Are you a vegetarian??

Monique

It could be that the vitamin B12 producing bacteria are present on the plant, but you shouldn't count on it. It hasn't been extensively tested that all available wheatgrass juice contains vitamin B12, so indeed unreliable information.

PAllen

If you eat paneer and raita (let alone eggs) you should have no problem getting B12. If you want to be vegan, just supplement (also IMO eat flax seed for Omega's if you rule out fish or fish based supplements).

glb_lub

Will do so. But in what form should one eat flaxseed ? Will flaxseed oil work ? In India , it is used in some dishes, but very rarely. Mostly it is groundnut oil and in recent times, soybean oil is gaining popularity. Is soy-milk a good source of omega acids ? I saw on wikipedia that Soybean has omega acids but couldn't see the same for soy-milk.


And since we are discussing supplements, I wonder what is the best source of calcium for vegetarians ? How is cow's milk on that front. I am mostly worried about calcium intake and that's what keeps me from going vegan.

Pkruse

I grew up eating a massive amount of meat and thought it impossible to do otherwise. Now that I'm much older I find myself eating much less meat. I'm considering giving it up completely as an experiment. If I do, i would probably find it preferable. I see no health or moral reasons for doing that. I would still be the one likely to shoot a hog and prepare a BBQ when my friends schedule one. I would still enjoy doing that for my friends, but I'm becoming less and less likely to eat it myself. Only real reason is that I've found so many non-meat things that I like better.

Monique

See the calcium paragraph in: Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets

glb_lub

Thanks.

Kholdstare

I second that.

This page tells me its a gross misconception.

Monique

Based on what do you make that conclusion?

glb_lub

The number of meat eaters are on the rise as standards of living are increasing.
When I said a high proportion of Indians don't eat meat, I meant a substantial population.(The link you provide says 40% are vegetarians, isn't 40% in a country of 1.2 billion a large number ?)
The per capita consumption of meat in the country is very low as compared to other countries. (This could be due to high levels of poverty and a high population.)

http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus..._meat_and.html

I am not totally sure how reliable above site is. And also the stats are a 12 years old so can't tell what current stats are.


Further a large number of meat eaters in the country consume meat only on special occasions. When I used to eat meat it would be 2-3 times a month on an average. Most of the people I know are like that. (I am not making a statistical assertion, just sharing anecdotal experience). So what I mean to say is that though there may not be many 'strictly' vegetarian people(though the link you provide says it is 40%), still a sizable population is 'predominantly' vegetarian for most part of the year.

Danger

You have my pity. You haven't lived until you've had a rack of garlic ribs.

Kholdstare

If the population has roughly 60% non-veg and 40% veg, I'd rather say a high proportion of population eat non-veg.

This site does not give the statistics for fish and seafood consumption.

IMO, a person is non-vegetarian as long as he has no problem eating non-veg foods. It does not matter how often he eats non-veg food. (However, I discount those who stopped eating or just tasted it once.) I guess the point of this poll is to get how many are non-veg or veg. Not how much non-veg food a person consumes.

TheWire247

I love meat!

Illuminerdi

I'm a vegan, but I'm <i>very</i> far from the anti-vaccination, all raw-food-eating, hippie type.

I actually became a vegetarian around age 7 or 8 because I simply cannot be around animal flesh. I cannot watch medical television or violent films, and, similarly, I cannot be anywhere near meat that physically resembles animal flesh. It fazes me too much. I became vegan around 16, while running track and field. I noticed that, days where I had a glass of milk in the morning, I would suffer from terrible stomach pain running in the afternoon. After I gave up dairy, entirely, I realized my stomach felt better, in general.* Nearly half the world is lactose intolerant. This doesn't mean that much, though, since half the world is also asian. I suppose I inherited this from my mongolian rapist ancestors.

*Not that it's not still in terrible pain, seeing as I am stuck with Jewish DNA.

On the veganism issue, I'm not lacking in compassion for animals, but sometimes I find it hard to reconcile this with my deterministic view of the universe that has no fundamental separation between the living and nonliving. I believe mostly what Nikola Tesla believed on these issues (though Tesla, himself, was a vegetarian).

Do I actually think that I'm healthier for not consuming meat? Sometimes. I'm definitely healthier for not consuming ground beef or any sort of fast food, but, can I actually find a health reason to not eat tuna fish? Of course not.

Monique

There are clear health reasons to limit the intake though: Dutch government advises to not eat more than 600 g (21 oz) fatty fish (tuna) a week, women with a wish to get pregnant (or those who are pregnant) are advised to not eat more than 300 g a week. This advice is given due to the presence of dioxins and heavy metals. It is also advised to eat fish with low-nitrate vegetables, the combination with lettuce or spinach could result in the production of harmful chemicals (reference).

Curious3141

I'm sorry, but that's not logical. It's clear that when glb_lub was talking about India having a high proportion of vegetarians, he was talking about India in comparison with the rest of the world. And that's perfectly true, India is universally acknowledged to be the country with the highest proportion of (lacto)vegetarians.

It doesn't matter that the proportion is less than 50%. It *would* have mattered if glb_lub's claim was that *most* Indians were vegetarian. But that wasn't his claim at all. In this case, it only matters that India has a higher proportion of vegetarians than any other country. Far higher in fact - no other country even comes kinda close.

(Also, while it's tangential to this particular argument, because of India's huge population, it's estimated that more than 70% of the world's vegetarian population are Indians. Don't hold me to this one, though, it's just a figure I found somewhere on the Internet.)

The vegetarian culture in India so entrenched that in many places, it's almost impossible to find restaurants serving meat. In fact, in these areas, restaurants that serve meat dishes have to be specifically labelled as such, and an unsigned restaurant is, by default, a vegetarian one.

This culture is heavily rooted in the predominant religion, Hinduism. Apart from many Hindus, Jains are also vegetarians - in fact, Jains are even stricter vegetarians than most Hindu Brahmins. It is likely India would've had an even higher proportion of vegetarians today if not for incursions by the Muslim and Christian colonial powers.

The Indian diaspora also tend to cling onto their ancestral dietary practices, wherever feasible (although this is by no means a rule). For example, I'm a Brahmin by birth. Even though I'm a second generation Singaporean (my father and I were both born in Singapore - a largely non-vegetarian country with a Chinese majority), my entire family has been lactovegetarian from birth. And while I don't really consider myself "Brahmin" any more since I've stopped being a practising Hindu (I'm an atheist now), I still retain a vegetarian diet. This is partly for humane reasons, but also because my upbringing has conditioned me simply not to crave meat (and in fact, to be averse to it). So I simply don't miss it - in fact, the thought of eating meat or fish actually revolts me. Thankfully, it's very, very easy to find restaurants serving only vegetarian fare in Singapore.

Kholdstare

It's also not logical. He did not explicitly mention among which population he is making the comparison when he said "India having a high proportion of vegetarians".

Curious3141

I thought that was implicit. It's the most logical conclusion.

And now, I'll stop sounding like Spock.