Vegetarian Or Vegan Food

Vegetarian or Vegan food is a diet followed by people who refuse to eat meat or fish, usually for religious reasons or moral principles.

Some Vegetarians are happy to include milk and cheese in their food plans, for while these are animal products, no animal has been killed for them. And some vegetarians will even eat eggs as well, reasoning that eating an unfertilized egg is still not actually killing an animal. So vegetarian food is not quite as restrictive a diet as many people imagine.

The Vegan philosophy, on the other hand, disallows making use of any animal products whatsoever. So a Vegan food plan is really strict, and it’s a bit harder to get adequate protein in your diet to maintain a healthy body.

Both Vegetarian or Vegan food plans concentrate on getting healthy nutrition from whole grains, such as rice and bread, fruits and vegetables.

Protein is necessary to build healthy body tissue, and without eating meat or fish, your best way of eating protein is to include beans or other pulses (such as Lentils) in your diet.

And while many vegetarians are happy to eat eggs, milk and cheese, the Vegans refuse to touch these dairy products because they still come from animals. It’s not so restrictive once you realize that you can eat Soy Milk (made from cooked soy beans and water that have been liquidized in a blender.)

Many commercial varieties of soy add heaps of sugar to make it taste more palatable, so be sure to read the food labels carefully. Remember, added sugar means unwanted calories and just feeds more craving for sweet treats.

Can your body afford any more sweet treats? Not if you're going to lose weight, it can't.

In much of South America, I've been told that meat is so expensive that the staple diet for poor people comes from what they term locally "The Three Sisters": That is the three vegetable food staples which are grown together and later eaten together. They make a simple but perfectly-balanced and nutritious vegetarian diet.

The peasants grow corn or maize, together with beans and squash vegetables. (Squash includes pumpkin, cucumber, zucchini, gourds and so on.) The gardeners plant the corn first, so the beans can climb up the corn stalks. The squash vegetables become a ground cover, a living mulch, which discourages weeds and conserves water.

Vegetarian food may seem a bit boring, but your taste buds will adapt quite quickly and you will feel healthier for it. And just consider this: There aren't many obese people who got fat on a non-meat diet. It would be very hard to do so.

Another way of eating that works well for some is the Mediterranean diet.