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Vegetarian and Vegan Diet - Being Vegetarian is Healthy - Vegans

What are Vegetarian and Vegan?

Vegetarians do not eat meat, fish, and poultry. Vegans are vegetarians who abstain from eating or using all animal products, including milk, cheese, other dairy items, eggs, wool, silk, leather, etc. and eats only plant-based foods.. Among the many reasons for being a vegetarian are health, ecological, and religious concerns, dislike of meat, compassion for animals, belief in non-violence, and economics. The American Dietetic Association has affirmed that a vegetarian diet can meet all known nutrient needs. The key to a healthy vegetarian diet, as with any other diet, is to eat a wide variety of foods, including fruits, vegetables, plenty of leafy greens, whole grain products, nuts, seeds, and legumes. Limit your intake of sweets and fatty foods.

Staples of a Vegetarian Diet

A balanced vegetarian diet should include:

• Grains and cereals: Whole grain bread, brown rice, whole-wheat pasta, muesli.
• Legumes, nuts and seeds: Soya beans. kidney beans, split peas, lentils, almonds, cashews, sesame seeds
• Fruit and vegetables: As much as you want - think variety. Try new fruits and vegetables and include them in your diet every day
• Dairy or Soya products: Look out for fat free and reduced calorie options for milk, yoghurts, and cheeses. 

A typical vegetarian diet closely matches expert dietary recommendations for healthy eating, being low in saturated fat and high in fiber, complex carbohydrates, and fresh fruit and vegetables. As long as you eat a variety of foods you will be getting all the nutrients you need. 

A vegetarian diet tends to be lower in total fat, and vegetarians tend to eat proportionally more polyunsaturated fat to saturated fat compared with non-vegetarians. (Animal products are the major sources of dietary saturated fat).Studies have shown that vegetarians (following a well-balanced low-fat high-fiber vegetarian diet) often have lower incidence of coronary artery disease, hypertension, obesity and some forms of cancer.

Some Americans are obsessed with protein. Vegans are bombarded with questions about where they get their protein. Although protein is certainly an essential nutrient which plays many key roles in the way our bodies function, we do not need huge quantities of it. In reality, we need small amounts of protein. Only one calorie out of every ten we take in needs to come from protein.

How much protein do we need?

The RDA recommends that we take in 0.8 grams of protein for every kilogram that we weigh (or about 0.36 grams of protein per pound that we weigh).

Since vegans eat a variety of plant protein sources, somewhere between 0.8 and 1 gram of protein per kilogram would be a protein recommendation for vegans. If we do a few calculations we see that the protein recommendation for vegans amounts to close to 10% of calories coming from protein.

So, in the United States it appears that vegan diets are commonly lower in protein than standard American diets. Remember, though, with protein, more (than the RDA) is not necessarily better. There do not appear to be health advantages to consuming a high protein diet. Diets that are high in protein may even increase the risk of osteoporosis and kidney disease.