Is becoming a vegetarian/vegan worth it?

[palou]

scrapking said:

palou said:

[...]Evolution doesn't care about us, beyond a certain point, and I think we can just as well stop caring about our evolutionary traits, as well. A vegan/vegetarian diet can be healthy, healthier than eating meat each day, anyways. (I don't believe that eating fish, once a week, is necessarily unhealthy either. The rest needs to be handled as a purely ethical question.)

I've thought a lot (and I mean, a *lot*) since you posted this.  I didn't want to reply immediately.

If you were an extraterrestrial cataloguing different life on Earth (cue an extraterrestrial discussing humans with David Attenborough's voice, or that's how I like to imagine it), you would conclude we were omnivores by observing our behaviour.  Extraterrestrial David Attenborough would likely also observe that the most plant-based populations are the healthiest, live the longest, the most vibrant in old age, etc.  And I think you and I broadly agree on all of the above.

I think the "correct" answer biologically is that both humans and dogs are omnivores.  Dogs are omnivores, that lean more towards carnivores.  They can live on an entirely plant-based diet, or an entirely meat-based diet.  Unlike humans, dogs lean more towards carnivores though because they have a larger number of physical characteristics in common with carnivores, and like carnivores dogs can create vitamin C in their body (which is why they can exist on a meat-only diet).

Humans are omnivores as well but, unlike dogs, humans lean the other way and lean more towards the herbivorous side of the equation.  The longest-living and most vibrant human populations are the eat the most plant-based diet, and humans can't create vitamin C in our bodies so we need to eat plant-based nutrition or we die of scurvy (among other diseases).  A human dying on a meat-only diet doesn't even take long, there are stories of people sailing from Europe to North America and eating only fish and cured meats, and some of them dying before the crossing was finished!  There's a famous story in Canadian history of a crew of Europeans arriving in what is now Eastern Canada, half dead from eating only meat for the voyage, and it being the middle of a typically bad Eastern Canadian winter.  Nutrition wasn't well understood in those days (they hadn't even discovered food had nutrients yet, or that germs exist, etc.), and even if they had understood nutrition, what plants were they going to find under the Eastern Canadian winter snow?  The local first nations (aboriginals) in Canada showed them that they should eat bark to get vitamin C and other plant-only nutrients to cure the diseases that they were dying of, and that saved the crew.

And while dogs have physical characteristics that lean more towards the carnivorous side of the equation, the majority of human physical characteristics lean towards eating plants.  For sure you can find points that lean one way, or the other, about human physiology, but the *majority* of our biology points towards us being best adapted to eating plants.  And if we don't eat any plant-based nutrients at all, we'll die in a hurry.

So we are omnivores and can include meat in our diet.  We can even live off of a lot of meat, for a while at least, before our odds of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, etc., finally catches up with us.  But we're not as omnivorous as dogs, as dogs can seemingly live equally well off of a meat-only or a plant-only diet.  I think dogs are possibly the most omnivorous beings on the planet, actually.  We can live extremely well off a plant-only diet (possibly better than an omnivorous diet), whereas we can't live at all on a meat-only diet without any plant-based nutrition.  So we're omnivores I guess, but I think we undeniably lean more towards being plant-eaters.

Agree on most of this.