Feb 1 (Reuters) - In yet more evidence that avoiding meat is good for the health, a UK study has found that vegetarians are one-third less likely to be hospitalized or die from heart disease than meat and fish eaters.
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"We're able to be slightly more certain that it is something that's in the vegetarian diet that's causing vegetarians to have a lower risk of heart disease," said Francesca Crowe, who led the new study at the University of Oxford.
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| This is on our fridge door |
Afterthought: this makes good evolutionary sense: it's a lot easier to hunt and catch vegetables, and you don't even need a firearm to harvest them.
Well, you could use a shotgun to help with the digging, but then you would spend a lot of time getting the bird shot out of the carrots.
ReplyDeleteIf you hand load, you could give a whole new meaning to seed drill.. ;)
Hand loading... that's like bird shot pointillism, right? :-)
DeleteIt's not primarily a matter of principle with me, though there's a bit of that in it; I confess I love the critters. AFAIK, people can eat any (damned) thing they are capable of digesting, and will doubtless consume some things they can't digest... it's up to the individual. Those who claim humans are natural vegetarians are simply wrong... full of good intentions, but factually wrong.
Health is another matter. To the extent that diet affects health, the results are all but in: vegetarians of all sorts, and even people who go lightly on meats, live longer. Sprout-eaters have said that all along, but sprout-eating by philosophy is not the same as sprout-eating by science. Now one can have both... if that's what one wants. In today's world, do we really want to live a long life? I don't know...
On the other hand, while you might chop five years off your life by eating the occasional Double-Double from In'n'Out, the years prior to that will at least be *enjoyable* years, as vs. the misery of a sprout diet. (Yes, I know it's not exactly voluntary with you. But admit it, if you could, you'd chow down too).
ReplyDeleteNot that I eat a lot of red meat in any event. I eat a fair amount of fish and chicken though. I figure I'm going to die of cancer from working in the oil refineries in my youth long before I die of anything I eat, so (shrug). Men in my family just don't last long, one of my cousins was fit as a fiddle, never smoked, never chewed, and just up and croaked from throat cancer in less than six months. One of the benefits of being born and raised in Louisiana -- don't have to worry about outliving your retirement funds, yo.
- Badtux the Fatalistically Snarky Louisiana Penguin
'Tux, see my reply to Bryan for starters.
DeleteIf I truly missed meat-eating... if I craved real hot dogs and lay awake at night dreaming of steaks... I'd eat the damned things and be done with it. I turned vegetarian in 1982 while at a music workshop at Oberlin in order to take a place at a sprout-eating residence house, and brought the practice home with me. It was easy. It was odd, but it suited me. I've never gone back because I haven't wanted to. When I want a burger for a semblance of the flavor and texture, two or three of the local burger houses make very respectable "garden burgers" that do the job. (Stella is pretty hardcore lacto-ovo-veggie; that's another incentive for me.)
Your diet as you describe it sounds nutritionally quite respectable to me, and you're right about the refineries... two of my uncles died that way, one in a refinery and one in a steel mill. Foodies notwithstanding, diet is NOT one hundred percent of health; your genes carry a lot of your health, and your immediate environment impacts you more and more.
My new "foot-loose" state, coupled with the economy and the damned foolishness of both American political parties, leads me to the first time in which I've feared outliving my retirement. It's not a pretty thought.
Ah they may be easy to catch but some veg sure now how to fight back if after death!
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, jams; I've had veggies fight back after death! There are some kinds of food poisoning you can escape by becoming a sprout-eater; then again, there are kinds of salmonella you can get from being a good boy and eating your veggies. Veggie food poisoning is no more pleasant, I guarantee you!
DeleteI'm with BadTux --- not eating meat is like not drinking alcohol . . . it's not that tee-totallers live longer than drinkers. They live exactly as long. It just feels much longer . . .
ReplyDelete;)
As I've always said, cristina... any person has a right to put any carrion in her or his mouth that s/he wants to! ;)
DeleteI don't believe I've missed a single mouthful of carrion I've eschewed (as opposed to "chewed"!) since I stopped in 1982. As noted... if I did, I'd eat some. But I truly don't. Stella says she sometimes thinks of pork chops, and wishes food vendors would invent a veggie pork chop. That would be OK, but I don't much care. And fakin' bacon is IMHO as good as the real thing, and a lot less greasy.
As for life just feeling long, it feels long when the fake Republicans in the feral gummint act so much like the real ones that you wish you didn't have to watch. Now THAT's unwanted longevity! :~} That's the oh-dash-it-all of hope!