The irony is, the companies that make the naturopathic stuff are just as bad as big pharma. There's no question that there are various natural medicines out there. I've generally found that a combination of naturopathy and modern medicine work well together.
I can even understand why some people choose the more natural route when it comes to something like cancer. Let's face it, chemo is nothing but putting poisons in your body in the hopes they don't kill you before they kill the cancer.
As for vegans, they do NOT get all their nutrients from the food they eat. Vitamin B12 is NOT found in any plant material and is absolutely vital for a properly functioning central nervous system.
There is good news though. A PEI farmer along with Dalhousie university have discovered a form of red seaweed that makes for excellent cattle feed. This red seaweed would not only free up land that's used to grow feed crops for livestock, it also reduces the methane in cow farts to virtually zero.
The cost in land to feed livestock however becomes criminal when we look at the waste of food in the West. A single store from a popular chicken restaurant chain here in Canada (Not KFC) throws away an industrial size green garbage bag of chickens every night. Sometimes it's only half full, other nights there's overflow to two bags. That's a lot of chickens that were killed for nothing. Add in all the fast food dumps and other chain restaurants and the amount of food they toss away every night adds up to a LOT of land being wasted growing food for livestock that will be butchered, processed and then thrown into the garbage. It's almost criminal.