or in other words how bad is meat for you if at all? I should say I became an vegetarian on ethical grounds not health, but a couple of vegetarian friends were adamant that meat is actually bad for you - e.g. increased colon cancer etc. Now while I think veges do live a little bit longer than non vegetarians, I am not sure that meat consumption is anything to do with it. My guess is that veges, making a positive life-style decision also smoke less, exercise more etc. Has there been any studies that try to disentangle life-style choices from pure meat eating on health?
So if I exchanged meat for tofu but made no other changes in my life (which I haven’t), am I going to make an appreciable difference?
We’d have to know with some degree of accuracy WHAT your diet was before and after you exchanged meat for tofu. It’s entirely possibly to have a dreadful vegetarian diet.
As a rule vegetraians are healthy than meat eaters. But there are many exceptions to that. Look I could eat candy bars only. That makes me a veggie but it certainly wouldn’t make me healthier than a meat eater.
For example colon cancer. The thought it more fiber in the diet passes the waste quicker thru the colon. Thus less chance for polyps. Meat eaters fill up quicker and therefore tend to eat less fiber. Could a meat eater eat more fiber to make up for that? Yes.
Veggies tend to be non smokers, they tend to work out more so studies are hard to compare directly.
Eating meat or not eating meat isn’t as important as establishing a healthy lifestyle. This means exercising 1 hour (at 60-80% of your resting heart rate) for 5 days a week. Some weight resistence and watching your cholesterol intake. Also increasing fiber and eliminating smoking.
I tried (in another thread) to get some hard data on what life-style changes helped your lifespan and how much. No definite responses. Maybe we can ask again here. Does anyone have cites/sites that show specific statistics about how much good it does to eat more veggies and less meat?
Clearly, not smoking is the biggest thing you can do for health. Keeping your weight down is next (quite possible that vegetarians have an edge here, probably because they care more–you can certainly get fat without eating meat), and regular exercise is third. After that I have no idea.
My bass player (a long time ago) informed us that he was vegetarian. After some discussion, it turned out that all he ate was cereal and cold Campbell’s Scotch Broth right out of the can. I’m guessing that in the long run that wasn’t terribly healthy.
Good luck preventing a vitamin B-12 deficiency. According to the US Government you may become more flatulent. My suggestion, Beano and eating red meat.
Oh, and don’t let me sit next to you in the movie theater
My mom could always identify, on sight, which of my HS friends were veges. Unhealthy skin color, bad skin, thin. So, once you cut meat out of your diet, you hafta take a bunch of vitamins and stuff. So my mom (Nurse Mom) says. I eat about a steak every two weeks, so I don’t eat a LOT, but a decent amount.
And on hlanelee’s point, if you leave your house, ever, you put yourself at risk, heh.
Actually AnimistDragon , there are many ways to die in the comfort of your own home for instance: fire, electrocution, slip and fall, carbon monoxide poisoning, brain aneurysm, to name a few. When you are born, you are given only one guarantee, so until it’s your time, make the most of what you have.
As to the OP, if you like bean curd better than prime rib, say so. Don’t tell us you intend to live a healthier/better lifestyle and try to seem better than us omnivores.
The general consensus of the literature on the longevity and nutritional effects of vegetarianism seems to be that modern vegetarian diets in the West are more sophisticated than they were even 50 years ago (historical and cross-cultural studies have too many confounding variables, and may not apply to an American vegetarian today) and probably contribute to longevity en masse by reducing the incidence of diseases that lead to early death [e.g. up to the 60s] but have limited effect in the 70s or 80s.
However, vegetarianism in the US today requires a higher than average attention to diet, nutrition and overall health, which may lead to better health. They also eat a substantially different diet [more raw or lightly cooked vegetables, more deliberate selection and variety in plant products, more soy-based foods like tofu, etc.] which have been shown to have substantial independent health benefits. The effect may not be as large as numerical comparisons may suggest, and there are no good (statistically powerful or definitive) studies that distinguish between various schools of vegetarianism. Some are better than others; some are known to be downright risky. All require care.
Overall, the upper limit for possible enhancement in vegetarian life expectancy seems to be about 7 years. the actual effect might be as little as 3 after correcting for all confounding variables (like weight, selection of foods, and atttentiveness, which could be substantially improved even for meat eaters), but there’s a philosophical issue over how many such variables should be corrected for: if vegetarism lifestyle tends to make one slimmer, choose better foods or be more attentive to health, is a purely physiological analysis really relevant to the choice of lifestyle? Many Atkins dieters don’t feel it’s particularly relevant if Atkins causes them to lose weight or merely decreases their appetite, they only care about the endpoint.
There are also questions of attendant mobidities and self-selection. ‘Self-selection’ means that if a [specific] vegetarian diet doesn’t suit your biological needs, makes you sick, etc., you probably won’t stick with it - therefore only those who feel a benefit tend to stick with it in the long term. not everyone may benefit (as much). Attendant morbidities include factors like mental health. To elaborate on that example, various studies have shown substantially increased rates of various developmental disorders and mental illnesses among vegetarians. This does not mean vegetarianism causes ‘madness’: almost any non-mainstream behavior is associated with increased mental disorders [‘nuts’ tend to be ‘different’]; some disorders, like eating disorders or schizophrenic notions of body purity, tend to draw people to become or self-identify as vegetarians; better understanding of vegetarian nutrition may diminish developmental, gestational and adult comorbidities; etc.
To return to your original question: too much meat may be bad for many or most people [with the popularity of Atkins et alia, this is being more thoroughly researched], but the benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle may not be wholly or even mostly related to avoiding meat. No one really knows the answer to the global question, and in fact, the global answer may not be relevant to anyone except as a debating point. We are, all of us, mere anecdotes - slaves to the quirks and details of our own bodies and situations.
I meant to note that apparent difference in life expectancy indicated by various studies is usually 3-8% of the expected adult life expectancy (as opposed to “at birth” life expectancy, which is less relevant to the choices we’re discussing). Smoking actually has a far greater effect on morbidity (sickness) than life expectancy, but the effect on life expectancy from not smoking is about the same as the upper limit of the effect of general vegetarian diets. [If you ask me, morbidity, not mortality, is the more important measure: how long I will live bed-ridden isn’t as important to me as how long I can remain healthy and vital. I say that having been bedridden at one time in my life]
I support any measure that improves health, but it amazes me how often various groups become self-righteous or defensive over an 8% gap in life expectancy. Yes, it’s a lot (especially since it’s all we have) but it’s hardly grounds for a religious war, as some seem to think.
If I understand what is being said here–not likely–that’s a 40% improvement in cancer rates for vegies, even after correction for smoking, weight, etc.
PS It’s cheaper, too. Just check the menu price, next time you’re out with the gang, of all the meat dishes vs. all (if any) veggie-only dishes.
