Vegetarian Concerns?
Eating a vegetarian diet is one of the healthiest ways to go.
But this article suggests that there may be some concerns you should watch out for, especially for your teenagers.
According to this work in the April issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, twice as many teens and nearly double the number of young adults who had been vegetarians reported having used unhealthy means to control their weight: things like diet pills, laxatives and diuretics and inducing vomiting.
When I pulled up this article, at first it seemed like they were making a link between disordered eating and being a vegetarian. The authors later took pains to say that this is not the case, but it is noticeable that I had to get well into the article body to read the disclaimer.
There are at least two take-home messages from this study.
- Despite the title of the article (“The Dark Side of Vegetarianism”), one should not fear that eating veggies leads to disordered eating.
- It is important to keep an open line of communication with your kids, at all times. If they suddenly want to be a vegetarian, that’s great! Just talk to them about the motivation behind it.
When you read articles like this, remember the scientific rule of analysis: correlation is not causation.
Just because two things are linked does not mean they are related. They MAY be, but they don’t have to be. For example, just because teens who adopt vegetarianism can also fall into disordered eating behaviors, does not mean that you should be worried about your kids eating veggies.
The disordered eating is coming from somewhere else … and that’s why it’s so important to stay in communication about such changes.
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