I’ve been reading The China Study lately. Its main message is that we can control our health outcomes by adopting a mostly vegan diet. According to the authors, studies show that animal proteins cause the so-called Western diseases of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
During the animal studies, they noticed that rats fed a plant-based diet were more active than those on a diet including animal protein. They gave the rats metered exercise wheels and found out very quickly that the rats on the plant-based diet were twice as active!
During the last several days, I’ve felt very sluggish. During this time, I ate a lot of dairy and meat, since that sort of thing is encouraged when one follows a low carbohydrate diet. When I read about the vegan rats, it dawned on me that the low carbohydrate high animal protein diet could be the cause of that sluggishness. I decided to give veganism a try to see if I felt better.
Yesterday was my first day on a vegan diet. It’s probably too soon to tell if I’m feeling better. I’m not exactly sure what metric to use for that. Perhaps I could look at how many hours I sleep. Last week, I slept in a lot, often sleeping until 11:00 AM or noon. I used information from Low-cost vegan meal plans.: An article from: Vegetarian Journal as a model for how to plan the meals. I certainly did not lack for protein. According to Diet Pro, I got 82 g of protein, which is more than the 55 g or so that I need. I got 20.5 mg of iron, too, which is plenty, even for a woman. I was surprised that I got 75% of my B12 need as well. I might have gotten more, since I don’t have B12 amounts in my database for some of the foods I ate.
[Edit: This post was recovered from my old Exploring Veganism blog. Veganism ultimately proved to be an inappropriate approach for me.]