Apparently a popular YouTube vegan has gone back to eating meat for reasons neither relevant here nor cared about by HeyHomie. From what I can tell the guy has been off animal products for a decade.
Does the human digestive system change in any meaningful way on a vegan diet, such that the reintroduction of meat/other animal products causes problems?
Well after being 100% plant-based for the first 53 days of 2019, my wife and I took our meat-loving son out for burgers this past weekend. We definitely had some gastro-intestinal distress that evening. I can imagine going a decade or longer without meat would be an absolute nightmare in the bathroom.
ETA: I had a friend who was vegan for college. He decided that after four years of no meat, he was ready for a burger… at a folk music festival in a Chicago park, sold from a dude I’m a tent. He pooped his pants before he could get home.
I would suggest anyone who has not eaten meat for a prolonged period of time re-introduce that to one’s diet slowly and gradually to minimize potential problems.
Any sudden, major dietary change can result in GI issues.
someone I knew had a vegan friend that ate a burrito that had meat in it it was supposed ot be just beans and had maybe a tablespoon or two of ground beef in it due to it being made in a an assembly line … apparently the taco place didn’t think it was a big thing…
I was told the vegan got so sick she put on a tubgirl performance except she was standing up and it came out of both ends ……. and took a week to totally clean up the tub …
The problem with most of the anecdotes is that there’s a large element of social belonging wrapped up them. Everybody who has been to college knows multiple vegetarians who “accidently” ate meat and got sick.
If the prolonged diet has been low-fat as well as vegetarian (or vegan) the most serious consequence of eating meat could be the introduction of animal fats too suddenly, resulting in a gall bladder attack, which I’m told can be very painful and in serious cases can lead to removal of the gall bladder. I don’t know if this would be less serious if the vegetarian was a regular consumer of butter, for example. But certainly caution is called for.
There is some truth to the idea that people who haven’t eaten meat for a long time have digestive trouble upon re-introduction of meat to their diet.
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People who have not eaten meat for years (and I mean years—make that decades of not eating meat) really do lose the ability to digest it properly. So bloating and maybe some diarrhea and really stinky farts are all part of the punishment (or reward) for slipping up. Not barfing, however.
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Don’t know if this is exactly the same.
I was raised with a kosher diet (7th day Adventist type church). When I became an adult I decided I wasn’t going to follow their nonsense anymore.
But man, I can’t eat pork. I get the strangest contractions, cramps, and side aches. And guess what? So do my siblings! Because of this we all avoid pork even though none of us follow the kosher diet. I can handle a little bit of pepperoni on a pizza, but too much and WHAM! There’s the weird, sickly feeling.
I wonder if not having had it for the first 20 years of my life is the reason.
Over the past year, I have restricted red meat (beef and pork) to eating only while out of the house. So it might be only a week or two, but I definitely have a GI challenge if I have more than a small amount. Gas and really stinky primarily, but I will need an extended bathroom stay shortly. I grew up with beef daily and probably had it 1-2x per week over the past two decades.
I don’t think it’s just meat, I feel like any abrupt change in diet can result in sad toilet time. I eat mostly meat, some fruits, and carbs. But when I hit the veggies hard I get the runs.
Pure speculation, but perhaps it’s down to gut biome? Maybe the little microbe beggers that help you digest X starve for lack of X over the years, so then you can’t digest it as well (until you build up a new colony of whatever microbe).
As pool said, the reading I’ve done seems to indicate that sudden changes, especially when you switch to an only X diet result in digestive problem for a lot of people. Smaller numbers have intolerance issues for other reasons, but your average person’s gut will protest when there’s a big change from X to Y, not just Vegan to meat. John Pinnett talks about it (skip to the second half).
This seems to be the basis for most of the “detox” programs, where you are abruptly put on a very different diet than you’re accustomed too, and must stick with it for a certain number of days. The resulting toilet deliveries are labeled as the “toxins” that are being flushed out, even though you’d probably see the same results by switching to any significantly different diet for a given time period, whether it was designed with health goals in mind or just randomly chosen.
I also have to wonder if gastric distress might have some psychological basis - perhaps some kind of stress reaction? This combined with confirmation bias might explain some issues that some people have had. They eat a bit of meat after years of abstaining, they know that some reaction is likely and the gut makes it happen.
Speaking just for myself, stress can certainly have nasty effects on my digestion. It doesn’t seem inconceivable to me that a lapsed vegan might have some kind of gastric symptoms from a stress reaction after consuming flesh.
Personal experience with vegans who “accidentally” ate meat points strongly towards drama queening/attention whoring. All present company excepted, of course.
I have had a couple of friends who were vegetarian (not vegan mind you) for many years suddenly turn to eating meat, in fact, one started raising pigs. I was always curious about this phenomena of “radical” diet change. So I asked them if they felt or experienced anything different. The answers to my surprise were always "No.
Vegetarians usually eat dairy, which means they’re getting some animal protein. That could be the difference in how they react to meat vs how vegans do.
I suppose it’s possible that you could have a group of people whose digestive system has never really gotten along with meat - such people would be more inclined to be vegetarian than folks without such a problem. Such people might have issues with switching back to meat, but folks who don’t have the problem can probably go back and forth from meat to non-meat and back without problem.
Have to wonder if there’s a psychological component as well in some cases.
As has been said, any big diet change will do.
It’s observed entering basic training, where just a lack of so much sugar and fat in the diet makes the average person not use the toilet for 3-4 days.
Reintroducing it afterwards when everyone wants that double burger and soda , or whatever gut bomb they crave usually causes some distress and diarrhea.
Real issues, probably not, unless they are also starved, which case rich fatty meat paste has killed people being re-introduced to food In general, but I’m fairly sure that’s a different issue entirely.
After looking a little harder at refeeding syndrome, if the person happens to be anemic or malnourished it appears reintroduction could possibly cause at least some of the same electrolyte shift seen in a starving or malnourished person.
Data is lacking, so I’ll let you look at refeeding syndrome for yourself and make your own call. Most of what you’ll see deals directly with starved persons but seems logical that in persons lacking sufficient sugar,protein,iron, or any of the basics behind the causes of refeeding syndrome could suffer minor versions of it… It is after all very common for vegans or vegetarians to have iron anemia or pernicious anemia.
My guess would be that it’s some combination of a somewhat different set of digestive juices being used by your body, combined with your colon and its biome not being used to those juices or the change in diet. Over a fairly short time, I’d imagine it would all adapt and you’d be fine.
Question- do very carnivorous people have something similar happen if they’re required to eat mostly plants?