I really want some help with my family's diet. We always make sure our kids eat vegetables but we also have WAY too much meat in our diets (like almost everymeal). I'd really like to scale back into an almost vegetarian diet but how can I start? It seems rather daunting. I know there is no way dh would go completely vegetarian.

I was also wondering if anyone could tell me the difference between vegetarianism, vegans and rawists.

I'm really trying to get my family to live healthier. We already grow some of our own vegetables, though probably not even a quarter of them.

TIA

First the definitions.

A vegetarian is someone who does not eat animal products. By definition this includes animal flesh and products produced by animals(milk, eggs, etc). Lacto-ovo vegetarians do eat dairy and eggs. Ovo vegetarians eat eggs, but not dairy. Lacto vegetarians eat dairy but not eggs. Vegans are even more strict in that they not only not consume animal products of any kind, they also don't use animal products of any kind...including but not limited to honey, dairy, eggs, wool, silk, leather.

A raw foodist is a vegan that consumes more than 75% of their food raw or uncooked.

A living-foodist is a vegan that consumes more than 75% of their food raw, uncooked AND sprouted.


My BEST advice for someone planning to add more vegetable items to their diet is to buy a GOOD cook book for this. 2 wonderful books are Vegan Planet and Vegetarian PLanet. Both have very mainstream recipes in them for those meat and potato husbands:). The other thing is to stay away from meat substitutes for a while as they don't taste good to meat eaters for the most part and there are much better ways of getting veggies into the body. Another way is to make more vegetable for meals as side dishes.

Good luck!

ditto what she said, I've found my dh much more likely to try a vegetarian ethnic meal than, say, lentil loaf. good luck

Thank you so much!!! I'll look into those books. My husband loves to cook (and collect cookbooks) so maybe I can convince him to get these. The "problem" is that he loves to cook and he's part cajun (I mean Layfette cajun not New Orleans cajun, there's a difference, LOL). Anyway he loves seafood and gumbos, etc.

Actually he just loves food, you'd never know it to look at him. But he will try anything once. We do actually use some of the Boca burger products (we like some them) but we only get them on occassion. guess I was just needing a start in the right direction to get more meals that were meatless just to show him it could be done.

Thank you so much!!!!!!!