Vegan Lifter Project

Do vegan male powerlifters have a kind of “inbuilt religion” toward veganism – one that overwhelms the urge to eat red meat that tags along with the urge to get big and muscular?

I suspected the answer was yes. I worked from an assumption that only the uninformed (or weak, or spindly, or female) would contest: The bigger and stronger and more muscular you get, the greater your urge to eat meat. To eat like a man, essentially.

As a researcher of decades’ standing I knew I had to fact-check my own ass. I’m the kind of verificationist who will read over 70 economics papers to determine if a claim is true. So I looked up a few dozen male vegan lifters on Instagram and Twitter and asked them if they’d help out. About 15 responded substantively. (Many more popped out of the woodwork subsequently, by which I mean Instagram’s algorithms pointed me to more such subjects. As is now the case in the United States, huge numbers of them were black: African-Americans are vegan so often now it’s barely notable.)

I posed not very many questions and didn’t change those questions much from respondent to respondent.

Body size

Where possible I asked for everybody’s height and weight. That wasn’t