A few weeks back, I was having a rough time. I said something overly harsh to one of my friends and later came one of those conversations full of recriminations and blame, apologies and excuses. I’m generally more of a listener than a talker (or more of a writer, ha), so it was hard for me to come out with one part of my problem. I won’t get into details here, but I’d been having some health problems, in addition to some stress overload (lack of sleep and all that fun), so I was a bit cranky. Anyways, when I started to explain about the health problems, my friend at first voiced some sympathy. And then he said something along the lines of, “I’ve never said anything before and I’ll only say this once – I know you’re committed to your morals and all, but there are a lot of really unhealthy vegetarians out there.”
I said something like, “Just like my dad,” not mad, just resigned. We let it go from the conversation and our rift was more or less repaired. I’m not really sure why he said that, whether it was some passive-aggressive retaliation for what I’d said earlier (for which I was actually apologizing) or whether he really believes it is true, but it brought back the memories.
When I first went vegetarian, my parents, especially my Dad, hated it. They didn’t really understand it and didn’t really try. When I went home for breaks (this was my first year at college), I didn’t eat a vegetarian diet, but rather an omnivore diet sans the meat (i.e., lots of bread and some side dishes). Also, the world was different at that time (1994) and there weren’t all the easy vegetarian premade foods available at mainstream grocery stores, like there are today. Anyways, we had our little fights, but life went on. Over that first year, I experimented with veganism. I even mentioned the idea to my parents, but they just laughed, unable to acknowledge its reality.
The next year, I went vegan and I told my parents and they freaked out. I thought they were mad at the lacto-ovo vegetarian thing, but they were only annoyed before – now they were furious. When they realized that they couldn’t change my mind, they insisted that I see a nutritionist. They seriously thought I was going to die, that the human body could not exist on a plant-based diet (without any animal byproducts). Of course, I didn’t know at the time what else was going on at home (some other health problems with my sister, which I won’t divulge details of online, but that somewhat explains their overreaction).
Truth be told, I wasn’t feeling especially good. That is, I’d been feeling especially bad since about the time I turned 10, long before I became vegetarian. Actually, I felt a little better physically after becoming vegetarian and even better after going vegan. Like a small weight was lifted off my chest. But it didn’t alleviate my long running depression, which certainly affected my physical state as well as the mental. Anyways, the nutritionist tried to psych me up, saying that all the vitamins and supplements would make me feel really good. I half-believed him at first. Then I was taking around 20 pills every day + 2 tablespoons of flax seed oil (nasty stuff). I hated taking all the pills and noticed that I felt a bit sick to my stomach sometimes. After a while, I realized the sickness was most strongly associated to one particular pill, a vitamin A supplement. I got curious and read the label and quickly figured out that it contained fish oil.
This nutritionist guy knew I was vegan (no animal products), yet he slipped me fish oil, what a jerk. I called him out on it (thinking maybe it had been a mistake rather than deliberate), but he just shrugged. That was the end of that. But I kept going to doctors quite frequently for the first few years at my parents’ insistence. Yet, the doctors never found anything wrong with me. They always said I was in good, significantly above average health and my parents seemed slightly disappointed to hear it. My good cholesterol was reasonably high, my bad cholesterol quite low. My mom worried about hypocholesterolemia (too low cholesterol) because my total count was slightly lower than average, but that condition is specific to the good cholesterol being too low (not me). One of the doctors even explained that all the supplements I had been taking could have been harmful (especially zinc) because too much can act like poison to the body.
Before I became vegan, I was interested in health. Actually before I went to college, I put myself on a “healthy” diet, which was basically no sugar. I still ate regular meals and some snacks, but no dessert type foods for over a year. And I did feel physically better for it. In college, I more or less kept it up for a while (being vegetarian/vegan helped since most desserts had gelatin or dairy), but at some point that fell off the radar. Anyways, part of the reason I was interested in veganism was the health benefits. Is dairy really good for you? I never noticed any positive health effects, but I had noticed some negative ones. Once I went off dairy entirely, I never got another blackhead pimple again.
There are definite health benefits to being vegetarian. One: your cholesterol goes way down (especially if you’re vegan). Two: the caloric density of your food goes down, which means that you eat more quantity of food for the same calories and you’re very likely to become (or remain) lean, when being overweight has myriad health consequences. Three: most vegetarian foods are more healthy and nutrient rich; most processed foods (especially fast foods) are not vegetarian/vegan and therefore will be avoided. Four: too much protein in the diet (especially from animal sources, which are highest in protein) can leech calcium from your bones and cause kidney stones. Five: meat makes you logy – plant-based foods keep you more alert and lighter.
Unfortunately, as the popularity of vegetarian/veganism has grown in the past decade or so, so too has the market and those people wishing to make money off convenient and not necessarily healthy premade foods. Therefore, it is much easier to find processed foods that are vegan/vegetarian these days, processed foods that have more chemical additives and less nutrients than the foods that vegetarians used to eat (many of which needed to be actually cooked from real vegetables). This has led to some more unhealthy eating habits in myself and some of my vegetarian friends and the vegetarian community at large. For the most part, vegetarians are still quite a bit leaner than the average American, but the preponderance of such “easy” foods is beginning to take a toll even on my population. That and the growth of sedentary lifestyles, thanks to the information/entertainment age, where physical movement seems to be discouraged outside of designated boxes (gyms).
Here is some info about health benefits of being vegetarian (c/o Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine): www.pcrm.org/health/veginfo/vegetarian_foods.html
Yeah, it’s true, I’ve met some pretty unhealthy vegetarians. But I believe these health problems are due to lifestyle choices (what kinds of vegetarian foods are eaten, what the sleep and exercise habits are) along with genetic predispositions, rather than simply being vegetarian itself. Certainly, most vegetarians I know could beat a smoker & meat-eater, like my friend, in any kind of race. Of course, if I was getting the proper amounts of meat, then maybe I wouldn’t have such crazy ideas. 😉
A friend of mine responded: I don’t think your friend was passive-aggressively trying to get back at you. To me, it sounds like he really feels that way, but has been biting his lip out of respect to you, but you voicing physical ailments made him speak up. And I understand why you’re vegan and what plusses it can bring, but they’re not all-encompassing plusses, just as eating meat isn’t all bad. Both are valid health paths when done smartly.
The health benefits you list go to the extremes. Yes, cholesterol goes down, but that’s only a plus for those suffering from high cholesterol. Many non-vegetarians are perfectly healthy and are not suffering the big C (well one of the big C’s). The caloric intake only goes down if you’re not eating junk. I know vegetarians and almost-vegans (none can give up that addictive cheese!) who often eat really crappily, and one almost-vegan who actually gets plump if she doesn’t carefully monitor her food. (which makes it a case of how you eat, not what you eat)Next, vegetarian and processed foods aren’t the two sides of the spectrum. Vegetarian and meat/animal products is. I actually love meat, and go organic when I can. For example, one of my favourite foods is elk, which I get from an organic farm, perfectly fresh. No, not everyone does that, but that’s a food attitude in general, not a symptom of meat eating or non-vegetarianism. Too much of anything is bad, whether it be protein or certain vitamins.
The sad fact is, which I think is what your friend is touching on, is that some bodies don’t do well without some sort of animal products, and I’m sure that’s what he assumed was your case. (but doesn’t sound like it from the rest that you have stated)
From all the vegetarians I know, which is by no means all-encompassing, but does show the possibility — many have had health issues as a result of their choice to be veg, and have had to change their lifestyle to fix things. Bodies are weird things. One friend was always getting sick, and she went to the doc, got a list of foods to help bring up some vitamin/nutrient levels, but it didn’t help. The only thing that did was beef — something that hurt her to digest, but once she started eating it once in a while, she became noticeably healthier (vitamins/supplements didn’t work). Another finally had to start eating fish, because no matter what she ate, she wasn’t getting all that her body required of her.
So basically, yes, a vegetarian lifestyle can be very healthy. That being said, some bodies take to it like nothing, some thrive, and some struggle.
And really, of course a non-smoker could beat a smoker.. That’s an entirely different conversation than a veg/meat eater. 🙂 I actually have one meat-eating triathlete friend, another who ran the Boston marathon, and another who sometimes runs races.
Oh, I suppose you’re right about my friend. I’m sure he really does believe that and had been biting his lip. Only his timing was very bad (the first time I open up about a recent health problem and explain that the doctors have been no help [yeah, they knew I was vegan and none suggested I change diet] and he responds with a criticism) and also, though he didn’t realize it, I have a long history of being harassed for my diet. The first 3-4 years of being vegetarian, I got a lecture pretty much any time I went to a food event and (of necessity) explained that I was veg. So I was a bit upset when I wrote this.
As for my health benefits, they’re not really that extreme. Heart disease is the number 1 killer in the USA and is related to diet (especially animal protein – vegetarians are significantly less likely to suffer this and vegans even more significantly less). I just did a search on “high blood pressure statistics” and found that “As many as 72 million people in the United States age 20 and older have high blood pressure – high blood pressure is related to high cholesterol and 72 million is a very significant chunk of our population. The caloric intake definitely goes down, even with junk food for purely plant-based foods. Agreed that vegan junk food is not any good for you, but if you want to compare Meat/animal products to vegetable products, the difference is significant in terms of caloric intake per quantity.
As for vegetarians that get sick from it, I’ve known a few of those myself and the ones I knew went about it all wrong, they mostly tried to omit meat from their diet (or replace it with faux-meat), rather than replacing it with a wide variety of vegetables. The truth is that meat is more nutrient-dense than any plant food, so in eating meat, you can be somewhat lazy about vegetables (you need some, but not that wide a variety), but when you go vegetarian, you need to pick up all those same nutrients from plant foods and you need to branch out. Some new vegetarians try to subsist on pasta and dairy (and faux-meat), with only small portions of vegetables and that is not going to cut it. And dairy, well, that is actually addictive and not at all good for you. Perhaps I should’ve limited my health benefits to vegans, since so many lacto-vegetarians rely too much on dairy (which is high-fat, high-cholesterol, contains calcium in a non-deal form and many, even most, people have lactose-intolerance to some degree which can cause general malabsorption of nutrients, when the person continues to eat dairy).
Having said that, I’ll agree that some body types tend to do better with more meat and others with more vegetables. I’m not convinced that some people are completely incapable of being vegetarian (I think that proper vegetarian nutrition is still not very well known and most mainstream doctors are incapable of giving sound nutritional advice [to veg or non-veg people]), but I’ll allow a sliver of possibility for that. I agree with you completely that a meat-eater can be perfectly healthy. I don’t think meat is intrinsically unhealthy. I just think the way most people eat meat (every meal) is not especially healthy and it contributes to health problems that a vegetarian diet can avert. Of course, being veg involves its own set of challenges (as mentioned previously, a wide variety of vegetables, especially green ones, are needed and not just fats/proteins/starch).
As for the smoker comment, that was just making a point that my friend (who is a long-term smoker and not especially active/healthy) should not be throwing stones in his glass house.