Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

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caffeinade said:
Because, if your heart is not in it, why bother.
If you don't have any "real" motivation you are just playing a game with your diet.

The reason why to bother is that it can not only help you live longer, but help you be far more vibrant in old age.  The idea that people inevitably become decrepit in later years is a relatively new one, people used to be far more vibrant in old age (and still are in communities that are largely plant-based, such as the elderly in Okinawa and in the Adventist community in California).  SOURCE:  http://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-okinawa-diet-living-to-100/

 

 

ruior said:

[...]1. being "natural" is just a very relative concept depending on the context. One can even say that what if we do use cars, is probably because was the natural step to take for us humans. Once we do something, it becomes natural. I think however people speak of "natural" more on par with our cave man "primitive" and "animalistic" food instincts when talking about eating meat or vegan. Well in natural environments a lot of animals have sex with their family and eat uncooked food. 
2. being "natural" per se is not an argument to select a diet as equal to being "healthier", "sustaninable", "ethical", etc. Being "primitive natural" we wouldn't take medicine. Of course medicine also has a bad side. But has a good side also.
3. I think we should worry with what we eat because of health, ethics, sustainabily and money. And because of "being natural"? What I'm disputing here an argument usually used to justify eating meat or vegan because of just the sake "being natural". What does that matter? We don't live on the forest.[...]

Yes I live in the Western World, and yes I live in a city (though a relatively small one that's thankfully free of any significant amount of air pollution).  And yes I'm on VGchartz so as you can guess I have a PC, and game consoles, and a smartphone.  I agree with your fundamental point.

I also believe that we can learn a lot from what worked in the past, however.  We used to eat almost entirely plant-based diets that were full of fibre and anti-oxidants, the former nurturing friendly bacteria in the body and the latter fighting cancer for us.  Now we eat large amounts of meat, dairy, eggs, and refined carbohydrates, which not only deprive our diet of the fibre and anti-oxidants we so desperately need, but they also do the reverse by damaging the bio-diversity of our gut bacteria and creating inflammation in the body.

The smoking gun here is that we've recently discovered a connection between a lot of diseases that used to be rare but have become common in modern times.  Heart disease, impotence, and a variety of neurological diseases may be connected.  Erectile dysfunction often has an emotional or psychological component, but that is frequently triggered by an initial failure to "perform".  That first failure to perform can be caused by cholesterol plaque building up in the penile artery, which is one of the smaller arteries in the body.  SOURCE:  http://nutritionfacts.org/video/survival-of-the-firmest-erectile-dysfunction-and-death/  Similarly, there's growing evidence that previously unexplained neurological diseases may be caused by plaque build-up in the brain.  SOURCE:  http://nutritionfacts.org/video/cholesterol-and-alzheimers-disease/  Rather than being separate conditions, they may all be the same condition: cholesterol plaque from dietary animal fat building up in different parts of the body.  If we're facing new problems, or an old problem that's becoming far more common, we can compare the past to the present to get an idea of what might have changed, and how that might be the cause.