Vegetarian and Vegan: What’s the difference?

Eat as healthy as possible, opting for a natural food-based diet, free of meat of animal origin. This is the essential premise of the vegetarian diet, the most stringent in cases considered vegan. Let’s see what the difference between the two trends is.

Not in vain to the vegans have been coined the term of strict vegetarians, since not only exclude meat, in diet but also has room for the product or derived from animals, such as eggs or milk. The vegan diet is, therefore, a diet based on eating only food from plants, without any exceptions.

Being vegetarian or vegan is much more than following one based on vegetables, fruit and vegetable diet, it is also a lifestyle that involves the adoption of habits and attitudes to be more respectful of nature and the environment, and this implies production and cultivation of food.

Types of vegetarians
Inside the vegetarian diet, and depending on the foods included or excluded, we can talk about different trends:

Ovo-Lacto Vegetarian: In addition to plant foods also include eggs and dairy in the diet.

Ovo-Vegetarian: Supports the consumption of eggs.

Lacto-vegetarian: Dairy products and its derivatives.

Vegan: Diet based exclusively in food of plant origin.

Raw Vegan: It is a person who takes all raw foods (fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, seeds, sprouts, vegetables …).

Fruitarian: It is he who feeds only fruits, raw and seasonal.

Vegetarian and vegan diet: What to eat?
For those who follow a vegetarian diet or vegan can seem complicated exclude animal foods in the daily diet. However, as several studies have found, the vegetarian diet is a healthy diet that, among other benefits, reduces hypertension, diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Similarly, the vegetarian diet can also be a healthy choice during pregnancy.

The products of animal origin may be replaced by other equally vegetable nutrition. For example, you can opt for vegetarian meat or vegetable milks (soy, almond, oat …). That is, most conventional dishes can be made to be a vegetarian or vegan style. A sample menu is: Fresh fruit for breakfast; one or two more pieces of fruit throughout the morning. At lunchtime, a good bowl of salad (potato, pulses, cereals…) combined with vegetables. In the mid-afternoon, fruit or a glass of vegetable milk, horchata or almond milk. For dinner, a vegetable soup or a salad with nuts.