Lipid profile and oxidative stress status in vegetarians

Objectives: to investigate the lipid profile and oxidative stress status in vegetarians and non-vegetarians.methodology: fifty healthy volunteered adults, 25 vegetarians and 25 non-vegetarians (meat eaters) ages 20-50 years from babcock university community were recruited for this study. venous blood sample was collected pre meal and two hours post-prandial for biochemical assay. we assayed for the plasma levels of total cholesterol, triglyceride, ldl-cholesterol, hdl-cholesterol, protein content, superoxide dismutase (sod), catalase (cat), glutathione s-transferase (gst), reduced glutathione (gsh). data collected were subjected to statistical analysis using the student's t-test and one way anova with the aid of spss for windows version 14.0. p<0.05 was considered statistically significant.results: lipid profile analysis showed non-vegetarians to be significantly higher (p<0.05) in total cholesterol, triglycerides, ldl-cholesterol and hdl-cholesterol than vegetarians respectively. plasma protein concentration was significantly higher (p<0.05) in vegetarians (1.23 ± 0.29; 1.22 ± 0.18) than non-vegetarians (0.83 ± 0.09; 0.84 ± 0.17) in pre and post meal respectively. furthermore, plasma superoxide dismutase (0.25 ± 0.72; 0.35 ± 1.60) and catalase activities (0.04 ± 0.00; 0.01 ± 0.27) were significantly reduced (p<0.05) in vegetarians than sod (0.93 ± 1.80; 0.63 ± 1.52) and cat (0.08 ± 0.24; 0.02 ± 0.05) in non-vegetarians in pre and post meal respectively. more so, non-vegetarians expressed a higher level of reduced glutathione (0.05 ± 0.00) post meal than vegetarians (0.02 ± 0.00). glutathione s-transferase activity was found to be higher in vegetarians (460.28 ± 44.77) than non-vegetarians (100.61 ± 79.28) after meal. conclusion: vegetarians may have lower lipid and oxidative stress status than non-vegetarians