Vegans in Danger
Lierre Keith and Ken Berry, MD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvzU08Ka-Z4
Lierre Keith was sixteen years old when she met a vegan friend who sold her on changing to a vegan diet. This appealed to her because she is a very caring person. She believed this was the path to better health and a better planet and was more humane to animals. Those are all commendable basic values that everyone should have.
Lierre was extremely conscientious—in other words, she was not an Oreo/potato chip vegan. She ate real food, just no animal products whatsoever. In a matter of months, she started to pay the price with her health. Her menstrual cycles stopped completely, and then she experienced severe depression and spinal degeneration.
It took these increasingly severe health problems a long time to drag her kicking and screaming to face reality. She was particularly disturbed by the idea that anything had to die for her to eat. She tried growing her own lettuce, but the slugs ate it. What to do? If she relocated the slugs to a different area, she was likely overpopulating that area, and they would die anyway. She also learned that fertile soil only happens with the components of dead animals. Mice, deer, birds and other animals make their home in fields of grain and soy. When those big harvester machines make their rounds, the slaughter is considerable. They often have to stop to clean all the dead bodies out of the machine. There is simply no way to produce our food without killing something. There is a cycle of life that will not be cheated.
Her health continued to deteriorate until she encountered a kindly traditional Chinese medicine practitioner who non-judgmentally and sympathetically broke the news to her. Her health would only get worse unless she ended the moratorium on animal foods. She started with eggs and noticed an immediate difference, but eggs were not enough. When she added tuna, the improvement was dramatic. She knows permanent damage has been done, and she does what she can to warn others from a position of experience and compassion, including in her 2009 book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, The thumb is UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2024
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