Data has shown that nearly 5% of Americans have embraced a vegan lifestyle and changed their diet in the hopes of decreasing their carbon footprint. A lot of people are fascinated by this trend and want to explore if it is as helpful for the body as pop culture suggests.
Alleged benefits of a vegan diet
Online health blogs have been pushing the vegan diet for a long time now. Advantages of the lifestyle have been enumerated over and over, and they include increased life expectancy, decreased cholesterol levels, and a fall in the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
These blogs also claim that adopting a vegan diet can make the skin healthy hair, increase the metabolism of the body, and even help in improving the mental health of individuals suffering from depression.
But what do health specialists and doctors have to say about the vegan diet? Let’s find out.
What Chinese and Western medicines suggest?
Wong Ching, a registered Chinese medicine practitioner in Hong Kong, suggested that it is impossible for humans to not have meat in their diets. He said that even though vegans claim to have plant-based substitute with benefits similar to meat, there is nothing that can provide the same nutritional value as real meat.
According to him, food can be yin or yang, and the body needs to consume both kinds of energies to get all the nutrients and vitamins required. He suggested that deterioration of organs is inevitable if the two energies are not well balanced. Therefore consuming meat can be hazardous according to traditional Chinese medicine.
However, Western medicine experts have suggested that consuming a balanced and adequate diet is more important, and it is not significant whether the nutrients are taken from a vegan diet or a diet consisting of meat.