Cinch your waist — and your wallet — by going vegan.
Switching to a vegan diet could improve your health, not to mention your savings, a new study published in JAMA Network Open found.
Researchers with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine randomly assigned participants to try diets with no calorie limit for 16 weeks each, with a four-week “washout” period in between to determine the differences between a normal American diet, a Mediterranean one and a vegan diet.
They discovered that a low-fat vegan diet reduces people’s food spending by 19% or $1.80 per day when compared with a standard American diet, which is typically filled with meat, dairy and other animal products.
The food regimen — one prohibiting animal products and instead focusing on fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes — is even cheaper than other healthy diets.
A Mediterranean diet — plates filled with vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, nuts and seeds — costs 60 cents more per day than the average American diet.
So those on that healthy diet who switch to veganism could cut food costs by 25% or $2.40 per day.
That’s about $900 in savings a year on grocery bills.
The difference comes mainly from cutting out meat, dairy and added fats. The money saved from not purchasing these products outweighed the increased spending of 50 cents per day on vegetables, 30 cents per day on grains and 50 cents per day on meat alternatives on the vegan diet.
However, there was no significant cost difference when switching from a standard American diet to a Mediterranean diet.
“As the cost of groceries remains stubbornly high, consumers should swap the meat and dairy products for a low-fat vegan diet based on fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans to possibly save more than $650 a year on their grocery bill, compared with a standard American diet, and more than $870, compared with the Mediterranean diet,” Dr. Hana Kahleova, lead author and director of clinical research at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said in a statement.
But eating a vegan diet didn’t just benefit people’s wallets.
Ditching animal products had better outcomes for weight, body composition, insulin sensitivity and cholesterol levels, compared with a Mediterranean diet.
“A vegan diet won’t just save money; it could save lives by helping to avoid or improve conditions like obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease,” Kahleova noted.
Sticking to a vegan diet — even for just two months — has also been found to drastically reduce your biological age, according to new research.
Scientists found that eating only vegan food for eight weeks led to reductions in biological age estimations.
The American team conducted a trial involving 21 pairs of adult identical twins.
Their findings, published in the journal BMC Medicine, were based on levels of DNA methylation – a type of chemical modification of DNA that alters gene expression but not DNA itself.
Professor Christopher Gardner, of Stanford University, California, said: “We also observed decreases in the ages of the heart, hormone, liver, and inflammatory and metabolic systems of participants who ate a vegan, but not an omnivorous diet, for eight weeks.”
