[yamalight]

As someone who never ate any meat or fish during the life and feels perfectly fine, stuff like this always makes me giggle. And I just love to see how people take only one specific point out of article and exploit it ignoring everything else. Including very important statement: "no statements can be made whether the poorer health in vegetarians in our study is caused by their dietary habit or if they consume this form of diet due to their poorer health status". So, yeah..

[oyvindeh]

The blog post does conclude with exactly what you say: "What can we learn from this study? Are vegetarians are more likely to be neurotic sick people looking for dietary cures for what ails them, thus come out of the study looking more skinny, unhappy, and unsatisfied? Or are vegetarian diets nutritionally bereft leading to health problems, mental health problems in particular? We will never be able to get that answer from a study of this design."

[yamalight]

Yeah, author does mentions that the study doesn't answers those questions. Still, I find the fact of writing a whole post based on one point, from the paper that seems to be pretty bad at specifically this point, to be disturbing (and sadly quite representative of modern journalism/blogging scene).

[vijayr]

I'm a vegetarian - while I wish everyone else was, it is just not possible. People love their meat too much.

Ethics aside, eating meat (at the current rate) is just not sustainable economically (unless the world's population suddenly shrinks, or the amount of resources available suddenly increases or both - significantly).

Those who care about the environment, sustainability etc should read this book http://www.amazon.com/Meatonomics-Economics-Consume-Much--Sm...

Some crazy/scary numbers from the book:

More than half the land used to grow crops in the U.S, are used to raise crops for (meat) animals.

Animal food industry is a big contributor to global warming

We've already eaten away many of the fish, and are seriously messing with the well being of our oceans

Some of the drugs used in the animal food industry, are banned in other countries (Canada, Europe etc)

And so on.

All this to say that we should carefully look at our food choices. If people want to eat meat, that's fine - we just need to make sure it is sustainable, and not cause irreversible damage to the planet. Ethics, animal suffering, cheeseburger laws...etc? That is a whole another discussion.