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Home Articles Reviews Videos App Store Book Shop Forum Is Being a Vegetarian Healthy? By Adam Sinicki Earlier I wrote an article on my experience of going veggy for a month. I wasn't a huge fan, but I didn't really notice any changes - good or bad. Now to answer another question - is it technically good for you? Forget whether I enjoyed it, and instead let's look at what the science is behind this thing. As you can imagine there are arguments both for and against vegetarianism as a healthy diet, and in fact the debate is pretty vicious and people on either side of it display a practically religious fervor. It's almost like the Apple vs PC argument... it gets nasty. I dare to delve in there with the Biomatrix angle on things. We'll also look at whether vegetarianism is healthy for you as a bodybuilder - as someone who needs extra nutrients even compared to the average Joe. Is it possible to get all that without eating any livestock? Well in my search across the world wide web I've found a lot of points in favour of vegetarianism and against. And like I've said it's got pretty vicious. Wherever you go you find it in an argument form - so much so that it seems to be seared to my brain. So that's how I'm going to present it to you here, as an argument. I am going to split my personality into two separate entities, Captain Green and CARNISAUR! They both have good points. Read on and we'll make some kind of conclusion at the bottom. Captain Green: Let's kick this off. Not only is vegetarianism better for you, it is in fact how we are designed to eat. We have a longer more twisted digestive tract which is typical of herbivorous animals, and it's why we struggle to digest meat. CARNISAUR: Hi Mom. Okay yeah that's fair but actually the digestive tract is a result of our evolution. We evolved from herbivorous creatures relatively recently, and so our stomachs still resemble those not that long ago. This information is also biased and misleading - our guts are longer than carnivores yes, but they are also smaller than herbivores. The arrangement is also more akin actually to that of a meat eating animal. At the same time we are omnivores, not carnivores, and that is why we need the ability to digest both. This is also why we have canines as well as flatter teeth. So we can eat both. Our bodies are actually designed for long distance running for hunting, and that is also why we developed the use of tools. In other words our evolution is primarily based around this ability to track and kill animals. In fact some scientists believe that the change to eating meat gave us the nutrients necessary for our brains to develop further. Captain Green: Imagine you found an animal carcass in the wild though - your body doesn't naturally tell you to eat it. In fact you feel naturally repulsed by the maggots and the smell and that tells you that your body doesn't 'crave' meat. CARNISAUR: Actually though there are many instances where people have had to turn to natural sources of meat to survive and have found their body's crave precisely what they mean. We have been brought up used to cooked food, and our immune system is not used to dealing with uncooked meat as a result. However if you were starving in the wild, you'd pretty quickly start to 'crave' meat. Another quick point is that whenever you crave savoury tastes, you are actually craving meat. Think about it - there are no other readily available sources of savoury food in the wild. Bread and pasta etc all require processing. Our bodies naturally tell us to move on to protein after we've eaten sweet things and vice versa. This is an evolutionary mechanism designed to make sure that we seek out different foods and don't just stay and gorge on one source. If you want to know whether eating meat is 'natural' or not, then just look at natural tribes of people who have had no intervention from modern civilisation. They all eat meat and tracking their prey is a big part of their life cycle. They do it in such a way as to work better with the environment, but they do eat meat. Captain Green: Just because we are evolved to eat meat doesn't mean that it is right and correct and there are not better ways to go about living. If we lived like animals we would still be living in caves and raping and pillaging at will. Digesting meat slows us down, clams our body with toxins and leaves us with less energy. We can consciously choose not to do this now - as everything we need in our diet is available in vegetation and fruit. Don't believe me you carnivorous moron? Well then look at horses, cows, sheep - they are covered in more muscle than any human and they are full of energy and power - yet they don't eat a scrap of meat. When they do... BSE. CARNISAUR: I don't see a problem with raping and pillaging at will... though actually that's not entirely true either - altruism and social abilities are also a part of our evolution and are designed to help us work together to greater ends. Those native tribes I referred to earlier - they don't rape and pillage each other. And it's actually not true that we can get everything we need from a vegetarian diet. Let's look at this more logically - a horse gets enough protein from its vegetation but that's because it spends literally all day grazing. They eat copious amounts of protein, and we then get that from them in one nice ready package. We can't digest grass (because we're NOT HERBIVOURS) and that means we can't do the same. We also can't utilise the protein in plant sources as well as they can - when we consume protein from animals it is already in a much more usable form - we are literally recycling the meat and flesh from those animals for our own ends. It would take ages to achieve this through a vegetarian diet and the amount of vegetables you'd need to eat would give you constipation. It's do-able, but more likely you're going to end up with toilet troubles. But protein isn't even the only thing we need in meat. We also need vitamin B12 of which there is no plant source, and essential fatty acids such as omega 3 of which there are very few plant sources. Without these fatty acids or B12 the symptoms you could expect to encounter are stiff joints, bad skin, reduced ability to synthesise protein, lower cognitive prowess and an increased likelihood of cancer and Alzheimers. Dickweasel. I hate to return to the point about nature (which you raised by the way) but if we ate just vegetation with nothing else it would be pretty bad for us. Captain Green: You're the one not being fair now - you can get vitamin B12 through supplementation, and it also exists in the soil. If you were to eat a vegetarian diet in the wild you would get B12 from the soil on your vegetables. At the same time there are plenty of vegetarian food sources that contain such as fortified qorn (here the vitamins and oils are added in later). You can also get lots of other nutrients and vitamins from soy beans which many vegetarians now rely on and did you know that soy milk has many benefits over regular milk? Studies have actually shown that your chances of developing cancer reduce being a vegetarian - certainly stomach and liver cancers. Meanwhile by eating a vegetarian diet you will be avoiding things like indigestion and acid reflux which come from consuming fatty meats. You'll also find that by eating a vegetarian diet you avoid all of the unhealthy foods - the MacDonald's, the KFC, the ready meals, the pub grub. Simply by turning to a vegetarian diet - in the modern age - you begin to take on a much healthier diet that will prevent all sorts of problems and I guarantee aid weight loss. You can also get a lot of good things from eggs as long as you're not ruling them out too - they contain all the amino acids and they contain them in a very available form. CARNISAUR: Yeah - weight loss of muscle. Sure you would probably avoid a lot of fat and salt as a vegetarian, but you could simply do that by being more healthy - no need to cut out meat completely and all the good things it does for you (besides I couldn't live without KFC). You're getting your B12 and your fatty acids by adding them into your diet later - that's fine but it means you really can't argue that vegetarianism is the natural way we are supposed to be, and nature does tend to know best. And let's examine your claims regarding soy. Sure it's a great source of protein and it has a lot of amino acids in a high percentage. However even soy bean falls behind egg, fish, whey and chicken in terms of quality protein. Some vegan bodybuilders use soy protein shakes - but ask yourself why no other bodybuilders do? Because it's not as good. Not only is soy a lesser source of protein, but it is also less bioavailable and this is true to a considerable degree. Yes it has lots of protein, but it's protein that is in plant form (bean form to be specific). It's not protein that is in meat form ready for your body to utilise and thus you will use more energy processing it and you'll get far fewer benefits. All vegetarian sources of protein are less bioavailable than carnivorous ones. At the same time meat contains something called 'BCAAs' - 'Branched Chain Amino Acids'. This means that the amino acids are already assembled in a form ready to be made into muscle, skin, flesh or whatever else our body wants to do with it. And it's not even that simple - you also need to have the correct ratio of IAAs (indispensable amino acids) compared to DAAs (you guessed it - dispensable amino acids). Otherwise there will be too much for your body to sort through and it won't get them out of the cocktail in order to use around your body. There are very, very few plant sources of 'complete protein' but even these are all wrong and far less bio-available due to their balance of IAAs, DAAs and BCAAs. Think about it - meat is already meat - it is what we need to build muscle. On the other hand plants are completely anatomically different so you need much more of them and in strange variations to achieve a similar effect. And you can't just eat eggs. This is simply because doing so to the correct degree would cause biotin deficiency and high cholesterol. As with anything you need a good mixture of different sources if you want to be healthy. What's bad is that no vegetarian website will tell you this - they'd rather cover it up because they are so zealous that they'd rather you believe that there are no downsides to vegetarianism when this simply isn't true. Even Wikipedia won't mention any of the downsides of vegetarianism for long. Why? Because some vegetarians are so obsessive that they will erase any bad words written about their lifestyle choice. The irony is that it is other vegetarians who will suffer. Most vegetarians aren't aware of these terms. Most people aren't aware of these terms but vegetarians who are taking a radical departure from their normal diet need to be educated on these topics so that they can maintain a diet that is carefully calculated to make up for its shortcomings and to eat supplements that would replace the amino acids, B12, iron, Omega 3 etc in their diet. Captain Green: Be this as it may, I have been vegetarian for a while now and I haven't noticed my muscle wasting or my brain shrinking. I will tell you what I have noticed though - and that is that my energy levels have increased and that I feel healthier than before. I know many other vegetarians who report the same and whatever the 'science' says, none of them are dying. CARNISAUR: No they're not going to die you're right. As long as you eat well in the rest of your diet then you're not going to. There's relatively little difference between the two, but what you would notice is that if you ate more protein that was a better quality you would build more tissue (muscle, neurons, skin) and more effectively. There are ways that many vegetarians limit the amount of damage they do through smart supplementation etc and that's fine. But you do also see many others who are fatter (they have to eat more carbs - I can't eat protein so I'll eat cake) and who have thin brittle hair and damaged skin. My sister went vegetarian for about a year but changed back because she had weak skin and hair. On the other hand though if you're interested to see what it looks like when you have no protein try Googling 'kwashiorkor' - yeah, eat your meat. The improved energy you speak of, where does this come from do you think? It comes from less work that the digestive system is doing. That's fair. It also comes from the simple fact that you have eaten more carbohydrates. That energy could be mimicked in other ways - by eating better quality lean meat (with less fat which is what causes the digestion issues), by eating more fibre, and by doing less of anything else. You could also still eat more carbs. You'd find that you then had even more energy still because your body wouldn't be starved of protein and oxygen-carrying iron. And anyway, if it came to a toss up, then I'd rather have improved brain function, bigger stronger muscles, healthier skin and reduced chance of illness than I would a little extra energy (which many people don't report by the way). My Conclusion: At the end of the day it comes down to you and what's important to you. It also comes down to a lifestyle choice. You can be either vegetarian or omnivorous and be absolutely fine but you have to admit these two points to be vegetarian: we are designed to be omnivorous, and a vegetarian diet is highly lacking without supplementation. If you want to be vegetarian then you need to supplement with a protein or soy shake (depending on whether you're vegan), with branch-chained amino acids, with a multivitamin and with cod liver oil/omega 3. You also need to think a lot harder about what you are eating at all times. But actually, it's easier and better to be omnivorous and to get a wider range of nutrients in the way our body has clearly evolved to. There, I said it... Next time I address the topic of vegetarianism I'll be looking at the moral aspect of it. So stay tuned for that. I'll be also writing a guide on how to go vegetarian and still build muscle.  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