Good-looking carrot and celery eaters will call steak lovers corpse eaters, and those in revenge will predict that vegetarians will inevitably die out soon, because due to an unbalanced diet they just say goodbye to the reproductive function the other day.
Is vegetarianism good for health?
Indeed, most modern representatives of the “we eat no one” lifestyle, including actress Natalie Portman, came to vegetarianism not for the purpose of improving their health, but for ethical reasons. And this fact should flatter all Russians, regardless of their gastronomic preferences, because our classic Lev Tolstoy began to actively promote the idea of “Do not kill our smaller brothers” to the masses.
However, Lizochka’s neighbors from “The Twelve Chairs” were right: the creator of “War and Peace” refused food of animal origin only after fifty, and before that, as the voices coming from behind the dormitory walls of the hostel rightly noticed, “he cracked the sausage”.
If we forget about ethics and turn to medicine, then suddenly it turns out: vegetarianism is not at all what it seems to most of us. Nutritionists refer to this group of people only those who not only said meat decisively did not, but also completely abandoned dairy products, eggs, fish and seafood.
Simply put – strict vegans. All the rest, like their unapproachable meat-eating opponents, fall under the definition of “omnivorous man.” But from the point of view of banal physiology, homo sapiens is a typical intermediate link between predators and herbivores: we have fangs, but the jaw is able to move from side to side, the stomach is not multi-chamber, like in cows, but the intestines are long enough for assimilation plant foods.
Where did the belief come from, that vegetarianism is not only ethical, but also good for health? The humanist scientist Colin Campbell is to blame. At one time, he conducted a large-scale study and found that the average life expectancy of people who refused meat and fish is longer than that of lovers of schnitzels and sausages. The work, frankly, is controversial, because it did not take into account that both strict and moderate vegetarians as a whole monitor their diet more carefully than simple hard workers who are used to eating a cutlet with potatoes for dinner.
Yes, and ethical animal lovers, as a rule, were not noticed in alcohol abuse, and smoking and regular libations affect health many times more than a steak for lunch. Modern researchers are unanimous: the main principle of a healthy diet is balance. It can be easily achieved by eliminating meat and even fish, but leaving dairy products, eggs and seafood in the diet.
The only vitamin that is not found in plant foods is B12, and its vegetarians should be taken as supplements. At the same time, it is interesting that today people who have refused beef, poultry, and pork actually eat many times more correctly than carnivores. Here the whole snag in the presence in their diet of a large amount of unprocessed plant food. According to nutritionists, it should be about thirty percent of a person’s daily diet.
Russians prefer leaning on carbohydrates and animal fats, so only five percent of what we eat is on greens and vegetables. In a word, the recipe for recovery in our case is simple to the simple: do not throw out meat from the diet, just add vegetables – and strength will come with you, of course, if you do not aspire to go vegetarian for ethical reasons.
It is believed that vegetables and fruits are rich in vitamins, but meat is not. This is not so, vitamin C is found in the blood, but retinol, which in our body turns into vitamin A, is easiest to get not just from raw carrots. The root crop should be eaten with animal fats, then the absorption of vitamin A by the body will increase from three to forty percent.
Even a herbivore like a cow eats animal products : flies, larvae, and sometimes bird eggs. This is necessary for the normal functioning of the intestine, otherwise problems with the digestibility of plant foods can occur.
An ideal European diet should be thirty percent vegetables and herbs, thirty percent foods of animal origin, thirty percent fruits and ten percent cereals.
