Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

[invetedlotus123]

scrapking said:

invetedlotus123 said:
Well, i didn't read anything posted but the OP but I'm talking from experience. If your goal is to eat healthier being a vegetarian isn't a requirement, since loads of stuff from animals can be healthier than their vegetal counterparts. Likr using pig fat to cook instead of vegetal oil. Vegetarians tends to think more about what they eat, but if you arent eatimg meat and indulge in french fries, fat cheese, candies and over processed food it isn't be any healthier than meat. You can be very healthy with both diets, and very unhealthy too.

Do you have a citation for your claim that cooking (frying?) in pig fat is healthier than vegetable oil?  Also, what vegetable oil (as they have different health and nutrition profiles)?  I'd add, that I'm not sure cooking/frying with any kind of oil is especially healthy.  I don't add oils to my food at all.  I do eat at restaurants from time to time, and there are probably some oils added to that food, but that's one of the reasons why I rarely eat at restaurants.  Here's a video on the topic (with a long list of citations in the comments for all of its claims):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbtwwZP4Yfs

I agree that a person can be unhealthy on any diet, and that it's possible to be healthy on several of them.  Healthy varies by degrees, though.  I don't think that it's true to say that all diets have the ability to offer an equal level of health in their respective best-case scenarios.  Eating a whole food plant-based diet may offer greater health than any other single dietary option.  There is a growing body of research that suggests as much, and it'll be interesting to see if the research continues to trend in that direction.

Most of my material is in portuguese, but I`ve found this article in English. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3176558/It-s-healthier-cook-LARD-sunflower-oil-Extraordinary-experiment-shows-ve-told-cooking-oils-wrong.html  The reason why pig fat, or lard, is better than most vegetal oils is because it has no added conservatives and vegetal oil has to go through severe modificantios to arrive the supermarket. And is possible to be very heatlhy on a meat based diet, Atkins diet proved wrong this idea that fat and red meat are necessarily unhealthy. And our body NEEDS fat, a friend of the family that is a gynecologist explained us that many women are having hormonal problems for not eating enough fat. An eating lifestyle i like a lot is Paleo Low-Carb. And whole plant-based diet can be very healthy or not, it all comes for how much you reasearch and applies in your eating habits, just like any diet. The thing is most vegetarians tend to know a lot more and do a lot more research about nutrition than meat lovers, so we tend to believe the vegetarian lifestyle in itself is healthier than eating meat, when it`s not quite the case. I eat a lot of egg yolks, meat, cook with lard and etc, and I`m actually really healthy according to my exams.