How to eat vegetarian food with enough nutrients to ensure health

1. What is vegetarianism?

Vegetarianism, also known as vegetarianism or bland eating, is a diet that includes only foods of plant origin (fruits, vegetables, …), with or without eating dairy products, eggs or honey, butter, cheese, cream, whey protein. Absolutely do not use meat (red meat, poultry and seafood, insects) or abstain from eating foods obtained from the slaughtering process such as (ham, sausage, fish sauce, dried shrimp, smoked meat …)

2. Benefits of eating vegetarian properly

Vegetarian food is light, pure, easy to digest and has many healthy vitamins. When eating vegetarian, because you do not eat meat or fish, you reduce the amount of saturated fat that is not good for your health. Therefore, it reduces the risk of heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure.

Vegetarian food is high in fiber and low in saturated fat, so it avoids obesity and constipation. At the same time, it reduces bad cholesterol in the blood, helping to stabilize blood sugar levels for diabetic patients.

Saturated fat:

Saturated fat is a type of fat found in the fatty parts of meat, butter, whole milk, and cheese. Eating too much saturated fat will contribute to increasing blood cholesterol levels, leading to the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure.

On the other hand, vegetarianism also helps reduce the risk of some cancers, reduces the risk of chronic diseases, and reduces the risk of kidney and gallstones.

Science also shows that eating a lot of vegetables and fruits such as squash, cucumber, carrots, sesame, soybeans, etc. will make your hair and skin beautiful.

Improper vegetarianism and insufficient nutrition can easily cause conditions such as: muscle weakness, infection, anemia, diabetes, stress, fatigue, pale skin, weakness, etc. Especially for children, adolescents, pregnant women, breastfeeding women, patients who need nutrition to recover are the ones with great nutritional needs, inadequate nutrition greatly affects health and growth.

Vegetarians can completely ensure nutrition if they know how. Therefore, they should get enough protein through bean groups such as peas, cowpeas, soy products such as tofu, soy sauce. Supplement calcium from dark green vegetables such as bok choy, broccoli, algae and seaweed. Iron and zinc are abundant in green vegetables such as bok choy, cabbage, spinach, broccoli and dried seeds such as cashews, almonds, whole grains.

3. Instructions for proper vegetarianism to ensure adequate nutrition
Choose the right type of vegetarianism for the subject

To ensure a complete and proper vegetarian diet, you first need to pay attention to choosing a vegetarian diet that is suitable for your physical condition.

For children, the elderly, pregnant and lactating women… should apply flexible vegetarian diets such as vegetarianism combined with eating eggs and milk, vegetarianism alternating with meat or one vegetarian meal and one meat meal.

The remaining subjects with good physical condition can choose a vegetarian diet depending on their needs.

Arrange meals and time appropriately

To eat a complete and proper vegetarian diet, you need to ensure that you arrange your meals, nutrition, time and number of meals per day appropriately. Meals need to be varied from many types of vegetarian foods that are fake meat, and processed appropriately. For example, breakfast should be high-energy but easy-to-digest dishes. Lunch and dinner need to be prepared with dishes that ensure adequate nutrition to improve taste. Pay attention to balancing foods containing lots of vegetable protein and other nutrients to ensure adequate nutrition for the meal.

Select ingredients carefully

In addition, the selection of ingredients for cooking vegetarian food needs to be done carefully and thoroughly. Vegetarians should prepare using methods such as boiling, steaming, blanching, etc.

Find and supplement nutrients

If you do not know how to arrange meals in a diverse way, your body can be seriously deficient in nutrients because each type of vegetarian food cannot provide adequate nutrition for the body. Therefore, you need to know how to combine them such as porridge with green beans, milk and cereals to avoid eating a single dish.

The daily diet of a normal person needs to ensure 4 nutritional groups:

• First is starch found in rice, potatoes, corn, wheat and cereals.
• Second is protein, found in many beans.
• Third is fat from oil seeds such as soybeans, sesame, peanuts, sunflower seeds, gac seeds, etc.
• Fourth is vitamins and minerals found in vegetables, tubers and fruits.

4. Suggested menu for vegetarian meals

• Breakfast: Vegetarian beef ball noodles, stir-fried vermicelli, peanut butter bread, dumplings, vegetarian vermicelli soup.
• Mid-morning: Yogurt, strawberries mixed with milk, fruit.
• Lunch: Rice, tomato sauce tofu, green cabbage soup and fruit for dessert.
• Afternoon: Sweet potatoes or a glass of soy milk.
• Dinner: Rice, stewed bitter melon, cabbage soup, or noodles, zucchini soup, braised mushrooms, etc.

No matter which form of vegetarianism you choose, eating a complete and proper vegetarian diet is still the top priority.