Comparison Of Animal-Based Diet And Plant-Based Diet

Contrast the animal-based diet and plant-based diet

Food, as the best solution to human basic needs, is playing a significant role in satisfying 7.6 billion people every day. Statistic shows that humans can consume 11.5 million pounds of food in the worldwide in only one minute (Thomson, 2014). Meanwhile, people’s daily recipe is also experiencing a revolutionary change when the increasing demand of the food and people’s awareness of health and sustainability become prevail. Currently, traditional animal-based diet is facing challenges from new fashioned plant-based diet. Both animal-based diet and plant-based diet can provide enough energy for human’s need; however, plant-based diet shows its advantages on high cost-efficiency, maintaining

Especially in the age with soaring cost of medical services, the prevalence of some modern chronic diseases, such as obesity and Type-2 diabetes, has been a miserable phenomenon in the society. In fact, there are too much processed food and animal-sourced foods in people’s daily recipes and it is one of the leading causes of chronic problems (Nutrition Facts, 2017). Hence, the introduction of plant-based diet is considered to be a feasible solution in order to shifting people’s unhealthy dietary habits because of its significant benefits in a long term. According to the medical research from Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism, Vang et al reveal that people who intake meat product weekly have a more 74% probability of developing diabetes than people who are adherent to vegetarian style (2008). In contrast, a relative low-fat, plant-based diet can dramatically avoid and cure diabetes with less medicine assist. For example, Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) plays a vital role of indicator of diagnosing diabetes in the blood. Basically, higher level of HbA1c people have, higher chances they will have diabetes. Research shows HbA1c level has decreased by 1.23 points for plant-based people in contrary to the 0.38 points for the people who follow American Diabetes Association diet (Tuso et al., 2013). In that case, keeping a vegetarian diet habits can partly avoid and manage the diabetes by patients themselves. On the other hand, plant-based diet is an efficient way to lose weight in a healthy manner, particularly for obese group. As for the people who eat a regular meat-based diet, their calories can only burn a little since the rest can be stored as fat in the body. However, vegetarians can lose 1 pound weekly even without exercising because they have to burn more calories from the meal and body fat to keep body function working (Tuso et al., 2013).