Vegetarianism has been around for a long time. In fact you could say that the creation of modern civilization began as a shift away from the hunter-gatherer meat-eating lifestyle to the growing plants for food (agrarian) lifestyle. On the other hand, the development of the large human brain is the direct result several million years earlier of moving from only foraging for plant foods to scavenging meat and bone remains left after the kills by larger carnivorous animals. So the question remains, which lifestyle is healthier?
Modern scientific studies have essentially told us almost nothing. Amassing all the studies on life span and meat eating verses only plant eating finds no superiority of one over the other. The choice primarily affects what disease you will die of. Vegetarianism does decrease death from ischemic heart disease (hardening of the arteries) but increases the likelihood of death from other causes. Issues like not smoking have a much greater impact on life span than vegetarianism.
For example, 30% of Americans have an autoimmune reaction to gluten containing grains. These reactions will eventually kill you. If you are part of that 30% and want to be a vegetarian, you will have to do it without eating most of the packaged foods you find in a grocery store…no bread, no pasta, no crackers, no cereal, no cookies, no 6000 other foods.
Can you be healthy on a vegetarian diet – absolutely! Is it easy – no. There are a lot of good reasons for wanting to be a vegetarian, from philosophical/religious reasons to ecological/political reasons. A certain percentage of the people have metabolisms that will leave them healthier with a vegetarian lifestyle, just as there are some people that absolutely must have meat several times a day. Most of us can swing either way and our system will adapt to what we feed it (within certain reasonable boundaries.)
Are there universal reasons for not eating meat? Yes, if you are talking about the meat found in your typical grocery store. That reason is toxins. Modern animal, fish, and poultry raising methods involve massive overcrowding which produces lots of infectious disease and stress hormone disorders. Farmers counter this with massive and continuous doses of antibiotics and hormones. These toxins are still in the foods you get in the stores. The feeds they use are unnatural to the animals and produce abnormal and unhealthy meat. (When did fish learn to eat corn?) (Cows don’t even eat grain normally in the real world.)
Unfortunately, studies about the health or lack of health in eating meat have all been done with people eating this kind of toxic meat. I suspect that studies done on people eating healthy naturally raised meats would show very different results. No such studies have been done.
The same problems exist with studies on the health or lack of health with vegetarian diets. No effort has ever been made to study only people whose bodies are designed to do well on vegetarian foods using healthy vegetarian foods.
Generally the vegetarians I know eat primarily sugary/starchy crap rather than vegetables. Humans were never designed to eat grains, and never ever designed to eat sugar (or honey, or any other high carbohydrate sweetener) as a food. Soybeans are also not a food; they are toxic (unless they have been fermented.) Yet these are exactly the foods modern vegetarians in this country eat. This is what really gets studied when a university decides to measure the health of vegetarians.
1. Eat a tremendous variety of vegetables, seeds, herbs, spices, and nuts every week. These should be 60% of your diet.
4. Legumes must be soaked, sprouted, or fermented (to remove toxic anti-nutrients). This is especially true of soy.
6. No more than 2 teaspoons of any kind of sugar per day. Use Stevia, Erythritol, Lo Han, or Xylitol for sweetening.
8. Use olive, coconut, avocado, or nut oils – not seed oils. (Seed oils promote inflammation.)
10. Supplement your diet with B vitamins (especially B12) and plenty of sunshine (or vitamin D). (You likely will also need omega 3 oils from some source that is already converted to EPA and DHA. We don’t convert ALA well to the needed DHA form.)
Following these ten guidelines will empower you to be healthy while choosing a vegetarian lifestyle. . I use the same guidelines for meat eaters except that in guideline 9, clean natural meat replaces the use of protein powders. Meat eaters also rarely need the extra vitamin B12. Always be sure to constantly “check in” with your body to see how it is doing with any diet you are following. We are all different, and our dietary needs are different. Plus our needs change constantly. Let go of dogma and respond day to day with what your body says it needs.