Is Veganism Healthy

Tags - #Vegan_Blog

People still like to debate if being vegan is a healthy option or not? Here are a few key benefits of going vegan and why you should be vegan.

It has been proven time and again that a healthy vegan diet helps reduce cholesterol levels. This simply because of the types of foods a typical vegan eats.

A good quantity of legumes, starchy vegetables like potatoes, green leafy vegetables, and a good quantity of fruits helps complete a typical vegan diet.

These food products do not have large quantities of fats, especially cholesterol, mainly derived from animal products like eggs, sausages, etc.

Even nuts that are high in fats do not contain cholesterol, although it is advised to limit the number of nuts consumed as they are high in fats.

Plants also provide a good amount of fiber that helps take out the cholesterol from the body by combining it. Thus helping reduce the cholesterol that would typically be absorbed by the body to be excreted.

All these things combine to create a cholesterol-reducing effect that can help anyone with high cholesterol.

In a controlled study vegans typically lowered 29.2mg/dL of cholesterol compared to the control group. You can see many other examples where people have seen tremendous results by adopting a vegan diet.

In 2019, the number of people who were suffering from type 2 diabetes was 463 million, which is 9.3% of the people on earth. It is estimated that this number will rise to 578 million by 2030.

Most of the people who are type 2 diabetic are from the urban population, which shows that junk food and lifestyle choices do have a hand in this disease. It is also noted that the higher-income population is more susceptible to type 2 diabetes. Which correlates to the consumption of junk food.

These numbers are from diabetes research clinical practice.

Milk consumption is also related to type 2 diabetes which we will discuss here,

Now getting back to the point of a vegan diet that helps reduce sugar levels, As we have seen in the first point of cholesterol that a typical healthy vegan diet contains a good amount of fiber and plant content.

This fiber and starch content digests slowly, not like your typical junk food that is high in processed food like sugar.

Do note that I’m talking about a healthy vegan diet here. You can still be on a vegan diet but consume processed foods that can hurt your blood sugar levels. Having vegan food that is as close to its natural state is the key to improving blood sugar levels.

As we age we deposit more and more plaque in our arteries, due to the consumption of high amounts of cholesterol. This plaque reduces our artery’s ability to provide sufficient blood flow, as a result, the heart has to work harder, Even the heart itself suffers from getting a low amount of blood.

A healthy vegan diet does not contain high amounts of cholesterol or fats and also is high in nitric oxide, a substance that repairs the endothelium lining of our blood vessels. Nitric oxide also helps with the dilation of blood vessels, keeping them free from any kind of artery hardening that is so common with age.

Knee joint degeneration has almost doubled since mid 20th century. Many other types of arthritis are observed to have increased in the last few decades.

The main reason arthritis develops is that the shock-absorbing cartilage that normally cushions the bones cannot function properly. There are a few reasons that this can happen.

1st is some kind of injury that hurts the cartilage making it harder to work the way it should.

2nd The natural wearing down of the cartilage over the years.

3rd is inflammation of joints.

With a vegan diet, we can tackle two of those issues to a certain extent. A vegan diet can slow down the degeneration of cartilage by keeping the arteries free from plaque to a certain extent.

Most of the joints fail because they do not get a fresh blood supply due to clogged arteries. This is common for most lower back joint pain which occurs with time. The small arteries get clogged enough with time that they can’t supply fresh blood to the lower back properly.

This clogging happens at a very slow rate taking years to see any significant problem.

The other problem is inflammation. We see a food that is high in fat and low in nutrients cause inflammation. A healthy vegan diet keeps any kind of inflammation at bay, keeping the joints working freely.

Healthy vegan diets significantly reduce C-reactive protein (CRP), a key marker for acute and chronic inflammation.

Most of the healthy vegan options are very low in fats. Which helps when trying to lose weight. The other good thing about vegetables is that they are not as calorie-dense as animal products Which helps make the stomach get full without consuming a lot of calories.

Many studies like This one here, Shows how easy it is for vegans to lose weight. While consuming healthy whole foods.

Natural plant-based foods like fruits, legumes, green leafy vegetables, nuts, and whole grains are packed with nutrition. Phytochemicals produced by these plants are linked to being one of the key things that help protect our cells from mutation.

The other key ingredient that most of the modern diet lacks is fiber. Our ancestors use to eat around 50 grams of fiber daily, we consume less than 15 grams in our modern diet.

A study showed that young women who ate fiber-rich food were 25% less likely to get breast cancer later in their life. The other risk factor is being overweight, a plant-based diet help maintain a healthy weight thus reducing the chance of any types of cancers.

As seen in previous points above, a healthy plant-based vegan diet is rich in fibers like soluble and no soluble. Which is one of the key factors that keep our gut happy and our microbiome working fine.

We also see food high in antioxidants like pecans, blueberries, strawberries, artichoke, kale, etc. Antioxidants are really important to prevent us from any kind of free radical damage.

Plants also have a variety of plant compounds called phytonutrients that help us like, carotenoids, flavonoids, glucosinolates, ellagic acid, etc. These compounds are necessary for our body to work perfectly.

Many people have some of these queries about a vegan diet, some of which I’ll answer below.

This is the first thing that people ask when they hear about a vegan diet. The simple answer is yes, you get more than enough protein in a healthy vegan diet and you don’t even have to purchase any supplements to do so.

The daily requirement for an average sedentary male is 56grams/day and 46grams/day for women. Even if we consider that you’re not a sedentary person and require a lot more protein. With a vegan diet, you can still easily meet your protein needs.

A vegan diet may only lack one important thing which is vitamin B12. This is something that even some meat-eaters are deficient in.

Vitamin B12 is something that no animal in the world can make! It is something that bacteria in the soil make. Animals just absorb B12 by eating foods that are covered in dirt.

So how do you get your B12? We can’t do something like our ancestors did. Picking out plants from soil and eating it or drinking natural water is not possible or healthy for us.

All we can do is supplement with Vitamin B12 from a vegan source, mainly made from algae. Vitamin B12 does not cost much and a little goes a long way.

All these things and more that are not covered in this blog post, prove that a Vegan diet is a healthy diet. Although it can be said that you can have unhealthy versions of vegan diets but, they are not recommended for anyone. Eating a diet that provides all the necessary things without any harmful substances is one thing that we all must keep in mind.

Eating a nutrient-dense whole food plant-based diet is the key to a long and healthy lifestyle. We can follow this diet pretty easily and the results are quick to see.