Should Veganism Be a Public Health Priority?

 

Right off the bat, let’s get something straight – I am not a vegan. I followed a vegan diet for about eight years, but I’m not currently. 

However, as a public health epidemiologist, I’m starting to wonder if I should go back to veganism.

COVID-19, Avian flu, anthrax, mad cow disease, and swine flu are all diseases that have “spilled over” into humans from the animals we eat. 

With concern over Avian flu growing and the world still recovering from COVID, I’ve been wondering what long-term pandemic prevention would look like. And continued industrial farming isn’t part of that picture. 

A recent article in Nature found that industrial fur farming is a “viral highway” where numerous infectious diseases are circulating - diseases with pandemic potential.

Potentially pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, and parasites that could spread quickly and easily in humans and could cause significant sickness and death. With not much difference in the living conditions between animals held in fur farms and animals in the food system, this study finding should be a major red flag.  

In the US, industrial animal agriculture is huge. However, as the total amount of land used for farming in the US has decreased 25% since the 1950s, the number of animals on that land has increased exponentially. 

The US Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture found there were 10 million chickens, cows, turkeys, and pigs in the US food system in 2022. Some of these farms are so large that they push the limits of “factory farm” and should instead be categorized as “mega factory farms”. The concentration of those 10 million animals on smaller and smaller parcels of land is central to the danger industrial farming poses to public health. 

Capitalism is responsible for much of this, as it incentivizes the mistreatment of animals by demanding the most profit for the least amount of investment. In practice this means that farmers cram as many animals into their facilities as possible, feed them as cheaply as possible, and offer them as little veterinary care as possible. 

This system also drives deforestation to expand cattle grazing and livestock production. “Unproductive” wildlands are turned into “productive” farmland. However, as wild animals lose their habitat and sources of food, they are at risk for contracting infectious diseases. Those hungry animals are drawn towards industrial farms by the massive amounts of feed stored there.

On those farms, wild animals come into contact with captive animals that are in close proximity to each other, allowing infectious disease to spread quickly. In these close quarters, urine, feces, and other bodily fluids can become air borne and enter the respiratory systems of the humans working there. A worker can also become infected as they dispose of dead animals. A virus can also stick to surfaces that are frequently touched (called “fomites”) like coop doors, dairy equipment, feeding bins, and watering troughs.

In the worst-case scenario for a future pandemic, the manure run-off from commercial farms could contaminate the water supply and improperly prepared animal products could lead to infections in humans who drink the milk, eat the eggs or meat. 

Already, people living around factory farms in the US have gotten sick after their well water become contaminated with manure run-off. 

All of this sounds avoidable – wear PPE, wash your hands – however mega farms often put workers under sweatshop-like demands – understaffed and undocumented to save money, doing tasks too quickly in order to make money. 

In the US many of those undocumented workers lack access to healthcare. They also may live in barracks-style housing with other workers, meaning that even if the sick worker did stay home, they would still likely infect others who similarly lack healthcare. 

As the gears of capitalism turn, humans and animals alike are caught in the cogs. 

This brings me to my central question - Is veganism the solution? 

It’s unlikely that a virus like Avian flu could pass through cooked food, but the idea of reducing the demand for animal products to protect public health deserves some attention. 

Reduced demand in the fur trade due to changes in consumer purchasing habits has led to fewer fur producers, so why couldn’t reducing demand for other animal products like dairy, eggs, and meat also reduce the number of animals in captivity? 

What is veganism? 

Before advancing a veganism for public health, let’s ground the idea in the existing landscape of the vegan movement. 

Veganism broadly defined, is a diet, philosophy, and/or lifestyle where adherents do not consume any animal-derived product. This includes meat, dairy, eggs, honey, and gelatin, but can also include people who don’t wear leather, or use cosmetics that have animal or insect byproducts. 

There are multiple, intersecting, and even contradictory motivations behind deciding to go vegan. I loosely categorize vegans into four types based on that motivation: 

- Ethical vegans

- Environmental vegans 

- Health vegans 

- Spiritual vegans 

Ethical vegans are typically those that center the suffering and mistreatment of animals in their motives. These are the group commonly associated with PETA. In my experience, these are the vegans that seem to most commonly adhere to the lifestyle components of veganism rather than just the dietary restrictions. 

They purge their lives of all products that were tested on animals, remove all animal-derived textiles like leather shoes and couches, and may even forgo wearing the vegan alternatives like pleather because it can be indiscernible from leather. 

Environmental vegans are those who center the environmental impacts of industrial farming – the methane, waste, the clear cutting of forests for grazing land, etc. They may also emphasize other sustainability-forward practices like consuming locally- or home-grown foods to reduce their carbon footprint. These vegans, along with the next category, are seen as being scientifically rooted, where eating fewer animal products means reducing their contribution to climate change. 

Health vegans, in my experience can fall into several subcategories that include the “clean eating” crowd, those looking for to cure or prevent chronic disease, those who consider plant-based eating to be the healthiest option. Some of this is rooted in science and some of it isn’t. 

I’ve found that certain sub-sects of health veganism make some wild claims about spices being poisonous, the health benefits of coffee enemas or colloidal silver, or that humans did not evolve to be omnivores at all. However, the science is indisputable – eating more unprocessed plants is linked to better health outcomes than the Standard American Diet. 

Finally, spiritual vegans are those whose dietary choices are specifically linked to their religious or spiritual beliefs. Some religions like Rastafarians, Buddhists, and Jains are explicitly vegan. These groups and others have cosmological beliefs and taboos around eating animal products, and often interconnecting beliefs about the suffering of nonhuman others. 

Vegan chef and co-founder of Wicked Kitchen, Derek Sarno is a Tibetan Buddhist who describes that his motivations for becoming vegan was related to Buddhist principles about compassionate action and the desire to cause no suffering to other sentient beings. In his words, “nothing needs to suffer or die for me to live”. 

In this way, there is often significant overlap between these categories. 

What I propose here is a new category – a veganism for public health. 

Public health vegans center the risk to that factory framing poses to public health. In particular, that industrial farming operations have conditions rife for the mutation of new infectious diseases with pandemic potential. 

In this way, a veganism for public health would cut across several categories, as this framework recognizes the interconnectedness of animal welfare, climate change, and population health. 

Calling on the Public Health Playbook 

To make public health veganism work, we need to employ several public health perspectives and practices to encourage more people to adopt the lifestyle: 

Normalization 

Veganism, often stripped of philosophical undergirding and rebranded as “plant based”, is slowly becoming more normalized, which is a positive development in the grand scheme of things. Even Walmart, which almost exclusively sells factory farmed meat now has a store brand that sells things like vegan cheese and non-dairy milk. 

Harm reduction 

Instead of focusing on full abstinence from animal products, we should look at reducing our consumption. Similar to work in substance use and HIV-prevention, providing someone clean syringes still moves the needle on reducing death and disease, even if incrementally. 

Communication 

This would include communicating information about how to reduce meat consumption, data around the benefits of a vegan diet, and the clear connection between factory farmed meat and infectious disease.  

Long time horizons 

Many public health campaigns, like those against tobacco use or youth substance use take a generation or more to demonstrate widespread effects. Similarly, thinking about a veganism for public health requires us to think in terms of generations instead of months or years. This is how long it will likely take for the results of decreased consumption to have an impact on an industry as large as Big Agriculture, and hopefully by that time, more laws and regulations will be enacted to help mitigate the risk of potentially pandemic pathogens. 

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I think that promoting veganism for public health could do more than just mitigate future pandemic risk. Changing the eating habits of the Global North (Europe, North America) could help alleviate the epidemic of chronic diseases with positive trickle-down effects on the climate crisis – which disproportionately affects the Global South (Africa, South America, Asia). 

Climate change is a big topic of discussion in public health – with the acknowledgement that climate crisis drives extreme weather events that lead to displacement of people and destruction of crops, creating famine conditions, which then can lead to epidemics of infectious disease. This vicious cycle has already led to the spread of diseases like mpox and cholera in African nations. 

As I feel the tug to return to veganism, I want to provide some tips and resources for those who may be vegan-curious or interested in incorporating more plants into their diets. 

1. Try different types of vegan diets 

I get really hungry on a high-carb, low fat, low protein vegan diet. This diet was really popular on the internet in the mid-2010s, and most of those vegans have since abandoned the diet entirely. I find a high protein, medium fat diet to be the most satiating. Figure out what makes you feel the best; everyone is different. 

2. If you’re going to try vegan recipes, get them from people who live as vegans 

Some of my favorite vegan bloggers are Rainbow Plant Life, The Korean Vegan, and Sweet Potato Soul. There are plenty of cookbooks put out by people who are not full time vegans and it’s noticeable in the quality of the recipes – looking at you America’s Test Kitchen. 

3. Consider international foods

Globally there are vegan and plant-based foods in every culture – African, Korean, Indian, Italian, Latin American. These cultures can provide us tasty meals with minimal animal products and lots of flavor. 

4. Don’t be afraid to start slow! 

You can do this gradually. Many of the more budget-conscious people I know only eat one meat-based meal a day to save money. You can start with cutting out dairy products and milk, or cutting out pork or chicken. Starting slow can help you figure out the recipes you like and the type of diet that feels best for you. 

5. Call it whatever you want

We don’t need to call it “vegan” if that moniker dregs up memories of mid-2010 memes about vegans telling you they’re vegan. We can call it plant-based; we can call it plant-forward; we can call it flexitarian; we can call it whatever we want as long as we’re eating fewer animal products. The name matters less than the action. 

There is likely room for a diet that contains animal products in a world without factory farming, but at this point, we need to be thinking more critically about our food choices and the demand it creates in the market. 

Would you consider becoming a vegan if it meant preventing another pandemic?