Before I even decided to completely transition into veganism I spent almost all of my time watching documentaries on health and food and how the two are related. Documentaries like Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and Forks Over Knives suggest using food as medicine and maintaining a plant based diet to achieve optimal health. Both films follow a series of people pretty much completely curing all of their medical conditions with raw plant based diets.
Forks Over Knives' website contains many stories of how people have completely turned their lives around with a vegan diet- from any ailment such as diabetes to cancer to mental illness.
As someone who has dealt with more than a lifetime's worth of mental illness diagnoses- depression, panic…show more content… When I started researching all the benefits of a plant based diet for my mental health I was hit from all sides on whether or not a plant based diet is actually beneficial or if it could be harmful. More than a few articles I read linked a vegetable based, low meat vegetarian, or vegan diet to mental illnesses- from 15% to as high as 28% increased cases of reported mental health related symptoms (depression, anxiety, eating disorders, panic attacks, etc.,) It's easy to assume, when faced with numbers like that, that a vegan diet obviously causes these…show more content… Sure, I ate crap at the lowest point in my life, but I ate everything- including animal products. I know that diet affects how I feel and- physically- I feel pretty good. I feel better physically than I have in a long time.
Even on my dark days.
I'm not going to sit here and say that nobody has ever changed their mental health with a better diet, or that people don't exist that are sensitive to how their diet effects them mentally. Someone who is very dear to me is effected greatly by their diet and they live in such a way that keeps them mentally well and nourished.
What I'm trying to get at, with this entire post is: until a study comes out proving beyond any doubt and you know 100% more than anything that there is any relation between veganism and mental illness (or what causes mental illness in general), please refrain from trying to tell me (or any mentally ill person ever on this planet) what will or will not "cure" them or make them feel better. Especially if it's something as harmless to the universe as a cruelty free diet or minimalist
