I am concerned about the increasing popularity of the vegan movement and vegan diets with respect to its potential impact on individuals’ health.

My personal opinion and my experience working with patients is that initially individuals who adopt a (healthy) vegan diet may realize some health benefits, however over the long term there is a significant potential that these individuals may develop nutrient deficiencies which may have profound effects on health.

From my perspective, there are a couple of considerations to this:

Firstly, every individual is biochemically and metabolically unique and a vegan diet may not be appropriate for a specific individual.  This is the same consideration with respect to any diet, whether it be low carb/high fat, vegetarian – or whatever.

The second consideration is the fact that most individuals simply do not have the knowledge and expertise to understand how to assess whether they are developing deficiencies, or how to supplement to address these deficiencies or prevent them.

I recently presented a three hour Master Class lecture to 4th year Naturopathic students at our local Naturopathic school: Boucher.

The topic of the lecture presentation covered ketosis, the ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, time restricted feeding – but also information on the Fasting Mimicking Diet developed by Valter Longo, PhD.

If you are not familiar with the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD), the concept is that for a limited number of days during any month if you consume a restricted number of calories of specific types of food, it has the effect of providing a CRM (Caloric Restriction Mimetic) influence on the metabolism for the whole month.

And Longo and his colleagues have published a considerable number of studies to back up his hypothesis.

The one negative about the program is that they recommend accessing (expensive) prepared meals from a provider for the fasting days in a set up similar to Weight Watchers.

Also in the lecture presentation, I talked about some of the issues related to vegan diets (deficiencies) – and also with animal protein consumption (the primary concern being an increase in IGF-1 insulin like growth factor levels which can stimulate cell growth and division – and some ways to counteract this mechanism which I will detail in a separate article).

Today I wanted to share an article from the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK detailing Virpi Mikkonen who is a high profile poster girl for the meat-free revolution and a social media guru and how she confessed that a vegan diet ruined her health and brought on early menopause.

Also I am including some information from my Boucher lecture regarding some of the potential nutrient deficiencies associated with a vegan diet.

Individuals choose specific diets for different reasons: for ethical and environmental issues (common with the vegan community), they buy into a fad diet which has become popular – or hopefully like myself and I would presume many practitioners reading this article that have biohacked their metabolism to determine the best diet to optimize their health and quality of life.

For myself, a LCHF (low carb / high fat) / ketogenic diet works optimally: I do not stay in ketosis continuously but I have adapted my metabolism so that it can switch back and forth effortlessly between burning fat and sugars.

I am of the opinion that this metabolic flexibility is something that all individuals can benefit from, provided their metabolism and health will allow them to stay in a continuous state of ketosis to initially make this transition to being keto adapted, which takes about six weeks.

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