Well, we follow different diets depending on the needs of our body. However, a study on Friday claimed that a plant-based diet may be touted as healthy, but it is not sufficient for the sustenance of older people; therefore, including seafood can help. Now, a diet that includes both vegetables and fish is known as a pescetarian diet.
What is a pescetarian diet?
A vegetarian diet that includes fish or other aquatic animals is known as a pescetarian diet. People who follow this diet are sometimes called pesco-vegetarians or pescetarians.
Apart from the consumption of fish and seafood, there are no hard and fast rules to distinguish between being a vegetarian and a pescetarian. The frequency of fish consumption required to be classified as a pescetarian is not set in stone.
About the recent study
The study, conducted by Loma Linda University in the US, showed that a pesco-vegetarian diet that includes fish and other seafood as a primary source of protein, along with vegetarian elements, may be a more viable option for older people.
Vegetarian diets are associated with a lower risk of several cause-specific deaths, as well as overall mortality, particularly in middle-aged and male participants.
However, the study found that very elderly vegetarians had a slightly higher risk of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia and stroke. However, elderly people who followed a pesco-vegetarian diet showed a small but noticeable advantage over other vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets.
“A vegetarian diet appears to offer protection against the risk of death during middle age, but once it helps people reach age 80, that overall advantage seems to disappear for those who adhere to a strict vegetarian diet,” said Gary Fraser, a professor at Loma Linda University’s School of Public Health.
“These increased risks of neurological disease among vegetarians in their 80s were not huge, but there is something going on that we should not ignore if we want the vegetarian advantage to continue for all vegetarians into their later years,” Fraser added.
The study analyzed data from a total of 96,000 participants, both Native Americans and Canadians, and found that vegetarians had a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-vegetarians.
Participants on a pesco-vegetarian diet had an 18 percent reduction in death, while those on a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet — a diet that excludes meat, fish and poultry but uses dairy products and eggs — had a 15 percent reduction.
Vegans had a 3 percent decrease in risk, and vegan men fared better than women, so even by a narrow margin, pesco-vegetarian diets were considered the best.
Overall, this could very well become a new global lifestyle trend, but this diet still warrants further study, the team said.
(With inputs from IANS)
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