In one of my first posts I mentioned that I was previously vegetarian for several years, but went back to eating meat. I also said that I would explain that decision in a later post – this is it.
We decided to go veggie for a variety of reasons:
Animals are lovely
I’d never dream of eating my pet cats so why should chickens and cows be different just cos they aren’t cute and fluffy?
Also factory farming, which is where most supermarket meat comes from, is just plain evil. Check out this website for more info on this, but please be warned that some of the images are distressing. Factory Farming
Health – Meat is “bad”
Eating meat every day is demonstrably not a great thing for your health.
Meat tends to come along with high saturated fats – remember last time you cooked beef mince? I bet you had to drain about half a pint of liquid fat off it after browning. Ever had to do that with carrots?
There is also a definite link between bowel cancer and eating large quantities of red meat, see this NHS advice, so everyone should cut that down even if not veggie.
Then there’s the slew of antibiotics, preservatives and other chemicals often found in mass produced meat items.
Health – Veg is good
We should all aim to eat more fruit and vegetables.
In Britain we have the “5 a day” campaign and I’ve heard people claiming this is unrealistically high in their average diets.
The word vegetarian is a pretty good clue that you eat a lot of vegetables. Most veggies eat well over 5 a day.
Learning is fun
I enjoy cooking, especially learning new recipes and trying new foods and this seemed an excellent way to try new things.
So with these things in mind we set about becoming vegetarian.
Now everyone always seems to focus on the protein aspect of the veggie diet so I immediately looked into vegetarian sources of protein and came up with the ever popular pulses.
This seemed perfectly adequate to supply our needs on a day to day basis alongside cheese and other dairy products so I gave nutrition very little additional thought – after all we’d surely be getting all the necessary vitamins and minerals eating so many vegetables.
The first year or so was great.
I learned tons of new recipes and became famous amongst our friends for my Indian meals, even getting confirmed lentil haters to try and enjoy dhals.
As you may have seen from my profile picture (recently added) I have naturally curly hair.
One of the great things about curly hair is that its very forgiving of not getting your regular trim. None of my hair falls at the same length as the rest whatever I do so it’s not unusual for me to go 6 months without getting it cut.
I didn’t in fact get my hair cut for the entire time I was veggie!
Here is a picture of me prior to going veggie:
As you can see my hair is way past my shoulders, and despite the fading dye job is in fairly good condition.
Here is a picture of me a couple of year into going veggie, remember that my hair had not been cut.
Excuse the silly face and pose, it was at a nightclub 🙂
As you can see my hair is now about chin length and despite the hat you can probably see that it’s frizzy and in poor condition. Some of the frizz is explainable by the excessive dancing, but that doesn’t cause you to lose inches from the length!
It was around this time that I realised something was going on with my hair. It was getting shorter rather than longer!
I started doing some research into things which could cause this.
I discovered that there are several essential nutrients which can cause hair loss when we are deficient in them. This is quite a complex topic so rather than blind you with science I’m going to skim over the facts and provide links for your own further reading
Ferritin
Ferritin is a substance our bodies create to store the iron we metabolise. This means it is actually possible to be ferritin deficient without being anaemic although it is more common for the 2 things to occur together. Iron & Ferritin Hair Loss Links
Iron – Heme vs Non Heme & Absorption
Iron in our diets comes in 2 forms, Heme (animal derived) and Non-Heme (non animal derived).
Heme iron is generally absorbed better than non-heme iron
The other issue here is with foods which aid or block the absorption of iron into our bodies.
Vitamin C is an excellent way to aid absorption of iron.
Sadly tanins – found in tea, are one of the things which can block iron absorption. Soya can also do this so my drinking tea with soya milk regularly was probably not helping much!
Lysine
Another thing which can cause hair loss is a lack of lysine in the diet. Lysine is essential for the production of collagen which as we all know is used to grow our hair and nails. Lysine and hair loss
Lysine is something which is particularly noted to be difficult to get in vegan diets (see about halfway down the page) and I now feel certain it was this that I was missing from my diet – we have cut back on cows milk for years as an eczema antagonist so apart from eggs and cheese my diet was practically vegan.
I did look into supplementation of these nutrients, however iron supplements in particular are known to have some unpleasant side effects.
Most of these centre around the digestive system and I already get enough stomach problems without inviting more.
I also found it very difficult to work out what level of supplementation would be sufficient to get my stored iron and ferritin levels back to a sustainable level.
Iron overdose can in fact be fatal in extreme circumstances so this was not something I wanted to play around with, even without the tummy worries.
In the end I decided that as the problems started when I stopped eating meat the best thing for me to do would be to start eating meat again.
I am aware that saying “sod the animals so long as my hair looks good” may seem a little selfish.
In my defence levels low enough to cause that degree of hair loss were almost certainly causing me other health problems, some of which would not have become apparent until much later.
Since I made this decision several years ago I’ve also been increasing my intake of non animal iron rich foods – dark green vegetables, dark chocolate, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I also now drink Almond milk rather than soya although that was not directly due to this research.
Long term lessons
We still don’t eat meat anywhere as much as we did before we went veggie. I try and buy free range and higher quality meat when we do although I won’t lie and say I always keep to that.
We still eat a lot of curry, but I have now included some meat dishes in my repertoire – home made Chicken Dansak is amazing and will be on here eventually.
Anyway, I’ve been back on an omnivorous diet for about 3 years now and my hair is, finally almost back to the length it was before I started this journey:
R
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