Vegans just eat chips and junk, it's not actually healthier
Short answer: You can eat badly on any diet. But studies link healthful plant-based eating to lower heart and diabetes risk, and 'vegan' is an ethical line, not a health claim.
The benefit was never 'anything without animals in it.' A whole-food pattern cut heart-disease risk; a refined-and-sugary one raised it. It's the vegetables, not the label.
Satija et al., JACC (2017), hazard ratios, extreme deciles
The objection
“Chips are vegan. Oreos are vegan. Half of what vegans eat is ultra-processed rubbish, so don’t tell me it’s healthier.”
The answer
Half right, and worth conceding cleanly: yes, you can be a chips-and-biscuits vegan, and no, that isn’t healthy. “Vegan” labels nothing about nutrition. Crisps, lager and dark chocolate clear the bar.
But two things follow, and they cut against the objection.
First, the research actually distinguishes good from bad plant-based eating. Satija and colleagues (2017) split plant-based diets into healthful (whole grains, fruit, veg, legumes, nuts) and unhealthful (refined grains, sugary drinks, sweets), and found the healthful pattern linked to meaningfully lower coronary heart disease risk, while the junk pattern was not protective. A whole-food plant-based diet is also tied to lower type-2 diabetes risk (Qian et al., 2019). What protects you is the vegetables, not the mere absence of animals.
Second, and this is the part the objection skips past, this site has never argued you go vegan to get thin. The case is ethical: avoiding unnecessary harm to animals. Health comes along as a frequent bonus. A vegan eating junk has still removed the slaughter from their plate, which was the point.
So the steelman of the objection is true and harmless to the actual argument: bad vegan diets exist, exactly as bad omnivore diets do. Compare like with like, a sensible plant-based diet against a sensible mixed one, and the evidence favours the plants. “Vegans eat junk” is true of some vegans and tells you nothing about veganism.