 Is a vegan diet healthy? The short answer is no, a vegan diet cannot be optimally healthy. Now can we make a vegan diet healthier? Yes, through proper food choices and incorporating certain supplements, we can drastically improve the vegan diet. And when we talk about healthy here, we are not talking about conventionally healthy. If you want to be conventionally healthy by modern culture and modern wisdom, then you're just going to end up being as sick as everyone else. Vegans love comparing themselves to the general population saying, oh, can you prove vegans are deficient in vitamins? Actually, yes, vegans are deficient in certain vitamins. And if you're comparing yourself to the general population that has heart disease rates of about 25%, it's not a good metric. That's the first thing we have to understand here. A vegan diet, in most cases, is usually not better than a standard American diet. A vegan diet, for many people, is the equivalent of a standard American diet plus deficiencies. Standard American diets referencing the high processed food consumption, the high carbohydrate consumption, a lot of sugar, a lot of inflammatory omega-6 fats, lack of activity, pretty much the worst combination possible. So in some cases, a vegan diet can actually be less inflammatory than a standard American diet. Iron and B12 are the two most common deficiencies on vegan diets. Most people do tend to become anemic on a vegan diet as well with have tissue B12 issues. And what we mean by that is, yes, their blood levels of these two things might be fine, but you can't exactly measure tissue levels because you can't take a tissue biopsy of a living person. Fat cycle vitamins, fatty acids, as well as minerals and elements. These are things that almost everyone is deficient in. So this isn't exclusive to vegans. This is why I'm saying we can't compare ourselves to the general population. I base my YouTube channel around nutrition from animal foods. The reason for that is not because I like eating meat, it's because there are specific vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins, I'll refer to them as FSVs, as well as water-soluble vitamins like B12 that are specific to animal foods. You cannot obtain these nutrients in any plant-based form. That's why we have laboratories and supplements made specifically for vegans that replicate these animal foods. And part of my belief of obtaining these nutrients from animal foods means we need to get them in amounts that are deemed a certain percentage of our calories. In nature, our native ancestors, hunter-gatherers used to consume a certain percentage of their calories from animal foods. If we don't achieve these fat-soluble vitamins in that percentage, it's tough to say we are an optimal health. So that's the main driving factor here. What I'm saying is, if we don't obtain these vitamins from animal foods, there's nothing else to really talk about. That's the most important thing. These vitamins are precursors to cell differentiation, gene expression, literally how every cell is made in the body, how every gene is regulated, they're involved in so many metabolic processes. So if we can't even get fat-soluble vitamins and fatty acids, what's really the point of worrying about minerals and elements? So the focus here today is going to be vitamins. Maybe I will touch on these other two things in the future. Emphasizing functional versus optimal. Are you a functioning human being and just barely getting through the day? Are you like everyone else and you need to drink coffee and have your sugar injections every two hours? Or are you an optimal health? Are you like Frankie the Roman statue and can go several days without eating and sleeping and still feel like a million bucks? That's the question you want to ask yourself. I've never had energy issues, I've never had to use caffeine, I don't have hourly sugar injections like most people on a standard American or vegan diet. You have to say, is your quality of life good? Are you on the toilet six times a day? Vitamins are key as I've been saying. Paper value versus availability. This is where the vegan diet falls short. People love to say, oh my god guys, kale is so nutritious. Look at chronometer. Did you guys see my chronometer numbers for today? That doesn't matter if the kale comes out the same way it came in. The paper value of a food, what a food says on a nutrition database has nothing to do with how it's actually absorbed in the body. Different animals have different digestive systems. Human digestive systems are capable of extracting nutrition from animal foods. That's what the small intestine is for. Animals that extract nutrition from plant foods have much longer large intestines, usually five to six times longer. Or organs that are specific for the fermentation of plant foods that humans do not have. Certain ruminant animals herbivores are incredibly effective at extracting nutrition from plant foods. They have enzymes that we don't have. They have the phytase enzyme that can break down phytates which are an anti-nutrient that inhibit mineral absorption in humans. Jurassic digestive differences that affect plant food absorption. I'm sure if vegans could, they would be in a field eating grass for 12 hours a day and fermenting and farting and belching with the cows. Vitamin synergy. This is something else that's important that I haven't really been mentioning lately on my channel. All these fat soluble vitamins work synergistically with each other. They are actually antagonists. So when you consume vitamin A, you need to get adequate amounts of vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 and omega fatty acids. The reason is because nature is a complete package. If you were obtaining vitamin A from liver in nature, that means that you were also eating other parts of the animal, obtaining other vitamins that are specific to those animal foods like omega fatty acids, like cholesterol, like vitamin K2, like vitamin B12. And you would also be in the sun getting vitamin D3. Nature literally tells us what we need to do. Go out in nature, hunt an animal, get these nutrients, get sunlight, vitamin D3 from the sun. It's a very simple baseline and when we go away from these principles, it becomes very difficult to replicate. Something we won't really touch on too much today is anti-nutrients. And this is kind of silly because when talking about vitamins, plant foods don't actually have available forms of fat soluble vitamins. Although there are substances in these plant foods that do inhibit vitamin absorption to some degree, it's not a well-known mechanism by most people. Anti-nutrients usually apply to things like phytates, oxalates, lectins and are mostly associated with mineral absorption problems as well as things that are a little bit lower on the totem pole, at least for me, than vitamins. So let's get into the meat of the discussion. Vitamin A, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, fat soluble vitamins, vitamin B12, water soluble vitamins. But the reason I emphasize fat soluble vitamins, FSVs is because this is what people are mainly deficient in. Vitamin A, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 are incredibly important for so many biological functions and we don't get enough of them due to food quality and lack of animal foods. Most people are also deficient in B12, just not as horribly. Starting with vitamin A, the plant form of vitamin A is beta-carotene. The true form, the animal form, is retinol. And the USDA is allowed to label beta-carotene as vitamin A. This is kind of misleading because beta-carotene in most fruits and vegetables has a 30 to 1 absorption rate. In certain high-carotene products like certain fruits and vegetables like carrots, it goes down to 14 to 1. But this is greatly bottlenecked. Your body can only convert so much carotene in a day and it requires fat to be metabolized. And where can you obtain fat in nature in every climate at all seasons? If you're in Europe in the middle of winter, you're not eating coconuts, you're not eating olives, they didn't have giant machines to press olive oil. There's no way to obtain fat in nature to absorb these vitamins outside of animal foods. That's something logically we have to keep in mind here. You couldn't be absorbing carotene, and you wouldn't even have these high-carotene fruits and vegetables because it would be winter and refrigeration didn't exist. There's so much logic here that you could go to, but the focus here is going to be, okay, we do have access to these foods, so can we actually absorb the vitamins? It's not that, oh, yeah, well, you need animal fat and animal fat already has retinol, so what are you worrying about carotene for? Not only is the absorption bottlenecked even with fat, there are gene polymorphisms that inhibit the ability of some people to convert carotene. This literally means some percentage of the population cannot follow a vegan diet. Not only are there gene polymorphisms that inhibit the absorption of carotene drastically, there are substances, flavonoids and flavonoids in all carotene-containing fruits and vegetables that inhibit an enzyme. This enzyme is used to convert carotene into retinol. It's called the beta-carotene 1515 deoxygenase enzyme. To put it simply, carotene is like two molecules of retinol, and in order for the body to utilize it, it has to be cleaved. This enzyme cleaves carotene into retinol, but there are substances in it that inhibit the enzyme. This plant food is literally saying it doesn't want to be absorbed or the human body is saying we are not meant to convert this. So it's fairly safe to say it's impossible to get a proper amount, an adequate, a high amount of vitamin A in order to be in optimal health from plant foods. What's the solution here? The hypothetical solution. On the topic of animal foods, liver contains an incredibly high amount of vitamin A. Seeing as we are vegan, the alternative is a supplement known as vitamin A palmitate. This supplement is very damaging to the liver. I've actually read a couple of topics discussing hundreds of people that needed liver transplants from supplementing vitamin A palmitate. I've been told by people that vitamin A palmitate is safe in smaller amounts, but that's what Accutane is based off of, and Accutane is very damaging to the gut and liver. So if there is a supplemental vitamin A solution that's plant-based that I don't know of outside of palmitate, maybe there is, but hypothetically you can't get enough vitamin A on a vegan diet. This is one of the main issues I have with it, and either way you go about it, even in ideal circumstances, if the person was able to convert it properly with their genes, they're still not getting an ideal amount. Vitamin B12. Of course there's another logical problem here where vitamin B12 needs to be supplemented. It's contained in animal foods, and to me this is a major red flag. How can someone say a vegan diet is optimal for health if you would literally die in nature without a vitamin B12 supplement? This is why a lot of vegans suffer from cognitive issues, and the main problem here is you can have normal serum levels of B12, and your tissue levels can be low, you can have neurocognitive issues, brain issues, and you'll never know. You could literally be wasting away. Your brain could be degenerating while you're taking this B12 supplement, but there are genes that regulate how well you can convert this, and regardless of how well you can convert the B12 supplement in your body, it's safe to say that you cannot get ideal amounts of B12 on a vegan diet. Of course there are gene mutations like MTHFR that literally make it so a person cannot follow a vegan diet. Supplements versus animal foods, it's kind of silly. You can either supplement it on a vegan diet or just eat animal foods. Water and oysters are incredibly high in vitamin B12, or you could go to your local laboratory and inject yourself with some B12. This is something that's, all of this is really overlooked. If you guys are wondering, okay Frank, why is no one talking about this? It's because if a vegan knew about these vitamins, they wouldn't be following a vegan diet. If they actually understood them and the metabolic processes associated with them, they would say, oh I shouldn't be following this diet. It's not good for my health, and this just gets worse and worse. It's already 100% safe to say you're not an optimal health here, but when you move on to vitamin D3, things get really, really bad. So almost everyone is deficient in vitamin D3. You can get it from the sun or you can supplement it. It's one of the things I do actually advocate supplementing for, that as well as iodine, but we're not talking about iodine in this video, or you can get it from animal foods. Animal foods do contain vitamin D in fairly substantial amounts if the animal is on pasture in the sun, on its natural diet. Unfortunately, most animals aren't on their natural diet, so the only good sources of vitamin D3 that most people can get are from wild squat fish. And if you ate like two to three pounds of fatty wild squat fish per day, you'd actually get enough D3 to not have to go in the sun. The issue with the vegan diet here is that cholesterol is a precursor to vitamin D3, as vitamin D3 is a hormone, and cholesterol is a precursor to a bunch of other incredibly important hormones as well. For anyone saying our bodies produce enough cholesterol, there is a specific metabolic process that starts in the stomach involved in vitamin D3 absorption. Since cholesterol is only contained in animal foods, that means you need to consume cholesterol containing animal foods to start this metabolic process and absorb vitamin D3 efficiently. This is why every single vegan person has hormonal issues, a lot of these women lose their period, raw vana, raw alignment, Bonnie Rebecca. What they all said was they went to a doctor and their hormones were in the dumpster. There has never been a point through our evolutionary history where we've had to produce cholesterol for periods of years without getting it from animal foods. Maybe for a period of weeks to months, the body can synthesize some cholesterol from fatty tissue, but placing that demand on the liver, your body cannot produce enough cholesterol to produce an optimal amount of hormones. Your body needs cholesterol for sex hormones, for cortisol, bile acids, aldosterone, which is very important for sodium metabolism. To say that your body can produce adequate amounts of cholesterol is comical considering every single vegan runs into cholesterol related issues. If you gave every vegan enough vitamin D3 to get their levels adequate, what that would actually do is deplete their cholesterol and cause hormonal issues. So I would argue on a vegan diet, if you were getting adequate amounts of sun and adequate amounts of vitamin D3 supplemented, your cholesterol would be even lower and you'd run into more issues. I believe as with all of these other things, this is greatly gene dependent and some people can tolerate this more than others. I actually have a compilation of about 20 vegan YouTubers that got their vitamin D3 levels tested and they were all below the minimum. It's literally safe to say that all vegans are deficient in vitamin D3 and this is just as big of an issue as everything else if not bigger. Vitamin K2 and Omega fatty acids actually become questionable due to modern supplementation. These three vitamins A, B12 and D3, it's safe to say we can't get enough of them. But vitamin K2 normally only occurs in animal foods. The plan form of vitamin K is vitamin K1, body doesn't really convert it into K2 efficiently enough to be an optimal health. In animal foods it occurs in two forms primarily, the MK4 form and the MK7 form. MK4 is specific to animal foods and has certain properties and organs but I believe MK7 can replicate that. Natto is a fermented soybean food so again, logically speaking here in nature you couldn't actually obtain vitamin K2 from plant foods but our modern amenities such as soy and fermentation and worldwide food access allow us to obtain K2 in that way or you could just be normal and eat animal foods that contain vitamin K2. Granted, the animal was raised properly it will have vitamin K2 in its tissue. If you're feeding a feedlot cow, grain and soy it's not going to have a substantial vitamin K2 content. And this is really back to the logic and animal food presence. If we can only obtain vitamin K2, vitamin B12, all these vitamins require animal foods in some way, shape or form to obtain them optimally it's hard to justify that a vegan diet is optimal for health. Omega fatty acids, again, as with B12 you have to supplement them or it's contained in fish, eggs and brains. The body cannot actually convert the precursors to omega fatty acids found in plant foods in the presence of high omega 6. In foods like flax seeds, any seeds really, alpha linolenic acid is an omega 3 fatty acid it's the precursor to EPA and DHA. In order to convert this omega 3 fat the body needs to utilize the 6 desaturates enzyme. Fortunately, omega 6 fats like linolenic acid compete with the omega 3 fats for conversion. There has never been a study that has shown that vegans can convert flax seed omega fatty acids into DHA. EPA conversion rates are very small but the end goal here is what's the solution. So we can supplement algae oil for DHA although algae oil is toxic in some cases and that's questionable in and in itself. The point here is can we obtain these vitamins and vitamin K2 and omega fatty acids can likely be supplemented to a reasonable degree. We touched on cholesterol already. Protein is something worth mentioning. All these vegans are falling apart. The only vegans with any semblance of muscle mass are vegan body builders and just about every single one of them has used steroids in the past so it becomes questionable from a muscle mass and body composition perspective if you would just turn into a bag of bones on a vegan diet. You know look at vegan doctors like Dr. Michael Greger aka Dr. Stringbean, let's be honest. And I've interviewed probably half a dozen vegan girls that have gone from vegan to carnivore and their body composition improves drastically. These women literally put on 10, 15, 20 pounds of muscle without even working out. So protein although vegan, you can get your protein from beans and lentils. The availability is very clear. Humans do not utilize it well. Omega 6 fatty acids and this ties into the solution. Hypothetically let's say vitamin A, palmitate is safe. Let's say the vitamin B12 supplements working. Let's say we can use a vitamin D3 supplement. Let's say we can supplement all of these things and they are converted optimally which is not true, absolutely not true. You would have to consume large amounts of plant fats for this to be optimal and you guys may have heard oh you only need a small amount of fat to convert these vitamins. You need a constant influx of fat in your diet to efficiently convert these vitamins. So it's arguable that you'd have to consume a much higher fat vegan diet and all plant foods are high in Omega 6. The problem with this is whatever fat your body consumes, it actually turns the lipids, all of the fatty tissues in your body into that fat and when the lipids in your body turn into Omega 6, particularly linoleic acid, your body doesn't recognize it. It's inflammatory. This is what actually causes heart disease and stroke. When they looked at the plant sterol, the plant fat composition in the arteries of heart disease patients, they were dozens to hundreds of times higher than healthy patients. So high Omega 6 intake causes inflammation and reactive oxygen species which is just oxidation of all cells in the bloodstream, highly associated with stroke. So the potential solution here to get your vitamins optimal might have the downside to Omega 6. Now, are there Omega 6 fats that are lower in linoleic acid that aren't as harmful and can this be alleviated by eliminating inflammation in the diet? I don't know. I'd like to think this is the most informative video out there on how to actually be healthy on a vegan diet and what you would have to do to try to optimize your health. I would be interested in seeing if there are any vegans out there willing to try this and let me know. If any of you vegans are interested in working with me in hypothesizing some sort of optimal fat soluble vitamin nutrition plan for vegans, you can reach out to me. My email and my contact stuff is in the comments below. I'm a very open-minded person and as much as people don't like to think I am objective, I actually am. I truly believe in what I'm saying here. I'm not trying to mislead people and say, oh, I don't think this works, it might not work. These don't work. I want to be very clear. You cannot get optimal amounts of these vitamins even with supplementing because there is a percentage of the population with gene mutations or certain genes in general that cannot convert these vitamins efficiently and it's a very large percentage of the population. One thing I didn't mention on the topic of Omega fatty acids was arachidonic acid as well as conjugated linoleic acid. Arachidonic acid is only found in animal foods. There is no supplemental version of it and it is very important for regulating inflammation. So arachidonic acid, I think that's something that will come up in the future coming against vegans. It's hard to show the importance of arachidonic acid in the body because the body does produce some endogenously by itself but you cannot consume any plant-based food that increases the amount of arachidonic acid in your body. Arachidonic acid might be some really big thing that's actually causing a lot of issues with vegans but we won't really know until more research has been done on it. Same thing with conjugated linoleic acid. CLA has been shown to have so many benefits and it's only obtained in animal foods. There's also carnation. There's a bunch of nutrients specific to animal foods that aren't really viewed as super necessary and we haven't even jumped into minerals and elements. So there's a lot more negative things to be said and things that are questionable on the vegan diet, especially iron, especially certain minerals like zinc. But I think that is plenty of information for one video. Guys, please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon. It's right next to the subscribe button and share the video if you can. If you guys would like to support me further, just check out some of the other videos on my channel. I did recently launch Frankies Free Range Meat, my goal being to provide you guys with nutrient-dense, high-quality animal foods that have been humanely raised. Check out frankiesfreerangemeat.com to learn more about our mission and what we're looking to do in the future. That being said, again, thank you guys so much for watching. Enjoy the rest of the week.