Vegan Perspective!

Crowd Science from the BBC World Service WHO did find that red meat can put you at risk for cancer so fish is there as usually the choice for a lot of people. So it’s not a hard transition to cut red meat and then all meats.

Do you think being vegan is a good thing? Yeah, because it saves animals from being eaten. Do you think being vegan is healthier or not healthier than eating meat? 

Healthier, because you're not eating animals. You can live a healthy life being vegan and actually if you look back through history a lot of cultures, especially like African culture, they consumed a lot of vegan food because meat is quite expensive.

So are you mostly a vegan then for health reasons? No, not only for health reasons. For environmental reasons and animal welfare.

The number of vegans in America grew from 4 million in 2014 to nearly 20 million in 2017. And here in the UK, nearly half of vegans cite health as one of their reasons for their food choices. So there are obviously lots of other reasons for deciding to be a vegan, environmental reasons, animal welfare considerations.

So if you eat something like tofu, that's pretty, that's pretty complete. The second thing you've got to worry about probably is iron. I think you're going to get quite a lot of iron in there.

And then calcium. So obviously, if you're going vegan and suddenly all the dairy products disappear, then you're going to want to make sure that you have enough calcium as well. You're going to be able to get that from really quite a number of different types of vegetables and also from the beans.

There are certain things that you will need to replace. The first and most important is actually vitamin B12.

Now, the interesting thing about B12 is B12 tends to come from animal based products. It's critical for brain development. And finally, iodine, depending on which part of the world you actually come from. It's important for our development and also our maintaining our metabolism.

Professor Tim Key, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford in the UK. He's currently studying a huge group of some 30,000 vegans and vegetarians. On average, the vegans have a lower body mass index, meaning they're sort of not as fat as the meat eaters, they're thinner.

They have a slightly lower blood pressure, but not a marked difference. But they, on average, have a quite substantially lower level of cholesterol in their blood. So all those differences, thinner, lower cholesterol,  slightly lower blood pressure,  are in the favourable direction and you would expect them to lead to a lower risk of some diseases, particularly heart disease and diabetes.

What about cancer? I mean, presumably if vegans aren't eating things like sausages or steak, they're less likely to get cancer. Studies have found a lower risk for prostate cancer in vegans, which is just statistically significant.

We’ve found where the risk was higher in vegans than the other diet groups was the risk of fractures of the bones, which suggests that maybe their bones were just slightly weaker.

Do vegans live longer? Well, we've neither found a significant difference.

And I was concerned about the treatment of animals and farming and slaughterhouses.

Things like microprotein, which comes from fungus, and tofu, which comes from soy. At the start of this year, the World Economic Forum published a report about the future of meat substitutes like this, where they modelled the health impacts of replacing meat with alternatives.

So we were basically looking at the effects on blood cholesterol levels. So that's largely down to how much saturated fat there is in the product. We were looking at the effects on blood pressure.

Dietary fibre or things like potassium is rich in plant-based products.

Susan's model found that proteins lowered cholesterol, blood pressure with increased fibre intake and decreased intake of saturated fats.

The effects of sodium and fat are also matters of concern.

The World Economic Forum report modelled the health impacts of alternative meats.

With Susan's predictions, Andrew got a group of meat eaters to half their meat intake and increase their consumption of meat substitutes, things like vegetarian burgers and vegetarian sausages, for three months. And just like Susan's model predicted, Andrew found a decrease in the group's cholesterol by about 10%, which lowers their risk of heart disease.

But that's not all they found. There was also a rather unexpected result which didn't appear in the World Economic Forum model. There was just one thing that we found which surprised everyone. 

And that was in the level of white blood cells in their blood. Now, white blood cells are involved in protecting us from infection. And there was a significant drop in the number of white blood cells.

A decreased white blood cell count suggests that the participants might be at greater risk of infection.

Andrew also emphasised that this study was based on meat eaters in the UK and that reducing meat consumption isn't necessarily going to be healthier for everyone. In the West, we have an almost limitless supply of a whole range of different types of food, different types of vegetables, pulses, beans.