I’m sure they would be unhappy, but would they get physically sick having to handle that much meat protein, or would their body easily shift digestive gears and handle it without a problem?
If they’re a strict veggie, as in “I don’t eat anything with a face” veggie, yeah, it’ll wreck their guts if they’ve been meatless for a long time. My wife is like a meat protein detector–even chicken fat in a soup base sends her to the latrine for a campout.
I can be so cruel to her sometimes. >=)
Excuse me…by “physically sick” do you mean like “Ketosis” sick? Because if you mean something other than “24 hours of barfing & violent rectal expulsion” which can only be overcome by gradual reintroduction of meat into the diet, then I got nothing. I might not have fully taken your meaning.
There’s no physiological reason why any healthy person would get sick from eating meat. Meat protein isn’t different in any serious way from plant protein and is generaly easier to digest. While some vegans suffer from protein deficiency most don’t so there’s no particular problem with the protein load. The worst problem would probably be the amount of fat causing indigestion and flatulence since many vegan diets are fairly low fat.
The thing to remember is that humans evolved to cope with a seasonally varied diet, and as foragers we are adapted to make best use of whatever becomes available. We also evolved to cope with large amounts of meat, at least periodically. In short, people can almost any old crap without any immediate physiological effect.
Having said that I’d wager large sums that any long-term vegan who knowingly ate a pound of rare steak would be violently ill, but that’s purely psychological.
Reference?
Fat is not protein. Fat is fat. People on low-fat diets often have a hard time coping with large amounts of fat, but that’s not unique to vegans, nor is it anything to do with protein.
However if your wife has problems with the amoun tof fat in a stock cube/soup base then she probably should seek medical advice. That seems like far to severe a reaction for a teaspoon or two of fat.
My wife is a vegetarian, and hence my son is. I didn’t want to argue about it, couse I had the feeling that eventually he’ll grab a burger and end of vegetarian story. You got to pick you fights, and this one wasn’t one I wanted to get into.
At the age of two and a half year he ate a couple of hot dogs, as first meat ever. It was the first time there were no other food on the table – the situation I did forseen from the beginning.
Imagine: A human being who has never eaten any meat, from the time he was born, grabs two hot dogs at the age of 2.5. Sick? Nope. No probs what so ever, and nowadays he eats all kinds of meat.
This is one of the reason that I believe that “none-meat eaters get sick of eating meat” is a myth.
I agree fully with Blake, above.
Any assumption that there is meat in hot dogs may be unwarranted. 
Intellectually, I agree with Blake that humans are omnivorous, and able to deal with both animal and vegetable proteins. As a long term vegetarian,(not vegan, I occassionally eat eggs and dairy) I gotta say my gut reaction is quite different. The few times in the past fifteen years I’ve eaten meat (as an experimental courtesy, could elaborate, but not that interesting, really), I’ve always had a bad reaction, the bad expulsion in the wee hours; cramping of gut, and quick expulsion via lower avenues, and quite stinking, to boot.
I didn’t expect that, always thought, “OK, human body can take it this once in awhile, no big deal”, but my guts did Not Agree at all with it.
Some people react differently to changes in diet, but any drastic dietary change can cause a bad reaction.
I’ve seen personal anectdotal evidence of people going both ways on this (vegetarians getting sick from eating meat, vegetarians being fine after eating meat) so I’d honestly say it probably varies from person to person, depends a lot on exactly what constitutes their daily diet and physiological factors.
After seven years of vegetarianism, I got sick from any amount of red meat. Nausea & diarrhea.
Both my son and I are mainly vegetarian, and neither of us have never had any problems on the extremely rare occasions when we do eat meat.
I do know someone who, after years of vegetarianism, threw caution to the winds while travelling in a very carnivorous country, and ate steaks on a daily basis. The effect? Suffice to say they used no toilet paper for a week or two.
uh… neither of us have ever had any problems…
[WAG]I got told had something to do with bile production not getting stimulated enough (not eating a lot of oils and fat) for a while, and then when you do eat a reasonable amount of (any) fat there isn’t enough bile to break down the fat.
This would depend on whether the vegans diet contained a lot of oils.
But by using this logic, it should happen when a vegan(or anyone on a long-term low fat diet) consumes a lot of oil also.[/WAG]
Well, just to keep pertinent, I use a lot of olive oil in my diet, and supplement with Evening Primrose Oil and Flax oil, every day, so I don’t think it’s a fat reaction in my case.
Debating whether to ask this as a seperate GQ thread, but I’ll try here first.
Is there a digestive enzyme or gut flora that is absent/reduced in the condition of long-term meatless diet? It’s my understanding that in the absence of a gallbladder the liver can take over with the processing of fats.
The gall bladder does not do anything absolutely essential in the processing of fats. The liver always produces bile, but only a little at a time. The gall bladder is essentially a warehouse, storing up bile and releasing it when it is required. I’m not certain if the liver can moderate its own bile production when required by the absence of the gall bladder, or if the system just has to get by with what is produced, whenever it is produced, but the liver is the original source of the relevant substance in any event.
I’m an A #1 carnivore and I’d get sick if forced to eat a pound of rare prime rib. Yuck.
Speaking as the husband of one woman and close friend of another who had cholecystectomies, the dietetic “rule” is to regulate fat intake if you have no gall bladder, neither attempting to completely avoid fats nor indulging yourself in deep-fried food twice a day week in and week out. Compare the practice of someone diagnosed with diabetes whose Islands of Langerhans are still quasi-functional … a little sugar, and complex carbs that take time to digest, are appropriate.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You don’t want unused bile building up, (though I imagine most of it would go out the bottom end, that could be unpleasant in itself.) And you definitely don’t want to dump too much fat into the digestive tract at once, more than the steady supply of bile can, erm, deal with.
Warning, anecdote ahead, “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” blah blah: I’m not a vegan, but I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian (i.e., I do eat dairy and eggs). In the many years I’ve been a vegetarian, I have unknowingly (at first) eaten meat/meat products like broth quite a few times. At least once I accidentally did it to myself, for example buying a box of “vegetable eggrolls” without reading the ingredients list closely, feeling nauseated and vomiting about 20 minutes later or so, and reading the ingredients list only to see chicken meat/broth/fat listed. On a number of occasions, I have had well-meaning or not-so-well-meaning relatives/inlaws try to sneak meat into my food, either out of a misguided worry that I’m not getting good nutrition or out of a “we’ll show her, she can eat meat just fine!” attitude. After I felt ill and threw up, they confessed to what they’d done. It was never an immediate nausea reaction like one might expect to a psychological, subconscious “ew I taste meat” response, but at least 15-20 minutes later, probably more. I have no problems making meat for people, and even hacked apart a couple turkey carcasses this weekend with a cleaver and my bare hands (to make broth), so I don’t have an aversion to dealing with it.
A vegetarian friend of mine, back in college, said something about her uncle being a microbiologist and how one’s body tends to reduce production of certain enzymes that deal with meat if they aren’t being used. I don’t have the time to search about this right now, but at the time it made sense to me and I didn’t think about it.
Regardless, I do have a history of reacting to something in meat after becoming a vegetarian, so my un-substantiated-scientifically response to the OP would be that even if you could get past most vegans’ psychological revulsion, you would probably still run into digestive issues. YVMV (your vegan may vary), etc.