A Vegetarian Diet : No Guarantee Of Good Health
The diseases that afflict, and eventually kill, almost all Americans can be avoided. You can live a high-quality, disease-free life and remain physically active and healthy. You can die peacefully and uneventfully at an old age, as nature intended. To achieve the results in preventing and reversing disease, and attaining permanent healthy body weight, we must be concerned with the nutritional quality of our diet.
The picture is becoming crystal clear — the key to what will make you thin, will also make you healthy. Once you learn to focus on the nutritional quality of your food, thinness and health will walk hand in hand, hopefully happily ever after.
Does that mean we are advocating a strict vegetarian diet?
The simple answer is … no!
People who omit meat, fowl, and dairy but fill up on bread, pasta, pretzels, bagels, rice cakes, and crackers may be on a low-fat diet, but because their diet is also low in vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, important essential fatty acids, and fibre, it is conspicuously inadequate and should not be expected to protect against cancer. Additionally, because these refined grains are low in fibre, they do not make you feel full until after you have taken in too many calories from them. In other words, both their nutrient-to-calorie and nutrient – to – fibre ratios are extremely low.
Let us repeat this again to be clear: following a strict vegetarian diet is not as important as eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. A vegetarian whose diet is mainly refined grains, cold breakfast cereals, processed health-food-store products, vegetarian fast foods, white rice, and pasta will be worse off than a person who eats a little chicken or eggs, for example, but consumes a large amount of fruits, vegetables, and beans.
Studies have confirmed this. Multiple studies have shown that vegetarians live quite a bit longer than none vegetarians do. But when we take a close look at the data, it appears that those who weren’t as strict had longevity statistics that were equally impressive as long as they consumed a high volume of a variety of unrefined plant foods.
Remember, long-term vegans (strict vegetarians who consume no dairy or other foods of animal origin) almost never get heart attacks. If you have heart disease or a strong family history of heart disease, you should consider avoiding all animal-based products. To quote a respected authority, William Castelli, M.D., director of the famed Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts:
“We tend to scoff at vegetarians, but they’re doing much better than we are. Vegans have cholesterol levels so low, they almost never get heart attacks. Their average blood cholesterol is about 125, and we’ve never seen anyone in the Framingham study have a heart attack with a level below 150”.
The research shows that those who avoid meat and dairy have lower rates of heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. The data is conclusive: vegetarians live longer in America, probably a lot longer.
So can it categorically be said that vegetarians live longer? This is a difficult question to answer accurately, as there are few studies on lifelong vegetarians in countries with electricity, refrigeration, good sanitation, and adequate nutrition. American studies done in 1984 on Seventh-Day Adventists, a religious group that provides dietary and lifestyle advice to its members, sheds some light on this issue. Adventist leadership discourages the consumption of meat, fowl, and eggs; pork is prohibited. Because eating animal products is only discouraged and not necessarily prohibited, there is a large range in animal-product consumption.
Some Adventists never eat meat and eggs, whereas others consume them daily. When we take a careful look at the Seventh-Day Adventist data, those who lived the longest were those following the vegetarian diet the longest, and when we look at the subset who had followed a vegetarian diet for at least half their life, it appears they lived about thirteen years longer than their average, non-smoking Californian counterparts. Most of the participants in this study were converted to the religion, not born into it. There was no data on those following such a diet since childhood. However, the data from this carefully constructed study was compelling; and what is of considerable interest is the association of green salad consumption and longer life. Leafy greens, the most nutrient-rich food on the planet, was the best predictor of extreme longevity.
Some nutritional experts would argue that a strict vegetarian who follows a diet rich in natural vegetation, not refined grains, has the longest longevity potential, as indicated by evaluating hundreds of the food-consumption studies — but, of course, this is still educated speculation. Let’s not argue whether it is all right to eat a little bit of animal foods or not, and thereby miss the point that cannot be contradicted or disagreed with.
Whether you eat a vegetarian diet or include a small amount of animal foods, for optimal health you must receive the majority of your calories from unrefined plant food. It is the large quantity of unrefined plant food that grants the greatest protection against developing serious disease.
