vegetarian health and nutrition

Vegetarian Health and Nutrition
From the book “The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking”
By Adiraja Dasa

“Can a vegetarian diet improve or restore health? Can it prevent certain diseases?

Advocates of vegetarianism have said yes for many years, although they didn’t have much support from modern science until recently. Now, medical researchers have discovered evidence of a link between meat-eating and such killers as heart disease and cancer, so they’re giving vegetarianism another look.

Since the 1960s, scientists have suspected that a meat-based diet is somehow related to the development of arteriosclerosis and heart disease. As early as 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association said: “Ninety to ninety-seven percent of heart disease can be prevented by a vegetarian diet.” Since that time, several well-organized studies have scientifically shown that after tobacco and alcohol, the consumption of meat is the greatest single cause of mortality in Western Europe, the United States, Australia, and other affluent areas of the world.