I should be a vegetarian

[truth96130]

I am a vegan because meat take 70 percent of your energy to digest apposed to other softer foods that take less energy to digest. Meat has a lot of bad cholesterol and loads of fat and whatever hormones were put into the food of the animal. If you decide to be vegetarian make sure you take a (b complex vitamin) supplement. There is no moral issue unless you actually kill the animal. The animals dead. It dos not car if you eat it. Peace.

[Chidzmitch]

I have a lot of respect for you. This video was seriously well thought out and well resourced. It's good to see someone who isn't vegetarian putting the effort into this kind of research.

[sonicsuns]

thanks

[raultalbot7]

While I think someone can "survive" on a vegetarian diet.....a vegan diet is too extreme.

[snowleperdsrule]

Hm. I have thought about vegetarianism, and I don't much like the idea of it. Don't get me wrong, I love animals and nature. But I think I have to eat what I have to eat to be able to be healthy and happy. Staying healthy on a vegetarian diet is very hard as a lot of other people are saying. Again on the moral issue, it's the way of life. You have to eat to survive...you have to kill to eat. When you eat plants you're killing them, too.

I love meat too much to give it up lol. Good luck.

[periurban]

Please, I'm begging you, do more balanced research!

[sonicsuns]

Peri, I *have* researched. The sidebar now includes links to the scientific conclusions of the The American Dietetic Association and the Dietitians of Canada group. It also contains a link to a metastudy published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which concluded that vegetarians live longer than regular meat eaters. (Vegans were just as bad as the regular meat eaters, and vegetarianism was better than both of them)

[sonicsuns]

Participants in the metastudy included the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Cancer Epidemiology Unit, Oxford, United Kingdom; the Center for Health Research and the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Loma Linda University, CA; the Department of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London; the Centre for Applied Public Health Medicine, University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, United Kingdom;

[periurban]

That would be the consensus view that has led us to a state of such ill health that almost 10% of the UK health budget goes on treating diabetes alone. I'd urge you to read Gary Taubes' on this before you make your final decision. The problem with the consensus view is that it does not easily take other variables into account. People who make considered decisions about their diet are likely to be healthier regardless of what diet they use.

[periurban]

As ever, it depends what question you ask. You can find plenty of "evidence", but simply quoting sources isn't the same as knowing what's going on. How does eating grain equate to good health? How does it work? Why is it that societies who eat more meat and fat (like the French and the Greeks) are healthier than high carb countries like the USA and UK? I'm not saying you cannot live healthily as a vegetarian, but it is extremely difficult for the reasons I outlined.

[periurban]

I'm not convinced your research is balanced, which was my request. I know you are a smart guy and I consider you a friend. I don't mean to be a pain (although I probably already am!) and I seriously wish you well and I respect whatever decision you make. Good luck!

[periurban]

You can get ALL the nutrients you need from a cow, and only some of them from vegetables. Iron - 1kg of spinnach *per day*, or a cup full of marrow. Calcium - 50 almonds, or a couple of ounces of cheese. No wonder vegetarians suffer from IBS! It isn't normal or healthy to visit the crapper 4 times a day, but it's what you'll end up doing if you eat enough vegetables to "stay healthy".

[baeritukaez]

It is perfectly normal to defecate up to 3 times a day. In fact, it's better than only once a day. Who needs all that extra waste?

[periurban]

Normal is a relative concept. A vegetarian diet is high in harmful fibre that is useless to the body. The body's favoured gut lubricant is based on dietary fat. If you have a low fat, high fibre diet you will crap a lot more because your gut cannot process what's being put into it. Stools will be wet and smelly. Cut the fibre and carbohydrate and increase the fat and protein and the stools become firm and virtually odourless.

[sonicsuns]

I've seen no evidence that a proper vegetarian diet leads to IBS. Prove it.

And it's quite possible to get all the iron you need on a vegetarian diet. I acknowledge that vegetarian diets provide only non-heme iron, which is absorbed in smaller percentages, but the diet includes more iron in the first place, so the overall absorbed amount remains the same. And anyway, heme iron is associated with colon cancer.

[periurban]

People who eat corn get very sick. People who eat cows stay very healthy.

[sonicsuns]

Peri, that is an absolutely ridiculous over-generalization. I hope that remark was intended to be some sort of humorous hyperbole.

[periurban]

Noooooooooooooooo! Vegetarianism ISN'T healthier! Nooooooooooooooooooo! Eat meat and fat, drop the vegetables and the sugar. Try it for six weeks and see how much happier and healthier you feel. Read Barry Groves. Read Gary Taubes. Stay away from nutjob psycho vegetarian web sites!!!!!!!!

[periurban]

Animals have the right to not be terrified unneccessarily, and modern slaughtering techniques are quite barbaric. But I'd much rather be healthy than morally superior. Every morning I thank the pig for his body!

[periurban]

Food quality is a very important issue, but most of the scare stories about additives in foods are just that. The only really problematic food ingrediaent we need to worry about is sugar in all its sneaky forms. Guess what a vegetarian diet is full of?

[periurban]

The "farting animals add to global warming" argument is a joke!

[periurban]

The environmental/resource question is interesting but the vegetarian proponents presupposes that only arable lands are used to raise animals, whereas animals can thrive quite well on land that cannot easily be used for crops.

[sonicsuns]

Nonsense, Peri. Of course (some) animals can thrive in (some) areas which are unsuitable for crops, but the fact remains that the animals must eat something. And what do they eat? Crops. Things may be different in the wild, but on meat farms all the animals are fed with crops, and therefore every animal *does* require a sizable chunk of land.

[periurban]

You can adopt a moral stance about animal welfare, but taking that too far WILL in all likelihood affect your health. Are you prepared to end up like I did? Being a vegetarian for 20 years was the worst mistake of my life.

[periurban]

Humans are designed to eat meat. If you want to be a vegetarian you need to supplement your diet strongly with iron, the real Catch 22 being that only iron from animal sources can be easily absorbed by the body. The normal iron supplements you get make your poo black, and are not really absorbed.

[sonicsuns]

You said: "Humans are designed to eat meat. "

I respond: Certainly we *can* eat meat, the question is whether or not we should. And even if we should, the question remains: how much?

You said: "If you want to be a vegetarian you need to supplement your diet strongly with iron"

I respond: Not true. Although iron deficiency is more common for vegetarians that for non-vegetarians, it is still rare for both groups.

[periurban]

I am 50 years old and was a vegetarian between the ages of 20 and 42. I ended up very sick and very depressed, which I put down to my diet. I have several vegetarian friends (some, like me, lapsed) and not one of them was as healthy as they said they were!

[sonicsuns]

First, Peri, your personal experience does not necessarily reflect on people in general. Perhaps, for some reason, you cannot be a vegetarian, but the rest of us can. What we need is objective research.

Second, just because you put your problems down to your diet doesn't meant that diet was actually the problem.

Third, even if diet was the problem, that doesn't mean that vegetarianism was the culprit. One can be a vegetarian and still have a poor diet, by eating the wrong non-meat foods.

[baeritukaez]

I've been an Ovo-Lacto Vegetarian for about 3 years and it was the best thing that I've ever done for my health.

[azurebreezes]

Dear Jimmy,

I actually became a vegetarian for a year. That year I became a lifetime member of Outpost Natural Foods Co-op in Milwaukee, Wisconsin which is a grocery store specializing in organic foods. I found that it was much more expensive way to live. Another issue was that I was having problems when I started becoming anemic. For me, if I were to become a vegetarian again I would work closer with my doctor and/or dietitian before switching over again.

Warm regards,

Buffy

[baeritukaez]

You were obviously ignorant of the diet needed to keep healthy. I find that I save money being a vegetarian. Canned beans and rice are the cheapest things you can get! They are the main staple of my diet, followed by noodles, and of course all of them are accompanied by fruits and veggies.

[azurebreezes]

baeritukaez,

I have been working closely with my doctor. I also have a dietician which I had seen on a monthly basis & I still struggle with anemia & iron deficiencies even though I have been following their dietary change recommendations & taking two iron supplements a day. Even with close professional help I still needed an iron infusion at the hospital. My concern is telling someone to just be a vegetarian is not good for me when I have special needs & require extra medical attention. Buffy

[periurban]

Azure. Your experience is very typical of what vegetarians experience, but the truth is masked by moral and philosophical considerations that have nothing to do with health and diet. Our entire metabolic physiology from teeth to rectum evolved to thrive on a carnivorous diet. The relatively late evolutionary adaptation that allows us to digest carbohydrate is a survival mechanism that means we can subsist on such, but it is very difficult to thrive.

[periurban]

How old are you? Examine the real health (and not the apocryphal) of anyone who has lived as you do for a couple of decades and you will most likely find they have diet related health issues.