Why Vegan?: A simple guide to the right choice for us and our planet by Cocolin Michela

Author:Cocolin, Michela [Cocolin, Michela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3: The health reason

“You must eat a little bit of everything”. “We are designed to eat meat”. “Fish is good for the brain”.

These are just a few of the things I was told by family and friends during my teenage years. Growing up in North-East Italy in the 1980’s was an aspiring vegetarian’s nightmare. Restaurants did not offer vegetarian menus, the usual meat-free options were cheese and bread, omelette, beans salad, mushroom risotto, tomato pasta and margherita pizza. There were no vegan options. Asking for something meat-free, dairy-free, and egg-free was often met with a raised eyebrow or a joke by the waiter. “Water?” was often the cheeky suggestion.

Since then, things have moved on considerably. There are now countless vegetarian and vegan food brands available in supermarkets from the pioneer Quorn and Linda McCartney to the more recent The Vegetarian Butcher and Beyond Meat, offering countless options from pizzas to burgers and sausages to fishless fingers and steaks in addition to the hundreds of grains and fresh ingredients already available, like rice, pasta, tofu, pulses, fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and spices for the cookery enthusiast.

Cafes and restaurants often have a vegan menu or vegetarian and vegan options clearly marked with the green v symbol for vegetarian and v symbol with a leaf for vegan.

Vegetarian and vegan foods and growing in popularity among all age groups. It is no longer a young adult trend, many middle-aged and senior citizen choose to eat meat-free alternatives, often dictated by health concerns. More and more dieticians and general practitioners advise their patients to cut down on or eliminate completely red meat from their diet, often in the presence of high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels.

Do we need to eat meat? Not at all. Can a healthy diet be meat-free? Absolutely. What about the “we are designed to eat meat” belief, then? In my brief experience as a veterinary student back in the 1990’s, I had the opportunity to learn amongst many other things, that humans are not “designed” to eat meat, they are designed to evolve. Contrary to other animals who hunt for food, we can choose to eat or not to eat meat. Our teeth include incisors for cutting, canines for tearing and molars for munching. In fact, our teeth are more similar to the ones of herbivores than the ones of carnivores. Herbivores lack big canines and carnivores lack large incisors. Some primates have large canines though they are mainly vegetarian. In such case, canines are used to crack open the shell of nuts. They are also shown to communicate with other primates.

The health risks associated with the consumption of meat, particularly red meat, are now well-documented. There are two problems with eating meat: the meat itself and what is added to it before and after the animal is slaughtered. Some meats are high in saturated fat, which can lead to increased levels of cholesterol in the blood and to a high risk of heart disease. Chemicals found in processed

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