Personal benefits of going vegan

June 14, 2020

It’s been almost three years now I have been vegan. I have seen many benefits from the move and I wanted to document them in this blog post. Interestingly, before going vegan, I had been vegetarian for 12 years (i.e. still eating dairy and eggs). I didn’t observe any health benefits from going vegeterian. Just to be clear, I am a “healthy” vegan, in the sense that I try my best to eat mostly whole plants; I limit quite a lot processed and junk foods.

The most dramatic change I have seen is that I am a lot less sick, and when I am sick, it’s a lot better than when I was vegetarian. Actually, I was always sick as far as I can remember. When I was a child, teenager, young adult, omnivore or vegetarian, I would just get colds and flus all the time.

Just before becoming vegan, I used to get a cold or flu at least four times a year. When I was sick, I would usually feel terrible and with high fever. It would usually take a couple of weeks for me to get better, and even when I was feeling better it was never completely over. Indeed, when I was not sick, I always had a lot of mucus being secreted from my nose and throat, sometimes with a bit of infection (white/yellow mucus). Now I get sick around once or maximum twice a year with a cold. When I do get sick, my temperature barely rises (max one degree Celsius more) and I feel quite OK. I am still usually able to work and even exercise. I usually recover in one week without any medication. I don’t have any mucus being continuously produced anymore. So overall it seems my immune system improved quite a lot, and I suspect my upper respiratory tract was chronically inflamed and that inflammation disappeared too.

I believe the reason I was so sick while being omnivore or vegetarian is because of dairy. Cow’s milk is a well-known allergen and is implicated in a number of respiratory problems, such as asthma. It might also be that I am lactose-intolerant; I certainly am now, the couple of times I ate some dairy while being vegan produced interesting gases, smelling like milk that had been off for a week…

The second change is in my bowel functions. My digestion is a lot better, and I have bowel movements twice a day on average thanks to all the fiber I am eating. When I was vegetarian, I used to have indigestion on a regular basis. When this would happen, I would have diarrhea for a couple days accompanied by a lot of pain and cramps in my intestines. That was a not a good experience. Nowadays, if I eat some vegetables that are a bit off, I have a bit of soft stools and a bit of cramps for a day and that’s it. And such episodes are very rare now. Also, since I turned vegan, I had no problems of constipation at all. When I have a bowel movement, I don’t need to push like crazy to help the stuff move (which can provoke an aneurysm, by the way). Everything happens naturally without effort.

The third improvement was on my skin. I used to have a lot of acne when I was a teenager and a young adult, and I was even treated with Roaccutane, which made my skin feel like it had been replaced by a plastic bag stretched over my flesh. Still during the rest of my adult life, I would have a significant amount of acne. When I turned vegan, my skin progressively cleared up. Nowadays, unless I eat some junk food, my skin is clear with (almost) no spots. Again, the couple of times I ate some dairy during those vegan years, some pretty wild skin eruptions occurred after a couple of days. That couldn’t have been coincidences. Also, when I do eat some junk food with a lot of saturated fat (usually palm oil in crackers or biscuits), some spots also come on my face and upper body to remind me that I didn’t eat well.

The fourth improvement is related to my right eye. For a couple of years before going vegan, my right eye had some kind of floaters, very slowly growing in size over a timespan of a few years. It wasn’t the usual kind of floaters with a well defined shape and that go away quickly. It was some kind of patch in my field of vision that I would detect only because my vision was blurred in these spots. They would usually stick for longs periods of time, giving me blurred vision for a few hours, or even a few days, at a time. Eventually, my vision was blurred most of the time. I went to see an ophthalmologist, who said that the liquid inside my eye was “becoming thick”. When I asked him what could I do about it, he responded “nothing”. So I couldn’t do anything about it and he didn’t prescribed any treatment… So that was quite depressing… After about a year being vegan, I started to observe some very small and gradual improvements. After three years, this problem has almost gone away, and I am very happy and relieved about that. To be honest, I thought my right eye would eventually go blind, so it’s a huge relief to me.

My wife has seen some benefits too. She used to have a lot of acne, but after a year being vegan, her skin cleared up a lot. She also used to have brown marks in the white of her eyes, and those also disappeared for the most part.

There are just the benefits I could see directly for myself. I am sure there have been many “hidden” benefits, and I have little doubts my blood lipids and cholesterol levels are better as well. I will do a test in the future, compare that with previous numbers and post it here for the record.