Diets and veganism

While perusing through the Tree Hugger website, I came across an article by Kelly Rossiter of Toronto (YAY Toronto!).  About veganism as a diet.

In the article Rossiter discusses diet as a way of living as opposed to short-lived regimen that we follow only to have the results of which disappear after a while.

According to Rossiter, diets where people only eat protein or only eat grapefruit for 2 weeks don’t get to the heart of the issue, which is that North Americans too much, salt, sugar, and fat.

The vegan diet is completely devoid of any animal products, and therefore low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Foods such as sweet potatoes and legumes and green leafy vegetables which are staples of a vegan diet are digested more slowly and don’t create spikes in blood sugar that is so dangerous to diabetics. Researchers believe that a plant based diet improves how the body uses insulin. In this study, those following the vegan diet lost weight, lowered their cholesterol and lowered their blood sugar.

The participants who followed a conventional diabetes diet complained about having to cut back on carbohydrates, fat and constantly counting calories and they still had trouble losing weight. Although the vegan participants initially reported having to put more effort into their food preparation, after a time this was no longer a problem, and they were much less likely to have cravings for fatty foods than those on the conventional diet.

To read the rest of the Tree Hugger article, please click on the link below.

The Value of Veganism

While the article is more about veganism, it does make reference to even a vegetarian diet being advantageous for people.  As a vegetarian myself, I can honestly say that I do feel much better and I’ve been able to successfully maintain a healthy body weight.

In fact, I recently met up with a group of friends from high school a couple of weeks back and a couple of them commented that I looked a lot thinner and asked me what (if anything) I had been doing.  I told them it wasn’t anything spectacular that I was doing, I was just keeping up with being a vegetarian and watching what I eat.  Nothing terribly complicated.

Now in order to keep up this healthy life style, I have to work out a little more, which my friend Don has been urging me (constantly) to do.

In any case, I suggest reading Rossiter’s article.  I think it’ll give you a different perspective on how we as North American view food.  Plus it comes with tasty vegan recipe at the tail end of the article.