Hurts When I Started Eating Meat Again

May 18, 2022 Post a Comment

Does meat make vegetarians sick?

People sometimes say that vegetarians get sick if they begin eating meat again. Research doesn't dorsum them upwards.

Most of us who know vegetarians have heard scary stories: A vegetarian accidentally gets a flake of pepperoni on her pizza piece or her soup contains chicken broth and she gets very ill.

Exercise our bodies actually react so strongly to meat later avoiding it for a while? Or is this just a vegetarian myth?

We've put the question to scientists.

If our scientists are right, they say in that location'southward no reason to fearfulness a catastrophe if a vegetarian chomps into the wrong pizza. Merely a vegetarian who decides to commencement a new life as a carnivore with a huge T-bone steak might risk an upset tummy.

Don't lose it

Few researchers have studied the consequences when vegetarians fall for temptation or only make a error. However, Professor Birger Svihus of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB)'s Department of Animal and Aquaculture Sciences can make some educated guesses based on his general cognition of the human digestive system.

"At that place's no reason to believe nosotros get sick. I tin can't conceive of our bodies losing the capability to tackle meat," he says.

Are his enzymes up and running? (Photo: colourbox.com) — Are his enzymes upwards and running? (Photo: colourbox.com)

"The nutrients in meats also accept to be digested when nosotros eat other foods. The enzymes that the body produces to suspension down meat proteins are too used to metabolize institute proteins."

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Heavy start

Professor Bjørn Skålhegg of the University of Oslo'due south Department of Nutrition concurs. Nothing would betoken that the bodies of vegetarians should refuse meats.

"A person might have a little problem if he or she started right out on a huge steak. Their trunk might not have sufficient levels of the right enzymes. Along the aforementioned lines it tin exist difficult to digest whatever large repast afterwards a long fast or period of starvation," he says.

You might also have this problem if you beginning to consume other kinds of foods that you lot haven't eaten in a long fourth dimension.

The lonely geek who does null simply heat upwardly frozen pizzas day in and day out might experience some intestinal discomfort if he suddenly starts eating a lot of fruit and vegetables.

Skålhegg thinks most of us would soon get accustomed to the new additions to our nutrition.

Svihus points out that meat is actually relatively piece of cake to digest.

"Proteins are generally difficult to assimilate but compared to other sources of protein, meat is rather easy," he says.

We might not always feel this style, but the human body is tough. It'southward a very robust and adaptable car that tin can tackle all kinds of challenges.

I-sided diets with large seasonal variations

"We tend to forget human history," says Svihus. "Just 50 years ago many people [in Norway] had very unbalanced diets from day to twenty-four hours. And at that place were large variations from flavour to flavour."

"In the late summer they had vegetables and in the fall there was a meat surplus. Simply the final rutabagas stored in their cellar would exist consumed by March. In March, April and May they had almost no vegetables. Fresh fruit wasn't available later Christmas."

Man beings are adapted to these kinds of regimes.

"The trunk is prepared to swallow almost of what information technology can become. Our survival has depended on existence able to consume whatsoever was bachelor," says Svihus.

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Meat allergies

This means that little in our physiology and our ancestral history should cause vegetarians to take problems if they eat a slice of meat.

"Despite that, there can be some differences between various types of vegetarians. Some have eaten eggs and milk all along, whereas vegans avoid everything from animals. I don't believe that a vegetarian who has eaten eggs or dairy products would get sick from chicken goop," says Skålhegg.

He says that in that case, the reaction would have to be due to a food allergy.

A very few – less than ane percentage of the population – are allergic to meats from common livestock, such every bit pork and beef. If a vegetarian has this kind of allergy, she could take a reaction from just a speck of these meats.

But an allergic in a cases like this would exist more than typical of a mutual allergic reactions, with symptoms such as congested air passages and a runny olfactory organ or eyes. Skålhegg doubts that a vegetarian who originally didn't have this kind allergy would develop one and become more than sensitive to meat.

He thinks we should go along our cool and resist the onslaught of disparate warnings well-nigh nutrition and diet. Later all, humans are omnivores.

"We don't need to get hysterical. If it's nutrient we can unremarkably eat it."

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Read the Norwegian version of this commodity on forskning.no

Translated by: Glenn Ostling