An Alternative Theory for My “Vegan Brain Fog”

When I used to follow vegan blogs more closely, I would sometimes notice when a normally prolific blogger suddenly wouldn’t post for a long time. Of course the most likely explanation was that life got in the way, but there was another possibility that would occur to me – maybe they stopped blogging because they finally hit the inevitable vegan breaking point and went back to eating animal products. So then sometimes when I would stop blogging for a while, I would wonder if there were any vegans theorizing that I stopped blogging because I realized how wrong it is to eat animals and went back to veganism.

That’s not why I’ve mostly stopped blogging here. Mainly I just had a lot less time and also thought I should at least try to get paid for my writing, and maybe write about a wider variety of things. However, if someone did think to theorize that maybe something had changed in my attitude about some aspects of veganism, they wouldn’t be entirely off base. I’ve been meaning to post about that for a while, and finally over the summer I decided I kind of had the time to stop putting it off. I put it off some more anyway. And then a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, ablest, Islamophobic narcissistic rapist was elected the next president of the United States, and it felt like it was time to get this over with and move onto other things.

Previously, when people would ask me why I quit veganism, I would always say that it was for health reasons. If they wanted me to elaborate, I would talk about being brain fogged and depressed at the end of my nine years of an animal-product-free diet. My mind felt like mush a lot of the time, and I was all but indifferent about living. But now, if someone were to ask me why I quit veganism back then, I would have to be a little more precise. I would say something more like, “I was feeling brain fogged and horribly depressed, and I became convinced that veganism was the cause of that.”

I would put it this way because I no longer am so convinced that veganism had much to do with it. This is not to say I think veganism is the best possible diet for me, or even that it is just as good as all other options I have – just that the main symptoms I was reacting to when I thought I needed to eat animal products again probably had little or nothing to do with veganism.

In a blog post called “The History of My Diet,” I meticulously described all the significant moves in my eating habits up until I quit veganism, and a couple of years beyond. I wrote that post because I’d gone back to eating animal products for health reasons, and I guess I still felt a little weird and insecure about it, and thought it was important to list everything I had ever eaten in my entire life as a sort of explanation. Silly as it may have been, the post came in handy later on when I started to question the veganism/brain fog connection.

Where “The History of My Diet” starts to get interesting for me now is, “Fall of 2006 - Summer of 2007,” which starts a little over a year before the November 2007 climax when I quit veganism. Here are the significant bits:

I become a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op, which has good produce and vegan products for cheap. I drink a lot of kombucha now that it’s reasonably priced. This is when I become aware of having chronic brain fog. I’m always tired and sluggish, my thinking isn’t as sharp as it used to be, and I’m generally depressed. To fight this, I overcome my fear of caffeine and get into coffee, which my roommate assures me is healthy as long as it’s black. It helps. I try not to drink it too much, but whenever I don’t, brain fog.

Nothing too interesting happens in Summer 2007, so let’s skip to “Fall of 2007 - Winter of 2007.” Again, the most significant parts:

My roommate…raised vegetarian and now an ex-vegan, has been following the “evolutionary fitness” model (a version of the Paleolithic diet). He looks healthier than I’ve ever seen him, which is hard for me to ignore while I’m feeling worse than ever. He’s been talking up meat and bashing starch for a while now, and his arguments coupled with how awful I feel start to make sense.

At this point in the story, I become worried that veganism is to blame for my poor health. I try to make a more paleo style veganism work, but it doesn’t, and eventually I succumb to animal products and feel better.

I see now that I got a significant detail wrong in “The History of My Diet.” The start of my coffee drinking should have been later, under “Fall of 2007 - Winter of 2007,” around the time my roommate and best friend was getting into “evolutionary fitness.” I know this because his coffee peer pressure was inspired by the dietary regime of Art De Vany, the fitness guru who was one of the earlier paleo diet advocates, and it wasn’t until the summer or fall of 2007 that De Vany started dominating our discussions. The coffee being healthy “as long as it’s black” was a reference to De Vany’s belief that humans were not designed to drink milky coffee.

For those of you not old enough to remember the paleo diet, one of its distinctive claims was that the majority of human evolution took place in environments that are totally at odds with most aspects of modern living, and we could be a lot healthier if we adjusted our diets and behavior to better match the expectations encoded in our DNA. In De Vany’s interpretation, obeying our genes’ commands meant avoiding grains, legumes and restricting dairy, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and animal products. It also meant frequent bursts of intensive exercise, and coffee – one of the neolithic exceptions that De Vany saw as a welcome development. Light beer was another of these welcome developments, which I assume is because De Vany really liked light beer.

As a vegan for ethical reasons with macrobiotic leanings, there wasn’t much for me in all this, though I appreciated the anti-dairy angle. Still, my friend’s enthusiasm inspired me to test out its few vegan elements that I wasn’t already doing – namely drinking black coffee and sprinting in the park. (In retrospect, that sprinting might not have been vegan, since I was almost certainly stomping insects. I guess the coffee wouldn’t have been vegan either, for similar reasons.)

At the same time, my friend was telling me some of De Vany’s more specific nutritional arguments, most of which clashed with veganism. In paleo discourse, veganism is often framed as one of the most egregious violations of our inherited nutritional requirements, so it’s a frequent punching bag for paleo defenders, including De Vany. A 2010 blog comment from De Vany to a vegan interested in evolutionary fitness sums up De Vany’s stance: “You could live AS a vegan, but you can never BE one. It is not in your genes or your metabolism to be other than a omnivorous carnivore because meat is where the dense nutrients and energy were trapped on the savanna. … You are walking a tightrope.”

I’m not sure why I would have misplaced the start of my coffee drinking in my otherwise fairly meticulous timeline, but to make sure I wasn’t misremembering now, I searched my gmail archives for “coffee,” looking for the earliest reference I could find to me drinking it. That turned out to be October 29, 2007, a little less than a month before I quit veganism: “I’m drinking coffee now,” I wrote my girlfriend at the time, “so I will certainly be up way later.”

The other thing I turned up in my coffee Gmail search was something I wrote a few days after quitting veganism. Someone who had always known me as a vegan had emailed to wish me a “Happy Tofurky Day” in late November 2007. I wrote back to her that as of a few days ago I no longer celebrated Tofurky Day, and explained why: “I’d started to be really bothered by how sleepy and non-energetic I’ve been. Any day where I wasn’t sleepy was unusual. I got into coffee and white tea, which would help every day that I drank them, but I didn’t like the idea of having to rely on them, and be living in a fog any day I wasn’t drinking them. That made me a sitting duck for a diet that [my roommate] has been trying for a while which has seemed to make him much more energetic. He reads this blog about ‘evolutionary diet and nutrition,’ which advocates a diet consisting of no grains or beans, but rather vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs and nuts (to the extent that he can eat nuts, since he’s allergic to everything but almonds). He is always talking about it, and I didn’t give it much thought, but eventually his arguments started to make sense.”

Any guesses what my alternative theory is?

A couple of years ago, when I moved into a housing co-op in Austin, one of the housemates asked if I wanted to buy into his “kombucha club.” If I helped pay for the ingredients and his time, I could drink home brewed kombucha. I love kombucha, but I turned him down. Kombucha has caffeine! I knew that once I started drinking it, I would need a steady amount every day to avoid withdrawal. There wouldn’t be enough kombucha for that, so I’d have needed to start drinking straight up tea again to make up the difference, and to drink just the right amount of tea to perfectly match the amount of caffeine I’d started getting from the kombucha. Even then I would be likely to have some grogginess and headaches. It didn’t seem worth the hassle.

I somehow got inspired to give caffeine another chance this year, and I bought a large box of decaffeinated white tea, thinking that a decaffeinated version of the supposedly least caffeinated tea (whether it actually is the least caffeinated tea is controversial and apparently depends) wouldn’t cause me any problems. My plan was to use one packet of this tea a week, on Tuesdays. I’d returned to school and had one three-hour metaethics class in the early afternoon on Tuesdays. I thought the small amount of caffeine in one or two steepings of a single bag of decaffeinated white tea would be just enough to make me slightly more alert, without making me feel worse the next day or day after. Nothing about this plan worked. The tea never made me feel better, but it did later make me feel worse. I gave up after three weeks.

One thing I didn’t know about myself when I started drinking kombucha and then coffee and white tea in that last year of being vegan is that I am ridiculously sensitive to caffeine. I had mostly tried to avoid caffeine since giving up soda as a teenager and I didn’t know about the variety of reactions to it, like that some people can drink it as a pleasant hobby and others become instant addicts. My roommate was in the former camp – he could drink coffee all day one day and none the next without it destroying him – and I assumed I could drink caffeine haphazardly too. The other thing I didn’t know is that caffeine withdrawal symptoms could be something other than piercing headaches – like, say, depression, existential dread and a near inability to think.

(I was reminded of these symptoms last year when my girlfriend at the time decided to give up coffee, thinking it would be better for her throat. By the next day or day after she went cold turkey, she couldn’t get out of bed because she was so overwhelmed with feelings that everything was horrible and hopeless and nothing mattered. I was eventually able to convince her this was caffeine withdrawal and not her new reality. She broke her coffee fast and instantly felt better.)

So, at the same time I was feeling awful because I didn’t realize I needed to drink a consistent amount of caffeine a day or none at all, my ex-vegan best friend was telling me the way humans evolved ruled out veganism as a potentially healthy diet. In what now seems to me a tellingly peculiar coincidence, it’s around this time that veganism began blatantly failing me. As I was hearing about the dietary tightrope I was walking by disobeying genetic fate, I happened to be feeling more miserable than ever. I was feeling so bad at that point that the “arguments started to make sense.”

That’s when internet searching led me to a blog called Beyond Vegetarianism, which featured stories of people who had given up veganism for health reasons, and painted evolution-guided eating in a favorable light. The site tipped me off to a vegan physician who was studying the phenomenon of “failure to thrive” on a vegan diet. “I’m one of these vegans who is failing to thrive,” I thought. Then I read the chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which Michael Pollan tries vegetarianism, can’t hack it, goes back to eating meat, and says that that’s okay. “I’m in an omnivore’s dilemma,” I realized. And so I made my attempted escape from this dilemma by resigning myself to my omnivorous fate and quitting veganism. Not too long afterward, a former vegan named Lierre Keith published a book called The Vegetarian Myth with her own story of vegan misery, which made me even more confident that veganism had been the problem. That’s when I started writing this blog.

At some point after that I learned the origin tale of Jack Norris RD, which I took as still more confirmation: he is a vegan activist who became a dietitian after encountering a lot of ex-vegans through his activism. Some of these ex-vegans had started eating animal products again for health reasons.

With health undermining so many attempts at giving up animal products, it was easy to see myself as just another one of those those cases.

Now it’s not so easy.

In “The History of My Diet,” I illustrated the addition of coffee into my diet with a photo of a cup of coffee, and the name I gave that file was “Brain Fog Deterrent.” Um… deterrent? I confused the culprit for the cure. When I wrote “The History of My Diet,” I thought I had been drinking coffee to escape the vegan brain fog that had suddenly hit me after years of veganism – nature’s punishment for my arrogant rebellion against evolutionarily preordained omnivorous fate. But much more likely to me now is that I was drinking coffee to escape the caffeine withdrawal that I was suffering from my inconsistent kombucha, white tea and coffee habits.

This may sound bizarre to people who have no problems with caffeine, but a prolonged caffeine withdrawal that you have no idea is caffeine withdrawal (and which you keep extending because you do not know this) can make you not want to live.

“I drink a lot of kombucha now that it’s reasonably priced. This is when I become aware of having chronic brain fog.” The connection seems obvious to me right now, but when I first started drinking caffeine, the only withdrawal symptom I knew about was headaches. And It’s possible that in Fall of 2006 - Summer of 2007, I didn’t think of kombucha as a caffeinated drink at all. Apparently, GT’s Kombucha, the brand I was drinking most, used to advertise itself as caffeine free because they thought fermentation destroyed all the caffeine. Now they say there’s less caffeine in kombucha than in the original tea before fermentation, but even that’s disputed.

At some point after I quit veganism, I did recognize that inconstant caffeine consumption would turn my brain into mush on withdrawal days. I quit caffeine for a while around the time I quit veganism – or at least, that’s what I gather from that email I found – but at some point after that I got back into coffee and drank it consistently for a while. When I was doing this, I would wake up very early every morning with a headache, which I would then cure with coffee. I eventually decided that as much as I loved caffeine while I was drinking it, it wasn’t worth the pain when I wasn’t. I went through an intentional, self-aware caffeine withdrawal that was around two weeks of agony – and the symptoms weren’t just headaches. But I somehow managed not to connect this with the reason I left veganism. I put “vegan brain fog misery” and “caffeine withdrawal misery” in separate boxes, and it was only more recently when I felt the brain fog again without knowing how to categorize it that I realized both felt the same.

The short version of that story is I was inexplicably brain fogged for a day and a half – I could barely stay awake or think at all, and was suddenly depressed – and as I was trying to figure out what was going on, I thought, “This feels like vegan brain fog or caffeine withdrawal.” I wasn’t vegan, so it couldn’t be that. Then I realized I’d had caffeine a couple of days earlier. The mystery solved, I was left feeling unsettled that I couldn’t distinguish between vegan brain fog and caffeine withdrawal when I didn’t know the cause. And then I remembered that veganism failed me around the same time I was drinking a lot of caffeinated stuff in random doses and learning about evolution’s exclusively non-vegan plans for me.

So that’s the new theory. There is at least one loose end in it. Why did I feel better once I started eating animal products if it wasn’t veganism that was making me feel bad? Did I time my last cup of coffee or tea just right so that my caffeine withdrawal lifted as I was biting into the fish? That would be difficult to believe, but I wasn’t lying when I said I felt better soon after eating animal products. Other ex-vegans have this sensation of feeling great after eating meat for the first time in a while. Some vegans chalk this up to the placebo effect, but I’ve always been skeptical of that explanation, and still am.

One reason is that I’ve experienced that feeling great surge multiple times since I first gave up veganism, and whenever I do, it always seems to correlate with breaking a mostly vegan or vegetarian diet for some kind of animal flesh. The most recent repeat of this was in the summer of this year. I hadn’t (and still haven’t) been a lot of eating animal products since late February, but a few months ago I was offered a supposedly freegan hunk of rare steak. I noticed the same sort of tingly rush as I was eating it that I felt when I was first quitting veganism, even though I wasn’t expecting anything like that.

This time, though, I felt like the importance of this sensation might be overstated. The sensation was relatively fleeting, and it’s not that I felt kind of tired and weak, and then I ate this steak and felt normal. Rather, I felt good and normal, and then as I was eating the steak (and a little while afterward) I felt great – and then pretty soon I felt normal again. And I know I can’t replicate that feeling every time I’m eating meat when I’m eating it regularly. I do, however, sometimes notice that I feel generally better while eating animal products than when I’m not. This summer I was being a bivalvegan, and it was obvious that I felt better while eating a plate of mussels than while eating a Daiya fake cheese covered gluten-free pizza. (Which may not be the most fair comparison.)

I don’t really know what to make of the meat rush sensation, but I do think it’s real. If you’ve been feeling mediocre or worse, and then suddenly you feel great right after eating meat, you might start discovering problems with veganism too.

As for the timing of my caffeine withdrawal/vegan brain fog possibly lifting around the time I first took a bite into animal products – it seems incredibly unlikely that the timing could have been so precise. But judging by my Tofurkey Day response, it does seem like I basically traded caffeine for animal products around that time, so maybe it did roughly go something like that.

If the new theory about my brain fog is right, it doesn’t mean there are no health benefits to eating some animal products, or that other people are wrong to leave veganism for their health, but it does mean that my quitting veganism was based primarily on a mistake. The mistake that changed my life, and likely the lives of some others too, was thinking the brain fog came before the caffeine rather than after.

Let them drink herbal tea.