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Vegetarianism

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Vegetarianism is the practice of not consuming the flesh of any animal, with or without also eschewing other animal derivatives, such as dairy products or eggs. Some vegetarians choose to also refrain from wearing clothing which has involved the death of animals, such as leather, silk and fur. Veganism, sometimes called "strict vegetarianism", excludes all animal products from diet and attire, whether or not their production has involved the actual death of an animal (dairy, eggs, honey, wool, silk and down feathers). Vegetarians have varied motivations including religious, cultural, financial, ethical, environmental, and health concerns.


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Food diet example

Contents

[edit] Vegetarian diet

Vegetarians who eat milk products and eggs enjoy excellent health. Vegetarian diets are consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and can meet Recommended Dietary Allowances for nutrients. It is possible to obtain sufficient enough protein from a vegetarian diet so long as the variety and amounts of foods consumed are adequate. Meat, fish, and poultry are major contributors of iron, zinc, and B vitamins in most American diets, and vegetarians should pay special attention to these nutrients.

Vegans eat only food of plant origin. As animal products are the main food sources of vitamin B12, vegans eat plenty of yeast extract such as Marmite or take supplements to ensure an adequate supply of this Vitamin. Vegan diets, particularly those of children, require care to ensure adequacy of vitamin D and calcium.

Protein is made up of amino acids and the only vegetable sources with all nine types of essential amino acids are soy, hempseed, amaranth, buckwheat and quinoa. There exists a misconception that dietary protein needs to be combined in the same meal.


[edit] Motivations and benefits

[edit] Health

Many people who choose a vegetarian diet do so because they believe it will benefit their health. Some of the reasons cited for a vegetarian diet include that it has a better nutritional balance, is better suited for the human body, and/or avoids contact with harmful bacteria, hormones, and chemicals.

[edit] Nutritional

The American Dietetic Association, the largest organization of nutrition professionals, states on its website "Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and phytochemicals."

As an example, American vegetarians tend to have lower body mass indices, lower levels of cholesterol, lower blood pressure, and less incidence of heart disease, hypertension, some forms of cancer, type 2 diabetes, renal disease, osteoporosis, dementias such as Alzheimer’s Disease and other disorders that may be diet-related. The health of a cohort of 27,000 vegetarians is currently being followed at a UK centre of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), the largest study of the long-term effects of vegetarian diet.

[edit] Medical

Sometimes patients of alternative medicine are advised to adhere to a vegetarian diet as prescribed by the practitioners of such treatments. These patients are either asked to continue such a diet either for the course of the treatment or for longer durations. Ayurveda and Siddha medicine are examples of medical treatments that prescribe such a vegetarian diet. In such cases, the patient either follows vegetarianism for the defined period or sometimes continues long after the treatment is over.

[edit] Ethical

Many vegetarians consider the production, subsequent slaughtering, and consumption of meat or animal products as unethical. Reasons for believing this are varied and may include a belief in animal rights or an aversion to inflicting pain or harm on other living creatures. The book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer has been very influential on the animal rights movement and specifically ethical vegetarianism. This corresponds to the belief among vegetarians that other animals' lives should not have to end for theirs to continue. In developed countries, ethical vegetarianism has become popular particularly after the spread of factory farming, which has reduced the sense of husbandry that used to exist in farming and which has led to animals being treated as commodities. Many believe that the treatment which animals undergo in the production of meat and animal products obliges them to never eat meat or use animal products. This could perhaps be summed up in the phrase "Not in my name".

Some vegetarians believe that consciously taking someone else's possessions without consent amounts to stealing. Since prey cannot consent to its life being taken away, according to this philosophy it would be immoral to consciously kill an animal and eat its flesh.

[edit] Labor Conditions

Some groups promote vegetarianism as a way to offset poor treatment and working conditions of workers in the contemporary meat industry. These groups cite studies showing the psychological damage caused by working in the meat industry , and argue that the meat industry violates its laborers human rights by delegating difficult and distressing tasks without adequate counselling, training and debriefing.

[edit] Economical

Similar to environmental vegetarianism is the concept of economic vegetarianism. An economic vegetarian is someone who practises vegetarianism from either the philosophical viewpoint concerning issues such as public health and curbing world starvation, the belief that the consumption of meat is economically unsound, part of a conscious simple living strategy or just out of necessity. According to the WorldWatch Institute, "Massive reductions in meat consumption in industrial nations will ease the health care burden while improving public health; declining livestock herds will take pressure off of rangelands and grainlands, allowing the agricultural resource base to rejuvenate. As populations grow, lowering meat consumption worldwide will allow more efficient use of declining per capita land and water resources, while at the same time making grain more affordable to the world's chronically hungry." Economic vegetarians also may include people from third world countries who follow a de facto vegetarian diet due to the high price of meat.

[edit] Psychological

Many vegetarians choose to be so in part because they find meat and meat products aesthetically unappetizing. Some cite a hypothetical example, that the carcass of a cow lying in a forest would attract a real carnivore like a wolf or leopard, but would disgust most human beings. However, it must be noted that since early humans were scavengers as much as hunters according to several anthropologists, this may not hold true in a natural setting. The metaphor by Douglas Dunn is that if one gives a young child an apple and a live chicken, the child would instinctively play with the chicken and eat the apple, whereas if a cat were presented with the same choices, its natural impulse would be the opposite. In a similar assertion, Scott Adams, who is also a vegetarian, once wrote humorously that a human presented with a live cow would be more likely to try to moo at it than to attempt to eat its backside.

Moreover, research on the psychology of meat consumption suggests that consumers of meat may need to use defense mechanisms such as psychological numbing to distance themselves from the notion that they are eating animals.

[edit] Cultural

Some people are vegetarian because they were raised in a vegetarian household. Others may have become vegetarians because of a vegetarian partner, family member, or friend. Some people live in a predominantly vegetarian society (such as India), and so adopt this practice to be social, to avoid ostracism, or because of the difficulty of buying meat in such a society.


[edit] Health effects

It is clear that many people live healthy lives as vegetarians (vegetarian Olympic athletes are often cited) but there are also some studies that show potential ill effects of vegetarianism if there is insufficient iron or calcium. These nutrients can be found in green leafy vegetables, grains, nuts, and fortified juices or soymilk.


[edit] Longevity

A 1999 metastudy compared six major studies from western countries. The study found that the mortality ratio was the lowest in fish eaters (0.82) followed by vegetarians (0.84) and occasional meat eaters (0.84) and which was then followed by regular meat eaters (1.0). In "Mortality in British vegetarians", it was concluded that "British vegetarians have low mortality compared with the general population. Their death rates are similar to those of comparable non-vegetarians, suggesting that much of this benefit may be attributed to non-dietary lifestyle factors such as a low prevalence of smoking and a generally high socio-economic status, or to aspects of the diet other than the avoidance of meat and fish."

Among these meta studies, the Adventist Health Study is an ongoing study of life expectancy in Seventh-day Adventists following different behaviour patterns. The researchers found that a combination of different lifestyle choices could influence life expectancy by as much as 10 years. Among the lifestyle choices investigated, a vegetarian diet was estimated to confer an extra 1 1/2 to 2 years of life. The researchers concluded that "the life expectancies of California Adventist men and women are higher than those of any other well-described natural population" at 78.5 years for men and 82.3 years for women. The life expectancy of California Adventists surviving to age 30 was 83.3 years for men and 85.7 years for women. However, this study of Adventist health study is again incorporated into meta studies titled "Does low meat consumption increase life expectancy in humans?" published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which, again made the similar conclusion that occasional/low meat eating and other life style choices significantly increase the life expectancy. The study also concluded that "Some of the variation in the survival advantage in vegetarians may have been due to marked differences between studies in adjustment for confounders, the definition of vegetarian, measurement error, age distribution, the healthy volunteer effect, and intake of specific plant foods by the vegetarians." It further states that "This raises the possibility that a low-meat, high plant-food dietary pattern may be the true causal protective factor rather than simply elimination of meat from the diet." In a recent review of studies relating low-meat diet patterns to all-cause mortality, Singh noted that "5 out of 5 studies indicated that adults who followed a low meat, high plant-food diet pattern experienced significant or marginally significant decreases in mortality risk relative to other patterns of intake."

[edit] Intelligence

One observational study has shown that high childhood IQ and vegetarianism in later life are associated. The study does not conclude that vegetarianism results in higher intelligence because of the temporal relationship of the two factors (IQ was measurably higher before the subject became vegetarian) makes this conclusion impossible to draw, but it does raise interesting questions about the reasons behind why some people choose to be vegetarian.

[edit] Health concerns

It is already long established in science that a number of positive or negative lifestyle choices such as smoking, exercise and alcohol influence health and longevity.

Another claim repeatedly made by vegetarian advocacy groups is that vegetarians suffer fewer heart problems. Studies which include the above, consistently confirm that vegetarians suffer less mortality from ischemic heart disease. Critics argue that these groups are engaging in scientific misrepresentation rather than focusing on scientifically proven health factors, such as moderate exercise, moderate alcohol intake, not smoking and sufficient intake of fruits and green vegetables.

Further confusion lies in the amount of protein in the diet. Meat-based diets are not necessarily richer in protein than vegetarian diets. Yet the unhealthiness of a largely meat-based diet is not easily disputed; for example, meat is devoid of fiber. However, it must be noted that consumption of some fish could help to reduce the cancer risk.

[edit] Nutritional deficiencies

Some vegetable protein sources lack in one or more essential amino acids. While everyone should eat a variety of foods to ensure a balanced nutrition, the body's requirement for essential amino acids now appears to be less important than researchers once believed. Vegetarians, taken broadly, do not suffer malnutrition, and so must receive at least most of the protein and amino acids important to humans from eating a variety of incomplete complementary plant proteins. If ideal nutrition is possible, intake of such foods must be larger since the protein percentages in these foods are comparatively lower than in a similar serving of meat. Attaining sufficient protein intake is rarely a problem in developed countries, and vegetarianism advocates have alleged that possible lower protein intake of vegetarians may cause some of the health benefits below.

A vegetarian diet does not include fish - a major source of Omega 3; though some plant-based sources of it exist such as soy, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, canola oil and, especially, hempseed and flaxseed, the plant based sources are considered potentially unsafe, and may actually have no health benefits while possibly increasing the risk of prostate cancer and macular degeneration. However these studies are preliminary.

Some suggest that vegetarians have higher rates of deficiencies in those nutrients which are found in high concentrations in meat. However, studies endorsed by the ADA found that this was not the case for either iron or calcium. Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D from vegetarian sources other than dairy products and eggs are not readily absorbed by the body and a vegan diet usually needs supplements. Nonetheless, these nutrients are now commonly supplemented in milks and cereals in the western world, and are not necessarily a problem in a vegetarian diet. Numerous studies demonstrate that vegetarians who are not taking B12 supplements can improve their health by improving their B12 status.


[edit] See also

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