Hi there! It’s Mathea Ford with Renal Diet HQ and today I want to talk to you about the different types of vegetarian and if it’s healthy to eat more plant-based for you with kidney disease. So, I wanted to answer some of those questions because I’ve been getting a lot of those questions and as you may know I’m getting ready to release a vegetarian meal plan, 21 day meal plan. So, I’ve done a lot of studying on this so I wanted to kind of give you my thoughts on that.
So, let’s first talk about the different types of vegetarianism. You often think that it’s just not eating meat but there’s a lot of layers to that. Vegetarians are you know they eat all kinds of protein so if you think of me as the only protein that’s maybe where you’re confused but a lot of times vegetarians eat plant-based protein whether they may be some animal products that contain protein and they get some of their vitamins and minerals from those but I wanted to go over kind of some definitions. So, what is a Vegetarian?
The Vegetarian Society defines a vegetarian as follows:
A vegetarian is someone who lives on a diet of grains, pulses, legumes, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruits, fungi, algae, yeast and/or some other non animal-based foods. For example, salt with or without dairy products, honey and/or eggs. A vegetarian does not eat foods that consists of or have been produced with the aid of products consisting of or created from (that’s a lot) any part of the body of a living or dead animal. This includes meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, insects, byproducts of slaughter or any food made with processing aids created from these. So, that’s kind of a very general definition and I wanted to go into kind of some of the more popular types of vegetarianism.
So, there’s the Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian which means that’s one of the most common ones that we see with people. Lacto-Ovo Vegetarians still consume dairy and eggs so they’re eating mostly plant-based and let me go over what plant-based means. So, plant-based is a term that a lot of people use and they may think it means you’re vegetarian but what it really means is you’re eating the majority of your food as plants or grains. The vegetarian type foods but you still might have meat, a smaller portion meat, chicken, eggs, all that type of stuff. So, plant-based just really means you’re putting more plant products or vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans into your diet versus completely eliminating meat like a vegetarian would do. So, lacto-ovo
vegetarians still consume dairy and eggs, they also eat cheese. So, a typical diet of a lacto-ovo vegetarian is going to have fruits, nuts, veggies, grains, seeds, herbs, milk, cheese, yogurt, eggs and this is the one that’s most commonly accommodated in a restaurant. With my 21-day a vegetarian
meal plan it will be a lacto-ovo vegetarian that you can adjust obviously
if you don’t want to eat cheese you just don’t put cheese in the recipe. So, it’s associated at lacto-ovo vegetarian you can it tends to have lower health risk and it improves your heart disease risk and it can reduce type-2 diabetes certain types of cancer. So, all those types of things.
A lacto-vegetarian means that so instead of a lacto-ovo vegetarian if you’re a lacto vegetarian you do not consume eggs but you consume milk and other milk products like cheese and milk products. So, in other cultures that might be more normal to just not eat the eggs but have the milk products.
Ovo vegetarian is somebody that is going to skip the milk products and still consume eggs and if you’re lactose intolerant this may work best for you so you’re not going to have the milk the cheese the dairy but you are going to have the egg products which give you the protein and a little bit of fat in your...