Up with veggies and down with meat!
photo: Brett Oblack via flickr
While I'm a vocal advocate for not eating any meat—in the interest of your physical health and the planet's health, as well as to cultivate greater compassion for other living things though purposefully choosing to do no harm (i.e., practicing ahimsa)—when it comes to just slimming down, just cutting back on the amount of meat you eat has marked benefits.
A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at nearly 400,000 European adults and found that eating meat was linked with increased weight gain, even in people eating a normal number of calories and independent of other factors. The strongest link with meat and increased weight gain was found with processed meat such as sausages and ham. (BBC News)
Participants in the study, who lived across ten different countries, were weighed at the beginning of the research and at the end; they also filled out detailed food questionnaires.
(Incidentally, keeping close track of what you eat in a food diary is something which I've personally found to be quite informative, even if you're not actively trying to lose weight, but just to really know what you're eating and drinking, and where it comes from; try it for a month or so. But back to the study...)
