To be or not to be a vegetarian nowadays is a question worth to be asked always – from the Shakespeare’s era to this modern century.
Born in India, among Hare Krishna members, vegetarianism found its roots in the belief that people can lead healthy life without consuming meat. Spread later around the world, this belief grew into religious form that was mainly supported from the environmentalists, easy to guess – the most by the animal lovers. The worst group is probably consisted of few of us enough naïve to believe that being vegetarian automatically means losing weight.
Nevertheless, if we go further more in the history of human kind, where after all everything started, then we cannot imagine the first men in the cave eating broccoli, pears, cherry tomatoes, olive oil, and soy nuts as a snack. No, it is more acceptable indeed to imagine those hunting wild animals and wolfing them down! So, our brains are programmed to be fed by proteins from Delhi to Tirana.
However, if the discussion for higher religious or healthy purposes can be dismissed for this occasion, one pound of meat, especially the red one, can be replaced with a jar of peanut butter for great nutritional proportion. In fact, if done correctly, the vegetarian diet might have a benefit for regulating the weight, the cholesterol, the sugar in blood, the whole life style.
The eager Lithuanian health practitioner and nutritionist, Anne Wigmore (1909-1994), once said: “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison”. How true! Every culture has its own favorite specialties, and most of them are vegetarian: Greeks live on pita with spinach; Italians on their famous “parmiggiana”, made of egg-plants, tomato sauce and cheese; going in Thailand is going for curry vegetable stir-fry…
Moderation is the mother of good taste. It is not hard at all to be a vegan, lacto or even fruitarian these days (the shelves throughout the markets offer...