Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

[palou]

scrapking said:

Yes we need protein, but it's not hard to get.  Heck, 20% of romaine lettuce's calories come from protein!  All plant-based foods contain protein, and some of them have a lot of it.  The average person needs about 35-60 grams of protein a day, and the average vegan in one study was eating about 75 grams of protein a day.  So the average *vegan* may be getting 50-100% more protein a day than they need!  Fascinatingly, vegetarians, pescetarians, and omnivores got hardly any more, usually in the 75-85 gram/day range.  Vegans might be eating foods with slightly less protein, but they're eating more food in total because their foods have fewer calories.  Traditionally we got about twice as much fibre as we did protein.  These days we get 4-5 times more protein than fibre, and that's at the root of many of our diseases.

Though I think looking to the past can help us answer questions about our present, I nonetheless agree with everything  in the second paragraph of your message.

The argument was about if eating meat is natural (which I personally think isirrelevant to the question of vegetarianism). In contrary to fats and sugars, a very large variety of amino acids is needed by human beings, not something humans can synthesize, unlike some purely vegetarian species. This diversity can be found, without much trouble, in a midern vegan diet, by eating nuts, beans, certain greenery... Together, they have all we need. However, in any given pre-bronze-age environnement, it was far from guaranteed that the edible plants available had everything. Eating animal substance assures this, since just as yourself the animal is constructed from the diverse amino acids. That is why humans at least occasionaly consumed meat (or other animal products) in pretty much all prehistoric societies. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, also primarily consume plant matter, but do go out of the way to hunt smaller animals (insects, if nothing else) from time to time, even if much harder to obtain, and a vegetarian diet readily available.