Going Vegan
I remember distinctly a moment at a dinner party, after 6 months of experimenting with eating vegan, stating emphatically to my friends that being vegan felt so good, I couldn’t imagine ever eating another way.
This was at a point when I had learned to mostly manage my migraines, but prior to discovering Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis. I was on a quest to heal my migraines for good, and going vegan seemed like a worthwhile approach. Some research had given me the idea that a vegan diet might be the missing piece to my migraine puzzle.
Eating vegan didn’t feel like a deprivation, it felt like a revelation: it was fun to be incentivized, through self-imposed limitation of certain food groups, to discover a whole new cornucopia of recipes previously unexplored.
While vegan, I felt an emotional/moral lightness of being that came from stepping consciously away from what is a horrific and disgusting practice we have culturally of overcrowding animals and treating them cruelly to extract protein and dairy. At the same time, I experienced the weight of the rather hard-to-avoid sense of superiority and judgement that eating entirely plant-based imbues when interacting with carnivorous or omnivorous friends and family.
Giving up dairy was even more gratifying than giving up meat. I had recently gone through two years of breastfeeding my son and that experience left me with a somatic understanding of over-extraction of the Divine Feminine that really tugged at my heartstrings when I thought about Sacred Mama Cows being pumped dry for our cheesy and creamy indulgences.
And of course, the environmental impact of our factory farmed meat and dairy is another great incentive to stop eating animal products. There are many documentaries exploring this issue (some of them in a very biased way), and these made a big impression on me as I considered how to eat. Take a look at these aerial images here of the blood and waste cesspools that accumulate in areas with large factory farms. These huge cysts upon our beloved Mama Gaia’s body are a sure sign we need to change how we eat.
Finally, not eating animal products was healthy for me on a cellular level, acting as a metabolic reset with such a greatly reduced input of acidifying and mucous-forming foods. My experiment with going vegan acted as a sort of cleanse, one which my body needed.
Why I Stopped Being Vegan
I am a huge fan of experimentation, and found my foray into vegan eating truly beneficial. When I stopped, due to the preponderance of nutritional information I came across suggesting to me that going vegan was not evolutionarily aligned with my actual nutritional needs, I remember how very intense it was to eat meat again.
Plant eaters inevitably have lower levels of stomach acid, both from the reduction in consumption of zinc needed to produce stomach acid, and from the reduced need for such strong stomach acid (since plants require much less acid to break down).
The heaviness of meat, combined with having shifted my frame of reference for how to eat, meant that as I transitioned out of veganism I hit a really nice sweet spot where I was still eating mostly plant-based with a small infusion of animal protein.
Years later, I now eat more meat and dairy than I ever have – all of it very high quality and humane, since we raise, slaughter, and butcher lamb and rabbit on our homestead.
We source our eggs and raw organic grassfed milk from a small, 5th generation creamery up the road from our home. We get salmon from the nearby general store that’s caught by the owner’s relatives in Alaska, and we also fish in nearby rivers.
Participating directly in the procurement of our animal protein and investing in local farmers requires humility, respect, and hard work which in turn ensures appreciation and enhanced awareness while eating animal products.
So I’ve come full circle here. I now supplement a vegan diet with the consumption of vegan animals. And I’d like to share more with you about why I believe my vegan experiment was so valuable but ultimately, not my holy grail – and why a long-term vegan diet can be difficult on the body from a nutritional standpoint, especially if you are simultaneously dealing with a chronic inflammatory condition like migraine.
Benefits of Vegan Eating
It’s clear there are huge benefits to vegan or plant-based eating aside from the ethical and environmental issues. If done properly, a plant-based diet has benefits that mostly come from the increased intake of:
- fiber
- hydrating fruits and vegatables
- antioxidants and bioflavonoids
- electrolytes like potassium and magnesium
Such a diet, because it reduces the intake of acidifying proteins and mucous-forming foods, is incredibly beneficial for maintaining a more alkaline body pH and supporting lymphatic health – but ONLY if the meat and dairy is not replaced with excessive nuts, highly processed plant-based foods like chips or soymilk, or reliance on too much bread and pasta.
Likely Nutrient Deficiencies in Vegan Diets
Aside from the excessive eating of nuts, bread and pasta, the main nutritional limitations of a vegan diet come from the huge reduction in access to the following nutrients:
- B12
Mostly absent in vegan diets, but easy to supplement. - K2
Different from K1 from leafy greens. Needed to help get calcium to the right places which improves cardiovascular health. Migraine is a cardiovascular disease. Also acts as a major antioxidant and improves functioning of nerve conduction. - Zinc
Available in some plant foods, notably in pumpkin seeds, but in much lower doses than in animal products. May also be bound to phytic acid in plants. Zinc has many functions, but in low doses it will affect the body’s ability to convert beta carotene into retinol, which is needed to make copper bioavailable via ceruloplasmin. - Vitamin A as Retinol
Needed to make copper bioavailable via ceruloplasmin. Ceruloplasmin brings iron into cells and thus affects ATP production. - Certain amino acids like tryptophan and glycine
Getting these amino acids is important for migraineurs because migraine is often caused by imbalances in the serotonin system, which tryptophan is a precursor of. Glycine is a critical amino acid for helping to reduce glutamate toxicity and increase GABA for better brain health. - Iron
Iron can be acquired from plant foods but not in heme form. Although 40% of iron in animal products is in nonheme form, animal products definitely have more bioavailable sources of iron. Further, iron is made bioavailable with the help of retinol, which vegans don’t get in their diet.
Being Vegan with Migraine
Many people can live on a vegan diet for an extended period of time and appear to be relatively healthy. However, embarking on or maintaining a vegan diet if you are already sick is an entirely different ballgame.
It is easy to see by looking at the previous list of nutrietns above that not eating animal products containing the them will have an impact on the body’s ability to maintain a healthy cardiovascular and nervous system, break down histamine, regulate serotonin and GABA, and efficiently produce ATP.
It is my view that while a diet that is composed mostly of plants is optimal, a vegan diet is not optimal for those suffering from chronic health conditions. This is because while it is theoretically possible for beta carotene to be converted into retinol in the body (for example), the number of enzymatic steps and other nutrients needed to complete that process is often not working efficiently if your body has a high load of inflammation and toxicity. Inflammation alone is one cause of compromised enzyme function, even in the presence of sufficient nutrition.
Because most migraineurs have problems both with absorption, assimilation, and retention of minerals and vitamins, as well as deficiencies caused by these imbalances, a vegan diet will be overall depleting and counterproductive over the long-term.
So How Best to Eat for Optimal Nutrition to Prevent Migraine?
I believe that ideological eating and excessive restriction of any food group is an eventual setup for ill health, even while it can be hugely beneficial to experiment with different food philosophies or eliminate certain foods temporarily to gain better insight into how they affect our bodies when we re-integrate them.
In my own coaching practice, I’ve seen that vegan eaters respond more slowly to nutritional balancing and often have a harder time finding creative ways to get nutrients from foods that they don’t want to supplement.
Migraineurs already have many food intolerances, food limitations, and nutritional deficiencies. A vegan diet can either temporarily alleviate some of those issues, or it can exacerbate them. Ultimately, I think eating in a way that is able to integrate all food groups is the healthiest.
It comes down to finding high quality sources of especially animal foods, not eating too much of any one food group, not relying overly much on animal foods at the expense of plants, and eating foods in good combination with their nutritional properties and your own mineral status in mind.
Because most people no longer grow, raise, procure, or seasonally harvest their own food, we are all either naturally confused about how to eat, or our certainty is coming from mental/intellectual/ideological reasoning.
I like what Dr. Joel D. Wallach has to say about trying to find the optimal diet in his book “Rare Earths, Hidden Cures”:
After 30 years of frustrating crusades trying to get vegans to eat fish and eggs and carnivores to eat more vegetables, we came to the realization that we could not change significant numbers of zealots from any dietary or nutritional camp or philosophy to the middle ground, so we decided to find a universal concept that would be acceptable to all and at the same time accomplish the purpose of optimal individual nutrition that would get maximal numbers of people through the hoops necessary to fulfill their genetic potential of longevity (120-140 years). . . .
Whether you want to live that long or not, the point is that optimal nutrition can lead to enhanced vitality and therefore, a higher quality of life – whether now, or into old age.
What did Wallach come up with as his “middle ground”? What are the key areas that anyone would benefit from nutritionally, that neither vegans or omnivores are probably doing?
- Drastically reduce free radicals by removing all deep fried food, vegetable oils, salad dressings, and margarine.
- Balance blood sugar by going off all sugars – natural or refined, because “sugar loads increase the normal rate of mineral loss in sweat and urine by 300% for 12 hours“. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with this one 100%, as fruits are incredible lymphatic cleansers and also contain valuable minerals, but overall I think our mineral balance would be supported by a huge reduction in the consumption of sugary foods.
- Supplement with all 90 nutrients.
Eek. That last one is a bummer. Supplement 90 nutrients? How is that feasible, and how did people from cultures with incredible longevity manage that feat without supplementation?
Wallach’s answer: they were able to do so because they ate food high in colloidal minerals from mineral-rich soil which had been suffused with rock dust from glacial “milk” (mineral-rich glacial runoff). You can learn more about glacial milk in this article.
They got plenty of sunlight, they lived in areas where soil and rangeland were not depleted, and ate plants grown without synthetic fertilizers which inhibit uptake of minerals from soil.
Most importantly, they ate animals who also were well-nourished with mineral-rich grasses, and they ate the WHOLE animal. They didn’t bypass the vitamin C available in the adrenal glands, the CoQ10 available in the heart, all the vitamins and minerals in the liver. They ate the pituitary glands and the kidneys, the stomach and brains – and likely thought nothing of it.
How are we to get the 90 nutrients that Wallach says are essential?
I suggest we start with the following steps:
- Recognize that a vegan diet will not provide enough B12, zinc, K2, retinol or other amino acids, which means vegans would need to do more supplementation than omnivores to maintain nutritional balance.
- Colloidal minerals, which are an optimal form of mineral as compared to oxidized or chelated minerals supplements, can be acquired from fulvic and humic acids – and they also enhance the absorption of other nutrients.
- Build strong stomach acid and support liver health and bile flow: this alone will allow the minerals already in your food to be properly broken down and converted into colloidal minerals in your gut. Beneficial bacteria also help with that, and these bacteria also produce b-vitamins for us. Proper bile flow and liver health is essential for creating the optimal pH of the gut so that the right populations of beneficial bacteria can thrive.
- A good place to start in getting properly nourished with supplements would involve being sure to get: b vitamins (without the folic acid and with special emphasis on thiamine); the major electrolytes (calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium – according to your individual mineral profile); the building blocks of the major antioxidants NAD, SOD, and Glutathione (ie, copper, niacin, zinc, manganese, selenium, C); focused intake of the amino acids glycine and tryptophan especially; and ensuring a balance of the fat-soluble vitamins retinol, vitamin d, and vitamin K2 (with special emphasis on neglected K2).
These steps are surely enough to take on!
As always, minerals and vitamins should be supplemented with their dynamic relationships and your own metabolism and mineral status in mind. The exact ratios of the minerals mentioned here are best evaluated based on your own HTMA lab.
