Welcome to Gaia! ::

This is mostly humor - I'm not meaning to offend anyone. sweatdrop I'm not trying to change anyone's mind or convert anyone - I'm just offering a little food for thought. smile

This is NOT about ethics. Just ironies. wink

Vegetarian: Someone who doesn't eat meat and animal products. You're cool. smile
Fundie Vegetarian: Someone who doesn't eat meat and animal products and believes a lot of pseudo-scientific BS with religious fervor.

Anyhow..


Okay, I've read up on a lot of vegetarian literature, and I can see where you have some good and valid points. But there are some things that I've been a-wonderin' about, and you guys, being the all-knowing gurus you are, surely have some answers ready.

First off, you seem to have an aversion to rotting foods, as evidenced by your proclamation that all meat is "decaying flesh." Okay, I'll grant you that. But what I want to know is how you keep your vegetables from decaying. Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure that when I pull a container of moldy, mushy broccoli from the fridge that it's "decaying."

Incidentally, have you ever compared the smell of rotting meat to rotting beans? If leave meat out overnight and it doesn't smell so bad. But leave the faintest traces of beans in a pan overnight and by the next morning the stench'll knock you off your feet.

You say that humans can't be 'natural omnivores' because we're lacking a bunch o' features that specialized carnivores have, like fangs and short intestines. Now, I don't know about you, but I've been around realio, trulio herbivores and I find us lacking a few suspect features that go into an all-plant diet. Like eating our poop or chewing our cud, for example. Or big ol' incisors or working appendixes. Or the ability to chow down raw, dry grains and beans without breaking off our little teeth. If your logic is true, then it must also be true that we can't be natural plant eaters, either. Maybe those breatharians are onto something.

And if we're herbivores, why don't our appendixes work? Those would be awfully handy for breaking down tough plant matter - instead of, you know, EXPLODING when we actually try to use them. And what's with the heme receptors? I mean, why would a true herbivore need the ability to get iron from BLOOD? Do true herbivores sneak off in the night to suck the blood of the innocent without our realizing it?

Another funny thing I've been noticing is that while on the one hand you declare meat to be 'unnatural' you scarf down grains and beans like there's no tomorrow. Now, this puzzles me. Before we humans started getting into agriculture, those grains and beans as we know 'em didn't even exist. I mean, sure, their puny, scrawny, tough and woody ancestors existed, but these were limited to season and location. Our ancestors woulda croaked off if they were trying to live off this stuff year-round. So what gives? I mean, meat has existed since the dawn of critters, but the beans and grains we snarf are the results of selective breeding over the past 10,000 or so years.

And you claim that meat is full o' toxins and nasty fats. I can see why. But I want to know one thing: how was it that there were so many groups of indigenous people who were healthy as horses eating almost nothing but fatty meat? Did meat and fat magically change their molecular composition in the past 100 years? Why are so many people right now actually reversing their heart disease by leaving the grains off their plates and eating the fat right up? You guys can't keep your eyes closed and your ears plugged forever... or maybe you can. Those fundies on TV haven't gotten a clue yet, after all.

Now, you say that the diets of what our closest ancestors eat is proof that we should naturally be eating similar diets. Okay, sounds reasonable. But I'm kind of a biology nerd, and I've seen enough critters to know that even though one animal eats a certain way, its cousins may have an entirely different diet. I mean, most bats eat bugs, but there are the weirdies that eat only bugs or fruits. Most slugs are herbivores, but there are a few carnivorous exceptions. Katydids range from herbivorous to carnivorous. Those infamous piranhas have a fruitarian cousin. Is there a special, magical reason why the same kind of dietary diversity can't apply to the great apes?

You also boast about how no critter died for your tastebuds. Now, I'm confused. I can't get through a single garden season without having to pull several hundred bugs out of their snuggly homes and doom them to death by squishing or something equally nasty. Maybe I'm just a little whacked, but I'd call that "dying for my tastebuds." I mean, if I didn't plant those tastebud-pleasing crops I wouldn't have had to kill the little guys in the first place. I just coulda plopped down a few critters to graze and saved the bugs the trouble, and...

Ahem. Getting off track.

Okay, so my point is, you say nothing died for your tastebuds. Is your food grown in some kinda airtight hydroponic facility or something? I figure that's the only way to do it. Some indoor super-efficient hydroponics system would sure be cool and oh-so-nerdy, but awfully expensive, I fear.

And where are you goofballs gettin' the notion that organic gardeners don't kill bugs, anyhow? We kill our share. The only difference is what we use to do it.

Well the reason i dont eat meat is...


1) All the terrible hormones they pump in the animals, eons ago i don't think our ancestors did that confused

2) I could never kill a pig with my bear hands, or any animal. I could never slaughter an animal, so why would i then eat one?
It was still slaughtered, just not by me =/


I DID read it all, and it was pretty informative on a whole.
Like you go into the teeth bit, and the reason for the appendix ^_^

Thanks for sharing!

Very true, but the whole karma thing still bothers me. Bugs that're killed by organic gardeners are only robbed of the rest of their life; factory farmed animals are robbed of their entire lives--even "free-ranged" animals never have to be allowed to see sunlight. They're subjected to all kinds of cruelties that don't rest well on my conscious stressed

Every body is different ^^ Humans don't eat their own poo or chew cud because our systems have developed enough to get most of the nutrients out of the food that we eat the first time around; and personal tastes have deemed it unsanitary and gross. However, certain bodies and genetics are better equipped to digest meat or vegetables than others. Everyone absorbs cholestorol, fat, and calories at a different rate; some bodies thrive better on cholestorol and fat, while it wreaks havoc on others. What you eat isn't the big factor, it's how it reacts with your body. Most humans are completely adapted to eat a pure vegetable diet, while others can't survive without animal protein and fats. I lived for two straight months on only raw fruits and vegetables and water, and felt more energized than I ever had in my life. Finding a diet that works for you is the hard part ninja

On the teeth thing, the human mouth is designed for a mostly plant diet. Beans and grains when eaten fresh and raw are easily chomped by our teeth. Four to ten out of thirty or so teeth are designed for meat consumption, the rest are designed for plants. Strangely enough, however, my canines elongated after I stopped eating meat. Over the years, when meat was the only source of food our ancestors ate, our bodies adapted to be able to survive off of meat. It's human habit that shaped our bodies, not the other way around.

Appendixes stopped working when they stopped being used; as in after we learned to cook food and therefore it was broken down almost completely before reaching the appendix.

The reason for the toxins and nasty fats is because of what the animals today are being fed and the way they lived their lives. Ancients ate animals that they caught in the woods, who had eaten organic grass and drank non-polluted water all of their lives, and ran and played so that the fat was mixed with muscle in their meat, and not just stored up in their flanks like animals of today because today's animals barely have two feet of moving space. Even hunted meat such as deer and rabbit is becoming contaminated because of all the stupid pollution.

If it was only a health thing; I'd say abolish the factory farms, replace them with conservatories where people can go hunt their own damn food and get limited to nine or ten big game per year, or--because people are lazy and don't want to have to hunt--hire people to hunt them and then freeze them, but you still only get ten big animals so you have to use the whole thing or go without meat. Because in the "olden days" when people did eat meat, two full deer per family was enough to last an entire winter--what a thought! So the meat would be healthier, free range, and organic, there would be less overall consumption so less waste to deal with, less pesticides and hormones used, less energy used, and everyone that wanted it could get the meat that they needed. [/offtopic]

Meat itself: not so bad for the body if it's good quality and not pumped full of artificial things.

Conscious aspect: Keeping a very sentiate bird or mammal captive for most of its life, trapped with too many others of its kind just to kill and eat it, seems cruel and unneccessary when I get just as good--and for me, even healthier--nutrients from fruits and vegetables.

Lol, I'm a really bad argue-er xd I just don't care enough about pushing my views xp

You know, once your teeth are in, they don't elongate; however, gums can recede at any age. I would check with my dentist and be sure that the whole mouth is healthy---and drink green tea! it kills almost 100% of germs in the mouth. Although I must warn you that tea stains your teeth worse than almost anything else. You could also swish a little hydrogen peroxide when you brush, it will actually whiten your teeth. They are compiling more research all the time relating bacteria in the mouth with heart disease and other inflammation-related diseases. Just want you to be healthy!

http://www.webmd.com/oral-health/news/20070228/treat-gum-disease-help-heart
http://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/heart-disease-oral-health.htm
http://healthandenergy.com/inflammation_is_a_secret_killer.htm

Of course, perfect health renders this all moot.

I don't think that most people even know that cholestrol is manufactured in the body and has a huge job to do. We've been led to believe that it's just a bad thing, and that's it. I see it as being akin to the whole smoking-causes-lung-cancer thing, as if that was the only cause, or the only factor in the disease. We both know that smoking is not the only trigger for cancer, and that everyone who smokes doesn't get cancer. There can be so many contributing factors to a disease.

The bottom line really is that a healthy body was designed to fight off all attackers, repair its injuries, clean itself up, and be ready to do it all again! The concentration in "medicine" needs to be on establishing health. Education in the importance of a proper diet and exercise is key, not only for the public, but for the doctors themselves. They can only work with the information that they have, just like all the rest of us. If the information is incorrect or incomplete, they can't help you, although most of them really want to help.

For myself, if I happen to be feeling a little off, the first thing I ask myself is, "What did I do?"