Teenage Vegetarians - Are They Doing The Right Thing?
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: Alternative, disease, environment, fitness, food, gardening, health, lifestyle, other, recipes, social issues, Uncategorized, vegetables, vegetarianTeenagers are very suggestible and tend to be more left-wing than their parents, because they are under the influence of their teachers, who tend to be more left-wing as well. This tends to make teenagers more in touch with environmental problems and other world problems. This can send teenagers off in many directions, and one of the most popular, especially among teenage girls, is vegetarianism.
This phase frequently passes for one reason or another. Occasionally the parents cannot be bothered to cater to their new diet and occasionally the teenager just misses bacon sandwiches too much to sustain the diet. However, many do stick to their principles or come back to them later on in life.
Their children going vegetarian is frequently a cause for anxiety for parents, yet it need not be. If your teenagers adopt vegetarianism you will probably become concerned that they get enough protein, but that can be taken care of. Instead, be grateful that they will be missing out on all the rubbish food that most teenagers eat in these, their most formative years.
If your teenager wants to be a vegetarian, you ought to encourage it, even though it will cost you more time especially if you do not know much concerning vegetarianism yourself. It will be a steep learning curve for you and your children in the starting.
One of the first things that a parent has to assess is to what level does their child hope to go. Does he or she merely want to give up meat or also give up fish or go the whole hog (!) and give up milk, dairy and eggs as well. These three levels make vegetarianism progressively harder.
One of the foremost problems of going vegetarian (particularly for growing teenagers) is vitamin deficiency. Meat is concentrated vegetable matter and is our prime source of vitamins such as calcium, vitamin B12 and iron.
You cannot live without these vitamins and several others besides, so if you abandon meat, you will have to take them in tablet form until you find or adopt a way of re-introducing them into your diet in food form.
There will be numerous new foods for your teenager to taste in their task to replace meat and some of these options may be unpalatable, depending on your child’s outlook on eating new foods.
Tofu is one. Some people love it and some people hate it, but it is a very handy alternative to meat. There are others, but it could be a long process of trial and error and your teen might just quit.
If your teenager wants to give up, it is almost certainly a good idea to make it easy for them to do so without them losing face or feeling that they have failed. It is difficult to undertake lifestyle alterations even at that relatively young age and who knows, perhaps they will return to (a level of) vegetarianism when they leave home and begin cooking for themselves.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several topics, and is now concerned with low fat low cholesterol diets. If you would like to know more, please visit our site at http://vegetariancasserolerecipes.com
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