Should We All Be
It's that more and
Vegetarians?
Would we be healthier?
Would the planet? The risks
and benefits of a meat-free
life.
By RICHARD CORLISS
Posted Sunday, July 7, 2002;
10:31 a.m. EST
FIVE REASONS TO EAT MEAT:
1) It tastes good
2) It makes you feel good
3) It's a great American tradition
4) It supports the nation's
farmers
5) Your parents did it
Oh, sorry ... those are five
reasons to smoke cigarettes.
Meat is more complicated. It's a
food most Americans eat virtually
every day: at the dinner table; in
the cafeteria; on the barbecue
patio; with mustard at a ballpark;
or, a billion times a year, with
special sauce, lettuce, cheese,
pickles, onions on a sesame-seed
bun. Beef is, the TV commercials
say, "America's food"—the Stars
and Stripes served up medium
rare—and as entwined with the
nation's notion of its robust
frontier heritage as, well, the
Marlboro Man.
But these days America's
cowboys seem a bit small in the
saddle. Those cattle they round
up have become politically
incorrect: for many, meat is an
obscene cuisine. It's not just the
additives and ailments connected
with the consumption of beef,
though a dish of hormones, E. coli
bacteria or the scary specter of
mad-cow disease might be
effective enough as an appetite
suppressant.
more Americans, particularly
young Americans, have started
engaging in a practice that would
once have shocked their parents.
They are eating their vegetables.
Also their grains and sprouts.
Some 10 million Americans today
consider themselves to be
practicing vegetarians, according
to a Time poll of 10,000 adults;
an additional 20 million have
flirted with vegetarianism
sometime in their past.
To get a taste of the cowboy's
ancient pride, and current
defensiveness, just click on South
Dakota cattleman Jody Brown's
website, www.ranchers.net, and
read the new meat mantras:
"Vegetarians don't live longer,
they just look older"; and "If
animals weren't meant to be
eaten, then why are they made
out of meat?" (One might ask the
same of humans.) For Brown and
his generation of unquestioning
meat eaters, dinner is something
the parents put on the table and
the kids put in their bodies. Of his
own kids, he says, "We expect
them to eat a little of
everything." So beef is served
nearly every night at the Brown
homestead, with nary a squawk
from Jeff, 17, Luke, 13, and
Hannah, 11. But Jody admits to at
least one liberal sympathy. "If a
vegetarian got a flat tire in my
community," he says, "I'd come
out and help him."
For the rancher who makes his
living with meat or the vegetarian
whose diet could someday drive
all those breeder-slaughterers to
bankruptcy, nothing is simple any
more. Gone is the age of
American innocence, or naiveté
when such items as haircuts and
handshakes, family names and
school uniforms, farms and zoos,
cowboys and ranchers, had no
particular political meaning. Now
everything is up for rancorous
debate. And no aspect of our
daily lives—our lives as food
consumers—gets more heat than
meat.
For millions of vegetarians, beef
is a four-letter word; veal
summons charnel visions of
infanticide. Many children, raised
on hit films like Babe and Chicken
Run, recoil from eating their
movie heroes and switch to what
the meat defeaters like to call a
"nonviolent diet." Vegetarianism
resolves a conscientious person's
inner turf war by providing an
edible complex of good-deed-
doing: to go veggie is to be more
humane. Give up meat, and save
lives!
Of course, one of the lives you
could save or at least prolong is
your own. For vegetarianism
should be about more than not
eating; it's also about smart
eating. You needn't be a born-
again foodist to think this. The
American Dietetic Association, a
pretty centrist group, has
proclaimed that "appropriately
planned vegetarian diets are
healthful, are nutritionally
adequate and provide health
benefits in the prevention and
treatment of certain diseases."
So, how about it? Should we all
become vegetarians? Not just
teens but also infants, oldsters,
athletes—everyone? Will it help
us live longer, healthier lives?
Does it work for people of every
age and level of work activity?
Can we find the right vegetarian
diet and stick to it? And if we can
do it, will we?
There are
as many
reasons to
try
vegetarianism as there are soft-
eyed cows and soft-hearted kids.
To impressionable young minds,
vegetarianism can sound
sensible, ethical and—as nearly
25% of adolescents polled by
Teenage Research Unlimited said
—"cool." College students think
so too. A study conducted by
Arizona State University
psychology professors Richard
Stein and Carol Nemeroff
reported that, sight unseen, salad
eaters were rated more moral,
virtuous and considerate than
steak eaters. "A century ago, a
high-meat diet was thought to be
health-favorable," says Paul Rozin
of the University of Pennsylvania.
"Kids today are the first
generation to live in a culture
where vegetarianism is common,
where it is publicly promoted on
health and ecological grounds."
And kids, as any parent can tell
you, spur the consumer
economy; that explains in part
the burgeoning sales of veggie
burgers (soy, bulgur wheat,
cooked rice, mushrooms, onions
and flavorings in Big Mac drag) in
supermarkets and fast-food
chains.
Children, who are signing on to
vegetarianism much faster than
adults, may be educating their
parents. Vegetarian food sales
are savoring double-digit growth.
Top restaurants have added more
meatless dishes. Trendy "living
foods" or "raw" restaurants are
sprouting up, like Roxanne's in
Larkspur, Calif., where no meat,
fish, poultry or dairy items are
served, and nothing is cooked to
temperatures in excess of 118°F.
"Going to my restaurant," says
Roxanne Klein, "is like going to a
really cool new country you
haven't experienced before."
Like any country, vegetarianism
has its hidden complexities. For
one thing, vegetarians come in
more than half a dozen flavors,
from sproutarians to pesco-pollo-
vegetarians. The most notorious
are the vegan (rhymes with
intriguin' or fatiguin')
vegetarians. The Green Party of
the movement, vegans decline to
consume, use or wear any animal
products. They also avoid honey,
since its production demands the
oppression of worker bees. TV's
favorite vegetarian, the cartoon
8-year-old Lisa Simpson, once
had a crush on a fellow who
described himself as "a Level Five
vegan—I don't eat anything that
casts a shadow." Among vegan
celebrities: the rock star Moby
and Ohio Congressman Dennis
Kucinich, who swore off steak for
breakfast and insists he feels
much better starting his day with
miso soup, brown rice or oat
groats.
To true believers—who refrain
from meat as an A.A. member
does from drink and do a spit-
take if told that there's gelatin in
their soup—a semivegetarian is
no vegetarian at all. A phrase like
pesco-pollo-vegetarian, to them,
is an oxymoron, like "lapsed
Catholic" or "semivirgin."
Vegetarian Times, the bible of
this particular congregation, lays
down the dogma: "For many
people who are working to
become vegetarians, chicken and
fish may be transitional foods,
but they are not vegetarian foods
... the word 'vegetarian' means
someone who eats no meat, fish
or chicken."
Clear enough? Not to many
Americans. In a survey of 11,000
individuals, 37% of those who
responded "Yes, I am a
vegetarian" also reported that in
the previous 24 hours they had
eaten red meat; 60% had eaten
meat, poultry or seafood. Perhaps
those surveyed thought a
vegetarian is someone who, from
time to time, eats vegetables as
a side dish—say, alongside a
prime rib. If more than one-third
of people in a large sample don't
know the broadest definition of
vegetarian, one wonders how
they can be trusted with
something much more difficult:
the full-time care and picky-picky
feeding of their bodies, whatever
their dietary preferences.
We know that fruits, vegetables,
grains, legumes and nuts are
healthy. There are any number of
studies that show that consuming
more of these plant-based foods
reduces the risk for a long list of
chronic maladies (including
coronary artery disease, obesity,
diabetes and many cancers) and
is a probable factor in increased
longevity in the industrialized
world. We know that on average
we eat too few fruits and
vegetables and too much
saturated fat, of which meat and
dairy are prime contributors. We
also know that in the real world,
real diets—vegetarian and
nonvegetarian—as consumed by
real people range from primly
virtuous to pig-out voracious.
There are meat eaters who eat
more and better vegetables than
vegetarians, and vegetarians who
eat more artery-clogging fats
than meat eaters.
The International Congress on
Vegetarian Nutrition, a major
conference on the subject, was
held this spring at Loma Linda
(Calif.) University. The research
papers presented there included
some encouraging if tentative
findings: that a predominantly
vegetarian diet may have
beneficial effects for kidney and
nerve function in diabetics, as
well as for weight loss; that
eating more fruits and vegetables
can slow, and perhaps reverse,
age-related declines in brain
function and in cognitive and
motor performance—at least in
rats; that vegetarian seniors have
a lower death rate and use less
medication than meat-eating
seniors; that vegetarians have a
healthier total intake of fats and
cholesterol but a less healthy
intake of fatty acids (such as the
heart-protecting omega-3 fatty
acids found in fish oil).
But one paper suggested that
low-protein diets (associated with
vegetarians) reduce calcium
absorption and may have a
negative impact on skeletal
health. And although several
studies on Seventh-Day
Adventists (typically vegetarians)
indicated that they have a longer-
than-average life expectancy,
other studies found that prostate-
cancer rates were high in
Adventists, and one study found
that Adventists were more likely
to suffer hip fractures.
Can it be that vegetarianism is
bad for your health? That's a
complex issue. There's a big,
beautiful plant kingdom out
there; you ought to be able to
dine healthily on this botanical
bounty. With perfect knowledge,
you can indeed eat like a king
from the vegetable world. But
ordinary people are not nutrition
professionals. While some
vegetarians have the full skinny
on how to watch their riboflavin
and vitamins D and B12, many
more haven't a clue. This is one
reason that vegetarians, in a
study of overall nutrition, scored
significantly lower than
nonvegetarians on the USDA's
Healthy Eating Index, which
compares actual diet with USDA
guidelines.
Another reason is that vegans
skew the stats, because their
strict avoidance of meat, eggs
and dairy products can lead to
deficiencies in iron, calcium and
vitamin B12. "These nutrients are
the problem," says Johanna
Dwyer, a professor of nutrition
and medicine at Tufts University.
"At least among the vegans who
are also philosophically opposed
to fortified
foods and/or
vitamin and mineral
supplements."
Debates about the efficacy of
vegetarianism follow us from
cradle to wheelchair. In 1998
child-care expert Dr. Benjamin
Spock, who became a vegetarian
late in life, stoked a stir by
recommending that children over
the age of 2 be raised as vegans,
rejecting even milk and eggs. The
American Dietetic Association
says it is possible to raise kids as
vegans but cautions that special
care must be taken with nursing
infants (who don't develop
properly without the nutrients in
mother's milk or fortified
formula). Other researchers warn
that infants breast-fed by vegans
have lower levels of vitamin B12
and DHA (an omega-3 fatty acid),
important to vision and growth.
And there is always the chance of
vegetarian theory gone madly
wrong in practice. A Queens, N.Y.,
couple were indicted last May for
first-degree assault, charged with
nearly starving their toddler to
death on a strict diet of juices,
ground nuts, herbal tea, beans,
flaxseed and cod-liver oils. At 16
months, the girl weighed 10 lbs.,
less than half the normal weight
of a child her age. Their lawyer's
defense: "They felt that they
have their own lifestyle. They're
vegetarians." The couple declined
to plea-bargain, and are still in
jail awaiting trial.
Many children decide on their
own to become vegetarians and
are declaring their preference at
ever more precocious ages; it's
often their first act of domestic
rebellion. But a youngster is at a
disadvantage insisting on a
rigorous cuisine before he or she
can cook food—or buy it or even
read—and when the one whose
menu is challenged is the parent:
nurturer, disciplinarian and
executive chef. Alicia Hurtado of
Oak Park, Ill., has been a
vegetarian half her life—she's 8
now—and mother Cheryle mostly
indulges her daughter's diet. Still,
Mom occasionally sneaks a little
chicken broth into Alicia's pasta
dishes. "When she can read
labels," Cheryle says, "I'll be out
of luck."
By adolescence, kids can read
the labels but often ignore the
ingredients. Research shows that
calcium intake is often
insufficient in American teens. By
contrast, lacto-ovo teens usually
have abundant calcium intake.
For vegans, however, consuming
adequate amounts of calcium
without the use of fortified foods
or supplements is difficult without
careful dietary planning. Among
vegan youth who do not take
supplements, there is reason for
concern with respect to iron,
calcium, vitamins D and B12, and
perhaps also selenium and
iodine.
For four years Christina
Economos has run the Tufts
longitudinal health study on
young adults, a comprehensive
survey of lifestyle habits among
undergraduates. In general, she
finds that "kids who were most
influenced by family diet and
health values are eating healthy
vegetarian or low-meat diets. But
there is a whole group of
students who decide to become
vegetarians and do it in a poor
way. The ones who do it badly
don't know how to navigate in the
vegetarian world. They eat more
bread, cheese and pastry
products and load up on salad
dressing. Their saturated-fat
intake is no lower than red-meat
eaters, and they are more likely
to consume inadequate amounts
of vitamin B12 and protein. They
may think they are healthier
because they are some sort of
vegetarian and they don't eat red
meat, but in fact they may be
less healthy."
Jenny Woodson, 20, now a junior
at Duke, has been a vegetarian
from way back. At 6, on a trip to
McDonald's, she ordered a tossed
salad. When Jenny lived in a dorm
at high school, she quickly
realized that teens do not live on
French fries and broccoli alone.
"We ended up making vegetarian
sandwiches with bagels and
ingredients from the salad bar,
cheese fries and stuffed baked
potatoes with cottage cheese."
Jenny and her friends were
careful to avoid high-fat, calorie-
laden fare at the salad bar, but
for those who don't exercise
restraint, salad-bar fixings can
become vegetarian junk food.
Maggie Ellinger-Locke, 19, of the
St. Louis, Mo., suburb of
University City, has been a
vegetarian for eight years and
went vegan at 15. Since then she
has not worn leather or wool
products or slept under a down
comforter. She has not used cups
or utensils that have touched
meat. "It felt like we were
keeping kosher," says Maggie's
mother Linda, who isn't Jewish. At
high school Maggie was ridiculed,
even shoved to the ground, by
teen boys who apparently found
her eating habits threatening.
She found a happy ending, of
sorts, enrolling at Antioch
College, where she majors in
ecofeminism. "Here," she says,
"the people on the defensive are
the ones who eat meat."
Maggie hit a few potholes on the
road to perfection. Until recently,
she smoked up to two packs of
cigarettes a day (cigarettes, after
all, are plants fortified with
nicotine), quitting only because
she didn't want to support the
tobacco business. And she freely
admits to an eating disorder: for
the past year she has been
bulimic, bingeing and vomiting
sometimes as much as once a
day to cope with stress. But she
insists she is true to her beliefs:
even when bingeing, she remains
dedicated to vegan consumption.
The American Dietetic
Association found that vegetarian
diets are slightly more common
among adolescents with eating
problems but that "recent data
suggest that adopting a
vegetarian diet does not lead to
eating disorders." It can be
argued that most American teens
already have an eating disorder—
fast food, soft drinks and candy
are a blueprint for obesity and
heart trouble. Why should teens
be expected to purge their bad
habits just because they have
gone veggie? Still, claims Simon
Chaitowitz of the pro-vegetarian
and animal-rights group
Physicians Committee for
Responsible Medicine, "Kids are
better off being junk-food
vegetarians than junk-food meat
eaters."
Maybe. According to Dr. Joan
Sabate, chairman of the Loma
Linda nutrition conference, there
are still concerns over vegetarian
diets for growing kids or lactating
women. When you are in what he
calls "a state of high metabolic
demand," any diet that excludes
foods makes it harder to meet
nutrient requirements. But he is
quick to add that "for the average
sedentary adult living in a
Western society, a vegetarian
diet meets dietary needs and
prevents chronic diseases better
than an omnivore diet."
Like kids and nursing moms,
athletes need to be especially
smart eaters. Their success
depends on bursts of energy,
sustained strength and muscle
mass, factors that require
nutrients more easily obtained
from meat. For this reason,
relatively few top athletes are
vegetarians. Besides, says sports
nutritionist Suzanne Girard
Eberle, the author of Endurance
Sports Nutrition, "lots of athletes
have no idea how their bodies
work. That's why fad diets and
supplements are so attractive to
them."
Eberle notes that vegetarian diets
done correctly are high in fiber
and low in fat. "But where are the
calories?" she asks. "World-class
endurance athletes need in
excess of 5,000 or 6,000 calories
a day. Competition can easily
consume 10,000. You need to eat
a lot of plant-based food to get
those calories. Being a vegetarian
athlete is hard, really hard to do
right."
It's not that easy for the rest of
America, either. Middle-aged to
elderly adults can also develop
deficiencies in a vegetarian diet
(as they can, of course, with a
poor diet that includes meat).
Deficiencies in vitamins D and
B12 and in iodine, which can lead
to goiter, are common. The
elderly tend to compensate by
taking supplements, but that
approach carries risks.
Researchers have found cases in
which vegetarian oldsters, who
are susceptible to iodine
deficiency, had dangerously high
and potentially toxic levels of
iodine in their bodies because
they overdid the supplements.
Meat producers acknowledge that
vegetarian diets can be healthy.
They also have responded to the
call for leaner food; the National
Pork Board says that, compared
with 20 years ago, pork is on
average 31% lower in fat and
29% lower in saturated fat, and
has 14% fewer calories and 10%
less cholesterol. But the
defenders of meat and dairy can
also go on the offensive. They
mention the need for B12. And
then they ratchet up the fear
factor. Kurt Graetzer, ceo of the
Milk Processor Education
Program, scans the drop in milk
consumption (not only by vegans
but by kids who prefer soda,
Snapple and Fruitopia) and
declares, "We are virtually
developing a generation of
osteoporotic children."
Dr. Michelle Warren, a professor
of medicine at New York
Presbyterian Medical Center in
New York City—and a member of
the Council for Women's Nutrition
Solutions, which is sponsored by
the National Cattlemen's Beef
Association— expresses concern
about calcium deficiency
connected with a vegan diet:
"The most serious consequences
are low bone mass and
osteoporosis. That is a permanent
condition." Warren says that in
her practice, she has seen young
vegetarians with irregular periods
and loss of hair. "And there's a
peculiar color, a yellow tinge to
the skin," that occurs in people
who eat a lot of vegetables rich in
beta carotene in combination
with a low-calorie diet. "I think it's
very unattractive." She also is
troubled by the reasons some
young vegetarians give for their
choice of diet. One female
patient, Warren says, wouldn't
eat meat because she was told it
was the reason her father had a
heart attack.
Michael Jacobson, executive
director of the Center for Science
in the Public Interest in
Washington, sees most of the
meat and dairy lobby's
arguments as desperate,
disingenuous scare stories. "It
unmasks the industry's self-
interest," he says, "when it voices
concern about B12 while
hundreds of thousands of people
are dying prematurely because of
too much saturated fat from
meat and dairy products."
Indeed, according to David
Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist, the
average American consumes 112
grams of protein a day, twice the
amount recommended by the
National Academy of Sciences.
"This has implications for cancer
risks and stress on the urinary
system," says Pimentel. "And
with this protein comes a lot of
fat. Fully 40% of our calories—
and heavy cardiovascular risks—
come from fat."
Pimentel argues that
vegetarianism is much more
environment-friendly than diets
revolving around meat. "In terms
of caloric content, the grain
consumed by American livestock
could feed 800 million people—
and, if exported, would boost the
U.S. trade balance by $80 billion
a year." Grain-fed livestock
consume 100,000 liters of water
for every kilogram of food they
produce, compared with 2,000
liters for soybeans. Animal
protein also demands
tremendous expenditures of
fossil-fuel energy—eight times as
much as for a comparable
amount of plant protein. Put
another way, says Pimentel, the
average omnivore diet burns the
equivalent of a gallon of gas per
day—twice what it takes to
produce a vegan diet. And the
U.S. livestock population—cattle,
chickens, turkeys, lambs, pigs
and the rest—consumes five
times as much grain as the U.S.
human population. But then there
are 7 billion of them; they
outnumber us 25 to 1.
In the spirit of fair play to cowboy
Jody Brown and his endangered
breed, let's entertain two
arguments in favor of eating
meat. One is that it made us
human. "We would never have
evolved as large, socially active
hominids if we hadn't turned to
meat," says Katharine Milton, an
anthropologist at the University
of California, Berkeley. The
vegetarian primates (orangutans
and gorillas) are less social than
the more omnivorous
chimpanzees, possibly because
collecting and consuming all that
forage takes so darned much
time. The early hominids took a
bold leap: 2.5 million years ago,
they were cracking animal bones
to eat the marrow. They ate the
protein-rich muscle tissue, says
Milton, "but also the rest of the
animal—liver, marrow, brains—
with their high concentrations of
other nutrients. Evolving humans
ate it all."
Just as important, they knew why
they were eating it. In Milton's
elegant phrase, "Solving dietary
problems with your head is the
trajectory of the primate order."
Hominids grew big on meat, and
smart on that lovely brain-feeder,
glucose, which they got from
fruit, roots and tubers. This diet
of meat and glucose gave early
man energy to burn—or rather,
energy to play house, to sing and
socialize, to make culture, art,
war. And finally, about 10,000
years ago, to master agriculture
and trade—which provided the
sophisticated system that
modern humans can use to go
vegetarian.
The other reason for beef eating
is, hold on, ethical—a matter of
animal rights. The familiar
argument for vegetarianism,
articulated by Tom Regan, a
philosophical founder of the
modern animal-rights movement,
is that it would save Babe the pig
and Chicken Run's Ginger from
execution. But what about Bugs
Bunny and Mickey Mouse? asks
Steven Davis, professor of animal
science at Oregon State
University, pointing to the
number of field animals
inadvertently killed during crop
production and harvest. One
study showed that simply
mowing an alfalfa field caused a
50% reduction in the gray-tailed
vole population. Mortality rates
increase with each pass of the
tractor to plow, plant and
harvest. Rabbits, mice and
pheasants, he says, are the
indiscriminate "collateral
damage" of row crops and the
grain industry.
By contrast, grazing (not grain-
fed) ruminants such as cattle
produce food and require fewer
entries into the fields with
tractors and other equipment.
Applying (and upending) Regan's
least-harm theory, Davis
proposes a ruminant-pasture
model of food production, which
would replace poultry and pork
production with beef, lamb and
dairy products. According to his
calculations, such a model would
result in the deaths of 300 million
fewer animals annually (counting
both field animals and cattle)
than would a completely vegan
model. When asked about Davis'
arguments, Regan, however, still
sees a distinction: "The real
question is whether to support
production systems whose very
reason for existence is to kill
animals. Meat eaters do. Ethical
vegetarians do not."
The moral: there is no free lunch,
not even if it's vegetarian. For
now, man is perched at the top of
the food chain and must live with
his choice to feed on the living
things further down. But even to
raise the question of a harvester
Hiroshima is to show how far we
have come in considering the
humane treatment of that which
is not human. And we still have a
way to go. "It may take a while,"
says actress and vegetarian Mary
Tyler Moore, "but there will
probably come a time when we
look back and say, 'Good Lord, do
you believe that in the 20th
century and early part of the
21st, people were still eating
animals?'"
It may take a very long while. For
most people, meat still does taste
good. And can "America's food"
ever be tofu?
—Reported by Melissa August
and Matthew Cooper/Washington,
David Bjerklie and Lisa
McLaughlin/New York, Wendy
Cole/Chicago and Jeffrey Ressner/
Los Angeles