Book review: The Vegetarian Myth

This is a book that, while 15 years old now, seems particularly apt for current times. Written to help vegetarians and vegans who are struggling to maintain their diet despite its effect on their health to see that while their compassion and fervor for justice are honorable and noble, they are mistaken about the solution. As arguably we are too about the current plight to go meat free for humanity.

In a nutshell, the author Lierre Keith, an ex-vegan, believes that "veganism has damaged her health and others" and argues that agriculture is destroying not only human health but entire ecosystems. At its core, the book is about the unsustainable nature of modern agriculture, but is "disguised" as a treatise against vegetarianism based in indisputable research.

Lierre Keith spent almost twenty years as a dedicated vegan, “succumbing to weakness” by eating fatty dairy products only on rare occasions. Her book is a moving account of how that diet destroyed her body and how she came to realize that vegetarianism was not the answer to the problems of environmental destruction, animal suffering or Third World starvation, each an argument for the types of vegetarians she describes in this book.

No matter what kind of diet we all choose, and choose we should (not feel it’s a chore or a political piece for survival), each individual has different abilities to synthesize the needed nutrients from different foods and if you’re not getting what you need, declining health often results.

You are what you eat, and what you eat eats and how all that comes around back again!