Why are so many YouTubers giving up veganism now?

Question

Recently there has been a rash of YouTube personalities who have very publicly stopped practicing veganism. Examples:

Rawvana - Raw Alignment - Kalel - Tim Shieff - Bonny Rebecca - East Coast Creep - Tish Wonders - Christie Swadling - Bobby's Perspective - ZenInMotion - Kay - HackYourHealth - Christina Randall - Joey Graceffa - Kevin Jubbal, M.D. - KasumiKriss - Samantha Lotus - Sarahs Day - Victoria Rose - Tori Sterling

Why is this happening now? Does this indicate a shifting trend away from veganism, or is this a totally normal pattern and it's just getting more attention right now? Basically: what is common between all of these announcements?

Answer 1

Part of the answer is how youtube works- youtubers need views, so they need to generate a story with change and drama. "Yup, still vegan and doing fine" isn't a story that is going to get views. Many response videos were "yup, still vegan" and they didn't get millions of views.

Many youtubers did response videos, I like Mic the Vegan's response videos. Unavoidably, trying to figure out what happened is a lot of speculation because the youtubers cite health issues, not necessarily supported by confirmation with doctors. Some of these health issues very plausibly relate to some of the extreme and unusal things they did, like drinking alcoline water to the point that it probably had an effect on their digestive system. That is just one person. Each youtuber that is prone to trying out extreme things did something different, fasts, eating just one food for a prolonged period of time, etc. The only pattern is that these are out of the ordinary practices and probably made for good stories. I don't think all of these youtubers set out to insincerely try a health fad for views, but when you get so many views that youtube starts paying your mortgage, I can understand how folk might naturally fall into doing crazy health stunts for the camera.

Another way you might want to look at this question is why do any veg*ns stop. This article says, 43% of those who stopped stopped because it was difficult to stay "pure". i.e. logistics problems, for example when eating at restaurants, with others, etc.

Answer 2

This is what they do for a living.

Maybe slightly opinion-based, but some of the influencers you name were never vegan. They just followed and then abandoned a strictly plant-based diet the same way they followed other fad/trend-diets in the past.

You might be also interested in this reddit discussion.

Answer 3

A vegan diet is easy to stick to if you eat a low refined fat diet. The more refined fats and oils you eat, the more attention you need to pay to your protein intake and getting all the required amino-acids. On the long term, people can get fed up with all the hassle with having to get to a balanced diet if they never tried to get to a low fat, high carb diet. They may also get fed up with eating tofu, beans etc. at every meal.

Example: 2000 Kcal of whole grains yields all the required amino acids, despite whole grains being a so-called "incomplete protein". This is how I eat, I don't bother with vegan meat, tofu, beans etc. etc. It's all unnecessary once you get used to eating large volumes of whole grains, large volumes of potatoes, brown rice, nuts and seeds etc. and the 100 grams or more of fiber intake associated with that.

Answer 4

You forgot JP Sears: https://youtu.be/COamG6NqCmg You will find a lot of answers in his video :-) Starting from the very first sentence.

Why is this happening now?

I believe in global shifting of human consciousness. I think the time is coming when the long hidden lies are being disclosed and debunked and people are naturally less and less able to live out of alignment with their inner truth.

Also, when something like this happens, it's like an avalanche. Events like this are not independently randomly distributed over time, rather, they tend to cluster :-)