So what that it’s not what people were “meant” to eat?
People were not meant to live in cities, and yet millions of people live and thrive in cities.
Part of the pretense is that it’s nutritionally superior. It isn’t.
See, this is what people are talking about. Sure, for some vegetarians, they believe it’s nutritionally superior. Not all do, though. But you’ll bash all vegetarians for this “pretense” that most of them don’t even hold!
I insult people who act like assholes in the Pit. If you act like an asshole in the Pit, i might insult you; i you don’t, i won’t. Pretty simple really. As for what it might or might not mean to you, i won’t lose much sleep over that, either.
Plus, some vegetarian diets are nutritionally superior to some omnivore diets, and vice versa. My veggie diet is probably quite a bit better nutritionally than my fast-food-loving brother’s. I’m sure a well-balanced omnivorous diet would be better than my coffee-and-alcohol heavy diet. Saying one is superior to the other in general is just lazy.
Exactly. It’s like, yes, I would agree that a, “whole grains, tofu, beans, fresh veggies and fruit, no meat” diet is healthier than a, “simple carbohydrates, fast food 10 times a week, cheez-doodle intensive” diet. But then, I’d say that a, “fresh veggies, whole grains, chicken, lean beaf and fresh fruit” diet is healthier than, “no meat, mostly cheese, noodles, bread, fried stuff and potatoes” diet.
**TWEEEEET!!
08-30-2009 12:02 AM**
= = =
Please note the time and date this thread was moved from the BBQ Pit to Great Debates, and that it HAS been moved.
I really do not need a lot of reported posts from the period when it was in the Pit, (I’m not going to indulge in retro-active punishment).
However, I do not want to see any further Pit like posts.
Thank you for your cooperation.
[ /Moderating ]
I don’t think that most vegetarians would claim that vegetarianism is necessarily healthier or nutritionally superior. I’m sure there are some, but I don’t find this opinion at all common. I don’t think it would make sense that it is nutritionally superior to subtract all animal products – you are, after all, limiting your pool of available foods. I think part of the argument is that the average vegetarian diet (in the US) is probably healthier than the average omnivorous diet.
I’ve been overweight all of my life (far before being a vegetarian) and I’ve found that it is easier to eat a low-fat and low-calorie diet as a vegetarian. Vegetarian recipes tend to emphasize fruits and vegetables, as well as whole grains, because there is so much overlap between the “healthy eater” and “vegetarian” groups.
I’ve recently done a high protein, but not necessarily always low fat diet intended for muscle gain and slow weight loss, and I’d say this diet is harder to be vegetarian. Modern conveniences make it definitely within range of possibility, even ease, but there are many convenient high-protein foods that contain meat. There is no question that my diet could be more varied if I ate meat, but then it could be varied based on a lot of other criteria. I would say that my diet is more varied than about 90% of people I know, because I have a strong love for trying new things and love ethnic food.
The point is that nearly nobody eats a nutritionally optimum diet, or even attempts to. The closest group I have ever seen is weightlifters who do things like drinking straight olive oil… and there are successful vegetarian weightlifters, too. Most people eat all kinds of things just because they are delicious, they are familiar, and they enjoy eating them. Talking about best-case nutritional efficiency is a red herring; practically nobody has any intention of pursuing such a diet.
I’m really not following this line of argument. If you took vegetarians, or even strict vegans, and locked them in cages without food, and then after a long enough period of time you offered them a nice juicy steak, most of them would probably eat it.
So what? People who are truly starving will eat their pets, they will try to eat grass or old shoes, and on numerous occasions it has been demonstrated that starving human beings will eat each other. So–all you oh-so-superior self-righteous vegetarians are really cannibals! And so are all of you oh-so-superior self-righteous meat-eaters, too. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people–including countless millions in the “Third World”–voluntarily refuse to eat pork, or refuse to eat beef, or refuse to eat the flesh of animals at all. Refusing to eat things that human beings are perfectly capable of digesting, on religious or philosophical grounds or just because (due to your cultural background) you find that particular food to be “yucky” is not a behavior that is confined to white bourgeois college students in the First World.
Great. So you know as well as I that the model starving African kid has probably met people with dietary restrictions before, had his own preferences back before he was starving, is probably too polite to engage in any “entertaining” theatrics and in any case has bigger things to worry about than what other people choose to eat.
The real first world luxury is sitting here on our butts passing judgment on the dietary choices of people we don’t even know.
So, it’s safe to say that you two don’t understand the significance of quotes around a word or phrase? I say this because you both picked this particular sentence to respond to, but didn’t understand that I thought anyone who said you’re meant to do A or B is full of shit.
We can eat just about anything we want to and survive. Vegetarians often try to point to health reasons for their food choices, but the case isn’t clear-cut. What constitutes an optimal diet is subject to debate. There is a lot of research that shows we should be eating a lot more vegetables, and basically nothing processed. Virtually no one disputes this. But, we know that people can live on anything from a virtually all-meat diet, to a meat- and animal product-free one. The middle ground between these extremes is the battle ground that medical journals have churned into mud.
And everyone has an agenda. Vegetarian sites keep lists of articles friendly to their position, while ignoring articles that don’t support their arguments. The same is true of other diet proponents. As I said elsewhere, the best first step to avoid hype is to read the source articles and avoid pop science articles, because the pop sci writers often misconstrue the research.
I also disagree with both of you that whatever we can do is good for us. That’s demonstrably not true, or there wouldn’t be any reason to debate food or lifestyle choices at all. Some things we do are self-destructive, and not all of the cultural choices our ancestors made have resulted in positive outcomes. Widespread obesity, heart disease, stress-disorders, environmental destruction, social stratification, etc. are the consequences of trying to reason our way into our wants, and living in cities, to address the example each of you provided. There are some positive outcomes too, but saying that our current way of life is the epitome of good requires wearing some heavily-tinted rose-colored goggles.
Gee, I thought the 5+ pages of back and forth before I got here meant that there was some sort of discussion going on. Silly me. I guess I was the first person in the thread to bring up the subject. :rolleyes:
Meat eaters do the same, with this appeal to what’s “natural” and what we’re “meant” to eat all the time, so please don’t pin this argument solely on vegetarians. There are plenty of valid health reasons to eat less meat, or none if you have a serious cholesterol problem. This is not to say that it’s the only healthy way to eat. But the idea that vegetarians are abnormal, weird, etc., is one advanced by meat eaters all the time to discount the validity of vegetarianism.
You cherry picked that out of my post, without the note that my healthy is excellent and my doctors have no complaints. My diet is fine without meat, therefore this idea that I’m being unnatural and “meant” to do something else is frankly without merit.
Please show me where I said this. I’m pretty sure you can’t.
You’re not the first person to bring up the subject. Other meat eaters have also derided vegetarianism. I haven’t seen a single vegetarian in this thread try to convince any meat eaters to convert, but plenty of commentary from meat eaters about how the vegetarian diet is bogus or invalid. Thus, when folks whine about how vegetarians lecture them about their eating habits, well, in this thread, all the lecturing and telling people they’re wrong has come from the meat eaters, not the other way around.
While I didn’t read them all, I looked over the articles linked above and read a number of the abstracts, and didn’t see anything that indicated a vegan diet was harmful to one’s health. There were some articles about dietary fat, but a vegan diet does not have to be lowfat. Some articles mentioned omega 3’s, but these are not absent from a vegan diet as there are a number of non animal sources.
So, I’ve seen peer reviewed articles that will show benefits specifically related to a vegetarian or vegan diet, including the one I linked to above, but so far, not so many articles showing that animal products are beneficial (some of the nutrients mentioned are found in animal products, but vegns can get them from non-animal sources as well) or that vegns following a well-balanced eating plan are significantly less healthy.
As a vegan, two things I realize is that I can be a healthy vegan in part because of where and when I live…there are some places in the world where it might be difficult to get everything you need to stay healthy (it’s not too easy here in Montana, but it’s possible), and that there are vegans who don’t eat a healthy diet (Oreos are pretty much vegan, so are a lot of fast food fries…so one could have a junky vegan diet).
I think that a whole foods based vegan diet with a lot of greens is a very good way to go for health. Adding small amounts of animal products probably wouldn’t negatively impact the healthiness of the diet.
The point is that eliminating animal products does nothing to enhance health, and only makes it more difficult to compensate.
Since it seems we’re all agreed that vegetarianism/veganism is neither ethically, nor nutritionally superior to natural, human omnivory, then what’s the point?
ETA, what’s with putting an asterisk in the word, “vegan?”
Are you really asserting that vegetarianism is not a medically superior choice for a significant number of individuals?
In terms of ethics, vegetarianism comes across as the “lesser of two evils”, limiting the animal deaths at least to some extent. And in America at least, the meat industry is notorious for cases of unusually inhumane treatment of animals, and locating animal products from independent farms is pretty difficult and expensive. I can understand vegetarianism as a sort of quiet protest against factory farming.
The asterisk is used like a wildcard to mean either the letters a or etaria…veg*n = vegetarian/vegan.
I think it can be shown that a good veg*n diet is nutritionally superior as far as lowered cancer risk, lifespan and lower cholesterol when compared to a standard American diet.
From an ethical standpoint, as mentioned in a few threads, ethical veg*ns try to minimize the animal suffering while realizing that it’s not possible to eliminate it.
Realistically, I’ve met very few people who take the position that there is nothing wrong with causing animals to suffer. Most people think, for instance, that dog fighting is bad, torturing kittens is bad, etc. Some of those people also think that factory farming methods that cause animal suffering are also bad. It’s a continuum, vegetarians and vegans are just further to one side than others. If there is no ethical value to being veg*n, is it also the case that there is no ethical value in being opposed to dogfighting or cockfighting?
I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case. It’s certainly not the case that it’s automatically superior to omnivory for all individual.
Dogfighting doesn’t feed anybody.
I will say that I have tremendous issues with the way that food animals are raised on factory farms, and I only buy organic, free range meat as much as I can.
Why bother?
By your own logic, it’s futile, because your decision to purchase organic, free range meat doesn’t make any dent at all in the number of animals raised on factory farms.