A member of staff works inside ‘Rudy’s Vegan Butcher’ shop, amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, in London, Britain, October 30, 2020. Picture taken October 30, 2020. REUTERS/Henry NichollsAleksandra Shai Chai needed a moment to process the idea that she would be stuck eating a vegan diet for eight weeks.Shai Chai, who typically eats meat, was participating in a study to examine the effects of different diets on twins’ health. When Stanford University researchers randomly distributed slips of papers to the twins last year to indicate which diet they would follow, Shai Chai hoped hers would say “omnivore.”Instead, it said “vegan.” Her twin sister, Mariya Foster, would eat a diet of meat and vegetables.Shai Chai replaced her favorite foods – bacon, sushi and steak – with tofu, beans and vegetables. She didn’t love the diet, but when Shai Chai recently learned the study’s results, she felt thankful that she had briefly changed her eating habits.After examining 22 pairs of identical twins, researchers found that vegan eaters had lower cholesterol, insulin and body weight than participants who followed a meat diet, according to the results published last week in the JAMA Network Open journal.Vegan eaters’ low-density lipoprotein – bad cholesterol – dropped on average by 15.2 milligrams over eight weeks; omnivore dieters’ fell by...
