Vegetarianism harms fertility

I spent eight years as a devout vegetarian dutifully drinking green juice in the morning and making sure I got in all my leafy greens and vitamin A-packed sweet potatoes at dinner. Little did I know the diet I began to be healthier, was ruining my health.

I find this particular topic so important because I have been there. I have spent years researching health and trying to stock my pantry with only healthy food. I wouldn’t touch beef or milk. I truly believed I would get cancer or some other horrible disease from animal-based products. I limited eggs and opted for salads full of chickpeas and mushrooms. So, why the heck was my health suffering? Why was I breaking out regularly, my hair not growing, and feeling perpetually bloated no matter what magic veggie elixirs I used? Well, the answer to that was in fact in the copious amounts of vegetables I was eating and the lack of nutrient-dense animal products.

There are many reasons a vegetarian diet (and a vegan diet, even more so) is unhealthy. I hope to cover all of the reasons in-depth in future blog posts. For now, I want to give an overview of all the reasons no one should attempt to eat a plant-based diet. None of these negatives are discussed in the vegetarian and vegan community. I think it’s important to view both sides of the argument to make an informed decision for you and your family.

Antinutrients

This is a word I never heard in all my years in the vegetarian community and I think it’s important to cover. There are many different types of antinutrients including, lectins, oxalates, tannins, gluten, goitrogens, and phytates. They interfere with our body’s digestive enzymes and make it harder to digest food and absorb nutrients. They also can damage our gut wall and lead to kidney stones. They are in most vegetables including beans, tomatoes, spinach, rice, corn, wheat, and nuts. I do not think we should completely eliminate vegetables, but we should properly prepare them to limit their negative effects and balance out our diets with meat, milk, fish and eggs.

Soy

Soy is a huge part of a plant-based diet. Whether in the form of tempeh, plain soy, plant-based milks, or additives to other products- it’s everywhere! Soy is full of pesticides, most of it is GMO, and it can lead to estrogen dominance. Soy is actually recommended to women going through menopause to increase their estrogen levels. It also inhibits mineral absorption and interferes with the absorption of protein. Soy is so negative I could write an entire article on all the harms it does to our bodies, especially when trying to conceive. 

Seed oils

Seed oils are rampant in vegan food. From nut milks to vegan “butter” they can be found in almost everything. The production of seed oils involves a ton of chemical solvents to process it. They also go rancid very easily. When they are stored incorrectly or heated during cooking they create toxic free radicals. Some of these oils are safflower, corn, sesame, sunflower, and cottonseed oil. The push for seed oils was thought to be healthier than saturated fats, but in the last 50 years we have seen obesity, heart disease, and diabetes rise significantly despite most people replacing animal fats with vegetable oils. 

Fats & veggies

So far, we’ve been talking about the fact that just because you eat something doesn’t mean your body actually utilizes the vitamins and minerals. Plant sources of vitamins and minerals are hard to absorb for 3 reasons. The first we already covered, anti-nutrients. The second is the inability to transform plant sources of vitamins into a usable form. For example, sweet potatoes are full of beta carotene and need to be converted by your body into its usable form, vitamin A. Some people have issues transforming these vitamins into a usable form and thus suffer on a plant-based diet. The third reason is that nutrients in vegetables are not bioavailable like animal sources, they need to be paired with fat. To do this, you need to add butter, tallow, ghee, or coconut oil to steamed or cooked veggies. 

Lack of protein

I sometimes joke that vegetarians are really just carb-itarians. A plant-based diet is usually high in carbs and very low in fats and protein. While fats are easier to get in a plant-based diet through things like nuts, avocados, and coconut oil, protein is much harder to obtain. Most plant-based protein sources are either factory-created fake meats or soy-based. A recent study found that 1/4 of plant-based meats do not contain enough protein to be considered a source of protein. Other protein sources like legumes and beans do not have the same absorption rate as animal-based sources. 

Missing essential vitamins and minerals

You probably already know that B12 is almost non-existent in a vegetarian diet, well it’s not the only vitamin missing. Choline, glycine, vitamin K2, vitamin D3, EPA + DHA, heme iron, zinc, and preformed vitamin A are all difficult to obtain from a vegetarian diet, and nearly impossible to obtain on a vegan diet. These are all important nutrients when trying to conceive and during pregnancy. Lacking these can lead to negative birth outcomes and negative effects on a growing baby or child. Midwives often report the placentas of vegetarian and vegan women are visibly less healthy than omnivorous women’s placentas.

Fertility and the growing child

Almost every fertility boosting, nutrient-dense food is animal based. Foods that produce healthy babies, nutrient-rich breast milk, encourage healthy birth outcomes, limit pregnancy complications, and lead to healthy fetal and infant development come from animal sources. Some of these foods include: eggs, bone broth, collagen, salmon, salmon roe, bone marrow, grass-fed beef, raw milk, and liver. You can find a full list of these foods here.

Ethics

A vegetarian or vegan diet is not inherently more ethical than an omnivorous diet. While everyone can agree that factory farming is abhorrent, vegetarianism isn’t the answer. Vegetarianism often involves: 

• Monocrop culture

• Death of birds, mice, and natural wildlife

• Overuse of pesticides

• Imported produce

• Bone meal

• Factory produced “meats”

• Soil depletion

The answer to a more sustainable diet is buying local in-season produce, supporting local farmers, and eating the entire animal, including offal. The rise of regenerative farming practices looks promising to support not only our health but the health of our planet.