Vegan diets are unhealthy, don't help the environment and lots of animals still die. We should stop indulging their propaganda.

It has become terribly faddish to be a vegan. Hardly a day passes without another TV show featuring some sort of vegan promotion. We're told that being vegan is healthy, environmentally responsible and, of course, morally superior to the old-fashioned human diet filled with animal products. The latest in this stream of propaganda come the other day with the supposedly planet saving 'healthy reference diet' proposed by the EAT-Lancet Commission:

The Commission quantitively describes a universal healthy reference diet, based on an increase in consumption of healthy foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts), and a decrease in consumption of unhealthy foods (such as red meat, sugar, and refined grains) that would provide major health benefits, and also increase the likelihood of attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.

It's true that these folk aren't proposing that we should all be forced into eating a vegan diet (although they do suggest lots of draconian choice-reduction enforced by government) but the arguments are familiar and move on from the traditional "don't kill animals" position of vegans to a more nuanced morality tale about saving the planet and eating healthily. It is still, however, vegetarian propaganda wrapped up as science. EAT is funded by a couple of Norwegian billionaires (they paid Bill Clinton 3.5m Norwegian Krone to speak at one of their conferences) and funds a familiar collection of researchers:

Take Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She has compared meat eaters to smokers - who likewise were once role models but later became pariahs - and believes that they should be having their meal outside of the restaurant. Or Harvard's professor Walter Willett, who has claimed that one in three early deaths could be saved if we all gave up meat, and Oxford's vegan researcher Marco Springmann who has called for a meat tax to prevent over “220,000 deaths” and save billions in healthcare costs.

This comes from a review of the EAT-Lancet Commission proposals published in the newsletter of the European Food Agency. The review by food scientist Frédéric Leroy and sociologist Martin Cohen concludes:

The initial effect of the EAT-Lancet campaign seems to be not so much to promote animal welfare as to open up for “Big Ag” lucrative new markets and feed the hunger of governments for new tax bases. What start as academic and scientific debates become political arguments that are dangerously simplistic and may have several detrimental consequences for both health and the environment.

This points us to the core issue with vegan and near-vegan diets - they are unhealthy, probably do little for the environment and almost certainly are bad for the planet's animals. It has always struck me as ridiculous to pretend that we can inhabit the planet without, at some point, killing animals. Moreover, vegans seem to make an almost arbitrary distinction between types of animals - keeping livestock is wrong but it's all fine to drive at 70 mph along the M6 while slaughtering hundreds of innocent flies. And how many little beasts are killed by the arable farmer in growing, harvesting and preparing that quinoa, soy or rice?

Humans have had a close relationship with livestock for thousands of years and cows, sheep, pigs and poultry shared our lives from prehistoric times. Indeed keeping animals makes sense as crop scientist, Dr Sarah Taber points out in a tweet - "when produce is too far gone to sell & there's no processing market (say, melons), it often gets fed to livestock. That's…actually a lot of the point of livestock, historically. They eat stuff we can't & turn it into meat, milk, & eggs that we can."

The idea of a balanced diet means perhaps eating more vegetables and less meat but vegan foods are commonly highly processed and require the addition of supplements to replace the nutrition lost from not eating meat or dairy. And, as Joanna Blythman points out, most of the pastureland in places like the UK simply isn't suitable for growing anything but grass:

But wet, green Britain lends itself to livestock production. Huge upland swathes of the country are quite incapable of growing food crops, but this otherwise agriculturally useless land can be grazed by cattle, sheep, goat, deer and other game. When meat and milk comes from predominantly free-ranging, grass-fed animals, this isn't stealing mountains of grain out the mouths of people, but harnessing natural resources to produce quality, healthy food.

Despite this the vegan propagandists are given a free ride but the media - nobody challenges Marco Springmann when he makes sweeping claims about the health benefits or a vegan diet (or rather the disbenefits of eating meat) or extravagent claims about the impact of livestock on climate change. And we're expected to change our choices and habits because a few people have adopted this pretty stupid dietary choice while their propagandists tell us meat-eaters that we're morally reprehensible humans.

The EAT-Lancet report has been beautifully ridiculed by Chris Snowdon but everywhere else - the BBC, ITV, radio and broadsheet newspapers - has treated it as a genuine contribution to science rather than as a piece of propaganda produced by vegan extremists.

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