- Salads
- Yong Tao Fu with all vegetables (no fish balls and meats)
- Vegetable U-Mian
- Mixed rice from vegetarian stalls
- Normal Mixed rice (with vegetables and no animal meats)
Having a few weeks adopting this 'vegetarian' food diet, i realised that it indeed takes a commitment for a person to stop taking animal meats.
It's known that vegetarian diet have many of the benefits to health!
According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics,
appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.
According to a large-scale study conducted over a 6 year period and published in JAMA Internal Medicine, a journal of American Medical Association,
the study shows that Vegetarians lives longer than meat eaters.
vegetarians had a 12% lower death rate than their meat-eating counterparts.
Vegetarians also had a 19% lower chance of dying from heart disease than meat eater, and lower risk of dying from diabetes and kidney failure.
Nevertheless, I realised that vegetarian diets sometimes may NOT be as healthy as we think if the below are our frequent selections:
1. Vegetarian diet comes with processed foods, example mocked meats, which may contain chemical additives and preservatives that are bad for health.
2. Certain vegetarian foods are often deep-fried.
Deep fried usually gives higher calories which may lead to obesity.
For example, in 100 g of fried tofu, it contains 271 calories.
100 g of fried dough fritter is having 558 calories.
Besides, the excess oil and fat are bad for cardiovascular health as the oils are high in Omega 6 which can cause body inflammation and leads to various chronic diseases.
3. Some vegetarian food is prepared using high-heat stir frying or deep frying. This cooking method may destroy the phytochemicals and antioxidants of the plant foods and significantly reduce its nutritional values.
4. Furthermore, vegetarians may be only taking one kind of mushroom (shitake) and rely on it to get polysaccharides nutrients.
It's actually more beneficial to consume different types of mushrooms to get different unique types of polysaccharides for different protection functions.
What NUTRITION is especially important for people with Vegetarian Diet?
Stay tuned for my upcoming post. Thank you.
Regards,
Joselyne
+65-9090 9942
Nutritional Immunology Lifestyle Consultant
