Are You Not Cutting Out More Thin Meat From Your Diet?

Many vegetarians fall into the dangerous trap of eliminating meat and fish from their diets without compensating for lost nutrients.

If balanced diet is important for vegetarian adults, it is even more vital for children last year, a senior lecturer of nutrition found that 80 % of mothers questioned believed low-fat high-fiber diets were appropriate for heir infants, and 20 % felt high kilo joule food was not important. Increasingly, traditional foods like baby cereal with whole milk are giving way to a “nursery starvation diet” of low fat yoghurts and fruit and vegetable purees.

Non-meat-eating can also be problematic for teenagers, particularly girls, a spokesperson says many young women have an iron intake puts them at risk of anemia. They often don’t realize that they have to replace meat with good sources of iron, sources that are not necessarily at the top of their lists of favorite foods.

One common misconception is that the processed vegetarian foods often favored by teenagers, such as vegetable burgers and prepared chilled foods, are “healthier” than the real thing. Often they are not. Surrounding a lump of tofu with pastry to turn it into a pie can cancel out many of the health benefits the tofu may provide. Also meat substitutes may require strong flavoring, and can be high in salt. Some contain nearly three times as much saturated fat, as meat.

Another danger is missing out on dairy foods that contain vitamin B12 and calcium. Certainly vegetarians who don’t have dairy products daily can at risk of not getting enough.

Although vitamin B12 deficiency is rare, an expert of nutrition says that it can cause severe irreversible damage to the nervous system. He also has concerns about Soya milk, another popular alternative for vegetarians. Giving Soya milk to children at better than no milk at all but should be a resort.

While many studies suggest that a vegetarian diet is a good one, that may be a result of other differences between meat-eaters and vegetarians, for example, vegetarians don’t drink or smoke as much and generally weigh less. And there is evidence that even balanced vegetarian diets do not significantly reduce some health risks. A research study last year found that deaths from stomach, breast, prostate & lung cancer not markedly lower among vegetarians.

With so much publicity about how we treat our animals, and what we feed them-it is not surprising that, more and more people are becoming vegetarians, the problem is, how many will encounter just as many health hazards as meat- eaters?