What is best for weight loss, a vegan or omnivorous diet? Although there is no single answer, you will be amazed to read what happened to twins who went on a diet for 12 weeks. With a difference. One of the two chose to go on a vegan diet, the other an omnivorous slimming.

The studies that are carried out on homozygous twin pairs in the nutritional field are always very interesting: and although this is not a study but an autonomous experiment of a pair of twins, the results will leave you surprised. Hugo and Ross Turner in fact followed a diet that had the same calories and the percentage of macronutrients (same amount of carbohydrates, proteins and fats) but with a difference in the type of food. What happened?

DOES A VEGAN OR OMNIVOROUS DIET WORK BETTER TO LOSE WEIGHT?

Well, as the photo shows, they are both thinner, but one of the twins looks drier. Muscle mass, on the other hand, is similar, as both have followed the same type of training.
It must be said that the diet was not for weight loss. It was a toning-up diet to be paired with a training program. So neither of them cut calories, if anything they increased them.

Hugo Turner, the twin who wanted to follow the vegan diet after watching The Game Changers documentary , however, lost 4.5 pounds in a month, and his cholesterol dropped significantly. From body composition tests, however, it was found that a large part of the weight lost was of fat mass alone. In fact, it is the one that is drier and more defined in the photo, especially at the abdominal level. He also said he felt more energetic at first, but definitely hungrier than his brother after the first month. As a result, he had to eat more, and by the end of the 12 weeks he had lost only half a kilo, albeit of body fat (remember that the goal was not to lose weight). Unlike the documentary, he experienced a noticeable drop in libido.

His brother Ross, on the other hand, lost less body fat and gained slightly more muscle mass, plus he didn’t experience hunger, quite the opposite. However, at the end of the experiment he was not thinner, but more massive. 5 kilos of extra muscle but alas, also four kilos of fat.

VEGAN OR OMNIVOROUS DIET: THE LIMITS OF THE EXPERIMENT

There is a small but, and that is that if Hugo was more hungry and therefore had to increase the calories, even the brother who was not hungry would have had to increase the calories accordingly, in order to continue the experiment with his brother.

We must understand what would have happened if he had instead followed his sense of satiety.

Finally, taking into account that Hugo has introduced much more fiber by eating vegan, it is probable that despite eating the same diet as his brother in terms of calories, he has absorbed much less.

When Ross who followed the omnivorous variant ate the same calories as his brother, he also introduced less fiber with animal protein, and the result was that he absorbed all the calories from his meals.

However, the twins have no doubts. The vegan diet may be the best for those who need to lose weight but not to gain muscle mass. With the small problem that you risk being hungrier than those on an omnivorous diet, but you also lose more fat. It therefore remains the best for those who have to lose a lot of body fat.

See also: 1200 calorie vegan weight loss diet for women .