Healthiness

Here's some research on incidence of bowel cancer - scroll down to 'Diet':
www.hindawi.com/journals/jce/2011/675154/

Remember we are talking averages here. Those who choose a vegetarian or vegan diet are a self selected group of people for whom health and taking care of themselves, as well as having strong ethical beliefs is important.

This cannot be said of the wider meat eating population, many of whom, will have a poor diet, and include overweight people and those that drink and smoke. All factors, more likely to be found in omnivores than vegans.

To find out if vegans were more healthy, you would have to match them against a sample of meat eaters who
will have a matching age range (more young people are vegan than older people) equally proportions of those that are overweight, heavy drinkers and smokers, levels of fitness, presence of other medical conditions etc etc.

I haven't seen this survey, so know nothing about the sample and who did it, but I would need much much more information before I would believe it.

That's interesting too, janea.

Meat is being grown in labs now, lully, not yet enough to feed everyone who wants to eat meat, but we'll get there. It is such good food that it would be silly to abandon it.

Yet around here there are many farmers , a good age and very active , they certaintly eat much meat

PS glad Baggs said healthiness not wellness.

I do think food is generational to a certain extent. I was brought up as an omnivore, as were most people in the 50s and 60s.

It does seem like there will be a need for the population to greatly reduce meat eating if the human race is to survive.

The propaganda has begun forcefully in the media and perhaps in 50 years time everyone will be vegan or vegetarian out of necessity and health. They will look back on us as being very strange eating animals.

Diet isn’t the only factor in health.
In older people, the single most important indicator of good health has been found to be social interaction.
Protein intake is important too in older people, to maintain muscle mass. This is important for falls prevention. I’m not sure how easy it is for vegans to ensure adequate protein intake. You have to eat an awful lot of nuts to get the same amount of protein as you do from a small piece of chicken.
Preventing falls is important for older people, to allow them to maintain independence & social contacts for longer.

I don't believe meat as such causes obesity.

Oh, you said digestive system, not gut. Sorry.

That's interesting, fennel, because my understanding was that meat is easier to digest than much plant material. This is rather borne out by the fact that herbivores like cattle have several stomachs and have to spend a long time digesting the same material more than once. Animals that eat meat only need one stomach because the digestive process is simpler in that meat doesn't need to ferment, or whatever it is herbivores' extra stomachs do.

What you said about the speed of the stuff passing through the gut might be true. I don't know. Maybe the several stomach business helps with that. Talking of which, I wonder if the overall time from mouth to anus is very different between herbivores and omnivores.

l looked into this some time ago. It seems that in countries where there's a mainly plant based diet there's less incidence of bowel cancer etc. Because the food passes more quickly through the digestive system than meat based.
Also with a plant based diet there's less of a risk for obesity and all diseases related to that. Probably for the same reason?

I'm not sure that the research has been done that definitively proves that hypothesis one way or the other. If people feel healthier if they take up any particular dietary regime and they enjoy it that must be a positive thing for mind and body.