Vegetarians are unhealthy

[PWrong]

That's probably a pretty reasonable compromise, for someone who actually likes the taste of meat and doesn't feel they can cut it out entirely. There's a health organisation promoting "meatless monday", where everyone stops eating meat for one day.

I wouldn't worry about muscular atrophy or collapse. I'm sure things like that have happened with vegetarians, but a lot of vegetarians don't eat a sensible amount of food. If you count an anorexic person as vegetarian in a scientific study, for instance, then you would get skewed results. From the studies I've heard of, sensibly-eating vegetarians are slightly more healthy than average, and vegans are equally healthy.

I'll let you know if I ever collapse, ok?

[mghtymoop]

i have doubts as to these studies you speak of, can u point to a journal that would suggest such a thing because apart from permi style writing i doubt one exists, no offence, i just don't like reading things which i know to be false for a number of reasons, by the way recently a couple of vegan parents were tried for manslaugter after bringing up there baby as a vegan and the childs subsequent death

[PWrong]

i have doubts as to these studies you speak of, can u point to a journal that would suggest such a thing because apart from permi style writing i doubt one exists, no offence, i just don't like reading things which i know to be false for a number of reasons

I completely agree with you about reading things that are obviously false. I don't like hearing things about "vegetables have feelings too" and "there's no iron in plants", either.

I'm not sure what you mean by "permi style writing", but most of the sites I've come across do have references to scientific journals. I don't know for certain if they're as valid as you might like, but they look ok.

Here's one website that I don't think is affiliated with any vegan organisations. They have heaps of information, and 256 references, mostly with links to journals.
http://www.eatright.org/Public/GovernmentAffairs/92_17084.cfm

by the way recently a couple of vegan parents were tried for manslaugter after bringing up there baby as a vegan and the childs subsequent death

that's awful. I'll have to find out more about that. Most importantly, how old was the baby? I wouldn't have thought a young baby would eat much meat anyway. I'm sure it's possible that the baby could die if the parents were extremely strict vegans. A lot of people go overboard with being 100% vegan, when really it's impossible.

But, according to the website I just mentioned:

The American Dietetic Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics agree that well-planned vegan diets can satisfy nutrient needs and normal growth of infants.

I seriously doubt that the baby's diet was "well-planned".

[RQ]

In a society such as ours, you can choose to be either vegetarian, or a meat eater or whatever you want to be. But in the early days of mankind, cavemen had no choice but to rely on meat due to its dietary efficiency, and rare meat diseases are to be ignored, because it wasn't the individual's survival that counted, unlike now, but the group's.

[Birdman]

Forgive me if I am rehashing an old debate but:

I'm a Christian, and according to the Bible, people and animals didn't eat meat until Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. After doing so, Sin inhabited the world, and people and animals started eating meat. Before they sinned, they lived perfectly in a perfect world. (Please don't quote me on that last sentence, it's just to further my own thinking and logic).

So Biblicaly, people can be perfectly healthy and not eat meat. I however, like meat!

[PWrong]

Hmm, that's interesting. It implies that eating meat is related to sinning, without actually being a sin.

It's hard to establish a good ethical reason to be vegetarian for someone who believes in creation, since animal rights relies on the idea that humans are just another kind of animal, which comes from evolution. So I just accept christianity as a reasonably consistent alternative to vegetarianism. I don't see how an atheist can believe in human rights but not animal rights, and still have a full and consistent understanding of ethics. Of course, most people don't think about it, which is fine.

As for RQ's idea, I agree that diseases caused from meat would have had little effect on cavemen, as they wouldn't live long enough to have heart attacks. I don't see how it has anything to do with the group's survival as opposed to the individual. Meat was probably neccessary only because there weren't enough plants. Fortunately, I'm not a caveman .

I think humans are naturally scavengers rather than carnivores or omnivores. I've heard that carnivores tend to eat the organs of an animal, rather than the flesh.
I could be wrong of course, but mghtymoop probably knows, being the biologist.

[houserichichi]

If I may be so bold as to interject here - I think (and I stress that word) that our ancient ancestors ate meat because it's biologically engrained into our minds the same way a lion knows to hunt animals and not trees. We are naturally omnivores (look at our teeth, for example), but it doesn't mean that we HAVE to eat plants or we HAVE to eat meat. In the end what it boils down to is a choice of lifestyle (something we have over other animals, as far as I know) - humans do it because they either feel bad about the handling of their "prey", don't like the taste of meat, or any of a myriad of other reasons.

While it may not be biologically "right" to be vegan (specifically), that is, going against the natural instincts of being omnivorous, unless it poses a serious health risk, which this post hasn't convinced me of, there seems to be no reason for them to stop. And heck, if it turns out that turning strict herbivore or strict carnivore ends up hurting the individual, we can at least blame it on survival of the fittest.

[Birdman]

Here's something else to think about:

Before Adam and Eve sinned, they didn't have to toil the ground for their food. It natually and abundantely grew I suppose. But after they sinned, this free and abundant food stopped growing as well, and they had to toil the soil for it. Therefore, killing an animal for meat which provided a quick and easy protein source might have been the best and easiest solution...

[alkaline]

I'd just like to throw in the random fact that I'm a vegetarian, and actually have been my whole life. Any meat I've eaten has been accidentally.

[PWrong]

hey, another veggie. There's so many on this forum; it couldn't just be a coincidence.

That's an interesting way to see it, Birdman. I agree that meat would have been a quick and easy source of food, because they didn't require us to till the land etc.

Of course, now that we feed animals with our own crops, there's not much purpose to the meat industry at all. You might say its success as an industry shows that it must serve some purpose, but you could say the same thing for cigarette companies.

Why create an animal, then waste three years of edible grain on it, go to extraordinary lengths to keep the cost of "storage" and "maintenance" of the animal to an absolute minimum, and finally slaughter it to feed a person for only a few days?