Were is the best place to eat? If your not a vegatarean?

Question

My military card gets me into eat a bases around the place but sometimes I like to eat other foods at real restrants. I like stuff like meat and potatos but not so much salads but my wife Joanjoin tells me to eat more fruits and apples. My question is this - do you think it is better to be a vegarian than a mostly meat eatter? Is one healthyer than the other? My dad says god made us to eat meat and that's why we have ribs (his favorte joke, it seems!)

Answer 1

Your dad is funny. But it has been proven that vegetarians maintain a healthier body weight than non vegetarians.As meat consumptions increases, so does body weight.They also tend to ahve lower blood pressure and rates of hypertension. As well as heart disease and related deaths is much lower for vegetarians and cancer. But scientist do not know if it is also because most vegetarians do not smoke and drink or do drugs and are physically active.

Answer 2

Being vegetarian is generally much healthier than eating meat. And despite some comments of the uninformed, there is PLENTY of access to protein in a vegetarian diet.

The reason there is so much misinformation is that many studies of vegetarianism have been skewed. They studied only new vegetarians, or those from cults with very restrictive consumption guides.

I am far healthier as a vegetarian of 3.5 years than I ever was as a meat-eater. I VERY rarely eat salads by the way. I enjoy a wide variety of foods much greater than the 'met and three veg' of most people.

We were not meant to eat meat either, as many people suggest. Anatomically, we resemble herbivores more than omnivores or carnivores.

A key point is atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). This is the leading cause of death in the developed world, and is caused by the consumption of animal fats and proteins. Natural carnivores never develop atherosclerosis, even when given 100 times the amount of animal protein they normally eat. A vegetarian diet actually reverses this.

Answer 3

To me the key is moderation. Too much meat or no meat at all is dangerous (the first plugs your arteries, the second starves you of protein). Just like an occaisonal drink is usually harmless, even possibly healthy, but heavy, especially routine drinking will kill ya.
Where to eat? That depends ALOT on how much you want to spend and what type of food you like to eat.

Tip 1: Find the good "mom 'n pop" restaurants in town. Ask the locals where they eat & why. You'll often get better food and better service with better prices. And it's just more interesting than franchises.

Tip 2: If you need a franchise to get your "meat & potatoes", I'd try these restaurants, roughly ranked in order from least to most expensive (remember, JMHO). I tried to pick nationwide franchises since I don't know where you are:
- Wendy's
- Fire Mountain
- Outback
- Ruth's Chris Steak House

Answer 4

your dad is probably a steak and potatoes guy like my dad is,so he probably wants you to eat meat also.

Improving Personal Health

It's no secret that compared to average meat-eaters, vegetarians generally live longer, are less likely to be overweight, suffer far fewer incidences of cancer and heart disease, and have more energy. These facts have been consistently borne out by decades of scientific research. The largest epidemiological study ever conducted (the China-Oxford-Cornell study) concluded that those eating the amount of animal foods in a typical American diet have seventeen times the death rate from heart disease, and, for women, five times the rate of breast cancer, than those who get 5% or less of their protein from animal foods. (See the references at the end of this article.)

Meat contains 14 times the amount of pesticides as plant foods, since pesticides get concentrated as they move up through the food chain, and since they're more easily stored in fatty tissues. In 1980, six years after the pesticide dieldrin was banned, the USDA destroyed two million packages of frozen turkey products contaminated with dieldrin. (And such contamination can routinely occur without detection.) In 1974, the FDA found dieldrin in 85% of all dairy products and 99.5% of the American people. The EPA discovered that the breast milk of vegetarian women contained far lower levels of pesticides than that of average Americans. A study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "The highest levels of contamination in the breast milk of the vegetarians was lower than the lowest level of contamination…(in) non-vegetarian women… The mean vegetarian levels were only 1-2% as high as the average levels in the U.S."

MYTH: "Humans were designed to eat meat."

FACT: Although humans are capable of digesting meat, human anatomy clearly favors a diet of plant foods. Our digestive systems are similar to those of the other plant-eaters and totally unlike those of carnivores. The argument that humans are carnivores because we possess "canine" teeth ignores the fact that other plant-eaters have "canine" teeth, and that ONLY plant-eaters have molar teeth. Finally, if humans were designed to eat meat, we wouldn't suffer from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and osteoporosis from doing so. [more on this topic]
MYTH: "Vegetarians get little protein."

FACT: Plant foods offer abundant protein. Vegetables are around 23% protein on average, beans 28%, grains 13%, and even fruit has 5.5%. For comparison, human breast milk is only 5% (designed for the time in our lives when our protein needs are as high as they'll ever be). The US Recommended Daily Allowance is 8%, and the World Health Organization recommends 4.5%. [more on this topic, inc. chart]
MYTH: "Beans are a good source of protein."

FACT: There is no such thing as a special "source of protein" because all foods -- even plants -- have plentiful protein. You might as well say "Food is a good source of protein". In any event, beans (28%) don't average much more protein per calorie than common vegetables (23%). [more on this topic, inc. chart]
MYTH: "Meat protein is better than plant protein. You have to combine plant foods to make the protein just as good."

FACT: This myth was popularized in the 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet and has no basis in fact. The author of the book admitted nearly twenty years ago that she made a mistake (in the 1982 edition of the same book). [more on this topic]

The achievement of vegetarian athletes are particularly noteworthy considering the relatively small percentage of vegetarian entrant. Athletes, after all, are not immune from the cultural conditioning that meat alone gives the required strength and stamina. Yet some have adopted vegetarian diets and the results invite scrutiny.

Dave Scott, of Davis, California is universally recognized as the greatest triathlete in the world. He has won Hawaii's legendary Ironman Triathlon a record four times, including three years in a row, while no one else has ever done it more than once. The event consists, in succession, of a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a 112-mile cycle, and then a 26.2-mile run.

Dave calls the idea that people, and especially athletes, need animal protein a "ridiculous fallacy." There are many people who consider Dave Scott the fittest man who ever lived. Dave Scott is a vegetarian.

I don't know how you might determine the world's fittest man. But if it isn't Dave Scott it might well be Sixto Linares. This remarkable fellow tells of the time:

"when I became a vegetarian in high school, my parents were very very upset that I wouldn't eat meat... After fourteen years, they are finally accepting that it's good for me. They know it's not going to kill me."
During the fourteen years that Sixto's parents begrudgingly came to accept that his diet wasn't killing him, they watched their son set the world's record for the longest single-day triathlon, and display his astounding endurance, speed, and strength in benefits for the American Hearth Association, United Way, the Special Children's Charity, the Leukemia Society of America, and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. So deeply ingrained, however, is the prejudice against vegetarianism that even as their son was showing himself possibly to be the fittest human being alive, his parents only reluctantly came to accept his diet. Sixto says he experimented for awhile with a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet (no meat, but some dairy products and eggs), but now eats no eggs or dairy products and feels better for it.

It doesn't seem to be weakening him too much. In June 1985, at a benefit for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Sixto broke the world record for the one-day triathlon by swimming 4.8 miles, cycling 185 miles, and then running 52.4 miles.

Then there's Edwin Moses. No man in sports history has ever dominated an event as Edwin Moses has dominated the 400-meter hurdles. The Olympic Gold Medalist went eight years without losing a race, and when Sports Illustrated gave him their 1984 "Sportsman of the Year" award, the magazine said, "No athlete in any sport is so respected by his peers as Moses is in track and field." Edwin Moses is a vegetarian.

Paavo Nurmi, the "Flying Finn," set twenty world records in distance running, and won nine Olympic medals. He was a vegetarian.

Bill Pickering of Great Britain set the world record for swimming the English Channel, but that performance of his pales beside the fact that at the age of 48 he set a new world record for swimming the Bristol Channel. Bill Pickering is a vegetarian.

Murray Rose was only 17 when he won three gold medals in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. Four years later, at the 1960 Olympiad, he became the first man in history to retain his 400 meter freestyle title, and he later broke both his 400 meter and 1500 meter freestyle world records. Considered by many to be the greatest swimmer of all time, Rose has been a vegetarian since he was two.

You might not expect to find a vegetarian in world championship body-building competitions. But Andreas Cahling, the Swedish body builder who won the 1980 Mr. International title, is a vegetarian, as has been for over ten years of highest level international competition. One magazine reported that Cahling's "showings at the Mr. Universe competitions, and at the professional body-building world championships, give insiders the feeling he may be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Another fellow who is not exactly a weakling is Stan Price. He holds the world record for the bench press in his weight class. Stan Price is a vegetarian. Roy Hilligan is another gentleman in whose face you probably wouldn't want to kick sand. Among his many titles is the coveted Mr. America crown. Roy Hilligan is a vegetarian.

The medical evidence is overwhelming and indisputable: The more animal foods we eat, the more heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other degenerative disease we suffer. This has been exhaustively demonstrated beyond any doubt. If it were natural for us to eat these food, they wouldn't kill us. The fact that health can be regained by laying off meat and dairy is powerful evidence that we shouldn't have been eating those foods in the first place.
Dean Ornish, M.D. was the first person to prove that heart disease can be reversed, and he did so by feeding his patients a vegetarian diet. John McDougall, M.D. has also written extensively about how animal foods cause disease, and how people can regain their health by eating vegan instead.

At Yale, Professor Irving Fisher designed a series of tests to compare the stamina and strength of meat-eaters against that of vegetarians. He selected men from three groups: meat-eating athletes, vegetarian athletes, and vegetarian sedentary subjects. Fisher reported the results of his study in the Yale Medical Journal.25 His findings do not seem to lend a great deal of credibility to the popular prejudices that hold meat to be a builder of strength.

"Of the three groups compared, the...flesh-eaters showed far less endurance than the abstainers (vegetarians), even when the latter were leading a sedentary life."26
Overall, the average score of the vegetarians was over double the average score of the meat-eaters, even though half of the vegetarians were sedentary people, while all of the meat-eaters tested were athletes. After analyzing all the factors that might have been involved in the results, Fisher concluded that:

"...the difference in endurance between the flesh-eaters and the abstainers (was due) entirely to the difference in their diet.... There is strong evidence that a...non-flesh...diet is conducive to endurance."27
A comparable study was done by Dr. J. Ioteyko of the Academie de Medicine of Paris.28 Dr. Ioteyko compared the endurance of vegetarian and meat-eaters from all walks of life in a variety of tests. The vegetarians averaged two to three times more stamina than the meat-eaters. Even more remarkably, they took only one-fifth the time to recover from exhaustion compared to their meat-eating rivals.

In 1968, a Danish team of researchers tested a group of men on a variety of diets, using a stationary bicycle to measure their strength and endurance. The men were fed a mixed diet of meat and vegetables for a period of time, and then tested on the bicycle. The average time they could pedal before muscle failure was 114 minutes. These same men at a later date were fed a diet high in meat, milk and eggs for a similar period and then re-tested on the bicycles. On the high meat diet, their pedaling time before muscle failure dropped dramatically--to an average of only 57 minutes. Later, these same men were switched to a strictly vegetarian diet, composed of grains, vegetables and fruits, and then tested on the bicycles. The lack f animal products didn't seem to hurt their performance--they pedaled an average of 167 minutes.29

Wherever and whenever tests of this nature have been done, the results have been similar. This does not lend a lot of support to the supposed association of meat with strength and stamina.

Doctors in Belgium systematically compared the number of times vegetarians and meat-eaters could squeeze a grip-meter. The vegetarians won handily with an average of 69, whilst the meat-eaters averaged only 38. As in all other studies which have measured muscle recovery time, here, too, the vegetarians bounced back from fatigue far more rapidly than did the meat-eaters.30

I know of many other studies in the medical literature which report similar findings. But I know of not a single one that has arrived at different results. As a result, I confess, it has gotten rather difficult for me to listen seriously to the meat industry proudly proclaiming "meat gives strength" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.