What do you think would happen if you ate nothing but meat – all kinds of meat – and dairy products? You’d die, probably within a year. What would happen if you ate nothing but a varied vegan or vegetarian diet including fruit, veg, beans, grains, nuts and seeds? You’d probably be much healthier than most people are today.

That has to be the staring point for understanding what is and what isn’t a good diet. So, if anyone ever tells you that meat is vital for life, you can be certain they don’t know what they’re talking about. You know the sort of thing, someone who smokes like a chimney suddenly becomes a world authority on health when it comes to vegetarianism.

Health is generally the biggest worry of non-veggie parents when young people decide to give up meat. Parents often think you’re going to fade away or be stricken by an army of diseases without your daily dose of dead animal protein. In fact, they should be really pleased because all the evidence suggests that veggies are usually much healthier than meat-eaters.

All the latest reports, including one by the World Health Organisation, say that people on a meat-based diet eat twice as much sugary and a third more fatty foods than is good for them. If you’re between 11 and 16, the figures are even worse because meat-eaters in this age group eat three times as much of these unhealthy foods. A good example of a fatty, sugary meal is cola, burger and chips followed by ice cream. A staple diet of this kind is bad news both because of what’s in the food and also because of what’s not in it.

So let’s start with the burger meal and look at what it contains that you don’t need. Top of the list is saturated animal fat – and burgers contain a lot. The fat’s minced up with the meat, even when it looks lean. It’s also used in dairy products such as ice cream and often the chips are fried in it too, soaking up large amounts as they cook.

This doesn’t mean that all fats are unhealthy – it just depends on what kind you eat. Basically, there are two main kinds of fat – unsaturated fats, found mostly in vegetable foods, and saturated fats, found mostly in animal-based foods. Unsaturated fats are better for the body than saturated fats and a certain amount are essential in everyone’s diet. Saturated fats, on the other hand, aren’t needed and perhaps one of the most important health discoveries of all time is that saturated animal fats are linked to heart disease.

Why is that so important? Because heart disease is now the biggest killer of men and women in the Western world. Meat, fish and dairy products also contain a substance called cholesterol and this together with the fats is helping to cause this epidemic. In contrast, unsaturated fats like olive oil, sunflower oil and corn oil actually help to reduce the artery clogging cause by animal fats.

As well as containing things that are bad for you, burgers – in fact all meat products – are lacking in things that you do need. These substances include fibre and fie extremely important vitamins.

Fibre is made up of the tough bits of fruit and vegetables that your body can’t digest. It contains no nutrients and passes straight through the body, but despite that it’s extremely important. Fibre gives the bowels something bulky to grip on to, and that helps them to work properly, forcing the waste food from the body. It seems that fibre acts like a brush, sweeping the bowels clean (now there’s a lovely image). Too little fibre and the food takes longer to pass through our bowels, allowing poisons to infect the body. Lack of fibre combined with too much animal fat helps cause another killer disease – colon cancer.

Recent medical research has also identified three vitamins that actually help to protect people against about 60 diseases, including the big killers of heart disease, stroke and cancer. These are vitamins A (the type from plant foods only), C and E and they’ve been given the name antioxidants. These vitamins are the goodies. They work by wiping out molecules called free radicals (which are the baddies and not some fringe political group). Free radicals are constantly produced by the body as a result of breathing, exercise or even digestion. They’re part of the process known as oxidation – the same process that causes metal to rust. These molecules don’t make you rusty but act like out-of-control hooligans, dashing around the body crashing into cells and damaging them. Anti-oxidants mop up free radicals and stop them causing the damage which can lead to disease.

In 1996, over 200 studies confirm the amazing benefits of antioxidants. For example, the National Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School revealed that eating vitamins A, C and E from fresh fruit and vegetables reduced heart disease and cancer. These vitamins even help keep your brain active in old age!

However, none of these three antioxidants is in meat. Meat also contains little or no vitamins D, which controls the level of calcium in the blood, or K, which helps blood to clot. The only source of all these vital health protectors is fruit and veg, and sunlight, butter or margarine in the case of vitamin D.

Over 30 years, a huge number of scientific studies have also been carried out into how different diets in general affect people’s well being. These studies have shown without doubt that vegetarian or vegan diets are the healthiest there are. Some of these studies have compared the diets of tens of thousands of people in places as far apart as China and America, Japan and Europe.

One of the biggest and most recent was carried out in Britain by Oxford University and the first results were published in 1995. The study looked at 11,000 people over a 13-year period and came to the staggering conclusion that vegetarians get 40 per cent less cancer of all kinds, 30 per cent less heart disease and are less likely to drop dead before reaching old age.

The same year, a group of doctors in the USA, called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, came up with an even more astounding result. They looked at over a hundred different pieces of research from around the world and on the basis of their findings came to the conclusion that vegetarians get up to 57 per cent less heart disease and up to 50 per cent less cancers of all kinds. They also found there were fewer cases of high blood pressure amongst vegetarians and in those who did have high blood pressure it tended to be less severe. Again, the improvement was estimated at up to 50 per cent.

To put worried parents’ minds at rest, these doctors also found that the brains of young vegetarians developed quite normally. In fact at the age of 10, veggie kids tended to be a year more advanced mentally than meat eaters! So convincing were their arguments that the USA government has now accepted that ‘Vegetarians have excellent health, obtain all the nutrients they need and vegetarianism is a suitable diet for US citizens.’

The usual meat-eaters’ argument against this type of discovery is to say that veggies are healthier because they also tend to drink or smoke less and that this is why they do so well in these studies. Not true – as serious studies, like the ones I’ve written about here, always compare like with like. In other words they compare only non-drinking veggies with non-drinking meat-eaters, and so on.

None of this stops the meat industry from advertising meat as the healthiest food in the world. Although it obviously isn’t, all their publicity may cause parents to worry. Believe me, meat producers don’t sell meat to make people healthier, they do it to make a lot of money.

Okay, so what diseases do vegetarians get that meat eaters don’t? None! Pretty amazing, eh?

‘ I became vegetarian for the animals but there were other unexpected benefits. I started to feel healthier – I became more supple which is important for an athlete. I also needed much less sleep and woke up feeling much fresher. My skin improved and I had more energy. I love being vegetarian.’
- Martina Navratilova, world tennis champion