giving an inch

My children love tape measures. Isaiah pulls the fluorescent orange cube out of the toolbox and carries it around the house, informing me in a business-like manner that the deck-struts are five inches in diameter, the chair seat is 22 inches high, and his knee is 16 inches from the ground. Then he asks me how tall I am, and I obligingly stand while Jeremy stretches the tape to the crown of my head. Sixty-nine inches. Wait, sixty-nine inches? Do it again. Sixty-nine inches. Let me stand against this wall here. Sixty-nine inches.

I've lost more than an inch in height.

Sometimes friends or readers ask if I regret my years as a vegan. Usually I say no. It was an important learning experience, I say. I developed sincere concern for animals, I say, and was humbled to the interconnections of all life on Earth. My children seem to have come away unscathed, I say, although Willow does have a skin condition connected to retinol deficiency. I say that most lessons in my life seem designed to knock me down from my pedestal of arrogance and certainty, to teach me compassion and skepticism. And mostly I say that I didn't seem to lose anything to veganism; I got out and recovered before anything permanent happened to me.

One of the health problems that scared me away from a vegan lifestyle was a severe deficiency in vitamin D. My endogenous production was 6, and my exogenous intake was zero. Healthy levels are above 25; severe deficiency diseases appear in levels below 10. The vegetarian supplement I was taking didn't seem to register in my body. An animal-based supplement, whether from lanolin or fish, was essential to my health. Maybe another vegetarian would have taken that lanolin-based supplement and kept the rest of her lifestyle “cruelty-free,” but that was just one problem. Returning to outright meat consumption while decreasing plant proteins was the only thing that returned me to good health.

Vitamin D, we are learning now, is far more important than previously understood, and deficiencies are far more widespread than previously believed. An industrialized person, vegan or not, is quite likely to be deficient, since most dietary vitamin D in the standard diet is synthetic, added after the fact to foods that don't naturally contain this nutrient, and most industrialized people don't get much natural sunlight, or else they wear sunblock religiously, or they don't live at the right latitude – so many variables make it difficult to obtain, absorb, transform, and utilize this nutrient.

Vitamin D deficiency is connected to increased cancer rates, viruses and infections, rickets and other bone deformities, and an overall increase in mortality, so I've often wondered about that deficiency. I don't know how long I was deficient. Since I'd been living in Utah for most of my vegetarian years, I certainly wasn't getting enough sunlight to make up for the lack in my diet, and I'd been taking a vegetarian supplement for all that time. 

I don't even know if I'm getting enough vitamin D now. I stopped taking the supplement after the winter, and I'm not getting many dietary sources. I can't afford to go back to the doctor and be tested again. But seeing that I've lost more than an inch in height -- by the age of 27 -- is very frightening to me. My grandmother has lost many inches to bone deficiencies as she's aged. I see her curling up like a little shrimp and I wonder, is that my fate? Will my body be punished for the next sixty years because of my hubris? 

The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging....observed 2,084 men and women aged 17 to 94 between the years of 1958 to 1993. In both sexes, height loss began at about the age of 30 and accelerated with age. The cumulative height loss from age 30 to 70 years averaged about 3 cm (1.18 inches) for men and 5 cm (1.97 inches) for women (Sorkin, Muller, & Andres, 1999).

What this means is that I lost 40 years' worth of average height loss in four years of being vegan.

Maybe it's not connected, but I can't help but wonder what's happened to my body since the age of 17, when I adopted a “healthful,” “plant-based,” “cholesterol-free,” “low-fat” vegetarian diet at just shy of 5'11. Is my spine settling? Is this loss related to the persistent back pain that's recently developed, or the knee pain I experienced while working on the farm? Is this a symptom of osteomalacia?

I went vegan because I believed T. Colin Campbell that heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes were direct results of an animal-based diet. I didn't understand that the Standard Industrial Diet is in fact a plant-based diet, and people who haven't been corrupted by our dubious bounty tend to be much healthier than we are regardless of how much meat or fat they consume. What's new to this culture is not meat but grain-fed, feedlot meat -- not milk but ultra-pasteurized, homogenized, fat-free CAFO milk -- not eggs but egg white omelets with fat-free cheese -- not bread but hybridized high-gluten flour -- not lard or butter but margarine and canola oil -- not broth but MSG -- and genetically-modified Roundup Ready corn syrup, and Fakin' Bacon, and carrageenan, and Coffeemate, and where does it end? 

I'm afraid to see a doctor and ask what this loss of height might mean. It's only an inch and a half, but an inch and a half just three years shy of peak bone mineral density is a significant thing. Jeremy tells me not to worry. He says we know better now so all we can do is do better. What should we do? he asks, and I say bone broth. I say cod liver oil, and butter from grass-fed cows, and sardines, and eggs, and pastured pork, and dark leafy greens. I say digging in the garden in bright sunlight, and yoga, and better posture, and good sleep. I say that I hope it's enough, I hope I'm not wrong again, and I apologize, and I look at my children and worry and worry.