Just a regularly updated page on counter points to the vegan diet. Based off an original Reddit thread.
Vegans are unobjective and cherry-pick individual studies over meta-analyses to call animal products unhealthy:
You can look up virtually any meta-analysis on milk and will find that it has no correlation to health risks, but many health benefits. Yet vegans will cite the one study in that meta-analysis that found an increase in mortality rate.
Milk is not "full of estrogen" either. A whole gallon contains 0,00057 mg of estrogen, which is over 1000 times less than daily oral replacement doses. Milk is also a very popular drink among strength athletes.
Vegans like to say that all meat causes cancer by citing the WHO's cancer agency. But the article actually says there's no data on poultry/fish and that red meat has not been established as a cause of cancer. It also says that meat has health benefits.
Despite being demonized by health organizations, dietary cholesterol has never been proven to correlate to heart disease.
Neither has meat.
Nor saturated fat. (hint: n-3 PUFA are known to reduce CVD risk, which is why "replacing" SF leads to improvements. Replacing literally anything with n-3 leads to improvements.)
The China Study, aka the Vegan Bible, has been so often debunked by hundreds of scientists that it is now a prominent example of bias. It is anything but a respected piece of work.
Vegans lie and twist words to claim that all health organizations support them:
There are plenty that explicitly tell you to refrain from veganism.
Note that the ones that support them always come with the unique caveat of a "well-planned" diet, but most people don't plan their diet.
Veganism defies the recommendations of eating a high variety diet - because restricting foods is it's only trait.
There is no health organization that tells you to stop eating meat. Or eggs. Or dairy.
Food trends are political. Many "health organizations" are largely funded by private sponsors and follow their agenda. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics was founded by Seventh-day Adventists and just so happens to have a strong pro-vegan stance. Every single author of their position paper is pimping vegan dieting books.
Veganism is not healthy nor sustainable for the average person. Ex-vegans outnumber vegans 5:1. Here is a study with common reasons for quitting. TLDR: 23% had health concerns, 37% cravings, 63% social issues, 58% ideological disagreement, 43% difficulties staying 'pure'. There are more people that left veganism with health concerns than there are vegans.
Veganism is poorly studied and anyone claiming it's been "proven" to be healthy for everyone is promoting pseudoscience. Nutrition science is complicated and nearly all studies on vegans rely on self-reported data with poor validity:
A plant-based diet is not a vegan diet because it includes all food groups. Even the mediterranean diet can be called plant-based.
Ex-vegans are not considered. People whose health suffers do not stay vegan.
Vegans are practically nonexistent in people over 60 - the demographic that has the highest risk of mortality.
Most vegans are wealthy, young women. A demographic with low risk of mortality.
Any "well-planned" diet does initially well when compared to the Standard American diet. This isn't just the Vegan one but also complete opposites like Paleo, Ketogenic, Carnivore, etc.
Faithful Seventh-day Adventists eat plant-based, but also don't smoke or consume alcohol. Other religions that follow a health code - but eat meat - have similar life expectancies. (Mormons)
It's a common thing to crave and then binge foods your diet is missing and then being unable to remember eating them - vegans having alarming rates of eating disorders and mental illness make this even more significant.
List of over 80 studies and articles of health risks and deficiencies related to veganism.
Another list, with health benefits of eating meat.
A common lie is that the vegan diet is "clinically proven to reverse heart disease". The study in question included many other interventions such as aerobic exercise, stress management, quitting smoking, caloric restriction (weight loss) and sugar avoidance. Simply attributing this to diet is extremely dishonest. And the diet wasn't even vegan, but whole-food plant-based.
Historically, humans are obligate omnivores. There has never been a culture that was able to survive without animal foods. Humans have been cooking meat for nearly 2 million years, which is what caused their brain to develop. Synthetic Vitamin B12 has only been around since the 1940s and eating poop was absolutely not common practice.
An ideal vegan diet can never be better than an ideal omnivorous diet because the omnivorous diet could always look the exact same - but has the opportunity to include other beneficial foods.
A diet is not healthy just because it contains the bare minimum nutrients to survive. By that logic, you could claim that gulping Monster Energy is healthy because it covers your Vitamin B12 needs. Many non-essential nutrients, e.g. Creatine or extra Protein, have proven health benefits.
Veganism on it's own is sufficient to get you diagnosed for an eating disorder. (ARFID)
Vegans are antivaxxers because vaccines are not vegan. And just like meat, they're unnecessary to live.
Vegans support and rely on an industry that has a reputation of selling snake oil and spiking their products with drugs. Vitamin B supplements were tainted with anabolic steroids in the past.
Vegans follow a least-harm fallacy. Pest control is responsible for many agonizing animal deaths, but 1-2 cows can feed a human for a year. It is not proven that crop agriculture causes less suffering/deaths per calorie than livestock. Animal feed is not responsible for these deaths because:
it is food that humans can't consume and is much less regulated.
animals are fed left-overs, crop failures or byproducts that don't fulfill human consumption standards.
Big-game (e.g. Elk) hunting is likely what causes the least nutrition-related animal deaths and saves their species. If you really care about animal lives, there's no contradiction in killing them.
Perhaps the most hypocritical thing is comparing livestock to slaves when vegans are more dependent on human slavery. Many of the nuts, beans, grains, garlics and sugarcane products they have to consume to make up for micronutrients in animal products (Zinc, Selenium, Iron, B6, ... ) are to a large extent imported child labor goods. And so is the cotton they usually wear. Only very few vegan products are Fair Trade certified. Those claiming that "real vegans don't support slavery" or "livestock eat those, too" are free to look up their personal slavery footprint and compare it to a diet based on meat, eggs and dairy. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Well-treated (non-intensive) farm animals live better and sometimes longer lives than animals in the wild. They receive food, shelter, protection from predators, low stress and a quick death. One could hypothesize that humans care about livestock because they eat them. If keeping pigs for food is exploitation, then so is owning dogs for comfort.
The videos of "tortured" animals are often staged or misrepresentations of industry standards. For example, the kicking of cows being dragged on a rope is actually a spinal reflex. They're supposed to be shot with a bolt gun before that point.
Sexual coercion (what vegans call "rape") is actually a normal thing among animals and only controversial when it comes to humans. Cows don't even care about being artificially inseminated, in fact it's more comfortable than being pounded by a 3.000 lbs bull - which is a reason why it's being done. Human needs can't always be translated into animals.
Veganism is a privilege. A usual argument is that meat consumption correlates with income. And as true as that is, it doesn't reflect the vegan demographic as voluntary veganism exclusively exists in first-world societies. No, lower-class Indians are not vegan, they're vegetarian - and they also have a very poor life expectancy.
Livestock use is indispensable in developing countries. Although unheard of in nations with sufficient meat consumption, malnutrition accounts for 54% of child mortality worldwide. A quick google search of "malnourished baby" will inform you that this is also a hot topic regarding veganism.
The "feed the planet" rationale is flawed because it ignores the fact that first-world countries are oversupplied in food and don't grow anymore: 97% of population growth happens in developing countries. This growth is primarily thought to be caused by poverty and child labor. The largest sector of third-world child labor is crop agriculture, which - you guessed it - veganism thrives on (cf. Ethics). As these countries already (have to) follow a plant-based diet, going vegan on a large scale would accomplish nothing but hinder their developement and therefore increase overpopulation.
It's not common procedure for cattle to be supplemented with B12. Ruminants' gut bacteria produce B12 and all they need for it is cobalt. B12 is only in the soil because ruminants poop there, which makes them important for soil health. The "90% of B12 supplements go to livestock"-figure...
is bullshit that vegans keep on parroting. It originates from an article calling humans herbivores.
doesn't quantify how many animals are actually given B12.
doesn't make much sense because cows can usually be supplemented cobalt directly instead of B12 (which is made from cobalt). Their gut flora also destroys most of synthetic B12.
Livestock is not a significant greenhouse factor. Look up any chart on GHGs and you'll see that total agriculture is usually around 10-15%. Animal agriculture is about half of that and unlike fossil fuels, cows play a role in the carbon cycle. Most animal products are produced in-country and therefore don't take much fuel to transport. This is not true for permanent crops.
Over 70% of pollution comes from 100 large companies. Fossil fuel producers pay money to blame the general public. The vegan movement is a tool for them to deflect the issue.
Veganism is not the best use of land either. While it is much better than our current practices, the most efficient scenarios have been modeled to be vegetarian and omnivorous.
Water usage is yet another example of vegan lying. The water footprint is divided into green (sourced from precipitation) and blue (sourced from the surface). Water scarcity depends on blue water use. Crop products generally have a smaller total footprint, but they are more dependent on blue water. Livestock predominantly needs green water and can be kept without any blue water at all. On top of that, a dishonest comparison between foods is usually made, e.g. 1kg of beef (2600 kcal, 260g protein, meat with highest water use) vs 1kg of tomatoes (180 kcal, 9g protein, crop with lowest water use).
According to the Vegan Society definition, simply excluding animal products (which is how vegans define themselves) does not make you vegan - and being vegan does not mean you exclude animal products. In fact, you can even call the Inuit vegans.
Excluding animal products does not make you unreliant on animal use. Many crops are dependent on cultivated honeybees. While natural pollinators are better at pollination, they don't/can't exist in large enough numbers to support modern agriculture. If honey isn't vegan, then neither are almonds.
If insects don't have moral value and it's fine to kill them with pesticides, then it would surely also be fine to farm them for human consumption.
Refraining from animal products is not even an efficient way to follow the vegan philosophy (reduce animal suffering & lower environmental impact). It's an investment of time, research and money that could be used in a better way and even then is still not guaranteed to work towards it's goal because it values purity over outcome. The aggressive, absolutist mentality is what makes veganism unsustainable and inefficient because Perfect is the enemy of good. The ideology shifts the focus away from approaches that are actually productive such as buying local, seasonal, from small farms or supporting regenerative agriculture. Prioritizing a belief-based system over objectively useful methods makes you wasteful with your resources.
No true Scotsman: "No true vegan eats cashews, avocados, garlics, fake meat, supports monoculture, drives a car, has an iPhone or owns a cat ..."
Definist fallacy: "... as far as is possible and practicable."
Special pleading: "It's never ethical to harm animals for food, except when pesticides slowly kill them over 3 days so I can feel morally superior by eating grains."
Nirvana fallacy: "We don't need to improve farm conditions because everyone can just go vegan instead."
Nirvana fallacy: "Vegetarians are useless. Go vegan."
(Burden of proof): "We can't prove that veganism won't make you ill, but you can't prove the opposite. Fucking go vegan already."
Moralistic fallacy: "Eating meat harms animals and the environment, therefore we don't need it."
Loaded question: "Why do you eat meat when it's not necessary?"
False analogy: "Dogs are also animals, you wouldn't eat your dog either."
Straw man: "So you're saying rape is justified because it feels good?"
False dilemma: "Factory farming is worse than no animal farming, so we should stop all animal farming."
False dilemma: "Producing only livestock is less sustainable than producing only crops, so we should only produce crops."
Appeal to authority: "Vegan diets are healthy for everyone because [X health organization] says so."
Correlation/Causation: "Red meat consumption correlates to cancer. So it's proven that meat causes cancer."
Anecdotal evidence: "I've been vegan for 200 years and never took any supplements."
Tu quoque: "Yeah, because no omni baby has ever died of malnutrition." (In response to the weekly news of vegan infant abuse)
Texas sharpshooter fallacy and Appeal to bias: "Here is a cherrypicked study that proves [X animal product] is bad for you. All those contradicting meta-analyses are funded by the livestock industry so let's ignore them."
Appeal to novelty: "Our fad is up to date with science. Veganism is the future."
False equivalence: "You can get all nutrients from supplements. Getting all nutrients is the same as having a healthy diet."
Appeal to emotion: Usage of words exclusive to humans (rape, murder, slavery, ... ) in the context of animals.
Proof by example: "Some people can seemingly live without meat. Therefore, everyone can live without meat."
Fallacy of composition: "Veganism aims to reduce animal suffering. Reducing animal suffering is good, therefore veganism as a whole is good."
List of nutrients that vegans either can't get at all or often lack without supplementation. Coincidentally, a lot of them are related to mental health.
Vitamin B12
Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxal, Pyridoxamine)
Retinol (also Vitamin A)
Niacin (bio availability)
Vitamin D
Vitamin D3
Vitamin K2
Creatine
Carnitine
Carnosine
Taurine
Iron (bio availability)
CoQ10
CLA
Cholesterol
Omega-3 (EPA/DHA)
Zinc (bio availability)
Iodine
Calcium
Selenium