'Pegan' Diet: Paleo Plus Vegan Results in New Diet Trend

— -- The latest diet trend to take the Internet by storm is the "pegan" diet, which combines elements of the popular paleo and vegan diets for a whole new regimen.

Pegan diet fans are plastering photos of their meals and snacks all over Instagram, images featuring eggs, avocadoes, roasted vegetables, chicken, mango and kale.

“It's just a diet that makes sense,” said Dr. Mark Hyman of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine.

Hyman coined the phrase “pegan.”

The diet offers a compromise between the two popular diets. The paleo diet, nicknamed the caveman diet, consists of meats, nuts, fish and vegetables, shunning grain products and processed food. In other words, it consists of foods that our caveman ancestors would eat. The vegan diet is rich in fruit and grain, but it doesn’t incorporate animal products.

“Combining the best elements of both of those gives you a balanced and healthy diet,” Hyman said.

The pegan diet allows some meat consumption, adds gluten-free whole grains and boosts consumption of fruit and vegetables.

“You're cutting out dairy. You're cutting out gluten. You're cutting out lots of sugar. You're cutting out all the processed, refined foods,” Hyman said, adding the diet was a “sensible way of eating that creates health.”

Hyman noted that pegan dieters can lose weight, lower their cholesterol and reverse the onset of diabetes.

But followers of the pegan diet could be missing something important, said Michele Promaulayko, the editor in chief of Yahoo Health.

“So one of the drawbacks of this diet is that without the dairy you are missing some calcium,” she said, “but you can compensate for that by drinking nut milks or taking a calcium supplement.”