Vegetarians Live Longer and Healthier

It just feels longer

bump for later....this is getting gooooood.


And just to contribute. I eat meat, but my girlfriend is a vegetarian. Its hard to pick places to go eat lol...but I deal with it. She gives me a hard time sometimes because she is just a fanatical believer like I think most vegetarians are....but I'm very healthy, strong and happy eating meat....until I start feeling otherwise or have a reason to switch....I'm gonna enjoy my steaks and bacon!

BS

good, more meat and bacon for me!

Omg, i love this.

Telomere length is the strongest link to longer life, though (blast those genetics... they foil a good story all the time, don't they?)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercising-keeps-your-cells-young/

Exercise is really key.

Perhaps meat kills telomerase?! :noway: :laugh:

Meh, in the zombie apocolypse we all eat meat.

good, more meat and bacon for me!

Hey leave some bacon for me!

we need a like button

lol zombie apocalypse!

I've been vegetarian for 15 years.
But I must say: they are STATISTICALLY healthier. Just avoiding meat won't necessarily make you a healthy person; sure, you avoid many processed and rubbish stuff. But you can have a healthy lifestyle eating meat, and a horrible lifestyle being vegetarian. I see no actual health benefits to being vegetarian; I see health benefits to watching your macros and keeping it as clean as possible.

There are other factors that play a role in the health of Seventh Day Adventists (there are some in my family). To just jump to the assumption that a plant-based diet is the cause, rather than a correlation, is incorrect. Someone using the studies to back up their opinion might make that claim but I can bet that the researchers did not.

I invest incredible amounts of time researching, observing my Inuit neighbours (who, until recently, had a diet of almost totally animal sources and yet had no heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc, and lived long if they didn't have an accident or a food shortage) and experimenting on myself and your assertion is not fact. I'm sure it fits your beliefs, but that doesn't make it true.

It's interesting that there is not one single Paleolithic society, or even current hunger/gatherer society, that had/have a completely plant-based diet. So, what do you suppose we are genetically designed to eat? Monocultured grains? Sorry, I don't buy it. And no, it's not "ethical" to eat monocultured grains over wild or grass fed animals. Not when one considers soil organisms and environmental impacts, and even the impacts on people and their livelihoods/culture. Oh and if you think one can survive on just vegetables, I beg to differ on that too. Fat is not an optional nutrient.

Seventh Day Adventists certainly do eat a diet that is, in many ways, superior to the Standard American Diet (remember most people are eating grain fed animals raised on factory farms) and they also have a completely different lifestyle than the average American. Factors abound. Correlation versus causation.

I have a couple of comments to make to what you have posted here. I'm not even going to get started on the what we "should" be eating evolutionarily speaking track because truthfully, nobody has a clue. A lot of it is guesswork. But I am going to comment on your saying that it's not ethical to choose a plant-based diet over an omnivorous diet. The reality is, the lifestock industry produce substantially more CO2-equivilant emissions each year than the ENTIRE TRANSPORTATION INDUSTRY. The reason being that people are consuming so much meat, that cows are being artificially inseminated to keep up with the demand and there are far more cows to feed and care for, and eventually process, than the environment can naturally sustain. This isn't something that I've made up either, it's well documented and the WHO (World Health Organization) has even made statements in regards to this issue. So if you consider environmental issues ethical issues, as I do, you'll find it is a very real issue. Also, when you consider how many tons of potatoes, for example, could be grown on one acre of land vs. how many pounds of meat could be obtained from the resources of one acre of land, you'll see very clearly that using what land we have for vegetables instead of meat could end world hunger. If that's not an ethical issue, I'm not sure what is.

Now I understand that a vegan/plant-based diet isn't for everyone, and I certainly don't go around telling everyone they should convert their ways. Ultimately people are going to do what they're going to do regardless of my opinion. However, the facts cannot be denied.

My second argument would be to the statement that people cannot thrive on a plant-based diet because "fat is not an optional nutrient". I will absolutely agree with you that fat is not optional and that we require it for all of our bodily systems, you seem to say here that you don't get any fat in a vegan diet? If this is the case, you couldn't be more wrong. Plant foods are loaded with healthy fats of all varieties. Avocados, nuts, seeds, olives + olive oil, coconut oil, not to mention the trace fats in a variety of grains and other vegetables. The healthy fats you need in your diet (mono- and poly-unsaturated fatty acids) you get from plant foods. The "bad" fats (trans and saturated) you get from animal products like fatty meat and whole dairy. While the good fats will be beneficial for your heart and vascular system, and your brain, saturated fats are the ones that clog your arteries, are associated with various diseases and leech nutrients from your body. Yes you need fat, but you need good fat. You will get more than enough fat from a vegan diet without difficulty. I'm a nurse who has studied nutrition extensively, you cannot argue with me here. Yes I'm aware that there are cultures in the world that have adapted to thrive off of blubber and such, but just because the body CAN adapt to survive, doesn't mean that's whats going to be optimal for the health of general society.

As a pork farmer, bacon is a food group . But in reality, my great-grandfather lived 90 years with a breakfast of bacon and eggs every morning. He died in a farming accident. My grandfather is 65 years old, and looks a lot younger with the same diet as his father.

More for me! :drinker:

Yeah...Ummm...No. I am not meant to be a vegetarian.

I am telling you now...

What gets people fat is the fact that they eat FAST FOOD! Lost of oil and what not.

I believe in MODERATION!

Glad it's working for you. Me: I need my meat thanks.

I already eat like a rabbit to begin with.