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Dropping animal foods from your diet could
make you as smart as George Bernard Shaw
Being smart is good for your health. Having a higher IQ as a child or teen is associated with a lower risk for heart disease later in life. And according to British researchers, children with higher IQs are more likely to become vegetarians as adults.
In one study, more than 11,000 children took a series of IQ tests at age 10. Twenty years later, researchers interviewed them about their diets. The found that the kids with higher intelligence were more likely to go vegetarian in adolescence or young adulthood.
This study—published a couple of years ago in the British Medical Journal—wasn’t the first to make a connection between vegetarianism and brains. A study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 1980 found that vegetarian children tended to have higher IQs than their meat-eating peers.
The link between vegetarian diets and cognitive health seems to last throughout life, too. A 1993 study found that, among Seventh-day Adventists, meat-eating more than doubled the risk of developing dementia in old age. If subjects were long-time meat-eaters, they were more than three times as likely to show symptoms of dementia. One theory is that diets high in antioxidants protect against dementia, but a number of factors may benefit aging vegetarians and vegans.
The idea that it’s smart to go veggie didn’t originate with modern day vegetarians and the people who study them. Back in 1890, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said “A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.”
So get smart and drop animal foods from your family’s diet. The following articles will help.
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