I'd be interested to know if the people here who claim that it is necessary for a balanced diet to eat meat have any scientific backup or if this more of a guess on their part.
Well most of what I have is off the top of me head from health class in high school, but I'll put in a minimum effort of Google searching to dig something up.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7610022
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian_nutrition#Potential_nutrient_deficiencies
Basically what I'm seeing is that unless you have a really elaborate plan to make up for something you could get from just eating one steak or one chicken wing, you could have some pretty serious deficiencies that could give you the hershey squirts or rickets, so have fun with that.
According to what I've read on the topic vegetarians actually tend to be more healthy and have a longer life expectancy than meat eaters, which of course might be due to the fact that many vegetarians are more aware of what they eat and don't smoke.
But you can still live a pretty long life on a balanced omnivorous diet by eating food humans have evolved to eat, inlcuding meat, like it or not. My grandma lived to be 86 and she ate all kinds of meat. Know what killed her? She got alzheimers and kept forgetting to eat, and when she would eat, she'd forget she was hungry - in other words she basically starved herself to death. Grandpa is stil lalive and kicking, and he's 88 and going strong. My great-grandma lived to be 94, though I can't think of off hand what killed her, aside from being old anyway. Since the average lifespan is late-70s/early-80s, that isn't really all that bad for a bunch of poor hicks who pretty much had to eat whatever the hell they happened to have (grandpa apparently developed a taste for chicken feet and gizzards, but I digress). But yes, if you really can't stand the flavor of food or can do without it, you could potentially live a little bit longer than Joe Meateater who doesn't have to plan what he eats nearly as much as you do. Oh, and you could both get plowed down bby a bus tomorrow anyway, so have fun with that thought. As Denis Leary said, "it's usually the yogurt sprout-eating motherfuckers that get run over by a bus driver who smokes three packs a day."
And why would a vegetarian necessarily need to be scrawny? You can take in enough protein to build up muscle without resorting to meat and you can just as well get fat by eating non-meat foodstuffs.
I'm guessing because most vegetarians can't do that for whatever reason, either because they can't afford it, or because they don't have time to get to elaborate with their meals. I can only speculate though, as I'm just speaking from observations I've made of people I know tobe vegetarian.
I don't understand why people seem to get downright offended by others not adhering to the same diet they do.
I get offended by the moral vegetarians trying to tell me I live an immoral lifestyle for eating a more natural diet than they do. As for the others, like I said, mainly I just like to poke fun because I think it's silly.
"I'm a vegetarian!" "I'm a meat eater!" Who cares?
To each their own.
And if you don't care about religion, just leave it alone. That's what I try to do most of the time. (Just most. Nobody's perfect.)
Yes, and to be fair I only brought it up because someone had the brilliant idea to try to use reincarnation as a reason for not eating meat.
Yeah, I'm sure all the scrawny vegetarians look so unhealthy because they couldn't read for two minutes...
