After reading one of the other posts about weight loss, it made me think of a discussion I was having with a 'friend' about being a vegetarian.
Is vegetarianism especially being vegan a modern trend?
I ask the question after an ear bashing by a veggie. She harps on about being a vegan and how I'm destroying the environment, but my question to her was, if it wasn't for globalisation could you maintain a healthy diet living as a vegetarian in Britain?
How would you get enough protein in your diet if is wasn't for the importation of other sources from around the world? No Soya, no Chick Peas, I can only think of beechnuts and hazelnuts that are native to the UK. A normal veggie can get protein from milk and cheese and some will eat eggs and fish, but what else is there?
An adult is supposed to have a daily intake of about 50 grammes of protein a day (taken from the Vegetarian Society website). To get that from Chickpeas alone you would have to eat 625 grammes of them. To get the same amount from Roast Beef, you only need 179 grammes.
Homo Sapiens = Omnivorous
Anything else is a lifestyle choice.,
God has given us the wonderful set of cutting and crushing teeth we have in order that we can enjoy all the wonderful eating on offer.
If we were supposed to suck lettuce, we'd have gobs like the tortoise.
I don't really care if people are vegetarian etc...but I'd say it's definitely not natural for humans.
Soya is exceptionally bad for the environment, and apparently unless prepared properly incredibly bad for you too.
I think that the real issue about most UK people's diet is that it includes too much intensively farmed meat and grain.
Not at all natural - a lifestyle/ethics/health choice that our comfortable western lifestyle lets us choose. And yes i am a vegetarian.
If we were supposed to suck lettuce, we'd have gobs like the tortoise.
Quote of the day 🙂
I'm veggie and its a choice. And that choice was **** all to do with saving the environment.
Your "friend" sounds like a pain in the arse veggie that gets us a bad name?
Fatboyjon - those teeth cam about through evolution not some bloke with a beard... but that's a different argument....
No it's not natural, evidence shows we evolved as a running race that practiced [url= http://alistairpott.com/2009/04/15/persistence-hunting-humans-running-antelope-to-death/ ]Persistence Hunting[/url] The problem is the crap diets many people eat nowadays, so vege becomes a viable alternative, beyond some peoples values & beliefs.
meat is murder.
tasty, tasty, murder.
I'm sure i eat way more meat than i need. so i try to keep my carniverous side under control. but it's not easy, you can't just replace meat with beans.
meat represents lots of land/energy/water - it's already expensive and will only get more so.
I can think of other native protein sources from back in the day - walnuts and beans for starters. I think veganism is a very modern fad, but suspect that for most of history most people lived a fairly vegetarian diet because of the difficulty or expense of killing lots of meat.
Clearly our ancestors were omnivores but they also swung from the tress to but it does not mean we have to does it?
i am not going to bother posting as i will be wasting my time and dont want my blood pressure to go up. enjoy your colon cancer and lets see you eat a raw chicken with your incisors and cutting teeth! i didnt think so.
See those 16 teeth at the front of your mouth?
They're are for tearing at flesh not grinding down plants.
I made the choice to become a lacto-ovo vegetarian 23 years ago - I don't really include soya in my diet but chick peas definately feature quite a lot. Most food contains protein and vegans tend to eat nuts, lentils, seeds, pulses and rice to get it -other sources include broccoli and potatoes.
I'm with momentum on this (I think)
Vegetarianism is not natural, but then eating the quantity of meat (particularly processed meat) that we eat today is not natural either.
Plenty of ways of getting protein including
Barley, Beans, Sesame Seeds, Lentils, Sunflower Seeds, Broccoli,
Oats, Peas, Walnuts, Rice, Peanuts, Cashews, Pasta,whole Grain Breads
They are just Incomplete proteins so you have to have mixture.
Oh and Walnuts are native to Britain for about the last 2000 years
yes I am veggie and your friend does sound a bit OTT
If god hadn't wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat!
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i am not going to bother posting
surprise !!!!
You just did
enjoy your colon cancer and lets see you eat a raw chicken with your incisors and cutting teeth! i didnt think so.
I have a healthy balanced diet, so really not sure where the colon cancer would come from. Oh, and raw meat? Not really my scene, apart from a nice Steak Tartare or some Sushi (if that counts!). Luckily, man make fire. Man cook chicken. Chicken taste lovely.
I can think of other native protein sources from back in the day - walnuts and beans for starters. I think veganism is a very modern fad, but suspect that for most of history most people lived a fairly vegetarian diet because of the difficulty or expense of killing lots of meat.
Walnut has always been a rare wood in the UK and certainly wouldn't really have been used as a source of nuts, as for beans, the more native beans grown in the UK are not particularly high in protein especially runner beans. Broad beans are not too bad. Plus they were too obvious to mention in my original post.
Also, pea proteins (peas and beans) are low in some amino acids that promote cell growth. So why is this type of diet supposed to be healthy?
Wearing clothes isn't "natural". Living in houses isn't "natural". So why does it matter that vegetarianism meets this description? We eat far more meat than is healthy, purely because of affluence and intensive farming. It's also bad for the environment. There's no way I would give up meat altogether, but we could all survive perfectly happily on much less of it.
[i]enjoy your colon cancer and lets see you eat a raw chicken with your incisors and cutting teeth! i didnt think so.[/i]
Only if I can see you eat some raw wild potatoes, cassava or kidney beans 🙂
Plenty of ways of getting protein including
Barley, Beans, Sesame Seeds, Lentils, Sunflower Seeds, Broccoli,
Oats, Peas, Walnuts, Rice, Peanuts, Cashews, Pasta,whole Grain Breads
They are just Incomplete proteins so you have to have mixture.Oh and Walnuts are native to Britain for about the last 2000 years
yes I am veggie and your friend does sound a bit OTT
Still not sure it answers my original question to the pain in the arse vegan and yes she is totally OTT.
If it wasn't for globalisation, could you maintain a healthy diet from the foods native to Britain?
If it wasn't for globalisation, could you maintain a healthy diet from the foods native to Britain
Very much so. Lots of fish, game and plenty of wild veg if you know where to look. Hell, even nettles can form part of a very healthy diet! (plenty of iron!)
Dr Mike Stroud, the other half of the Ranulph Feinnes Antarctic crossing duo, has written a fascinating book based on his research, [i]The Survival of the Fittest[/i]. In a nutshell, he concludes that the human body has evolved to metabolise and run on a staple carbohydrate based diet. Protein is also essential, but in nothing like the quantities we the 'normal' western populus consume.
Many more interesting facts and well worth a read. I'd go so far as to say it is lifestyle changing.
There's no way I would give up meat altogether, but we could all survive perfectly happily on much less of it.
and therein lies the moderate solution of most reasonable people. Everything in moderation.
On one hand though you will get the screaming vegamentalists and on the other the slobbish over-consumers of processed meat and earth-raping excess.
Sorry that should have read.
If it wasn't for globalisation, could you maintain a healthy vegetarian diet from the foods native to Britain?
They are just Incomplete proteins so you have to have mixture.
I don't agree with 'incomplete' - they are completely functional for the plant in question - they just lack certain amino acids we need...
Probably not. Certainly as you travel north it becomes harder. Certainly impossible once you reach Greenland and Iceland. I know they grow a bit of veg there but nothing that could really sustain a human.
It isn't 100% natural, but the omnivorous diet that most non-vegetarians eat nowadays is much less natural.
In the distant past, in hunter-gatherer societies, the reality was that the vast majority of people's diet came from plant sources, i.e.gathering food, with a relatively small proportion coming from hunted animals.
It is only in the last 100 years or so that meat has come to make such a large proportion of people's diets.
If we were meant to have a primarily meat based diet, we'd have mouths like dogs, rather than just a few pointy teeth.
The thing about protein and vegetarianism being a problem is a bit of a myth though - as long as you get a varied diet, you can easily get enough protein. For example wholemeal bread has 10g of protein per 100g, so you can get 10% of your 50g just by the bread on a single sandwich.
In terms of globalisation and environment, the impact of meat farming is massively massively more, as it is a very inefficient way to create calories or protein. That is why there is an environmental movement for people to pledge to not eat meat for one day a week (or more).
Joe
I'm afraid my weakness is neither meat or veg. It's those overly processed sugars that find their way into the brightly packaged containers of Sir Walter Raleigh's greatest discovery (no not tobacco!!)
Yes you can maintain a healthy vegan diet on uk only produce but it would need thinking about to get the balance right.
a lifestyle/ethics/health choice that our comfortable western lifestyle lets us choose
tell that to the people of Gujarat 😯
Got any examples of diets mt? Presumably they're must be plenty of vegans who have tried this sort of thing.
I believe 49er Jerry is about right. we are evolved as omnivores but I believe that large chunks of red meat would have been a rarity in our diet before the development of farming. Meat would have been the occasional rabbit rather than the daily cow and very rarely the tribe would have killed some big animal. Domestic animals such as cows and pigs have been bred to be docile and easily caught. Try catching wild boar or and auroch!
The excess of red meat in the average western diet is definitely linked with disease including bowel cancers.
Meat production is unsustainable. on average 10kg of plantstuffs make 1kg of meat, cows fart an airship of methane a year
I eat meat as an occasional treat. Salami or similar a couple of times a week - a chunk of real meat every now and then
10% of your 50g just by the bread on a single sandwich.
indeed, however in order to get 100% you would need to eat the equivalent of 10 sandwiches which is a lot. In a day I probably eat the equivalent of only 5 or 6 "sandwiches".
All you have demonstrated is that the concentration of protein in a sandwich is very small and impractical as a source of protein other than an incidental one.
[i]i am not going to bother posting as i will be wasting my time and dont want my blood pressure to go up.[/i]
So your vegetarian diet is doing your blood pressure some good then. 😆
Want to be a veggie could for you!
Want to be a vegan good for you!
Want to be the latest fad diet or what ever is trendy, good for you!
But please don't preach me.
[i]Meat would have been the occasional rabbit[/i]
Very occasional in the UK, in fact probably never as they were also farmed.
definatley never as they aren't native 🙂
a lifestyle/ethics/health choice that our comfortable western lifestyle lets us choosetell that to the people of Gujarat
In answer to the post
my post makes perfect sense 🙂I don't really care if people are vegetarian etc...but I'd say it's definitely not natural for humans.
But yes, others may not be able to make the same choices we make....
Joe
The thing about protein and vegetarianism being a problem is a bit of a myth though - as long as you get a varied diet, you can easily get enough protein. For example wholemeal bread has 10g of protein per 100g, so you can get 10% of your 50g just by the bread on a single sandwich.
The Vegetarian Society says you only get about 7.0g of protein from 2 slices of bread. That makes 14 slices to get the 50 grammes. That's one hell of a butty.
In terms of globalisation and environment, the impact of meat farming is massively massively more, as it is a very inefficient way to create calories or protein. That is why there is an environmental movement for people to pledge to not eat meat for one day a week (or more).
I agree that modern farming techniques and the over consumption of meat by the western world (in general) has severely damaged the environment. But I'm not sure that the majority of peoples diet did actually come from plant sources. There is so little nutritional value in plant material (calories, vitamins and minerals) that can be extracted by the human gut, it's not really worth eating (you use more calories eating and digesting celery than are actually contained in it).
the same post has just appeared above !
8)
indeed, however in order to get 100% you would need to eat the equivalent of 10 sandwiches which is a lot. In a day I probably eat the equivalent of only 5 or 6 "sandwiches".
Do you have nothing inside your sandwich? And none of the many other sources of protein in the rest of your diet? All I was pointing out is that by a typical lunch and a couple of slices of toast for breakfast, you'll end up getting a fifth of your protein intake, before you even consider adding obvious sources of protein (like nuts or whatever) to your diet. Protein is a bit of a red herring really, because if you just eat a healthy diet, chances are you'll pick up enough just through incidental things that you don't think of as a lump of protein.
When I was vegan (for two years a bit back), I was maintaining a constant weight, commuting for 1.5 hours a day, riding off road for 8-10 hours most weeks, swimming for 40 mins every weekday morning, and not having any health problems. All by just eating a varied, mostly home cooked vegetable based diet. Oh and I got me a world record for off road unicycling, competed in a bunch of bike races and other stupid sporting events, I wasn't unfit. Anyone saying that you need meat to be fit and healthy, or that it is hard to get enough protein as a vegan is just plain ignorant.
I stopped being vegan because I like the taste of cheese and eggs a lot. It was a lifestyle choice that I made, and I don't try and kid myself that it is something I needed to do, it is just something I did because I wanted to.
Joe
There is so little nutritional value in plant material (calories, vitamins and minerals) that can be extracted by the human gut, it's not really worth eating (you use more calories eating and digesting celery than are actually contained in it).
Whilst that may be true of celery, it isn't true of many other plant sources of nutrition. Which is why no-one worried too much about the Irish Celery Famine, but the Potato Famine was quite a big thing.
Joe
