You asked about the source for the study about type 2 diabetes: It’s from the American Dietetic Association. It’s linked to above.

Another thing they’ve noticed on the rise among indigenous groups who eat like us is an increase in cancer. And again, this is not something they needed special lab equipment to find. The kind of cancer that usually kills people becomes very obvious in its later stages. I read about a doctor in Africa, back before they had effective treatments for breast cancer, who watched a native woman be eaten away by the disease. And as we know, President Grant died of throat cancer from his longstanding cigar habit–and we didn’t even have x-ray machines yet at that time.

I had a friend on LiveJournal who died of breast cancer a couple years ago. She decided to fight it with a macrobiotic diet. Rice, rice, veggies, and more rice. Guess what? Most cancer cells thrive on straight glucose. They get energy out of it by fermenting it rather than turning it into ATP. If you eat vegetarian you naturally eat more sugar; if you eat more sugar, especially as you get older, you put yourself at risk for cancer. The insulin you put out to deal with the sugar you eat (which also comes from starches–and you can’t avoid these if you’re vegetarian) encourages rogue cell growth; the sugar you’ve got around almost constantly then feeds the cancer and helps it get established.

It haunts me that she might have been able to buy herself some time by dropping plant foods entirely for a while. I tried to drop hints about it in the time she had left, but I had to let her find her own way too. She could still be here. People need to get their noses out of ideology and start looking at science. Good science, not the bad-science-fair, twelve-year-old crap that some “researchers” are coming out with and cherry-picking the results to suit their funders’ agendas.

Industrial animal husbandry certainly is bad for the environment, just ask people in North Carolina who have to live near industrial pig farms and deal with the stench. To say nothing of what it does to the waterways. It’s just ugly. But I never see these comparisons made with small, humane farmers who raise animals on pasture. Actually, the stats for how much methane a cow puts off assume that the cow is corn-finished. You’re not supposed to feed corn to a cow. It hurts the cow and taints the meat.

Another thing vegetarians seem to refuse to acknowledge is that *growing plants* is destructive to the environment. One, you have to cut a forest. Two, you have to dig in the dirt, causing erosion. Three, you have to apply all kinds of chemicals to keep the weeds and bugs away. Four, this kills lots and lots of animals. Just because you don’t eat those, doesn’t make them any less dead. And with the forest gone there’s that much less carbon sink for the CO2 you release by cultivating the earth, and then again when the leftover plants rot at the end of the season.

Meanwhile, you can raise a pastured animal under tree cover. Even a cow. And animals can eat plants that humans can’t eat, making that food energy available to us when it wouldn’t have been otherwise.

There is only so much arable land in the world. The fact is that animals tend to be raised on land which is unfit for any other purpose, especially climbing animals like sheep and goats. Chickens can be raised on a building rooftop; rabbits can be raised in your house. Try doing that with wheat.

And while it is true that any living thing will have protein in it simply by virtue of its DNA (which is nothing but protein), the fact is that protein in plants is accompanied by starches. That’s bad news for people with a greater genetic tendency to diabetes. Well, the majority of us could get it, really, but it’s easier for some of us than others, to the tune of something like one-third of the population. That is nothing to play around with.

The simple fact is that plants don’t tend to want to be eaten, but the problem is that plants are stationary. So they have to defend themselves chemically. Any part of the plant that has to survive to support the plant’s life is going to have chemicals in it that aren’t good for the animals eating it. Herbivores have developed some adaptations to these chemicals. We aren’t herbivores. We descend from insectivores which happened to pick up a mean fruit and salad habit along the way during our evolutionary timeline. We make some amylase for breaking down starch, but that’s all we’ve got going for us. Leaves tend to contain tannins and psychoactives; seeds contain phytates and protease inhibitors and other nasty stuff. You have to cook the heck out of most plant foods so that they don’t behave like anti-nutrients in the body. The one exception is fruit and those are high in sugar, particularly the ones we’ve bred for human cultivation.

You say that meat-eaters are more likely to get diabetes, well, I wonder what your sources are. If it’s PETA then that automatically disqualifies your statement. I also rather doubt the studies you allegedly cite covered anything else but the meat consumption. For instance, someone who eats a lot of fast food is probably eating a lot of meat–but they’re also eating a lot of grain and drinking a lot of sugar. If you look at human populations that only recently were introduced to grains and sugars you will see a manyfold increase in diabetes cases. They were eating meat before the grain and sugar came along, with no attendant diabetes. That should tell you something.

I think this is one of those areas of “frugality” where we need to think about future consequences of our actions now. You may think virtuously avoiding meat makes you healthy but if you’ve got chronic allergies, are infertile, have irregular periods, suffer from insomnia, get blood sugar highs and crashes or have any other chronic disease, or were born with a malformed face and/or crooked teeth, it doesn’t matter if you’re not fat or haven’t had a heart attack yet. Fatphobia has become an effective distraction from all sorts of health problems in this country and is a great way to distract people from healthier modes of living. Don’t let yourself be snookered.

I also preserve lots of food that we grow or buy in bulk from the co-op and eat lots of that in the colder months.

There is a huge fallacy about protein. People eat way too much of it everyday and this can lead to many health problems as we age. Even vegetarians need to not eat so much dairy (still coming from a cow which is bad for the environment, goat dairy is better and easier on your body).

Spinach is actually 50% protein. If you bought (or better, grew your own) spinach, you would be getting all bio-available protein that the body can use. Your body actually needs amino acids (it breaks down a complete protein we eat like meat into amino acids) and then forms protein molecules as needed from it’s pool of stored amino acids. All living plant foods (fruits, veggies, raw nuts, seeds, sprouts) have lots of enzymes in them which are made from amino acids so there is your protein – it’s in all plant food that’s not cooked over 118 degrees (enzymes die then). A salad gives you the building blocks of protein, an apple, an orange all loaded with amino acids in a form the body can immediately use. When eating cooked food, the body works harder to break down the food back into the amino acids it needs to store it in so you are always getting enough amino acids and don’t need to consume so many animal products. Lentils are very high in protein and have to be the cheapest legume sold. Only pennies per ounce.

As for websites, a great one with so many amazing vegan recipes (even crock pot ones)is Fat Free Vegan.com. Her blog has so many recipes on there and they are not all fat free – even my husband, an omnivore, loves the recipes I make from there and his flesh food consumption has gone way down – maybe once a week now and he doesn’t miss it bec. these recipes, especially the ethnic ones are so hearty and good. Also vegcooking.com has great recipes, too.