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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
we're primarily poultry and fish people when it comes to flesh, but when we do have red meat (maybe every other month or so), we tend to go for lamb. Anyone know the environmental impact of our fleecy friends?
thanks
Hi, Liz,
I really enjoyed reading your article.
Interestingly, I have been engaged in this debate with some coworkers of mine for a while now - whether it is better for the planet to be a local-leaning vegetarian or a local-leaning chicken eater - a debate in which you have come down on the side of the latter. I am wondering, though, what is considered a standard lacto-ovo vegetarian diet, and if it is assumed for the sake of argument that vegetarians on average eat more egg and dairy products than omnivores.
If anyone can answer my question - what is the average egg- and dairy- consumption of a lacto-ovo vegetarian versus a person who eats egg, dairy and chicken or is a complete omnivore - and on what information this average is based (in this article or in general) - that would be great, not only for the sake of argument but for my own personal and professional enrichment. I apologize if I have missed it in the article.
Peace to all
Mandy
PETA has gone way beyond thier orignal purpose.
When PETA first formed they were helping to so curelty to animals locked up in science labs on college. At the time my route to some of my college clasees took me by a lab filled with howling dogs, used for ceintifice esperiments so I tought PETA was a good idea. However when they started going after farmers raising animals for the specific purpose of being killed and eaten, I thought they went too far. I grew up on a faram, even had pet lambs as a child, in fact they paid my way through college.
However lamb is one fo my favoirte meats to eat. I understand the differnce beween raising animals for food and having pets. Yes we need to cut red meat out of our diet for health purpses, but many grains vegans eat are grown with fertilizers. When I see PETA protestors outside a resturants protesting veal, I usally go in and order it.
A much better focus woudl be to start talking about popultions control as the growing population is tis biggst casue of global warming.
I found the link to the paper cited in this article re: lacto-ovo vegetarian v the chicken diet:
http://minerva.simons-rock.edu/~geshel/papers/nutri/nutriEI.pdf
Not that I can understand the crazy mathematics employed therein!
Peace!
Hello, Laurie. No, I do not seriously think soybeans and meat are the only foods on the planet that contain protein. (In fact, as an avid baker, I know that the more protein in flour, the more bread-like, or less cake-like, the structure of your baked goods.)
However, I did use the phrase "complete protein", not protein. What I meant was, from page 70 of Nutrition for Dummies:
"For example, eggs are 11 percent protein; dry beans, 22 percent. But the proteins in beans do not provide sufficient amounts of all the essential amino acids, so they are not as valuable to human beings."
Or, from page 72:
"Nutrition fact #1: Food from animals has complete proteins. Nutrition fact #2: Vegetables, fruits, and grains have incomplete proteins. Nutrition fact #3: Nobody told the soybean."
There's also a quote from Matt Ridley's Genome that I cannot find right now that basically says humans started eating fish and other animal proteins to support their larger brain sizes.
So perhaps in my first letter I come off as saying it's impossible to be a healthy vegetarian, (and if you're a vegetarian, perhaps you're somewhat pre-disposed to read my letter that way) but that was unintentional on my part.
On the other hand, if I came off sounding like I think it's perfectly normal for humans to crave meat as part of their diets, and that it is unrealistic to ask the average person to become a vegetarian, you'd be spot-on.
When I read articles in Scientific American that discover wolf meat in pre-historic people's stomachs (apologies, again no reference), this comes as no surprise to me. The same way we have to sometimes substitute honey or artificial sweeteners for sugar, or good fats (olive oil) for bad (butter), any realistic dietary solution for the planet is going to have to grapple with the fact that most people like meat, and that from an evolutionary standpoint, this is completely normal.
PETA telling me to be a vegan is like a bishop telling a teen to abstain from sex rather than using a condom, or like Nancy Regan telling me to "just say no". It's so much more complicated than that.
Thanks for reading my letter.
But I'm willing to explore cannibalism of PETA too.
Yes, multivitamins are a bit of an ad hoc solution (more on that below), and honestly I don't know a lot about them, but I am basing my endorsement of them on what seems to be a consensus among nutritionists and others who should know. Now, could they be wrong? Absolutely. I haven't looked at any actual studies on multivitamins myself (other than the metastudy you just linked to), and probably, as that study suggests, there isn't a lot of data out there to begin with. The studies that this article reviewed seemed to at times find positive evidence for the benefits of multivitamins, but it was inconsistent. In any case, they're not harmful and so (except for their cost) there's no risk in taking them -- as long as it is done intelligently; as you point out, one doesn't need 5000% of one's 'recommended daily value' per day.
However, I would note that the article you linked to seems mostly concerned with major issues like cancer, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, and found little to no consistent effect from multivitamins. But I (for one) never really thought the point of multivitamins was to help with those major issues in the first place. I see them as a way to prevent specific vitamin and mineral deficiencies (which I'm fairly certain they do help with), and perhaps boost overall immune-system performance (although I don't really know how well they do that).
The vegetarian (or in your case, mostly vegetarian) diet is what helps with bringing down all those cardiovascular and other major risks that seem to be mostly associated with consumption of too much bad cholesterol and fats in general (and saturated fats and trans fats in particular), though such problems are also with too little exercise, smoking, and other things.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know whether a purely vegan or vegetarian diet is better in health terms than an almost-vegetarian diet. I suspect it is, but nearly all the research out there compares the typical American diet with a vegetarian diet, and while that comes back in favor of vegetarianism or veganism, that could just be because the typical American diet contains way too much meat, dairy, and eggs. But maybe in small amounts those things are okay. To me, though, there are other reasons to be vegan; nutrition is just one of many, many things that makes me think being vegan is overall a better choice than not being vegan.
Also, I should say that I have absolutely nothing against people who try to reduce their meat (or dairy or whatever) consumption, even if they're not strict vegetarians (or vegans). It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing. For all the reasons I'm vegan, anyone eating less animal products is better than not trying at all, and I support you and see you as an ally, not an enemy. And I would not criticize you for not going "all the way" with it. In that way, I am at odds with PETA and some of the other animal activists, and I think a lot of times they're not helping the cause because they just make meat-eaters defensive and then nobody can get anywhere because the argument is reduced to "meat is murder" (obviously untrue, although it is killing) versus "mmm, but it tastes so good" (obviously true, but not exactly a relevant response to an ethical question; some people also enjoy robbery or rape, but no one would say that makes them okay).
This is getting a little longer than I intended, but one more point in defense of vitamin supplements is that I have sympathy for the viewpoint that we shouldn't need supplements because after all we didn't evolve eating supplements, they're unnatural, etc. -- however, we don't have the same environment that we had as, say, hunter-gatherers. We have changed our surroundings and our sources of food, so we need to adapt in accordance with that. We don't eat a lot of roughage and leafy greens and such anymore; our refined grains are not as good for us; not to mention that we have comparatively depleted the soil of nutrients with our agriculture. So anyway, I used to be sort of anti-vitamin-pill kind of for that reason, but with all I've read and researched about nutrition, I've come around on that issue. (Being vegan really makes you research all this nutrition stuff, not because you really need to compared to omnivores for the sake of staying healthy, but just because everyone is constantly challenging you on your nutritional opinion and you need facts to back it up.) Sorry this is so long-winded; thanks for listening.
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