![]() ![]() But it does raise intriguing questions about whether veganism could be holding some people back. Of course, more research is needed to verify if this effect is real, and if it would also apply to adults in developed countries, too. Along with the children who received soup with added oil, they also did the best on a test of arithmetic ability. By the end of the study, they outperformed all the other children on a test for non-verbal reasoning. Surprisingly, the children who were given the soup containing meat each day seemed to have a significant edge. Because of their economic circumstances, the majority of the children were de facto vegetarians at the start of the study. They were tested before and after, to see how their intelligence compared. It was conducted on 555 Kenyan schoolchildren, who were fed one of three different types of soup – one with meat, one with milk, and one with oil – or no soup at all, as a snack over seven school terms. Instead, the only research that comes close involved the reverse. But there isn’t a single study like this. Ideally, to test the impact of the vegan diet on the brain, you would take a randomly selected group of people, ask half to stop eating animal products – then see what happens. So is it really damaging our intellects, or is this all just fear of the unknown? After the Royal Academy of Medicine in Belgium decided a vegan diet was “unsuitable” for children, parents who force a vegan diet on their offspring in Belgium could even one day find themselves in prison.īut on the other, if abstaining from meat had any real impact on our brains, you would think that we would already have noticed. Back in 2016, the German Society for Nutrition went so far as to categorically state that – for children, pregnant or nursing women, and adolescents – vegan diets are not recommended, which has been backed up by a 2018 review of the research. On the one hand, recent concern about the nutritional gaps in plant-based diets has led to a number of alarming headlines, including a warning that they can stunt brain development and cause irreversible damage to a person’s nervous system. Meanwhile in India, meat-free diets have been mainstream since the 6th Century BCE. In the West, veganism has ditched the hippie stigma to become one of the fastest-growing millennial trends in the United States, it grew by 600% between 20. According to the latest statistics, there are around 375 million vegetarians on the planet. One reason is that intelligence is expensive – the brain devours about 20% of our daily calories, though it accounts for just 2% of our body weight – and what better way to find the enormous array of fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals these fastidious organs require, than by feasting on animals which have already painstakingly collected or made them.īut though it’s hard to imagine our ancestors choosing turnips over tuna, today it’s a different story. Some have even gone so far as to say that meat made us human. The idea that avoiding meat is bad for our brains makes some intuitive sense anthropologists have been arguing about what our ancestors ate for decades, but many scientists think that there was a lot of bone-crunching and brain-slurping on the road to evolving these remarkable 1.4kg (3lb) organs. More stories on The Vegan Factor from BBC Good Food But his picnic companion was a shady character with an unusual obsession – the idea that meat held the key to being physically and mentally strong. No, for the first time in his life, he was going to eat meat.Īs he later wrote in his biography, Gandhi was raised as a strict Vaishnava Hindu, so he had never even seen meat before this fateful day. ![]() And on this occasion, India’s future national hero – and one of the most famous vegetarians in history – wasn’t planning to dine on cucumber sandwiches. Mahatma Gandhi, who was just a teenager at the time, hadn’t told his parents where he was going if they had found out, they would have been shocked to death.Īs it happens, Gandhi was having a picnic. ![]() The meeting was to take place on the banks of the local river – and discretion was essential. It was the late 1880s in the city of Rajkot, India. ![]()
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