My Fitness Pal

With the support of my children and wife I have joined those using the web site "My Fitness Pal" to track my diet and lose some weight. I currently weigh about sixty pounds more than I'd like (it was seventy when I started) and I believe a lot of the symptoms and side effects of my chronic pain would be mitigated by being more healthy. I try to track everything I eat. This is aided by the app that runs on my phone so I catch the little things that I prefer to forget. Like that bite of carrot cake or stolen cookie.

As long as I was going to work on a healthier diet, I looked at what advantages a "vegetarian" or at least "more vegetarian" diet might have. I currently eat very little red meat and not much of chicken or other meat. So I studied the data at the NIH and other sites to see what evidence there was. I found that the studies interpreted by pro-vegetarian sites always had a bit more nice to say about the diet.

In the end, after everything I read, it appears that there may be an advantage of 1.5 to 2 years longevity for the vegetarians (vegans did worse than everyone - attributed to the difficulty in getting enough B vitamins in a strictly vegetable diet!). Still, it was not enough difference that it might not have been the typical higher incomes of vegetarians and the overall heightened health awareness. Vegetarians were much less likely to smoke, drink to excess and exercised regularly. There lies the real secret: exercise. This is the element that significantly impacts longevity and lifestyle. MFP encourages me to exercise and track the aerobic or strength fitness I pursue. The only thing that the NIH was comfortable saying was that Vegetarians had a lower risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease.

In the end the question remains, "Should one pursue a vegetarian diet for health reasons?" Nobel prize winning author Isaac Bashevics Singer replies emphatically, "Yes, for the health of the chicken."