It’s Not So Hard to Switch to a Vegan Diet

A new study finds that going vegan is easy.

To investigate how people would cope with a switch to an all-vegan diet, Barnard and his team asked half of 64 overweight women to try a low-fat form of the diet — one that excluded all animal products, nuts, avocados and other fatty fare — for 14 weeks. The rest of the women ate a standard low-fat diet that included animal products.

There was[sic] no limits placed on calories or portion size, and people could eat allowed desserts as often as they liked. Vegan participants also took a supplement of vitamin B-12, which is naturally found in animal products…

After 14 weeks, 93 percent of vegan eaters said the diet was good, moderately good or extremely good, and 79 percent rated the diet as "acceptable." Almost 90 percent said they planned to continue the diet after the experiment, the authors report in the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation.