hellyes!! wrote:definitely not crap.
personally, i like the lightness and energy of a good vegetarian meal as opposed to that heavy, bloated feeling one gets from meat.

Hmmm.... I'd have to say legumes are about the bloatin'-est food around.

Then again, if you're one of the Superfans, and you eat 5 racks of babybacks, 17 polish sausages (sassagessss, as we say in Chicagay)... That can make anyone bloated.

Anyone heard of this Dr. Nicholas Perricone fellow? He's on PBS all the time, and he taught medicine at Yale for 12 years. I'd say he's fairly well qualified...

Anyway, I watched his PBS show, and ended up buying one of his books. He touts a low glycemic, high protein diet. Mostly eating (Alaskan wild) salmon, chicken, turkey, etc., vegetables and whatnot.

Anyway, in his book, he was saying that women tend to be vegetarians, and they tend to get wrinkled by the time they're in the late 20's or 30's because they don't get enough complete forms of protein in their diets. Also, the increased consumtion of starches that most vegetarians need to do, causes glycolization -- where sugars bind to collagen fibers (in skin etc) and stiffen them, causing lines and wrinkles. Beyond that, the increased glucose in the blood stream causes all sorts damage to internal organs through inflammation. This is similar to what someone with diabetes experiences. Of course, diabetes is more dramatic. But when someone eats a high glycemic starch (like bread, rice, most pasta) it raises blood sugar, and the insulin/glucose spikes and valleys allow for intermittant spikes in glucose that damage tissues and organs. Glucose is a damaging, oxidizing substance when it's levels are elevated in the blood stream...

Nonetheless, we were never meant to eat, say, Triscuits. Really, grains and starches came into the human diet (at most) 10,000 years ago, but evolutionary events take 100,000 years. Humans were always hunter/gatherers...

I know quite a few women in their early 30's who have been vegetarians when they came into the whole "alternative lifestyle" thing in high school. They look old. Lots of wrinkles. Everyone of them I know...

So anyway, most physicians are on the side of the balanced diet, which includes meat. From what I've seen, this tofu and bucket of rice diet isn't that great at all... Unless you have the luxury of taking an insulin nap after every meal.

Sure, there are a few physicians who tout a vegetarian diet. Every one of these guys suffer from the premature geriatricism that comes from over consumption of starches and a lack of protein.

I think a big part of the problem is how meat is raised these days. For example, Conjugated Linoleic Acid is virtually absent from meat and dairy, since these animals are no longer pasture fed. Also, there's quite a lot of nitrates in meat, which is no good.

But I encourage people to continue their vegetarian diets. It keeps meat prices down, and makes me comparitively younger and more physically fit.

Vegetarians who feed their dogs/cats vegetarian food should be shot. This is beyond cruel. Don't force you're politically/socially motivated lifestyle on your pet.

Oh yeah... Then there's the fact that the diverse vegetarian diet that people have to try so hard to attain is due to global shipping... Which will get much more expensive. Yes, good old oil, war, etc. is what puts fresh veggies on the table! Fruits from the labor-friendly fields of Chile! Let's all join hands and feel the love!

Peter Gabriel is a vegetarian... Have you seen how OLD that guy looks? He's in his mid 50's and he looks like he's 65...

Now he can really sing that "Why don't you touch me" line, without the old guy mask...



This is a photo from a year ago... He's not wearing a mask!

In terms of animal creulty, agricultural machinery kills billions of animals every year.

If you want to exist on this planet without killing anything... good luck to you!

On the basis of health = NOT CRAP @ all...

On the basis of kindness towards life = mildly crap

Very simple.

not crap. but doing it to save the animals seems like slight crap since they are already dead, and all yr doing is saying yo uare too good for them, better to let their corpses rot for naught. yucko.

i eat meat though. was vegetarian for years (my mom says those were the years when i "went bad"). then i started taking care of living animals instead of worrying about the already dead ones.

my grandma has been pretty much vegan her whole life (except she eats fish, but no cheese, eggs or any other meat, and never buys packaged food that may have biproducts... just a lot of pickled vegetables) and is like 90 and super healthy. this lifestyle also keeps her diabetes at bay. i would like to convert to a lifestyle like that for health reasons but don't think i can eat kimchee, banchan and stink fish all day for the rest of my life. not to mention the smelly soup. oh man.

I ate some bull heart on the weekend at a South American BBQ.

Tasty.

i'm very indifferent toward vegetarianism since on average i only meat three or four times a week.

cjh wrote:

The irony of vegetarianism is that it can only exist due to petroleum

I'm going to bed now. Tomorrow morning I'll walk 5 minutes up to the local high street where there's a Saturday farmer's market, the same as last week. I'll buy freshly baked bread, free range eggs, swiss chard, garlic, tomatoes, spinach, miscellaneous squashes, new potatoes, carrots, a range of cheeses, asparagus, vegetarian scotch eggs and anything else that takes my fancy. True enough, some of this will have come on the back of a van but no further than 20 miles away (I'd wager four times less than the average journey for a pig to a slaughterhouse). I have no qualms whatsoever about anyone eating meat but the arguments of your last post read like the ramblings of a drugged horse.

while this is great I highly suggest you try to do this in Wisconsin, in the winter... they do not call it the "Frozen Tundra" for nothing... He has a point with the Oil thing...

eating less meat = good for the environment and good for your health

not crap

humans are omnivores, eating meat isn't 'wrong'
the problem really is the quantity

yut wrote:Anyone heard of this Dr. Nicholas Perricone fellow? He's on PBS all the time, and he taught medicine at Yale for 12 years. I'd say he's fairly well qualified...

Dr. Perricone also has an insanely expensive, as in $100+/oz., line of anti-aging skin creams to sell, so he's not exactly a disinterested party. One item is $570 for 2 oz. (I had a friend who was into this stuff, which is the only reason I know about it.) With regard to skin care as one ages, the only things I think have been proven beyond any doubt are 1) limit sun exposure or wear high-SPF sunblock if unavoidable, and 2) don't smoke. I do the first of these but not the second.

As for vegetarianism, my choice is to eat meat maybe once or twice a week, ditto fish. I tend to buy free-range or organic meats when I'm cooking 'em myself; for one thing, they taste noticeably better to me than the factory-farmed kind. I think the serious ethical & environmental arguments for vegetarianism are not to be flatly discounted; if fewer people ate animals and/or if people ate fewer animals, the demand for them would go down; result: fewer dead critters, better human health, less impact on environment. But those critters sure are tasty when prepared well.

I can't relate to getting overly exercised on either side of the issue. Orthorexia, or obsession with eating "correctly" according to whatever definition, is boring as hell as far as I'm concerned, and getting sentimental and wrought-up about EVER killing ANY animals to eat seems misguided.

In other words that's a mild "not crap" for vegetarianism from me as a non-vegetarian, and a "crap" to NV Perricone.