When I first came to veganism, I thought about the health benefits of going vegan. Being younger, I wasn’t struggling with my health, but I wasn’t watching very closely.
I quickly learned that veganism has awesome health benefits and something about it appealed to me. I had eaten in vegan restaurants before and loved the style of vegan foods.
Looking at the health benefits of going vegan only fueled me in this direction.
Key Takeaways
I wanted something to lose weight, but I also wanted something more meaningful than a diet because I didn’t want to simply lose weight and stop doing it. This healthy lifestyle was to become something that I would continue doing.
Here are some of the things I learned about going vegan.
Veganism Improves Your Stomach Health in 16 Weeks
You’d be surprised to learn that even a short 16-week vegan diet works wonders for the stomach.
They proved this with a study. They made one group eat a low-fat vegan diet, while the other group ate their normal diet.
When the 16-week study ended, the vegan group lost weight, visceral fat, fat mass, and improved insulin sensitivity.
These were people in the stages of being pre-diabetic and it helped them.
The vegan diet works for stomach health because it gives you lots of fiber with an average of 40 to 45 grams of fiber daily.
The fiber cleans out the bad bacteria in the intestines.
At the same time, it reduces your risk of constipation and lowers the risk of stomach inflammation.
Some vegans said that they had IBS and it eliminated their stomach problems.
Now it’s also important to eat healthy vegan food because some people have reported vegan foods as worsening their stomach issues. This is an individual thing and everyone needs to listen to their own body when it comes to veganism.
The High Fiber Diet Lowers the Risk of Cancer
Along with fiber helping to improve your stomach health, it also lowers your risk of getting some cancers. Now it’s important to be realistic about this because no diet will totally eliminate the risk of cancer.
However, some studies show how the vegan diet could prevent breast cancer and colon cancer.
For breast cancer, you might have a lower risk because a diet rich in beans, grains, vegetables, and fruits are rich in fiber.
One study from Harvard looked at 20 previous studies. The women with more fiber in their diet saw an 8% decrease in breast cancer.
This is the same reason that it lowers the risk of colon cancer.
Dr. Denis Burkitt, a surgeon in Uganda, says that you need 50 grams of fiber daily to lower the risk of colon cancer.
In the last 50 years, Dr. Burkitt’s suggestion for daily fiber has proven true under a growing body of evidence. To give another example, they did another study in rural South Africa.
Researchers saw how colon cancer only happened at around 5 for every 100,000 people in rural South Africa.
Next, they compared them with African Americans and found 65 out of every 100,000 experienced colon cancer. This may be due to the fact that African Americans eat a lot of meats, fats, and carbohydrates.
Meanwhile, rural South Africans eat plenty of fiber ranging from 50 to 120 grams daily.
Healthy Heart in Just 8 Weeks?
Stanford University did a study that found that a vegan diet may improve your heart health in as little as 8 weeks.
To do the study, they randomized twin pairs from 44 participants: One would follow a vegan diet and the other would follow an omnivorous diet. At the end of the study, they found that the vegan diet led to better heart health.
When researchers drew blood at three different points during the study, they found that the vegan diet had a 20% decrease in fasting insulin levels, and they lost an average of 4.2 pounds more than with the omnivore diet.
To put this into greater context, lower insulin levels improve the heart because high blood sugar levels lead to inflammation that damages the artery lining.
The vegan diet contains many foods healthy for the heart, which includes:
While this gives you an idea, in general, many of the vegan foods are good for the heart. They cut out the fats and cholesterol in the blood that will cause heart attacks. In fact, the European Heart Journal published a study from between 1980 and 2022 that showed how vegan and vegetarian diets helped:
Bad cholesterol will narrow and harden your arteries over time. Eventually, you could have a serious heart attack.
Now cholesterol can have an element of genetics to it, so you may still need to monitor it even on a vegan diet. In particular, for vegans, be aware of coconut-based products like coconut milk and coconut oil since it can ruin your cholesterol.
FINAL THOUGHTS
All the health benefits of going vegan make it worth the effort. Just remember that not all plant-based diets are created equal.
In particular, watch out for vegan diets with refined carbohydrates and processed foods high in salt and fat. Even when vegan, it would still be unhealthy to eat vegan junk foods.
Going vegan can be great for your stomach health, lowering the risk of certain types of cancers, and maintaining a healthy heart, but you still need to eat right to see the benefits from it.
You don’t want to think that it will solve all your health problems. For me, going vegan was about trying to keep my health. I like that it gives me more nutrients and vitamins compared to how I was eating before.
