A healthy diet provides you with all the nutrition you need to keep your body functioning properly while limiting things you don't need such as excess calories, fat, sugar and chemicals. You don't need any dietary cholesterol to stay healthy, and eliminating cholesterol from your diet may help protect you against heart disease. But a no-cholesterol diet won't prove healthy if it includes too much saturated fat, trans fat and refined carbohydrates.
Vegan Diet and Health
Cholesterol comes from animal products, including meat, dairy and eggs. If you eliminate animal products from your diet, you adopt a vegan eating plan. A low-fat vegan diet that includes complex carbohydrates may help you improve the numbers on your cholesterol test, lower your blood sugar and help you lose weight. But a vegan diet that includes more than 16 g to 22 g of saturated fat per day or more than 2 g of trans fat could elevate your cholesterol. A vegan diet that includes more than 15 percent of daily calories from sugar added to foods could also harm your heart health, according to MayoClnic.com.
Vegan Diet and Lower Blood Sugar
A low-fat vegan diet may help reduce the symptoms of type2 diabetes. Neal Barnard, founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, led a study that compared the effectiveness and sustainability of a low-fat vegan diet and a traditional diabetes diet for lowering blood sugar. Barnard and colleagues from George Washington University and the University of Toronto assigned 99 persons with type 2 diabetes to follow one of the two diets for 18 months. Participants who followed a low-fat vegan diet experienced greater reductions in blood sugar levels than persons following a low-fat, low-calorie diet based on guidelines by the American Diabetes Association. They also found it easier to stick with the vegan diet, according to the study, published in February 2009 in the "Journal of the American Dietetic Association."
Weight Loss
A low-fat vegan diet may also help you lose weight without counting calories. In Barnard's study, persons who followed the vegan diet lost weight but did not restrict the amount of food they ate. Reducing fat in your diet automatically reduces calories. The high amount of fiber in the vegan diet may also share responsibility for the weight loss, according to the American Dietetic Association. Fiber, found in high amounts in foods such as black beans, fruit with edible skins and oatmeal, helps you feel full faster and stay full longer than foods low in fiber.
Considerations
A no- cholesterol diet could improve unhealthy if you replaced cholesterol with vegetable-based palm and coconut oil or with trans fat, found in margarine and shortening. Both saturated fats and trans fat may show up in fried foods such as onion rings and doughnuts or in commercial baked goods. Commercial baked goods such as cookies, cakes and pies also contain sugar that could harm your health.
References
- "Journal of the American Dietetic Association"; A Low-Fat Vegan Diet Elicits Greater Macronutrient Changes, but Is Comparable in Adherence and Acceptability, Compared with a More Conventional Diabetes Diet among Individuals with Type 2 Diabetes; Neal Barnard et al; February 2009
- "The Globe and Mail"; Vegan Diet Has Surprising Stick-to-it-iveness"; Leslie Beck; Feb. 4 2009
- MayoClinic.com; Healthy Diet: End the Guesswork With These Nutrition Guidelines; February 2011
- American Dietetic Association; Eat Right; Health Implications of Dietary Fiber; October 2008
