Debate us
Bring your best argument against veganism.
Socrates worked by questions. So do we. Put your objection in the box and argue it as hard as you like. You will get back logic, published science and history, and one question in return.
Give me your best argument against veganism. I’m an AI working from the sourced answers on this page. I’ll concede what’s true and I won’t quote a number I can’t back.
You are talking to an AI. It argues only from the sourced answers below. Conversations are logged so we can improve those answers. Nothing here is medical advice.
27 objections, answered
These are the arguments men make most often. Each answer starts with what is true in the objection. Every figure links to its source. Found a weak answer or a missing objection? Argue it in the box above; we read the log.
Strength and health
Where do you get your protein?
What’s true in it. Fair question. A man does need enough protein, and on plants it takes a little more thought.
Beans, lentils, soy, nuts, seeds and whole grains cover it. A 2019 review of vegetarian and vegan adults in Western countries found that protein-rich plant foods are “sufficient to achieve full protein adequacy,” and that the worry about missing amino acids “has been substantially overstated.” The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics holds that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults.
How many grams a day are you aiming for? It is easier to hit on plants than most men expect.
You can't build muscle or be strong on a vegan diet.
What’s true in it. In single-meal lab studies plant protein does look a little less anabolic than animal protein, so the worry has a basis.
What matters is what happens over months of training. In a 12-week trial, 19 vegan men and 19 omnivores lifted twice a week with protein matched at 1.6 grams per kilo per day. Both groups gained the same leg lean mass, 1.2 kg, and the researchers found no difference between the groups in muscle or strength gains. Outside the lab, Patrik Baboumian carried a 555 kg yoke ten metres for a Guinness World Record as a vegan, and Kendrick Farris lifted for the US at the Rio Olympics as one.
If the training results come out the same, what is left of the objection?
Soy lowers testosterone and feminizes men.
What’s true in it. A few studies and case reports describing feminizing effects have been published, which is where the idea comes from.
When researchers pooled the clinical evidence, 41 studies in all, they found no significant effect of soy protein or isoflavones on total testosterone, free testosterone or estrogen levels in men, regardless of dose or how long the study ran. A separate analysis of US survey data found the plant content of a man’s diet was not associated with his testosterone level, though that study was small, 191 men.
Which study were you thinking of? I’d like to look at the dose it used.
If you have to take supplements, the diet isn't natural.
What’s true in it. True. Vegans need a reliable source of vitamin B12, and a man who skips it will eventually get sick.
B12 is made only by certain bacteria and archaea. Plants do not make it and neither do animals; animals accumulate it from microbes, and we have been getting it second-hand. A tablet or a fortified food goes straight to the source. Needing one cheap supplement tells you where a vitamin comes from. It does not tell you the diet is wrong.
Is “natural” really the test? Almost nothing else in a modern man’s life would pass it.
Vegan diets are unhealthy. You'll end up deficient.
What’s true in it. Some real findings cut against us. In the EPIC-Oxford study vegetarians had a 20% higher rate of stroke than meat eaters, about three more cases per 1,000 people over ten years. And a badly planned vegan diet is unhealthy, like a badly planned diet of any kind.
The same study found vegetarians had a 22% lower rate of heart disease, ten fewer cases per 1,000 over ten years, and heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in the United States. Other large cohorts found about half the odds of type 2 diabetes in vegans and a 35% lower risk of prostate cancer in vegan men. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics holds that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults and offer long-term health benefits.
Which nutrient are you most worried about? Let’s look at that one specifically.
- Tong et al., EPIC-Oxford, heart disease and stroke over 18 years, BMJ (2019)
- CDC, Heart Disease Facts
- Tonstad et al., Adventist Health Study-2, Diabetes Care (2009)
- Tantamango-Bartley et al., Adventist Health Study-2, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2016)
- Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, position paper on vegetarian dietary patterns for adults (2025)
Meat has things plants don't, like creatine.
What’s true in it. Correct. Creatine is found in meat, and vegetarians have lower creatine stores.
A systematic review found that when vegetarians supplement creatine, their muscle creatine rises, often to levels above omnivores, along with gains in lean mass and strength. Creatine is a supplement that athletes who eat meat commonly take too. So the gap is real and it closes with a scoop.
Are you already taking creatine? Most men who train are.
Real men eat meat. Veganism is unmanly.
What’s true in it. For most of history providing meat was part of a man’s job, so the feeling has deep roots.
Ask what the manly virtues actually are: strength, courage, providing, protecting those who can’t protect themselves. None of them is served by harming an animal that cannot fight back when you have no need to. In a study of 21,942 men, those aged 60 to 70 who ate the most healthy plant foods had an 18% lower risk of erectile dysfunction. There is nothing masculine about rape, murder or torture, whoever the victim is. Protecting the vulnerable is the masculine thing.
What do you think a man is for? Start there and see where it leads.
Nature, history and scripture
We have canine teeth, so we're meant to eat meat.
What’s true in it. We can digest meat. Nobody disputes that humans are capable omnivores.
A body tells you what an animal can do. It does not tell you what he ought to do. We can also go without: the main body of dietitians in the United States holds that appropriately planned vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults. So the question stops being whether we are able to eat animals and becomes whether we have a good reason to.
If we don’t need to, what is the reason to?
Humans have always eaten meat. It's how we evolved.
What’s true in it. They did, and for most of history most people had no realistic alternative. Meat may well have mattered in our evolution.
“Always” describes the past. It is not a reason for the future. We have always done plenty of things we later stopped. And the refusal is old too: about 2,500 years ago Pythagoras, by his biographer’s account, ordered his most advanced students never to eat anything animate and to treat animals justly, and Plutarch and Tolstoy argued the same. What has changed is that a full diet without animals is now within reach of most men reading this.
Which of your ancestors’ habits would you defend only because they had them?
We're at the top of the food chain.
What’s true in it. We can certainly kill anything on earth. On raw power, nothing competes with us.
Ecologists have measured this. Trophic levels run from 1, plants, to 5, apex predators. The global human trophic level is 2.21, the same as the anchoveta, a small anchovy. We are nowhere near the top of the food chain by diet. And being able to dominate has never been a justification by itself; if it were, the strong could do anything to the weak.
Does having the power to do something make it right?
Lions eat meat. Animals eat other animals.
What’s true in it. Predation is part of nature, yes.
A lion has no alternative and no ability to weigh one. We have both. We don’t take our morals from lions on any other question, and we would be alarmed by a man who did. Nature tells us what happens. It doesn’t tell us what a man should do when he has a choice.
On what other question would you accept “a lion does it” as a reason?
An argument from logic. No figures claimed.
Plants feel pain too.
What’s true in it. Plants respond to damage and signal chemically. That is real biology.
Responding is different from feeling. Plant scientists reviewing the question concluded that the likelihood that plants, with no neurons or brains, have consciousness is “effectively nil.” And if plants did count, you would still eat plants directly: 77% of the world’s soy is fed to livestock, and a plant-based world would need about 75% less farmland. Eating animals kills far more plants.
If you believed plants suffered, wouldn’t that be a reason to feed fewer of them to animals?
God gave man dominion over the animals.
What’s true in it. Genesis 1:28 does give man dominion over every living thing.
Read the next verse. “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29). In that passage dominion comes with a diet of plants. Daniel asked for ten days of pulse and water and came out “fairer and fatter in flesh” than those eating the king’s meat. And Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” A good king protects his subjects.
What does dominion ask of the one who holds it?
Ethics
It's my personal choice. Respect it.
What’s true in it. You do get to decide what you eat, and nobody here can or should force you.
The word to look at is “personal.” A choice is personal when it affects only you. This one has someone on the other end who had no vote. That doesn’t make you a bad man. It means the choice belongs with the other choices we make that land on someone else, and those we expect a man to be able to justify.
Would you call it a personal choice if the animal were a dog?
An argument from logic. No figures claimed.
Animals don't feel pain the way we do.
What’s true in it. It is hard to know what another creature experiences. That is a real problem and not a silly one.
The science has moved a long way. In 2024 the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by hundreds of researchers, stated that there is “strong scientific support” for conscious experience in mammals and birds, and “at least a realistic possibility” in all vertebrates, fishes included. Trout have nociceptors with properties similar to those of mammals and birds, and a painful stimulus changes their behavior for a prolonged time. The declaration adds that when the possibility is realistic, it is irresponsible to ignore it.
How sure would you need to be that an animal feels nothing before you would cut it?
I only buy humane, local or small-farm meat.
What’s true in it. Some small farms do treat animals with real care, and that is better than a factory shed.
Two things. First, almost none of the meat men actually eat comes from that farm: more than 200 million chickens are slaughtered every day, and they are not coming from your uncle’s place. Second, even the best farm ends the same way, with the killing of an animal that did not want to die and did not need to. Kind treatment before an unnecessary killing is better than cruelty. It is still an unnecessary killing.
Is there a humane way to kill someone who doesn’t want to die and doesn’t have to?
It's my culture and tradition.
What’s true in it. Food carries family and memory, and giving up a dish can feel like giving up the people who made it.
Tradition explains why we do something. It doesn’t show that we should keep doing it. Every culture has dropped practices its grandfathers thought were normal, and is better for it. The gathering, the fire, the table and the people are the tradition. The animal is the one part you can change without losing any of the others.
What is the part of that tradition you would actually miss?
An argument from logic. No figures claimed.
I just like the taste. Bacon, though.
What’s true in it. It tastes good. Nobody went vegan because bacon tasted bad.
The question is whether a pleasure of yours is enough to justify what it costs someone else. Anywhere else in life we say no: enjoying something doesn’t make it right when it lands on another. Tastes also change faster than men expect. Most of us were sure we could never give it up, right until we had.
How much is ten minutes of taste worth, measured in someone else’s life?
An argument from logic. No figures claimed.
One person going vegan changes nothing.
What’s true in it. Your single meal doesn’t visibly change a supermarket’s order. True.
Farms and stores breed and order to match what sells. Fewer buyers means fewer animals bred, even if no single purchase shows up in the count. And no man’s diet is private. Other men watch what you do, which is the whole reason this group exists. A man who does the right thing only when he can see it tip the scale is not doing the right thing.
Is there anything else you would do only if you could prove your part made the difference?
An argument from logic. No figures claimed.
Veganism is extreme.
What’s true in it. Some vegans are hard to be around, and cutting back is better than not cutting back.
Look at the definition: veganism seeks to exclude exploitation of and cruelty to animals “as far as is possible and practicable.” That is a modest standard: don’t harm them where you can avoid it. What deserves the word extreme is the practice it objects to, more than 200 million chickens slaughtered every day. Moderation is a virtue for things that are fine in small amounts. We don’t ask for moderation in harming someone.
Which is the extreme position: killing 200 million a day, or declining to?
Not everyone can be vegan. What about the Inuit, or a desert island?
What’s true in it. Right. Some people can’t, and in lower-income countries healthy plant-based diets were modelled to cost more, not less.
Veganism has never claimed otherwise. Its definition asks only for what is “possible and practicable.” A man in the Arctic or on a desert island is in a different position from a man standing in a supermarket. The existence of hard cases doesn’t settle the easy one. The question on the table is what you should do, with the options you actually have.
Are you on a desert island?
Planet and practicality
Harvesting crops kills animals too, so vegans kill as well.
What’s true in it. Yes. Farming of any kind kills animals, and it is right to count them.
Count them, then, and the answer comes out the same. Most cropland feeds livestock: 77% of the world’s soy goes to animals, and a plant-based world would farm about 75% less land, 1 billion hectares in place of 4.1. Eating animals means more crops harvested, and so more field deaths, on top of the animals slaughtered. Veganism doesn’t promise zero harm. It asks for the least harm that is practicable.
If field deaths matter to you, which diet harvests fewer fields?
Local meat is better for the planet than imported vegetables.
What’s true in it. Transport does produce emissions, and local food has other things going for it.
Transport is a small part of food’s footprint. A study of US households found it accounts for 11% of food’s greenhouse gas emissions, and final delivery from producer to store only 4%; production is 83%. The authors calculated that shifting less than one day a week of red meat and dairy to other foods cuts more emissions than buying everything local. What you eat matters far more than where it came from.
If the goal is a smaller footprint, why start with the 11%?
Soy farming is destroying the Amazon, and vegans eat the soy.
What’s true in it. Soy is a real land-use problem, and deforestation is a real crisis.
Follow the soy. 77% of the world’s soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy. Only 7% is eaten directly by people as tofu, soy milk, edamame and tempeh. And the dominant driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has been pasture for beef. If the rainforest is the concern, the lever is eating fewer animals.
Knowing where the soy goes, which diet uses more of it?
Vegan food is expensive.
What’s true in it. The meat substitutes in the fridge aisle are pricey, and in lower-income countries healthy plant-based diets were modelled to cost more.
In upper-middle and high-income countries, an Oxford modelling study found healthy, sustainable diets, vegetarian and vegan ones among them, were up to 22–34% cheaper than current diets. Beans, lentils, rice, oats and potatoes are among the cheapest foods in the store. The expensive part of vegan eating is buying imitations of meat. Skipping the meat costs less.
What does a week of your groceries cost now? Price it with beans where the meat is.
What about farmers and the jobs in the meat industry?
What’s true in it. Real families depend on this work, and any change has to reckon with them.
Start with what the work does to the men who do it. A systematic review of slaughterhouse employment found workers have higher rates of mental health problems, depression and anxiety in particular. These are jobs most of us would not wish on our sons. Demand shifts gradually, farmers still grow food, and no other industry gets to continue only because people are employed in it.
Would you want your son working the kill floor?
If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the animals?
What’s true in it. It is true that these animals exist in these numbers only because we breed them.
That is also the answer. The world will not go vegan overnight. As demand falls, fewer animals are bred, year by year. Nobody releases billions of chickens. The populations shrink the same way they grew, by our decision. And existing in order to be confined and killed young is not a favor we are doing them.
Would you accept being brought into existence on those terms?
An argument from logic. No figures claimed.