Vegetarians Vs Meat-eaters: which is Better

Diet plays an important role in dictating a person's health. Everybody should choose his/her diet carefully if they are aiming for better health. There are many diets to stay healthy, one of which can be a vegetarian diet, where a person restrains himself from eating meat and starts to depend mostly on vegetables & fruits. Another diet can be a carnivore diet, where meat is a large constituent of a person's daily food intake. In spite of the latter seeming more nutritional due to all the protein a person can get from it, the former is proven to be better. A vegetarian diet can improve health more than a carnivore diet can do.

First of all, vegetarians, on average, weigh less than meat-eaters. This can be due to meat-eaters consuming less carbohydrates in their diet when compared to vegetarians. If truth be told, BMIs for both men and women on high carbohydrate diets were found to be significantly lower than those on low carbohydrate diets. {1}. On the contrary, a high protein and low fiber diet is proven to have a positive correlation with an increased BMI{2}. Moreover, Turner-McGrievy et al randomized controlled trial (2007) {3} , which enrolled participants in vegetarian & omnivorous diets for 6 months, found an almost double weight loss for those who were on the vegetarian diet than those on the omnivorous diet ( -7.5% and -3.2% respectively).

Furthermore, a vegetarian diet develops stronger immunity against a variety of diseases. These diseases can vary from chronic diseases, such as chronic hypertension, to acute diseases , like developing a brain stroke. On the other hand, animal-based foods have higher cholesterol due to the animal fat within the food, thus increasing the blood cholesterol level of meat-eaters. Therefore, a meat-eater is more likely to develop cardiovascular diseases. As a matter of fact, Timothy J. Ley Key et al (1999) study {4} found out that meat-eaters have 8% more cholesterol than vegetarians. Moreover, the meat-eaters had 20% higher LDL:HDL ratio than vegetarians. And according to 'First Aid Basic Sciences: General Principles' {5}, In large arteries, LDL can get trapped and oxidized in the vessel intima. Oxidation of LDL renders it recognizable by macrophages, resulting in endocytosis and formation of foam cells, which initiates atherosclerosis.

Finally, a vegetarian diet contains a much higher nutritional value than a carnivore diet. Indeed, a carnivore diet has higher protein content, but a vegetarian diet still contains lots of nutrients that are both essential to the human body and absent in animal based foods. For example, vitamin C can't be found in food from animals, but it can be obtained from citric fruits like lemon or orange. Another example can be dietary fibers, where they are absent in animal based food, but present in almost all leaves and vegetables. In fact, a study (Nezami BG et al, 2015) found out that high saturated fat diets , including red meat which contains animal fats, increases the prevalence of constipation by 31 % due to low dietary fibers.

In conclusion, its highly recommended to start considering a vegetarian diet instead of a carnivore diet in order to achieve the goal of better health. This is due to a variety of reasons, like developing stronger defense against diseases, losing weight, and increasing the assimilation of essential nutrients.

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