Saturday, January 31, 2009

A Restaurant for Vegetarians?

By Ros Harlot

Even in today's health conscious world, mentioning you are a vegetarian quickly stops the conversation. If you are thinking of following vegetarian diet for certain causes - religious belief, health reason, economic reason, animal rights - you will often face a barrage of uninformed arguments from skeptical relatives and friends. You may want to consider a vegetarian diet for improving and maintaining your physical, mental and spiritual health. Your vegetarian diet may be very healthy for you but an lack certain elements that are only obtained from animals.

The health of most children can benefit from a hormone and preservative free diet that vegetarian food can provide. You would be wise to carry out some research before placing your child on a vegetarian diet to ensure they receive a suitably nutritious intake.

A vegetarians diet with involves regular servings of fruit, vegetables and whole grains is known to be healthy. By adopting the vegetarian diet, many obese people could deal with the problem of too much protein and animal fat in their diet and increase the amount of fiber. Low amounts of Cholesterol and fat are two other advantages of a vegetarian diet.

The higher than usual amounts of fiber found in a vegetarian diet means that it doesn't stay in your system for as long nor does it take as long for the food to be produced initially. History and archaeology has shown us that our ancestors hardly ever ate meat so being a vegetarian would be normal for us. Although a vegetarian option is usually on the menu in almost any Italian restaurant nowadays, it's always a good idea to remind the server that you require a vegetarian option and whether or not you eat dairy products and eggs.

Medical research into the vegetarian diet highlights some interesting statistics. Of late, increasing numbers of people have switched to vegetarian meals - as scientific research has shown the adverse effects of animal meat. There is also, for instance, a 50% less chance that a vegetarian will develop heart disease. A large number of the population has decided to start a vegetarian diet during their life.

Although more and more people are adopting a vegetarian diet, it is the West where the biggest health benefits would be seen. Like all things in life, something worth doing that will benefit your health in the long term, is not necessarily the easiest thing to do. For a successful change to occur though, you must not consider a vegetarian diet as just a replacement for a meat based diet.

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