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Simple College Life

Should you become a vegetarian?

I am a hard-core meat lover. I love eating fish, cows, rabbits, chicken, ducks, crustaceans… anything that was once alive I can eat. But being constantly surrounded by vegetarians has made me wonder about my dietary choices. Leaving animal-rights and ethical concerns aside, I do have to accept that maybe, just maybe, eating meat is not the healthiest habit.

First comes my mother’s ability to make me fear all seafood. The amount of mercury in fish is not unknown to most of us. The decision to ignore it, is. Apparently those people who eat fish on a regular basis, that being mostly poorer people in fishing villages, are dying of mercury poisoning. We have contaminated our oceans to the point of no return! Now, an environmental engineer friend of mine rebutted my mothers scare with this answer… why don’t we just eat fish now, since they are going extinct anyways?

The hormones in birds are not a mystery either. Bird-growing farms an all the chemicals they put in turkeys and chickens to make them bigger must have a bad effect on our bodies.

And the harms of red meat have always been evident. According to this New York Times article the increase of red-meat consumption in the US is directly correlated to dietary-caused deaths.

“Extrapolated to all Americans in the age group studied, the new findings suggest that over the course of a decade, the deaths of one million men and perhaps half a million women could be prevented just by eating less red and processed meats, according to estimates prepared by Dr. Barry Popkin, who wrote an editorial accompanying the report.”

So what to do? Becoming a vegetarian brings a whole new set of health issues with it. Will our own contamination of food end up being our own demise?