Professor investigates: this is how (un)healthy plant-based eating is
Are all vegans slim and fit? Do you live years longer if you stop eating meat, fish and dairy? Professor Tim Spector investigated, and his conclusion is: sorry, but plant-based eating isn’t always super healthy.
Plant-based eating is trendy. Just look in the supermarket: vegan burgers, pizzas and plant-based milk are simply sitting on the shelves next to their animal-based siblings, sometimes even bearing almost the same names. You couldn’t have imagined that ten years ago.
This is how (un)healthy plant-based eating is
And people who have switched to a plant-based diet almost all say they feel fantastic. More energy, fewer spots and a few kilos lost—it sounds too good to be true.
Super healthy?
Professor Tim Spector delved into the subject. In his new book Scooped, he debunks persistent food myths, and he also wanted to find out just how healthy veganism actually is. He worked his way through stacks of studies to draw his conclusions. At first glance, green and plant-based food does indeed seem super healthy: for example, a meta-analysis comparing forty scientific studies on a vegan lifestyle found that a plant-based diet can reduce the risk of heart disease by 40 percent. That’s impressive.
No smoking, no drinking
Still, Spector isn’t immediately convinced. Much of the research, for example, was conducted among Seventh-day Adventists, a strict religious group that doesn’t eat meat or fish. They have a 12 percent lower chance of dying from any cause. Is that because of their diet? No—the group also exercised much more on average than other people, drank little alcohol and didn’t smoke. And these so-called co-factors cannot be separated from one another in these studies.
Losing weight as a vegan
Most people who eat vegan are slimmer than people who eat meat or fish. People who switched to a vegan diet lost more weight than people who counted calories. The professor’s warning: many people don’t stick to such a diet for long and simply gain the weight back afterward, and a vegan diet is difficult to maintain in the long term.
Child abuse
For growing children, a 100 percent plant-based diet is probably not the best option, he observes. They are often smaller than other children and lack certain nutrients such as vitamin B12; in France, raising a child vegan is even considered a form of criminal neglect, he writes. His warning: vegans need to be very careful to get enough iron, vitamin B12 and amino acids. Despite taking vitamin supplements, the levels of these substances in the blood remain.
Too fatty and too salty
The researcher’s conclusion: on average, people who eat vegan are somewhat healthier than people who eat meat and fish. But whether that is solely due to their vegan food cannot be said. There are also plenty of unhealthy vegan snacks, especially now that fast-food restaurants are offering vegan options, so he doesn’t expect much good to come of that. Vegan cheese, for example, is too fatty and too salty, and fries are vegan but not necessarily healthy. A sausage roll with meat or with a meat substitute: both are packed with highly processed food, calories, fat and salt. In short: you can eat unhealthily as a vegan too.
Going green
Tim Spector cannot deny the positive environmental impact of eating more vegetables and less meat. His scientific advice: eat a little less meat, but treat yourself occasionally to a delicious piece of local organic meat. We can do without those bargain-basement bulk deals, but switching completely to Swiss chard and quinoa is going too far for the professor—and you don’t need to do that solely for your health either.
Read also:
- Sushi, no fish: how to make the tastiest vegan sushi
- Vegan fake tuna: even the cats fall for it
- ONA is the first vegan restaurant in France to receive a Michelin star
