Is Veganism Unhealthy?

A case study of a poorly planned vegan diet

An increasingly popular trend in the vegan community has been the onslaught of vegan YouTubers with sizable followings deciding to change their diets.

Over the last few months, a number of popular figures have left veganism including Bonny Rebecca, Kalel, and Rawvana to name a few.

All of these creators made videos outlining the many reasons why they are no longer vegan, breaking the news to their followers and triggering a slew of responses from other YouTubers analyzing their reasoning.

The most recent addition to this group and the most personally shocking is Alyse Brautigam of RawAlignment. Brautigam posted a video on March 18th explaining to her 781K (and falling) subscribers why she has decided to begin eating meat and eggs after five years following a series of restrictive vegan diets.

As a follower of Alyse since I went vegan almost three years ago, I was floored by this news. Although she was not necessarily an “inspiration” per se, her channel was one of the first few that I found after beginning my vegan journey.

I never expected her to be apart of the group as in the past she has hosted a webinar about how to pursue veganism and seemed extremely devoted to the lifestyle.

Alyse cites longterm health issues as the reason for this change in her diet. She explains that she had been suffering from migraine headaches, chronic sinus congestion, brain fog, memory loss, extreme appetite loss, and inability to communicate properly or articulate herself, which have all had an understandably negative effect on her wellbeing.

These are issues that she has evidently faced for a number of years but were considerably worse in the last few months. She claims that these issues are as a result of her “external environment that had toxic mold in it”, referencing her time living in Hawaii.

Following the discovery of this external factor, she became very interested in finding any solution to this issue, leading her to eventually leave Hawaii. After this move, she noticed an improvement in a number of her symptoms except for the brain fog and issues with communicating.

Months later after believing she was mostly healed of her symptoms Alyse returned to Hawaii to visit a friend and was disappointed to find that her physical symptoms returned in about “15 minutes.” As before, these symptoms were attributed to her assumed sensitivity to mold resulting from Hawaii’s damp environment.

While in Hawaii and continuing to experience symptoms some of her friends shared with her that they had recently changed their diets (I would assume from a vegan diet to diets including animal products, but this is not made clear) and had experienced positive changes in their digestive and brain health.

Alyse discusses prior research that she had done into alternative medicine choices to help the brain such as ways to improve “mitochondrial functioning and repairing or replacing damaged neurons and glial cells.”

Much of this research had led her to believe that grass-fed beef and salmon would help accomplish these ends (no reputable scientific sources were found to back up her claims.) One can assume that these conversations with trusted friends encouraged her previous inclination to turn back to animals foods.

Following this visit to Hawaii upon returning home Alyse continued to feel the negative symptoms that were brought on by being reintroduced to the environment that she believed caused these issues.

This was the final straw, as she explains that one night she decided to eat 8 oz. of salmon to test out the claims found in her alternative medicine research and the assumed experiences of her friends.

Miraculously, the next morning after eating the salmon she felt better — “zero congestion, and zero brain fog, zero migraines, zero lack of clarity, I felt the best that I had in probably like 3 years.” After one night of eating salmon.

This was the first dietary changes that had improved her health although she has tried many over the years as she says “I lived on a fruit farm and tried to eat raw vegan…switched back to cooked vegan food, I tried high carb low fat, low-fat high carb, juice fasting, water fasting, all the things.”

From this point in the video on, Brautigam continues to explain that this dietary choice has helped her greatly and that she understands that many may disagree but it is her choice in continuing her health journey and she hopes everyone supports her.