Women’s Health Magazine has recently published an article speculating that going vegetarian could make women go “out of their minds.” According to this article, while some women can be veg with no problem, others must eat some “animal protein,” be it the flesh of dismembered animals (including fishes) or their manipulated and stolen bodily fluids. Otherwise, they claim, their mental health is at risk.

Confirmation Bias

After my initial four-word reaction – what the actual f*ck? – I quickly remembered something I've learned from writing various earnest articles about why veganism is an urgent social justice issue, many of which took months to complete, and then spending half a day quickly penning a satirical piece “Our Vegan Diet Almost Killed Us – No, Really.” Guess which piece went viral with well over half a million views and over a thousand comments? Yep. The one with the anthropocentric title appearing to be anti-vegan.

Most people who have been raised to believe they are entitled to exploit certain animals for their pleasure and convenience (as I once did) are NOT looking for reasons to stop doing so. People hate change and they don’t like to acknowledge contributing to the misery of others. They are more often looking for ammunition to not go vegan, despite all the undeniable ethical, environmental, health, and humanitarian reasons to do so, which are piling up by the minute these days. In publishing this article, Women’s Health is simply baiting people with confirmation of the pro-meat bias most of their writers, readers, and advertisers share and that will get them lots of views, because more views make their advertisers happy and everyone makes more money. So far, it's working; CBS news is even reporting on the article.

Seeing as vegans are still in the (rapidly-growing) minority, it’s not hard to find people willing to speculate on the myth that some special people must eat “animal protein,” including the psychologist they interviewed. (And here are a million reasons why the go-to anti-veg gal Lierre Keith, references in the piece, is full of the same bullshit that is polluting our waterways more than all other industries combined per Greenpeace.)