It's Not Easy Being Vegan

It isn't easy to maintain a healthy vegetarian or vegan diet. You can't just decide to stop eating meat without doing your homework to find out how to maintain your health in a non-carnivorous way. Well, certainly you could stop eating meat, but you would become very unhealthy as a result unless you carefully looked into what amendments needed to me made to your food intake.

After a few Google searches on vegan and vegetarian diets, it's not hard to understand why so many non-vegan and non-vegetarian people think that these people are just plain crazy. They - many of them - almost seem cult-like in their severity. They talk about meat-eating people like they are total bottom-feeders. I was expecting to get some legitimate information within the first few search results when I typed in "pros and cons of vegan and vegetarian diets, but it was quite the contrary. None of the results on the first page were dot-org or dot-gov. Even when you do find a dot-org site, it seems more like the sites' emphasis is on why it is bad to eat meat rather than why it is good to be vegan or vegetarian. It must be hard to be a vegan or vegetarian if you were not raised that way because you would have to really do some research to find out exactly what your new diet needs and why.

I think that the bottom line here is that vegetarian and, even more so, vegan diets have the potential to be healthy, but they are absolutely not for the lazy eater. For someone who wants to live life without really focusing on what nutrients, a meat-eaters lifestyle would surely be a safer bet. Meat-eaters can get many essential vitamins and nutrients without even meaning to, but vegans and vegetarians have to make a real concentrated and deliberate effort in order to meet their nutrient and vitamin needs, particularly in the areas of such things as protein, calcium, vitamin D and B12, zinc, and riboflavin. As far as the soy issue is concerned, I think that vegetarians must be worried. If too much soy can have adverse effects, then they will have to find another dietary staple to replace it. I would guess that many vegetarians will not be too worried, however, until there is much more research and media attention on this issue.