Abstinence from meat and vegetarianism is a worldwide popular system of feeding that exclude taking meat products or limiting their consumption as well as animal based products. The origins of vegetarianism are in the ancient times.
Vegans are a kind of orthodox vegetarians who refuse to eat any kind of meat, fish, sea food, eggs, milk and products based on milk and sometimes even honey.
Lactovegetarians are people who do not avoid some milk products,
Ovo-lacto vegetarians are those who concede eating not only milk products but also eggs of some domestic birds.
All the types of vegetarianism allow thermal processing of food and this is one of the main feature that distinguishes it from raw eating.
Vegetarians use about 300 types of vegetables, root plants, approximately 600 kinds of fruit and 200 types of nuts. Nuts and beans are a good source of natural proteins, especially soy, lens, peas along with spinach, kale turnip and cauliflower. Vegetable oils such as olive, sunflower, cannabis, cocoa, nut and corn oils are the best providers of daily fat. Almost all the fruits contain carbohydrates that are also necessary for people every day. Vinegar and flavoring are considered as unfit for food.
There are pieces of advice to combine several items of food, for example, rice with beans; wheat with peanuts and sesame, etc.
Specialists are still uncertain about the beneficial features of vegetarianism. Some of the vegetarian lifestyle is admitted to be good for health however some of the scientists believe there must be animal based proteins in a daily food ration.
Specialists say that sticking to vegan diet for a long time leads to a significant deficiency of iron, calcium, zinc and vital amino acids because they are not present in vegetable fruit or they are not enough. Although the quantity of nutritional elements in vegan food can be quite enough but they can be badly digested and produce no positive effect.
It is said that even healthy people can suffer from dysbiosis, vitamin deficiency, and proteins insufficiency. As a result, strict vegetarianism is considered as bad nutrition plan for kids, youngsters, pregnant women, nursing mothers and sportsmen.
Vegetarianism cannot satisfy easily digested calcium needs when it comes to women during their menopause and old people and that is why there is a high risk of osteoporosis.
However lacto vegetarianism and ovo-lacto vegetarianism are not that infamous as veganism. Such a lifestyle can be beneficial for health and is sometimes even used like treatment for hypertonia, obesity, pyelonephritis, podagra, atherosclerosis, circulatory inefficiency and other diseases.
A lot of people today who had started their vegetarian diet decades ago confirm that they feel really good and healthy despite what scientists usually say. It is quite interesting that more and more people today tend to become vegetarians although the society as a whole still rejects it. The World Health Organization started to associate vegetarianism with a mental disorder that needs to be treated. The opinions differ and no one still can say for sure if being a vegetarian is good or bad.