Is being a Vegetarian actually good for you?!

I understand the desire to not want to eat another creature but if we were all vegetarian, we would have acres & acres of soy, wheat & corn that would have to be fertilized with chemicals. Unfortunately, that is happening now with genetically modified grains raised on chemicals. The most beneficial aspect of having all these animals is to produce manure for a healthy topsoil - crops would be just a constant drain on topsoil.

As Lierre Keith pointed out in her book, "The Vegetarian Myth" all this farmland to grow these crops would displace the wild animals. With loss of their natural habitat, they would starve & die. Agriculture kills many animals in processing crops. Are some lives just more valuable than others?

Dr. T. Colin Campbell has been publicly disgraced for outright deception in promoting his personal agenda. His book, "The China Study" has been completely discredited as vegan propaganda

Ex-vegan, Denise Minger, whose own health was destroyed by a vegan lifestyle, dissected the China Study's original data & exposed Campbell's multiple major flaws.

The China Study was always dismissed due to it being an epidemiological study & all an epidemiological study can due is open questions, it does NOT provide any meaningful answers.

Denise Minger summarized what’s wrong with “The China Study" -

The two biggies:

1. Campbell’s casein research. His aflatoxin studies showed that the amount of casein fed to carcinogen-exposed lab rats could literally turn tumor growth on and off like a switch — a finding that he used to implicate animal foods with cancer in humans. Although the research is valuable, Campbell has no basis for extrapolating the effects of casein onto all forms of animal protein, and onto animal protein exclusively, and in the context of a real-world diet that contains whole foods rather than isolated substances. His own research showed that plant proteins behave identically to casein when their limiting amino acids are restored, which happens naturally in a vegan diet containing a mixture of plant foods. And another of his studies showed that tumor growth induced by animal protein could be inhibited by swapping the sources of fat in the diet (fish oil instead of corn oil), so tumor-promoting properties of complete proteins may be dependent on other elements of the diet. And more importantly, another form of animal protein — whey — has well-documented anti-cancer action, which invalidates Campbell’s theory that all animal protein promotes cancer growth.

2. Campbell’s interpretation of the China Study. Despite the book’s claims, the China Study data does not show an overarching, direct relationship between animal food consumption and Western disease mortality. For cardiovascular disease, the relationship is consistently inverse — meaning the counties eating the most animal products generally had less heart disease than the counties eating the least.

The only way Campbell was able to indict animal products was by hooking together chains of correlations — for instance, “animal protein correlates with cholesterol and cholesterol correlates with various cancers” — as a way to make animal foods look like relevant players in disease etiology. The problem with this method (apart from the fact that it assumes cause and effect, thus breaking the Golden Rule of Statistics) is that when you actually look at the link between animal foods and the diseases in question, the relationship is close to neutral or too weak to be significant. In the cases where it appears positive, there’s typically some sort of obvious confounding going on — such as fish consumption, which correlates strongly with liver cancer, being highest in humid regions where hepatitis B and aflatoxin growth (two liver cancer risk factors) are widespread.

It’d be fine if Campbell had performed adequate statistical analyses on the numbers and found a direct link between animal foods and disease, but he didn’t. ... In fact, he often cited univariate correlations from the China Study — without adjusting them for confounding variables — in order to extol the virtues of a plant-based diet.

http://letthemeatmeat.com/post/143844627…

Denise Minger recounts - "When I started all the China Study stuff, it was mainly out of curiosity. It’s such a widely cited book by vegans and its namesake study claims to be the most comprehensive epidemiological study ever conducted — so as someone who’s deeply interested in health, I wanted to see if it really did suggest that any consumption of animal foods may be harmful. ... I was excited to find out the original China Study data was available and I wouldn’t just have to take Campbell’s word for it. I wasn’t planning on launching a crusade against veganism.

Critiquing the China Study was about more than just veganism, though: it was about looking at the misuse of science to support a weak hypothesis."

http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/

per Dr.Mercola -

"I experimented with following a mostly vegetarian diet . . . after a few weeks of eating fruit for breakfast I was stunned to discover my fasting triglycerides had skyrocketed from below 100 to nearly 3,000 (yes that is not a typo)! Clearly this diet was NOT right for me and was rapidly doing some serious damage to my body. "

Angelina Jolie discussed her bad experiences with a vegan diet.

“I joke that a big juicy steak is my beauty secret,” said Jolie. “But seriously, I love red meat. I was a vegan for a long time, and it nearly killed me. I found I was not getting enough nutrition.”

This is not an uncommon complaint among former vegans; the limitations of the diet require extra diligence to make sure you get proper nutrients.


http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articl…

It depends on who you talk to.

Vegetarians and vegans point to the much lower incidence of heart disease in those who eat a vegetarian/vegan diet, but what they don't tell you is the per-capita rate of high cholesterol and heart disease among vegetarians/vegans is only slightly lower than that of people who also eat meat.

Vegetarians and vegans also say they're more healthy and have fewer problems with illnesses than their meat-eating counterparts, but I know a couple of strict vegetarians that are CONSTANTLY sick. Every bug that comes down the line, they get it. I can't prove conclusively that the cause is their vegetarian diet, but it makes me wonder...

What's your email address? My answer is too long to post on here.
Being vegetarian is very good for you- and nowadays 98% of meat is raised on factory farms. Go look up what a factory farm is and you'll probably change your mind about this subject.

I've never touched meat my entire life. I'm vegan/vegetarian and I'm extremely healthy, I rarely ever get sick, and im a great runner and im very strong! A vegetarian diet is very healthy.

its bad when you eat too much veggies cuz ull get too much minerals which is bad for your kidney try eating chicken,fish,stake, for protein!

I'm vegetarian, I have been for a few years, and I've noticed that I've lost a lot of fat (I used to be quite chubby and now I'm thin), I feel a lot healthier and I don't feel as sluggish/tired all the time. I agree that cutting meat out reduces the amount of protein, iron, etc. in your diet but I make up for this by eating other foods rich in protein and iron - nuts, beans, etc. (I do take protein and iron supplements as well but they are for my dance training, not because I don't get enough in my diet)

A lot of people are vegetarian simply because they feel it is unethical and cruel to kill animals for food, they feel that humans aren't 'above' other animals and shouldn't use them for food, etc (this is why I'm vegetarian), instead of being vegetarian for health reasons.

me.