You may not need to force your kids to eat their vegetables – the backlash against veganism is here. With the rise in popularity of vegan, plant-based diets, people are discovering that plant-based diets are not healthier.

Even with people eating more plant-based foods – 35 percent more fruit and 20 percent more vegetables – health problems in the U.S. continue to grow. People are not feeling healthier or living better lives by eating more plants. It is hard to blame today's health problems on animal-sourced foods with people eating less than ever before – 28 percent less meat, 27 percent less animal fat, 80 percent less butter and 79 percent less whole milk.

What’s more interesting is that veganism has spawned its antithesis – the carnivore diet as an answer to the health problems caused by veganism. The carnivore diet is a way of eating that includes only animal-sourced foods like meat, eggs and dairy, and completely omits fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains from the diet. The diet has been dramatically healing people from health problems and malnourishment they developed when eating a plant-rich, carbohydrate-based diet.

The idea behind the carnivore diet is that animal-based foods can heal your body because they are easier for your body to digest and are more nutrient dense. Plants possess many defense mechanisms to keep predators from eating too many of them, like oxalates, phytates and lectins, which block nutrient absorption.

Dr. Shawn Baker, a leading proponent of the carnivore diet, actively promotes the #MeatHeals hashtag on social media. Baker has shared countless stories of people experiencing radical health improvement while on the carnivore diet. Besides physical changes such as losing weight and body fat, people have been experiencing dramatic changes in mental and psychological health as well, eliminating depression and other mental maladies. People are even lowering their blood pressure, reversing diabetes and reducing inflammation in their bodies.

It may sound crazy, but the idea of a meat-based diet is not a new phenomenon. The Inuit in the arctic regions of northern Canada survived for hundreds of years without plants for nutrition and instead opted for meat like fish, seal or polar bear. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an arctic explorer, documented his life with the Inuit people in 1910 and learned from them how to live on an entirely meat-based diet. He lived in the Arctic for five years and developed no sign of nutritional deficiencies, even proving this in a controlled research study in the U.S. in 1928 about the effects of an all-meat diet.

Interestingly, most of the people turning to the carnivore diet are former vegans themselves. A YouTuber who goes by the name Sv3rige is an ex-vegan who nearly died from veganism, ending up in a hospital with severe mental problems. He now shares on his YouTube channel how meat healed him and helped him recover from his tragic experience on a plant-based diet. He interviews other ex-vegans on his channel, allowing them to share their experiences and health disasters caused by veganism. Many of the ex-vegans he interviewed share a similar experience with a multitude of symptoms caused by a vegan diet such as bloating, diarrhea, loss of muscle function, loss of appetite, development of food allergies, depression, brain fog, weakness, tiredness, diabetes, poor memory, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, skin problems and psoriasis, just to name a few.

The length of time many of the ex-vegans spent on a plant-based diet was different, but eventually, the nutrient deficiencies caught up and health problems began to appear. The length of time a person can go without animal products depends on how many nutrients your body stored up from eating animal-based foods. There are a variety of nutrients that you can only get in animal-based foods like vitamin B12, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, CLA, DHA, taurine, creatine, heme iron, etc.

Sv3rige showcases the effects of a vegan diet in video compilations of vegan YouTubers over the years. From their own videos, you can watch the vegans go from good health to becoming dramatically aged and showing physical signs of malnutrition. How can a vegan diet be considered healthy when it leads to starvation-like symptoms and deficiencies? The tragedy is that so many of them needed to experience damaged health from a plant-based diet before they could see the value of animal-sourced nutrition.

Milk has over 400 different fatty acids, many of which have positive health benefits on their own. Your heart and brain are fueled by fat, and your body’s cell membranes are made of saturated fat. It should not be surprising that animal-based foods are healthy, nourishing and in fact, necessary.

The very foods people have rejected the past 40 years are the foods helping people to heal. Animal-based foods are a valuable part of a healthy diet. The good news is that this story is not being told by farmers, science or opinion, but simply by people who have had real experiences eating more animal-based foods.  

Stephen Weststeyn is a California dairy farmer. Check out his blog, Dairy Moos.