Vegan Men’s Group™

Resources

The film, the men, the research.

Watch this first

Dominion title card: a calf lying on a slatted floor beside the film's title and narrator credits.

Dominion (2018)

A feature documentary from Farm Transparency Project, shot in Australia with drones and hidden and handheld cameras inside working farms and slaughterhouses.1 Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Sia, Sadie Sink and Kat Von D. Free to watch.

It is graphic and hard to sit through. Watch it anyway, ideally with another man, and talk afterward.

Watch on YouTube
We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable.
Joaquin PhoenixAcademy Awards, 2020

The Pythagorean rule

Men in white robes on a hillside at dawn, one raising his arm to the rising sun while others play lyres and kneel.
Fyodor Bronnikov, Hymn of the Pythagoreans to the Rising Sun, 1869. Public domain.

Around 530 BC Pythagoras founded a community at Croton in southern Italy. According to his biographer Iamblichus, a candidate was observed for three years and then kept five years of silence before he was admitted to the inner circle.2

Iamblichus also records the rule on animals. Pythagoras ordered “the most contemplative of philosophers” among his students “never to eat any thing animated,” never to sacrifice animals, and “to preserve most solicitously justice towards them.” He asked the same of the lawmakers among his followers. Students who had not reached that level were allowed some meat.2

The earlier sources do not agree. Eudoxus wrote that Pythagoras avoided even the company of butchers and hunters. Aristoxenus wrote that he ate some meats. Historians read this as a sign that Pythagoreans themselves argued about the rule.3

…for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.
PlutarchOn the Eating of Flesh

Men who went before

The word “vegan” dates from 1944. Before that, men who would not eat animals were called vegetarians, and before the 1840s, Pythagoreans. Each line links to its source. Being listed here means only that a man’s diet is on the public record; none of them is affiliated with this group.

Gone before us

Living

Health for men

What large studies have found. These are mostly observational: they show association, and people who avoid meat often differ in other habits too. None of this is medical advice.

The diet is adequate
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics holds that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults and can offer long-term health benefits.4 Its earlier position named athletes specifically.5 Vegans need a reliable source of vitamin B12.
Heart
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in the United States.6 In a British cohort of 44,561 people followed for more than 11 years, vegetarians had a 32% lower risk of ischemic heart disease than nonvegetarians.7
Prostate
Among 26,346 men in the Adventist Health Study-2, a vegan diet was associated with a 35% lower risk of prostate cancer.8 Among 47,239 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, eating more plant foods was associated with a lower risk of fatal prostate cancer.9
Type 2 diabetes
In the Adventist cohort, 2.9% of vegans had type 2 diabetes against 7.6% of nonvegetarians. After adjusting for weight and lifestyle, vegans had about half the odds.10
Erections
Among 21,942 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, men aged 60 to 70 who ate the most healthy plant foods had an 18% lower risk of erectile dysfunction than those who ate the least.11
Testosterone
A study of US men using national survey data found that the plant content of a man’s diet was not associated with his testosterone level. It was a small study, 191 men.12
Living longer
Among 73,308 Adventists, vegetarians as a group had a 12% lower risk of death from any cause over about six years. The associations were larger and more often significant in men than in women.13
Processed meat
The World Health Organization’s cancer agency classifies processed meat as carcinogenic to humans and red meat as probably carcinogenic.14

Planet

Oxford researchers linked the diets of 55,504 people in the UK to data from more than 38,000 farms. The diets of vegans carried about 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions, 25% of the land use and 46% of the water use of the diets of people eating 100 grams or more of meat a day.15

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Sources

  1. Dominion (2018), Farm Transparency Project
  2. Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras, trans. Thomas Taylor (1818), chapters 17 and 24
  3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pythagoras”
  4. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, position paper on vegetarian dietary patterns for adults (2025)
  5. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, position on vegetarian diets (2016)
  6. CDC, Heart Disease Facts
  7. Crowe et al., EPIC-Oxford, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2013)
  8. Tantamango-Bartley et al., Adventist Health Study-2, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2016)
  9. Loeb et al., Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2022)
  10. Tonstad et al., Adventist Health Study-2, Diabetes Care (2009)
  11. Yang et al., Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, BJU International (2022)
  12. Kuchakulla et al., World Journal of Urology (2021)
  13. Orlich et al., Adventist Health Study-2, JAMA Internal Medicine (2013)
  14. World Health Organization, Q&A on the carcinogenicity of red and processed meat
  15. Scarborough et al., Nature Food (2023)
  16. Plutarch, On the Eating of Flesh I, Loeb Classical Library (1957)
  17. Joaquin Phoenix, Academy Awards acceptance speech, 9 February 2020 (transcript, The Hollywood Reporter)
  18. Fyodor Bronnikov, Hymn of the Pythagoreans to the Rising Sun (1869). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo credits