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With vegan restaurants shuttering and celebrity soy boys publicly renouncing their ways, the once flourishing movement is showing signs of struggle. Is this the end of the plant-based boom?Irvin St-Louis converted to veganism aged 21, back in 1996, long before the diet became a cultural phenomenon and everyone started eating avocados. The choreographer and personal trainer was impressed by reports of the plant-based diet's health benefits in books such as
The China Study and as part of the Rastafarian principle of Ital, which promotes a vegetarian wholefood lifestyle. If it didn't come from a plant, it didn't make it on to his plate. 'I was dogmatic about veganism,' St-Louis says.
But nearly two decades of religiously avoiding animal products took a toll, he believes. 'I had heavy inflammation in my knees, tendinitis in my elbows and my lower back was killing me,' the 49-year-old says. These aches and pain may have simply been consequences of ageing, or general wear and tear. But, one day, in early 2017, he got turned on to Instagram accounts promoting
carnivore diets, in which all plant-based foods are eliminated in a attempt to address chronic ailments. For him, that was when the vegan bubble began to burst.
Comment: Causation: Given unrelentingly devastating news, scare tactics, 'change' agendas and purposed propaganda aimed to defy and undermine an individual's coping skills and destabilize vast numbers of people, it would seem the PTB are achieving target.