Tips on Eating Vegan



This article, published in USA Today, highlights Bill Clinton's new vegan diet to hand out some tips on staying healthy through eating a more vegetarian friendly diet. This article is great because it focuses on some problems that many aspiring vegan/vegetarians are confronted with. Check it out if you want some tips on eating less animal foods:

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/diet-nutrition/story/2011-08-23/Bill-Clinton-declares-vegan-victory/50111212/1?csp=ylf

Comments

Anonymous said…
I found this interesting since I read the book "The China Study," by Colin Campbell, PhD, which advocates a vegan diet. His stance, also advocated by the likes of Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish, is that a vegan diet will help prevent and treat cancers and diseases of affluence. It seems common nowadays that researchers and diet promoters recommend a restriction of some sort- in this case it's animal-based proteins. Now, for the sake of discussion: do you think there is any merit or evidence to eat a diet completely devoid of animal protein?
August 29, 2011 at 10:57 PM
Sheena Pradhan said…
There are positives and negatives of both including and excluding animal protein in any diet. Animal proteins are easily digestible, lower in starch than most vegetarian sources of protein and contain nutrients such as vitamin B12 and iron, which are harder to find in non-animal foods. The perks of vegetarian proteins is usually that they are leaner (lower in saturated fats), but they often (such as in the case with legumes) need to be paired with a grain food to create a complete protein (all 20 amino acids). Likewise, vegetarians and especially vegans often encounter problems with meeting needs for vitamin B12. Of course these needs can be met through foods that are enriched or fortified with B12 or vitamin supplements, but natural non-animal sources of B12 are hard to come by. The only non-meat sources of vitamin B12 that I know of are eggs and dairy products, and unfortunately both of those are animal products. This puts vegans at risk for certain health disorders. This is the main problem with a diet completely devoid of any animal protein. If one is supplementing their vegan diet with vitamin B12, and are generally fulfilling all of their other dietary needs, the vegan diet has been shown to lower risks of cardiovascular and other diseases (mostly related to high saturated fat diets).
January 10, 2012 at 11:10 PM

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