What are the pros and cons of becoming a vegetarian?

I think it depends if you like vegetables or not. I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like the taste of meat (and to a lesser degree I don’t like the idea of eating baby animals i.e. veal, lamb etc) I love vegetables but also like Quorn and tofu etc, so I get all the vitamins and nutrients that I need without supplements. My sister however, is a vegetarian that isn’t keen on vegetables. She quit meat purely because she doesn’t believe in killing animals and likes anything meat flavoured. She has to take vitamins to keep her in good health.

@MissCupid I <3 veggies :)

veggies are great for you,....I dont really like chicken either.
but make sure you get your vitamins. nuts, legumes.

Pros: ‘Vegetarians have a lower BMI, lower cholesterol, and lower mortality from ischemic heart disease’.

You will no longer be contributing to Confined Animal Feeding Operations or factory farms, where animals are raised in filth, terror, squalor, and agony until they’re butchered.

Aside from the moral issues involved in the above, raising animals for food is “a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.”

So basically, this is the single best thing you can do for the environment, incredibly positive for your body, and ethically very preferable to the alternative.

Cons: You will have to make a conscious effort to get certain nutrients. If you are an athlete, getting enough protein will take a special effort. As a woman, you will also need to be careful to get enough iron. B vitamins are also hard to come by outside of animal protein.

I’ve been totally vegan at one point in my life, then lacto/ovo..now, I just do what I want. lol

Not a meat fan, but will have a bit on occasion..admittedly I LOVE Ham and Turkey..with my killer cranberry apple relish of course.

I can never give up cheese…not ever. Cheese is a goddess to be worshiped,

Bread and cheese and fruit is my life staple. haha

Food combining is huge on a strictly vegan diet.

Beans and rice, and other protein combos to create the complete proteins the body needs.

If you are not opposed to dairy, cheeses, yogurts, etc. it makes it a lot easier to maintain good health without so much effort.

I’ve traveled every path there is over the years, I think the middle is just fine. ;-)

Vegetarians have a higher percentage chance of having handicapped children.

@filmfann

Are you serious or making a joke? :-/

@filmfann Do you have a source for that information?

You don’t have to “make the change.” It’s not like you have to say on employment applications if you are vegetarian. Take meat out of your diet for a while if you want to see how it works for you. I am a vegetarian on days I do not eat meat. Other days I am not. It’s not an ideology to which you must make a lifetime commitment.

I was a vegetarian for about two years after I got out of the service. The advantages are that it is tough to take in enough calories to gain weight, assuming you exercise, it is fun to learn how subtly tasty veggies really are, plus they are easy to prepare. The downside is that some of your friends will feel awkward around you when you eat because they will imagine that you disapprove of their food choices, even if you don’t. Plus eating out is a little tough. I am not a vegetarian any more, but I lost my taste for big tasting meat like beef. It seems too rich and heavy. No big deal.

Pros is you get to eat a lot of tomatoes, con is you get to eat a lot of crummy out of season tomatoes.

@Coloma and @chels I considered becoming vegetarian years ago, and came upon that information. I will try to find it, and I will post it.

Here is one

I fix chicken once a week, and add the cooked meat to various dishes, but it’s just as easy to skip the meat entirely. I find that by eating eggs if they are part of dish, chicken broth (tastes better than vegetable broth) and treating bacon as an occasional condiment, no one has ever noticed that I’m not eating meat.

I really like vegetables, and some of the grain mixes are really interesting.

I consider myself a flexitarian; that is, I generally try to avoid eating meat and usually don’t cook it at home, but if I really crave a hamburger or bacon or am eating at someone’s house, I am not rigid about it. Although in some respects – mainly moral/political – I’d like to be a true vegetarian, this compromise seems to work for me. (Plus I really like bacon and hamburgers.)

This study looks well considered

@filmfann, that study doesn’t support your original statement that vegetarians have a higher chance of having handicapped children, but it does serve as a good reminder that children’s dietary needs from birth to age 5 require a lot of B-12 and D, as well as omega 3 fatty acids for brain development. In order to get the vitamins they need, all children should take a vitamin supplement during peak developmental years.

If you have high cholesterol and you go vegan, I would say there is a 95% chance your cholesterol will drop like a rock, and move into normal ranges. So everything that comes with lower cholesterol should follow, like better heart health, unless you eat a diet of very high fat still. but I find that unlikely. Still your cholesterol will probably go down, but your triglycirades and weight might go or stay up.

Many animals are treated very badly, so it is more humane to be a vegetarian.

If you are talking about just being lacto-ovo, then your cholesterol has a good chance of staying where it is, and for health honestly I think fatty dairy is worse then lean meat.

If you don’t have a cholesterol problem, then almost nothing I said matters, except for the animal cruelty of course.

It depends on where you live – the moral and environmental arguments for being a vegetarian hold up only under the circumstances of factory/industrialized farming.

The problem with meat is not the meat itself but what has become the common way of producing it. I think this is an important distinction that many vegetarians and vegans do not understand or realize…or they believe that killing anything living is immoral which makes no sense since you have to kill plants to eat them, and in industrialized farming (even industrial organic farming) you are often killing animals to get your plants (whether by poor farming methods that destroy biodiversity, mechanized harvesting, pesticide/herbicide application, allowing soil to be depleted of nutrients and thus in turn life, etc).

Eating meat does not have to be a bane on the environment. Perhaps you live in a place where the land is naturally best suited for animal grazing and not suited for annual crop production; you are willing to care for and butcher your own animals or you live near people who do; you are subsistence hunting wild animals; you are hunting animals that are invasive and destructive of biodiversity.

Eating meat does not have to be supportive of CAFOs and factory farms, and producing meat does not have to contribute to environmental degradation. It is possible to raise animals in harmony with the ecosystem of which they are a part.

I just came back from a camping trip where we caught fish from the ocean and slaughtered, cleaned, and cooked wild pigs that are highly invasive here. Fish waste can be used in a number of ways to build soil.

People are omnivores and were built to eat meat. I am not an expert on nutrition, but from what I do know, I see the omnivore/vegetarian situation as somewhat analogous to the preservation of an ecosystem compared to the restoration of a depleted ecosystem – while you can come close to mimicking the former with considerable effort and knowledge, it will never be exactly the same.

That’s not to say that your diet should be heavily meat-based. It is important to eat a balanced diet, and my argument here is simply that a well portioned amount of meat in your diet is not a bad thing at all (caveat – depending where it comes from).

I have gotten to know quite a few vegans, but have never met one that looks healthy.

To go along with what @lilikoi said, in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes an organic farm where a symbiosis between plants and animals is carefully arranged to maximize production without the use of chemical fertilizers.

I am not a vegetarian, but I try to limit the amount of meat that I consume. The only time I eat beef is when I give in to an occasional craving for a corned beef sandwich on rye with mustard and pickle, accompanied by a celery tonic, it’s an ethnic thing. I find that preparing vegetarian meals requires a bit more effort than preparing a meat meal. It is easy to throw a hamburger in the broiler or to bake a chicken. Combining vegetables to come up with something tasty and satisfying is not so easy, but definitely worth the extra effort.

Another advantage of eating fruits and veggies is that they are the only sources of fiber, which aids digestion.

Michael Pollan’s 64 rules for eating Seem reasonable to me. Make sure to look at rule #64.

Cons are you really have to make sure you eat the right things because you can get ill if you simply cut out meat and don’t replace it properly with the right foods.
You can get Vitamin deficiencies etc I am not saying threes anything wrong with being a vegetarian i am just saying make sure you cover your basses as it takes a bit more to balance your diet.

Well if you don’t think you’ll miss meat that much, there aren’t really any cons that i can think of. Except maybe that you’d have to find new recipes? :) Oh, wait, i almost forgot…one con is that it’s harder for you to find a quick lunch, you know, for a lunch on the run kind of thing. At least that’s how it is over here. All pastry pies are meaty. All subs are meaty. All sandwiches are meaty (with the exception of one which is egg mayo). Also, most takeouts won’t cater sufficiently for you, and if they do, you have very limited selections, unless the takeout place caters for vegetarians. Restaurants may also be a problem sometimes (ie limited selections – some are better than others), but at least they’re usually better than supermarkets and takeouts. That’s about it! :)

Pro: Good for Earth’s climate, good for your health if you know what you are doing

Cons: This can cause stress when you’re invited, it can be bad for your health if you don’t know what you’re doing especially the radical form of veganism

@mattbrowne – i don’t think it should cause stress when you’re invited. Even if the people don’t know me that well, it’s rarely, if ever, the case that ALL food served at their home has meat in it (unless it’s a one pot meal type thing like a stew). And if you’re worried about that, bring a back up meal with for yourself and leave it in the car until you see what’s for offer to eat there. Just call the host aside and ask if you can heat up your meal quickly or something.
It may only be a little uncomfortable if for some reason you were not able to talk to the hosts about this at the time they invited you. In normal circumstances you simply just tell them you don’t eat meat, and ask them kindly if they can tell you what they’re serving, so that you can bring something with for yourself if the side dishes or whatever won’t be enough for you. It’s never been a problem for me. The people i know well will cater for me when i come there.

@NaturallyMe – Therefore I said “can cause” and you’re right sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve been observing both cases. And some vegetarians are open to exceptions.

@mattbrowne – O. Um…i knew that! Yeah. I was just giving her tips on how to deal with it when she gets invited. :P

I have a friend that is strictly vegan, mostly raw.

She has always been an incredibly beautiful woman by any standards..BUT…now that she is in her 50’s, she does not look healthy, thin yes, healthy no.

She just spent 9k on an eye lift, had fat injected into her cheeks from her abdomen and a laser treatment of her lower face.

The Dr. refused to do the procedures unless she gained 10 lbs. as she had NO body fat to speak of.

She managed to put on maybe 7–8 lbs. over several months, mostly from nutritional drinks like Ensure.

I’d never say it in a thousand years, but…aside from the eye lift, the rest of her face would not have needed any ‘enhancement’ if she just ATE more food, period!

I think younger people can get away with a more radical vegan diet, but as you age, no…not good.

@Coloma Being vegan does not necessarily mean you are skinny. She just needed to eat more calories, pasta, fat, legumes whole grains. You can be skinny on any diet. You can also be an overweight vegan.

@JLeslie

Yes, that’s what I said, she doesn’t eat enough period.
I do think that as we age we look better with a little extra ‘meat’ on our bones.

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Its not difficult being a vegetarian, I’ve been one myself for 21 years. Now about the pros and cons. First, vegetarianism is healthier. However, you might need some adjusting to the lack of animal protein. But there are huge varieties of pulses which can make up for that. Moreover, there’s more variety in vegetarian food than non-vegetarian food; there are more varieties of vegetables than meat.