Poll: Vegetarian? Carnivore? Pescatarian?

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 20 May 2011 14:09

Curious to see what the breakdown is here.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 20 May 2011 23:25

I am an omnivore, although you could perhaps use the term "flexitarian" to describe my eating habits. My eating habits are mainly based on trying to have the healthiest diet I can, followed by the most socially and environmentally responsible. I avoid dogmatically cutting groups of food out of my diet.

PoisonTaffy · Post by **PoisonTaffy** » 21 May 2011 02:20

Isn't ethical responsibility a worthy consideration as well?

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 21 May 2011 15:29

Ethics are an important part of everything we do. On the other hand, if by saying that, you're trying to suggest that it is unethical to kill animals for food, I completely disagree.

max · Post by **max** » 22 May 2011 09:27

Omnivore. Eating (out) is definitely one of my favorite pastimes.

habitat · Post by **habitat** » 23 May 2011 10:50

Fish don't have any feelings.

Tsiangkun · Post by **Tsiangkun** » 24 May 2011 11:22

canivore don't eat anything that doesn't have parents

Matt K · Post by **Matt K** » 29 May 2011 20:58

Omnivore. I don't adhere to any specific diet because footbag will usually balance out whatever I eat. My weight has only been fluctuating 5 or 10 pounds for the past few years

Justin Hall · Post by **Justin Hall** » 30 May 2011 18:47

I would say I am kinda between vegetarian and pescatarian but I don't really care for the names. Mostly my diet is vegetarian with the only dairy I eat is feta cheese. The odd time I will have free range chicken eggs, which I'll probably stop eating when I move out. I am currently looking for a sustainable
source of fish that isn't expensive and isn't farmed. So in the mean time I'm not eating fish.

verena · Post by **verena** » 02 Jun 2011 03:39

vegetarian for over 7 years. most of time i eat vegan food (though i wouldn't consider myself vegan).

PoisonTaffy · Post by **PoisonTaffy** » 02 Jun 2011 05:14

Jeremy wrote: you're trying to suggest that it is unethical to kill animals for food, I completely disagree.

I think the way most people in first world countries obtain their meat is unethical, yes.

Verena - you're a boss on multiple levels!

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 02 Jun 2011 15:03

I don't really follow. What food do you think people eat in any country that is socially and environmentally sustainable (the two ethical basis of what I eat), that is still unethical?

Justin Hall · Post by **Justin Hall** » 02 Jun 2011 19:52

Jeremy, I think PoisonTaffy is referring to how first world countries kill and process the animals into food. for example this video here.

It is pretty graphic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebTQXkMUqt0

Not all slaughter houses are like this, of course but there is a great deal in North America that are.

Now if you're eating animals that are free range or/and organic than I would say than I don't think its an issue of ethics. Personally the reason I started to give up eating meat was to be healthier and I feel much better now.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 03 Jun 2011 00:20

Factory farmed meat in that style causes a great deal of environmental damage, so I don't eat it.

The scientific evidence shows that people who eat only a little meat are the healthiest on a large range of criteria, which is one of the reasons why I eat some meat.

Justin Hall · Post by **Justin Hall** » 03 Jun 2011 04:10

That's good to hear lol. Is that study based on a typical vegetarian diet? In my family we cook pretty much everything from scratch and a make sure we are getting everything we need. Personally most people I know that don't eat meat aren't doing it properly and it would be healthier if they did have a little bit.

Drew · Post by **Drew** » 03 Jun 2011 08:08

My option wasn't there; I eat only chicken and the rest vegetarian, as well as dairy. I selected Pescetarian.

Although, I WAS vegetarian for 23 years, until I began eating chicken earlier this year do to nutritional aspects.

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 03 Jun 2011 08:56

Justin Hall wrote:Personally most people I know that don't eat meat aren't doing it properly and it would be healthier if they did have a little bit.

Agree. I was pescatarian for a year before I fell off the wagon, and I've been pescatarian (with a couple exceptions) since the new year. My doctor told me I'm iron deficient, so now I take iron pills every day. But yeah, a lot of people don't balance their diet properly, which can be tricky.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 03 Jun 2011 16:01

The biggest and most robust studies on diet don't study particular diets, but rather study a very large group of people over a very long period of time by getting them to write down everything they eat every day for decades, as well as filling out regular surveys and having regular checkups in order to look at exercise and see how all this correlates with health. This makes it much easier to draw conclusions about particular food items and to take in to account other aspects of diet. There is a very large ongoing study of something like 160,000 nurses like this, and I think some others. I haven't seen an analysis of different types of vegetarianism, but these kinds of studies mean somebody could do one if they wanted.

It sounds like what you're saying though, is that it wasn't becoming a vegetarian that made you more healthy, it was trying to eat a healthy balanced diet that made you more healthy. Health is often cited by vegetarians as a reason to become vegetarian, but I think that's spurious reasoning, as there's no evidence to suggest a healthy balanced diet containing meat is worse than a healthy balanced diet not containing meat.

There's a lot of debate about supplements in the scientific literature. Some supplements correlate with higher rates of cancer, and some supplements appear to almost completely pass through the body without being digested. The general view is that if you can get a particular nutrient from eating it in a whole-food, rather than a supplement, that's probably better for your health - but of course it depends on your specific condition, the specific nutrient, and even then there is still a lot of uncertainty.

If you don't read through scientific literature when you have a question, a fairly good book on this subject is "In Defence of Food" by Michael Pollan.

cd · Post by cd » 04 Jun 2011 19:14

I've also heard other vegetarians/vegans give health as a reason for making the switch. Since going veg is a pretty big commitment, it's not hard to imagine that a larger proportion of them pay careful attention to their diets than your average omni. So yes, on average they may be healthier. But I don't think it's necessarily because of a vegetarian diet in and of itself.

The bottom line is you can be perfectly healthy with any of the diets in this survey if you're aware of the potential pitfalls. All of them have risks if they are not well planned out.

By the way, I have been vegan for about two years and vegetarian on and off before that. I'm doing it for ethical reasons regarding the animals.

verena · Post by **verena** » 05 Jun 2011 01:40

a few years ago i wrote a university paper about vegetarianism and competitive sports. after a lot of research my conclusion was that it's perfectly healthy (if you eat vegetables and fruits and not only chocolate and french fries). the only two exceptions were iron and zinc (there's a lot of debate on this topic). while there is actually a lot of iron in all green vegetables, the body can't resorb vegetable iron so well. as calcium inhibits the iron absorbtion, vegans normally have higher iron stores than vegetarians.
as jeremy wrote, you have to be really careful with supplements though. especially iron supplements can cause cancer. that's one of the reasons why vegetarians live longer than the average meateater, as too much iron can cause cancer.

i'm not a vegetarian, because of health (as a lot people wrote in here, i think it would be healthy to eat good meat every couple of weeks), but because of ethical reasons.

i think we have so much good vegetarian/vegan food that we don't need to kill animals (including fish). and yes, i always liked meat.

my main reason is though that you save so much energy if you eat the vegetables right away. imagine how much energy it costs to get 1 kg of meat (you have to feed the animal as well)! also, cows produce a lot of co2 (that goes for dairy products as well, so i mainly eat vegan stuff).
i also watch out that i mainly buy regional products. of course it costs a lot of energy as well, to ship some vegetables from spain to austria for example.

Poll: Vegetarian? Carnivore? Pescatarian?

What is your diet?

Poll: Vegetarian? Carnivore? Pescatarian?