Chapter Four: Young People and Vegetarianism
(Mary) I will give you some more of my favorite foods in a while but first Mr. Russo, I walk to talk to you about your teen aged granddaughter. You mentioned that she has become a vegetarian. How did you feel about it when she first mentioned it?
(Author) I was concerned as were her parents. It’s not that we had anything against vegetarianism but we were worried that she wouldn’t get the proper vitamins and such.
(Mary) I understand your concerns. Let’s figure out why some young people are so interested in vegetarianism. Teenagers are often more in touch with world culture than adults. They are more in sync to the environmental movement and with issues involving organic farming. They are often against the cruelties of the meat industry. They love animals and cannot understand how people who treat dogs like valued family members can sit at a table and eat animals that should be living in harmony with their beloved canines.
So as more and more teenagers experiment with the Vegan movement, the better informed they are about what it really means to live meat free.
Even if young folks like your granddaughter decide not to remain a vegetarian, or if they bounce back and forth between meat and Veganism, their experience was informative and they will be better able to make choices if they wish to go back to a meatless style in later life.
(Author) Mary, you make perfect sense, but shouldn’t parents worry about the health questions.
(Mary) There are proven health benefits to the lifestyle. The only questions come from those parents who will not even consider that their child could make an informed decision on something they themselves know nothing about.
Parents of teenagers who wish to explore the vegetarian lifestyle, should be celebrating instead of worrying. There are numerous health benefits of eating vegan and if their new passion reduces the amount of fast food and junk food they eat, that's a good thing.
You will naturally wonder if your teenager is getting enough protein if they skip eating meat. The parents need to get involved, just like they did when their children first starting bringing homework into the house.
By helping them learn about a well rounded vegan or vegetarian diet, they can derive all of their nutritional needs from natural foods. They can begin eating organic. Organic is good for many reasons, not the least of which is that organic food is grown without putting poisons on the plants. Many times a teenager will start studying Veganism and the whole house ends up buying less processed food and more natural things like organic fruits and vegetables. One stubborn teenager can often brings measurable health benefits to an entire family.
I mentioned before that I am a vegan, but many teenagers want to carry the banner of Vegetarianism without moving into the Vegan stage. That’s fine. They can find happiness and better health just by giving up meat. It is possible to have a vegetarian diet that does include cheese, eggs, fish and dairy. This also makes Mom and Dad a little more comfortable. In adult life, the teenager can stay a vegetarian or can move into the next stage where I am – a full Vegan.
As always in all matters, Mom and Dad should sit down with the Vegan ‘wannabe’ and discuss both the pros and the cons of a Vegan move. Almost always a compromise can be worked out that will make both sides feel at ease. Parents may recommend that their teenager start out as a vegetarian by giving up meat at breakfast and lunch but still eating meat at dinner time. This situation could also allow the teenager to gradually transition her or his lifestyle to lean more towards full Veganism.
Parents and children alike need to be concerned about the vitamin needs of anyone changing their style of eating, whether it is dieting, going ‘green’, or fasting.
One of the biggest concerns that you should help your teen beware of is their vitamin needs in any new diet program. While a switch to a total vegetable diet will have many positive influences, you should make sure they are getting enough protein and other essential vitamins that they used to get from meat in their diet. Calcium, B12, zinc and iron are all essential vitamins especially to young people that must be found elsewhere if they decide to stop eating meat. It is a good idea for the teenager to start on a multi vitamin, if she or he isn’t already taking them.
You can help your granddaughter enjoy a successful exploration of the vegetarian lifestyle and not face health risks just by being aware of the vitamin needs and making sure she gets the vitamins in pill form.
It’s a path of sharp rocks and potholes we have to walk, when we help guide a young person through an interest in the green life. It is possible that many of the new foods they eat won’t give them spark of a Big Mac or the zip of a Coke.
They may be tempted to give up the program. That shouldn’t make parents happy, because the teenager may be feeling that she or he failed miserably in their attempt to better their life, the lives of the animals, and the life of our planet.
Feeling like a failure is an especially heavy weight for a person 16 or 17 years old. Many teenagers have a blossoming desire to save the world, but being powerless and penniless, going Vegan is actually one of the few noble things that’s readily within their grasp. They need encouragement, and not belittling, cajoling, or being bribed with offers of prime rib and lobster.
(Author) Lifestyle changes are not easy for anyone. When I went over the 200 pound mark on a frame of only 5’8” my doctor was furious. More exercise she said. I was already doing 15 to 20 miles per day on my bicycle plus a variety of other exercises.
“Well cut down on your food intake,” she said. I explained to her that with all my bike riding and walking, I get very hungry.
“Portion control,” she shot back. “Instead of two eggs in the morning and two pieces of toast, have one each.”
Well I took her advice and though I have not lost much weight, I have stopped gaining. I use smaller plates now and put less on them. My point is that lifestyle changes are hard. Do you have any advice on how to ease into the Vegan way?
(Mary) Make it easy on yourself. It’s a good motto for learning a new skill or going through a big life transition. I remember some movie with Bill Murray in it, I think. He was talking about ‘baby steps’. It is the same when you decide to explore becoming a Vegan. It is very easy to get scared off by what appears to be a difficult and rocky road. But the truth is, there are two ways to becoming a vegetarian:
1. The easy way.
2. The hard way.
(Author) So in keeping with our motto of the day of, "make it easy on yourself", why don’t we walk down the trail that’s marked, ‘Vegan the easy way’.
First of all along with learning a new way to eat, you are also giving up something you probably have loved to eat for years…Big Macs, Prime Rib, a Rack of Ribs, Pork Chops and bacon.
So to reduce the difficulty of hiking on this slippery trail, take it slow and easy. This road cannot be traversed in a single day. Many people have a mistaken idea that the conversion is instantaneous as though one day the person was eating all the meat he or she could find like a trencherman and in a flash they became a robe wearing, mantra singing vegetarian.
That is a complete myth. Most successful greeners found their pathway into the “V” in stages and gave up meat slowly.
Let’s break the day into three parts of eight hours each. First. Give up eating meat in the eight hours you sleep. See how easy it is so far?
Taking out those sleep hours leaves us 16 hours and three meals to deal with. Since we start our day at breakfast time let’s begin with it.
If you are one of those people who skip breakfast, once again you are ahead of the game, you only have about 12 hours and two meals to be concerned with.
All kidding aside, breakfast should never be skipped for a variety of reasons including the fact that it messes with your metabolism and it’s just not healthy.
Now let’s tackle breakfast. It’s seven In the morning and you are ready to fry up three or four eggs and half a dozen slices of bacon. As delightful as it may smell to you, if you were to break down the nutritional and health contents of this meal, you might rush to what I will describe next.
Put away the eggs and the bacon and switch to grain cereals or pancakes. Do NOT GIVE UP MILK AND CHEESE. At least in the beginning you are going to need them to smooth your traipsing over the rocky path. Pick a few specific items that you will eliminate from specific meals and do this for a week or two.
After you have been successful in improving the breakfast part of your day, you can go to lunch. Much later on you can move on to dinner.
Backsliding, slipping and falling is allowed! Do not beat yourself up if you slack off and go backwards by wolfing down a few eggs and a rasher of bacon.
You will not be kicked out of the vegetarian community for this offense. Just pick yourself up, wipe of the bacon crumbs and start again.
Try to find the way to success by being sensible in your meal planning and modest in setting your achievement targets. If one of your hopes in going green is to lose weight don’t substitute sugars and sweets for the meats.
(Author) Excuse me for the interruption Mary. When you said sugar and sweet, it reminded me of what I first did when I ramped up my exercise program. My formula was sugar and sweat. I felt that if I exercised long enough and worked up enough sweat, then I could have all the sugar I wanted! It took me quite a while to get a handle on that portion control deal.
(Mary) Sugar and sweat isn’t the greatest, but it is better than the sugar and sweet. What good does it do if a person gives up meat only to eat monstrous portions of cereal, swathed in fruit with a layer of sugary additives. If they do this, they will not lose weight and they will think that the program failed them.
(Author) Hey Mary, one of the things that scares a lot of people away from trying to go Vegan is the idea of having to learn to eat exotic and expensive new foods such as tofu.
(Mary) They need to remember the new mantras. Baby steps and make it easy on yourself. Eat the foods you know. By doing your shopping in your own grocery store and buying more food from the produce section than the meat section, you will be working with foods like carrots, onions, garlic, broccoli, celery and cabbage. These are familiar to everyone and eating them helps to clear the rocks out of the path towards the ‘V’.
Also by frequenting regular stores like Stop and Shop, Kroger or Ralph’s, and eating "normal" foods, you won’t feel like you have become a member of some bizarre cult.
Next, make it a fun experience. Yes it can be fun to be a vegetarian. You can start shopping at farmer's markets and select very fresh produce and vegetables for your next cooking experiment.
Not only are outdoor markets more adventurous you will find them cheaper. Some aspects of the ‘V’ life can be expensive but this is one area where you will save money.
By working as a family to find good recipes and working together to make them, everybody gets in on the act discovering how delicious vegetarian meals really are. If you walk the path with a song in your heart and some fruit in your belly, you may find your way to the land of the ‘V’ without even realizing that to get there was a long walk indeed.