You’ll likely find this reply to have a useful mental model that you may be unfamiliar with, but which can serve you well in the future.

Here is another equally unreliable (yet true) anecdote:

I was on an omnivorous diet for over 17 years; I was skinny, anaemic, and generally unhealthy. I’ve been vegan for the past >7 years and my health is both objectively (markers from clinical tests) and subjectively great. Why? Is it because omnivorous diets are necessarily unhealthy? No. It’s simply because I have ensured to meet all my nutritional needs through planning and reiteration; it is the nutrients that matter to health, not the source or label of your diet.

Why is this anecdote unreliable, though? On the hierarchy of evidence (which is a heuristic for applying the same scientific method that makes this very platform possible), anecdotes score very low. When there is a myriad of (systematic reviews of) RCTs and high-quality cohort studies that show – on the totality of evidence – that it’s possible to be healthy on a vegan diet at all stages of life, there is no reason to rely on individual stories with many uncontrolled confounding factors and overlooked judgement errors. For more info about this and the research on the topic, I highly recommend checking out Dr Gil Carvalho’s channel, which is probably the most measured and rigorous free educational resource about diet and nutrition available online that is also very accessible and easy to digest (npi): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPcLNXDAj0