she begins to question. If this was just a dietary preference, there would be no struggle, no trauma, no painful end to friendships. But being a vegan isn’t just what you eat—it’s who you are, and it’s a totalizing identity, usually kept in place by a community of true believers. Other vegans will simply refuse to believe that this diet could do harm to anyone’s health. The rejoinder is always, “Well, they did it wrong.” You could not have done it better than me and my friends. I would not even eat ketchup if it had sugar in it. And we all ended up a mess. When ideology outweighs physical reality, including someone’s physical pain, that is a cult mentality. Ideology cannot sledgehammer the world into the shape we would prefer. Believe me, I tried, and I learned the hard way that it can’t be done.

Finally, I have been physically assaulted by vegans. Could you find a more extreme psychology than assaulting people because you don’t agree with them? Ever hear of the Taliban? You don’t like my book, don’t read it. Normal people engage when they don’t like an idea. That, or they shrug their shoulders and turn to other concerns. But the vegan mindset has produced people who are willing to physically hurt people who disagree with them. What else to call that besides fundamentalism?

You discuss the health issues you experienced while you were a vegan.  Can you tell our readers more about your condition, what it is and if you’ve recovered?

Is there anything more boring than other people’s health problems? Severe hypoglycemia, gastroparesis, a degenerative joint disease at age 18, infrequent menstruation, intransigent depression and anxiety, a rare form of eczema, skin so dry it hurt, profound exhaustion, and finally an autoimmune disease.

Taken one by one, for readers who find this sort of thing interesting, the blood sugar issues are fine as long as I don’t eat more than maybe 40 grams of carbohydrate a day. That’s permanent. My insulin receptors aren’t coming back. Vegans, if you are constantly craving food—especially carbs or sugars—you are blowing through yours as well. The human body was never meant to handle that amount of sugar. I had to eat every two hours, then every hour, then basically semi-constantly, and it was dreadful. The amount of adrenaline that requires has left me with exhausted adrenal glands and a dysregulated cortisol pattern that nothing and no one has been able to correct.

One result of all that insulin-demanding food is gastroparesis, which diabetics often get. Adrenaline suppresses the body’s ability to produce hydrochloric acid. If you do that three times a day for years, you will do damage. I was nauseated and bloated every day for years. The medical people were mystified. Finally, I consulted with a doctor who works with recovering vegans and he knew in ten seconds what was wrong. He told me to take betaine hydrochloride supplements and it was a miracle. It helped instantly. I’ve been taking those for I think eight years now—healing is long and slow, but it is happening.

I have degenerative disc disease. It’s a Grade IV derangement at at least four levels. People’s spines are not supposed to fall apart at age 18 for no reason. The reasons behind my condition only became clear to me when I read Weston Price’s extraordinary book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and the companion volumes by Sally Fallon (Nourishing Traditions) and Ron Schmid (Native Nutrition). Humans, especially our bones and teeth, need nutrient-dense animal foods. We need the protein, the minerals, the fat and the fat-soluble vitamins only available in animal fats. I wasn’t getting any, essentially. Not compared to the levels we need. And our bodies can’t absorb minerals without fat. And to compound the situation, all those whole grains I was eating contain tons of phytates, which are chemical substances that plants use to fight back—they don’t want to be eaten, either. Phytates bind with minerals in the digestive tract, making then inaccessible to us. So what few minerals I was getting, were being carried right back out. It’s no wonder my spine fell apart. By the end of my vegan career, I couldn’t sit more than 30 minutes and only stood in five minute bursts. I lived my life on the couch from the pain.

Adding back good-quality animal fats and proteins produced a miracle. I will always be in pain with physical restrictions, but I’m in substantially less. I can go to the movies. I can go out to dinner. I’ve even flown across the country, sitting up for 6 hour stretches. You have no idea what it’s like to go from such a small, constrained world to one where I can semi-function enough to have a social life. Of course there are times when I regret all I could have done—gone to law school, earned a living. Life below the poverty line is no fun. And constant pain is exhausting. But I remember how bad it was, how bad it could be.

The amenorrhea stopped two weeks after I removed all the soy products from my diet, and I haven’t skipped a period since. That was stunning. And really scary. I was basically on birth control pills for twenty years. The phytoestrogens in soy products are chemicals, not food. Please take this seriously. My sister got endometriosis from soy products and had to have a hysterectomy. It is really, really serious.

Eating lots of good animal protein and fat produced a miracle in stable mood state. I’d say that’s the number one complaint that recently-ex-vegans write to me about. The depression lifts, sometimes in 48 hours, and the world goes from grey to color. They are so grateful to have their lives back.

The dry skin healed up after three days of animal fat. That was amazing, too. I didn’t realize that skin could actually bend with me and not hurt. The dyshidrosis went away the moment I stopped eating grain.

And now it looks like I have Hashimoto’s. Once the immune system is turned on, it never really turns off. I have to be very strict about never eaten grain, especially gluten grains, again. It remains to be seen whether there’s any help for the profound exhaustion that I live with every day.

Had you discussed your health with a nutritionist or was it just an “ah-ha” moment that led you on this path?

It never occurred to me that my righteous vegan diet—which was supposed to be so good for animals, the planet, and human health—could possibly be causing me these problems. That’s what I mean about the cult-like mentality. It was unthinkable. Vegans, if you are reading this, please think it. Please. Before the damage is permanent. There’s a whole generation of us out here who already tried it and we ended up a mess. You’re allowed to learn from our mistakes. For four million years our species has been eating nutrient-dense animal foods. Ideology cannot change the biological needs of your animal body.

I was once a strong proponent of soy, but now campaign against it after experiencing adverse hormonal effects. Just how dangerous, in your opinion, is soy?

Don’t touch the stuff. Ever. If you want to eat a tablespoon of miso now and then with fish broth, that won’t hurt. But everything else, no. Especially the soy milk and fake meat products. They are industrial waste products that act as drugs–many of them are serious endocrine-disruptors and cause cancer. Why would anyone want to eat food that was manufactured? Let alone manufactured by Dupont? Yet the industry has spent millions to market these products as groovy and green, and environmentalists, of all people, have fallen for it. It’s truly bizarre.

A good place to learn more about the dangers of soy is here.

What is your advice to mothers who use soy-based formulas for their babies?

Stop, stop, please, stop. Giving a baby soy formula is a hormone load equivalent to four birth control pills a day! Let that sink in. That has got to be a bad idea in anyone’s book. Please do not let your ideology get in the way of your baby’s health.

Over the last decade, as a vegan, I have witnessed many who have taken several missteps in their diets. Would you say plant-based diets are generally healthy but aren’t employed properly? Is there a common ground that should be taken into consideration if one chooses to remain vegan?

A vegan diet does not contain enough nutrients for the long-term maintenance and repair of the human body. Give the body enough bulk calories and it will limp along, but you’re on drawdown the whole time. If you are currently a vegan, the first important thing is to remove all the soy. The second is to add coconut oil, which is one of the only plant sources of saturated fat. Those will help as stop-gap measures.

You mention in your book how the blood and bones of animals feed the soil and keep it alive. What are your thoughts on vegan-organic farming and how do you think it compares?

It’s an absurd project. The living world needs its full cohort of community members to actually keep living, never mind be resilient. I don’t understand wanting to drive animals from the world, especially in the name of helping animals. What we have got to do, if there is any hope for this planet, is to repair the perennial polycultures—the forests, grasslands, and wetlands—and help the animals come home. And then finally take our place as members of those biotic communities instead of destroyers. That’s how we lived for our first 4 million years. It’s only in the last 10,000 that we’ve become monsters. Agriculture is the most destructive thing that humans have done to the planet. More of the same won’t save us.

You have a new book coming out. Can you tell our readers about it and when it will be released?

The book is called Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. It’s co-authored with Aric McBay and Derrick Jensen. Read about it here.

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