Plant Based Diet for Diabetes Prevention
Maybe you’ve contemplated going ‘vegan’ before, or your spouse have been nudging you to try switching to a vegetarian diet, or the thought of even removing meat from your diet is unimaginable, whatever your stance is on vegetarian diet, perhaps this article could give you a little mindset shift.
There are many misconceptions about those on vegetarian diets: they look unhealthy or pale, they’re lacking in certain supplements that can only be obtained from meat products, etc. This is far from true because with a well balanced meal, all the nutrition that can be found in a well balanced diet containing animal product can be found in a vegan diet.
We’ve already established that diabetes can be effectively prevented by weight loss and dietary change. The question is, do you really have have to go so far as to adopting the vegan diet to see a positive effect in your blood sugar control or a diet low in saturated fat and high in fiber should be enough to get the job done.
The National Institute of Health (United States) went ahead to find out if plant-based diet is all that effective. From their study, comparing both a well-balanced vegan and individualized (containing animal product) diet, it is obvious that plant-based diet was superior to the latter in terms of long-term weight loss achievement and better cholesterol control. Those taking the plant-based diet also needed less medication for blood sugar control later on. When both groups’ nutrient intake were compared, the plant based diet was not lacking in nutrients conventionally thought to be reduced in vegan diet.
Of course, your favourite dish may be a meat based product and it certainly can be challenging to give that up. However, in the process of adopting the vegan diet, it is possible that you might discover new dishes that you would never have known if not for this change. It is recommended that you take things slow. Perhaps, start off with 2-3 vegan meals in a week. Those who wish to go ‘cold turkey’ can do so. The power plate http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/pplate/power-plate is an educational tool to help you learn more about the vegan diet. If you’d like to kick-start your vegan diet. You can do so with the help of this plan. http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/kickstart/kickstart-programs.
For those of you who are leaning toward the skeptical side or don’t think you can keep up with the change. Keep an open mind, you’ll be surprise to find that surveys showed that young women who had tried either a vegetarian or calorie-restricted diet had a mean duration of adherence to vegetarian diet of at least 2 years, compared to only 4 months for calorie-restricted diets. This perhaps could be due to the fact that those who switch over to the vegan diet are more committed to the change since the swift is so drastic. At the end of the day, it really comes down to how committed a person is to his or her lifestyle modification and how much control they’d like to have over their disease progress.