The Foods You Eat. And Your Diet.

[Edited on Aug 08, 2005 by AceTracer]

"Your diet includes meat" is a fact.
"Your diet is appalling" is a value judgement.

There is a difference (even to those of us who are vegetarians and agree with you).

Answer me these simple questions.
If my diet is so appalling (which as Shalome pointed out is just your opinion) why am I feeling better than I have in years? Why is my cholestorol only 3.54 (I'd hazard a guess that mine is lower than yours) Why is it that I don't feel hungry or tired nor been ill? Why is it that the last time I saw a doctor, he told me I was in perfect health? You might not agree with my diet, that's fine, you don't have to agree with it, but what you don't seem to realize is that this is not doing me any harm, and that is the opinion of someone that has been my family doctor all my life. If it were, I would have either felt the effects months ago, or my doctor would have found problems, which he didn't.
As I said before, which you decided to count as bollocks: I only continued to discuss my diet because someone asked me about it. If you don't like that, don't read what I write, or put me on your ignore list. You already ignored the comment I left regarding your tattoo, why not just ignore me now? I for one won't lose any sleep knowing that you won't be reading what I write.
[Edit for spelling]

[Edited on Aug 08, 2005 by Spike]

I think it depends on what is meant by "appalling." If it's "your diet is appalling because you eat meat and that's morally wrong," then yeah sure that's a value judgement. But if it's "your diet is appalling because it leads to malnutrition and poor health," that's a statement that can be supported or disproved with facts. My impression of Nefertari's comment was that she meant appalling in a sense that it transcends squabbling over eating animals because Spike's diet is just flat nutritionally unsound.

Nutrition isn't literary criticism; There are good and bad diets from the standpoint of supporting or undermining one's health. If you decide to eat nothing but granulated sugar, you will die of malnutrition. Even if your opinion is that this diet is healthy, that won't save you because you're wrong. I think a lot of people have appalling diets, but it has nothing to do with moral problems with any of the foods they eat, it's just that their diets are undermining their health, often in outwardly obvious ways.

I guess ultimately you do come back to a value judment of whether or not having a healthy diet even matters. But I'm going to assume that health is important to everyone having this discussion or they wouldn't be here. If you you want to be unhealthy and die or just don't care about your health, heated nutrition debates probably aren't the place you'd hang out.

Nick

it's called being a "freegan" and isn't a terribly uncommon practice among the vegetarian homeless. if they don't pay for it, then they'll eat it, becuase they are not directly supporting (via funding) the meat industry. personally i do not see any hypocrisy in it. if i were homeless i would definitely take whatever i could get, high cholesterol be damned.

my parents fed me "boring" food when i was little - organics, Juicy Juice, turkeyburgers, fruit leather, Frookies (i miss chocolate Frackers ). i was jealous of my friends who got to eat junky food. i'm extremely thankful for the good habits that my parents instilled in me, however. as a child i tended to overeat and got almost no exercise - i was too busy reading and being nerdy all day. i loooooved meat. when i was about 12 it finally clicked for me that pork = pigs = a favorite animal so i gave it up, and threw in beef just for the hell of it. i craved it lots but when you're not the one cooking and serving the food and the person who IS has been informed of your dietary change, then it's easy to avoid. about a year later my little group of friends from school decided one day that we would all go vegetarian (no idea why), and since then i've eaten almost no meat (only seafood a couple of times, when i was in restaurants with someone else paying who had a limited budget, and its been a couple years). i have very high cholesterol because of genetics and despite dropping all the extra weight from cutting out meat and exercising moderately to heavily, plus being lactose intolerant so i usually avoid dairy, nothing has helped. and i'm too lazy and stubborn to take pills. i feel fine so fuck 'em. they told me it was ok for me to take some herbal supplements that are supposed to help but then told me to take fish oil with it (that's just insensitive, and i thought my doctor was cool ) so i'm just not bothering. and i don't intend to go back and get bled again so they can make me pay for a stupid prescription after it turns out i still have the highest cholesterol they've ever seen (even more than morbidly obese patients).

You might consider supplementing with flax oil instead. Pretty much anything you can do to get some omega-3 fatty acids in your system will be beneficial. You'll miss out on EPA and DHA, which are the real important omega-3s present in fish oil, but your body can manufacture them to some degree. There's also algal oil, which is a vegetarian source of DHA (that's where fish get theirs), but that stuff is expensive.

You could also eat Omega Eggs. Those are a rich source of EPA and DHA and are an all-around pretty awesome food. A couple of those a day would do you some good, though I'm not clear whether you have any moral reservations about eating eggs.

Nick

Edited to add Omega Eggs.

[Edited on Aug 09, 2005 by The_Incubator]

As I said above:

Well, the fact that their not funding the meat industry is a fair enough point, but they would still be eating a substance that they claim to avoid for personal (ethical/moral/sometimes health) reasons, and that's why I say it would still be hypocrisy. I have a friend who is an extremely fussy eater. So much so, that if he goes away anywhere, if he can't get food that he likes (purely on preference, no health/moral issues involved) rather than eat something he doesn't like, he'll go hungry. It's extreme, but if that's just on the basis of food preference, I expect no less from a vegan or vegetarian. If I were homeless, I would also eat anything I could get my hands on.
A while back I saw a disgarded hotdog on the floor. There was still about 3-4 inches of the 'meat' left surrounded by bun. I said to my fiance, to a homeless person, that would be perfectly eatable food. Sure, you might want to take off the outer layer of bread, but other than that, it would've been quite edible.

I'm going to go eat some pho ga. Its going to be fucking delicious.

bump ftf(ail)

I had such high hopes. This thread is starting to look more and more like Gary Coleman.

Call me meat mouth all you want. I like my food still squirming on the plate.